This module will provide an in-depth introduction to the key formal features of contemporary television including genres, medium specificity, and seriality; five key shows; and the way they’ve responded to the historical, political and cultural contexts of this period. A new form of serial TV storytelling emerged in the US in the 1990s and became a cultural force in the early twenty-first century. Shows such as Twin Peaks (1990-1991), The X-Files (1993-2002), The Sopranos (1999-2007), Sex and the City (1998-2004) and Six Feet Under (2001-2005), featuring longer story arcs, intricate plots, and high production values, led some commentators to hail a ‘new golden age of television’. By the later 2000s, shows like The Wire (2002-2008), Breaking Bad (2007-2013), Mad Men (2007–2015), and Orange is the New Black (2013-2019) consolidated this, and these shows are now commonly understood as exemplars of ‘complex TV’ or ‘prestige television’ (Jason Mittell, 2015). This has meant that the status of television within the wider cultural landscape in America and beyond, has shifted in compelling ways, upending old genre hierarchies, re-shaping the established Hollywood order, and reaching new audiences. Coinciding with these shifts has been a set of seismic technological developments: from subscription cable television and the DVD boxset to the advent of Netflix and streaming, this has been a period of rapid change in how we watch TV, as much as what we watch. Furthermore, complex TV has registered, resisted and sometimes reinforced the social and political currents of this era in unique ways, via its dynamic and responsive long-form storytelling that evolves over a period of years. Shows have dealt explicitly and figuratively with de-industrialisation, the rise of the internet, the turbulence of war on terror-era domestic policies, and new eruptions of and challenges to systemic racism and toxic masculinity. Crucially, TV has responded as compellingly as any medium to the advance of neoliberalism, which, according to scholars such as Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald-Smith, entered a critically important phase at the same time complex TV emerged, in the 1990s. For them, and many other scholars, this period marked ‘a more granular extension’ of neoliberalism from economic and political policy into ‘previously noneconomic domains of human life’ (2017, 7).