Narrative Realism and Television

Abstract

Abstract This chapter links nineteenth-century serial novels like Fedor Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment (1866) to twenty-first-century television serials like David Simon’s The Wire (2002–2008) and Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016–2022). In each of these examples, the chapter authors focus on the collaborative tension between realism and melodrama, as tools for both revealing and resisting the structural dynamics of a given historical moment. Where Simon continues in Dostoevskii’s tradition—using serial narrative to make a claim about the true inner nature of reality and the social, spiritual, and political forces that threaten to mask it—Glover destabilizes and shifts this realist project. By highlighting the surreal aspects of the everyday experience of Black Americans, Atlanta interrogates the boundaries of a stable, shared reality in the post-2016 era. Taken together, these three texts thus contribute to a corrective (and evolving) notion of plurality: realisms and modes of reality alike.