Streaming privilege

Streaming Privilege examines how today's serial television plays a powerful role in legitimating the 'new Gilded Age' of extreme inequality. We live in an age of extreme inequality where the wealth of the super-rich continues to skyrocket and dynastic power seems unstoppable. Meanwhile, our television screens are saturated with glossy dramas about the rich and the privileged.Streaming privilege dives into this cultural paradox. From Downton Abbey to The Crown and from Succession to Yellowstone, today’s most-watched television series are obsessed with wealth and inherited power. What do these celebrated shows tell us about the world we live in and the one we ought to build? Why do we enjoy following the lives of rich heirs and their families?The book argues that the luxury turn in contemporary television is no accident. In a period of deepening economic divides, television has become a key site in which anxieties about inequality, inheritance and elite power are negotiated. These blockbuster shows invite viewers to both admire and resent the life of luxury, blending anti-elite critique with nostalgic attachments to tradition and family values. In doing so, they offer ambiguous – and often contradictory – frameworks for understanding class, morality and who deserves to inherit.Accessible yet critically rigorous, this timely study challenges us to rethink not just the stories we love, but the unequal systems we live in. It urges us to consider the narratives and policies needed to disrupt the growing wealth inequalities. 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.

Pages: 232, Hardcover, Manchester University Press