Abstract

In the last decade, many successful US tv series focused on politics. In each series, politics is dealt with in different ways, as Coleman (2008) showed in his empirical research on British soap operas. Coleman's work focused on three main dimensions of the political discourse: issue politics, that is those issues stemming from the real-world political agenda; process politics, referring to the depiction of the political process; and everyday politics, that is the storylines dealing with the private sphere and interpersonal power relationships. In this article, Coleman's model is applied to some recent US tv series, in order to understand how they succeed in building their narrative identity upon one or more of these three dimensions.