Streaming’s flagship shows blur genre to dissolve politics into tone

Evidence

When dramedies do flip the coin to sixty-minute dramas larded with laughs, grave ills like mass incarceration, racialization, and rape burble with dark humor—an indistinction key to immersive engagement and mass appeal. The apotheosis here is Orange Is the New Black, an ensemble drama in a women’s prison, often taken as Netflix’s flagship revision of prestige TV’s presumed white male centrism, and offering such an unclassifiable blend that it became the first show in Emmy history nominated in both comedy and drama categories. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 234

Categorization

• QUESTION: The specific claim that subjecting grave social ills to dark humor is ‘key to immersive engagement’ — worth weighing Steel’s media-effects counterarguments here.
• XREF: ‘Burble with dark humor’ echoes her ‘Writing’ chapter claim that boundary-pushing = freedom is the shared conceit of literary and TV producers alike. — connects to: British TV’s tone of light mockery signals and sustains political disengagement — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 737; Mandatory-jokey political TV actively deters the politically engaged audience — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 739