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Streaming privilege

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Streaming privilege shows how contemporary serial television helps to legitimate our ‘new Gilded Age’ of extreme inequality. The book exposes television’s obsession with privilege, analysing blockb...
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  • 28 July 2026
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Streaming Privilege examines how contemporary serial television helps legitimise today’s “new Gilded Age” of extreme inequality. Through sharp cultural analysis, the book reveals popular culture’s fixation on wealth and dynastic families, and how these narratives contribute to sustaining economic divides. Focusing on Downton Abbey, The Crown, Succession and Yellowstone, it explores what today’s most-watched dramas suggest about contemporary attitudes toward privilege and power. At its core is an interest in the intersection of family, wealth and morality, showing how stories of dynasties help audiences make sense of widening disparities. The book argues that television does not simply reflect inequality but actively shapes public understandings of it. Streaming Privilege is essential reading for scholars and students of media, culture and economic sociology, as well as general readers interested in how popular culture influences perceptions of inequality.
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Price: $36.95
Pages: 232
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 28 July 2026
ISBN: 9781526190055
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, Film, television, radio genres: Drama, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, Social mobility, Media studies: TV and society
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Hanna Kuusela is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Jyväskylä

Introduction: Streaming privilege
1 Family matters
2 From pleasure to ideology: Reading popular narratives of privilege
3 Downton Abbey: A benevolent dynasty for the common good
4 The Crown and the burden of privilege
5 Succession: A fantasy for the middle class
6 Yellowstone and the nostalgia for the present
Conclusion: Fighting inheritocracy and familialism