4. The Crisis Fetish in Post-September 11 American Television

Serialized television programs airing in the mid- to late-2000s, particularly within the speculative fiction genre—such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward—have summoned real-world headlines to inform themes and plots for mass viewers without necessarily conforming to real-world factions and outcomes in partisan ways that might alienate some of those viewers. Accordingly, each show offers a sustained consideration of the possibilities, limitations, and ethics of human beings trying to nourish community and combat enemies under conditions of extreme threat and precarious survival, with oblique reference to these issues’ real-world corollaries. In this way, unresolved tensions around notions of safety and choice point to traumatic fractures within post-September 11 cultural formations.