FrontCover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

Invisible Italian TV drama

The structure of the book

1. Building the Nation: The Origins of Italian TV Drama 1.

The words to say it

The domestic stage

Literary adaptation

Electronic library

The implication approach

The foreign sources of a national genre

Literature and history

2. The Cinematic Turn and the Americanization of the Television Landscape

Keeping the cinema at bay

The cinematic turn

The rise of the miniseries

The flood of American imports

The Italian response to Dallas

3. The Political Career of a Popular Fiction: La Piovra (The Octopus: The Power of the Mafia)

A phenomenon of popularity

Bond and beyond

An intertextual octopus

The origins of La Piovra’s success

Mafia plots

Social melodrama

The fascination of the loser

Italian-style serial

Television event

The Mafia and politics

4. A Place in the Sun: The First Italian Soap Opera

Escape from fiction

Turning point

The close encounter of local and global

An Italian sense of place

A seminal story

5. Mimetic Heroes and Ironic Leaders: The Genesis and Evolution of Italian Police Drama

The season of the detective story

Stories from the sea

Stories from the soil

The funny detective

The hero is ‘one of us’

A ‘heritage’ trilogy

Squads

The girls with a gun

Women on top

The merging of sailor’s and peasant’s storytelling

6. In the Footsteps of La Piovra: Twenty years of Mafia stories in Italian TV drama

Mob stories are always hot: a tour d’horizon

A 20-year cycle

The centrality of Cosa Nostra

Facts burst into fiction

Heroes and villains

A male-dominated genre and its exceptions

The Mafia is everywhere

7. Life Stories: A Heroic Enclave and the Rise of the Religious Biopic

The rebirth of the biopic

Anti-heroic society

The biography genre and the shifting definition of the fame

A heroic enclave

The Bible Project

A plural catholicism

8. The Re-enactment of the Past and the Politics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Drama

The temporal turn

Past and present

Television as historian

Divided, denied, shared memory

‘We are not like them’

Conclusion

The convocative power of the mainstream drama

Visibility for what?

References

Index

BackCover