Julia Leyda

“This Complicated, Colossal Failure”: The Abjection of Creighton Bernette in HBO’s Treme

The character of Creighton Bernette on the HBO series Treme, in his excesses and abjection, embodies post-Katrina New Orleans in crucial ways: physical and emotional excesses become ways to distance his character from viewers, in ways analogous to the othering of the city and its inhabitants in post-Katrina media and public discourses.

Financial Times: Economic and Industrial Temporalities in Netflix’s Arrested Development

Arrested Development occupies an important place in twenty-first-century American television culture, both because of its peculiar positioning as a “before” and “after” snapshot of the housing crisis, and because its experimental revival (Netflix’s first) occasioned a similar set of obstacles to those that plagued the original series. As a representation of and an instance of the financialization of domestic space, this series about the failures of a wealthy family itself courts failure as a complex and innovative television narrative.

Cli-Fi in American Studies: A Research Bibliography

by Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda Over the last two decades, the global landscape of cultural production has been teeming with a cornucopia of fictional texts, in print, in live performance, and on the screen, engaging with the local and global impact of advanced human-induced climate change. In academia as well as in popular culture, this rapidly growing body of texts is now commonly referred to by the catchy linguistic portmanteau ‘cli-fi.’

The Financialization of Domestic Space in Arrested Development and Breaking Bad

Julia Leyda focuses on the sitcom Arrested Development and the ground-breaking drama Breaking Bad. Both shows portray the moral and ethical laxity—in the business world and in US-American society and the family—that would later be invoked as the fulcrum of popular understanding of the economic crisis. However, both also depict the commonplace neoliberal appeals to self-improvement and individual responsibility that provided justification for the risky financial behavior that fueled the housing boom and ultimately brought down the economy. Leyda examines the ways in which the material and emotional spaces of the home were opened up to public scrutiny during the early years of the millennium, revealing the ways in which financialization had begun to permeate televised domestic spaces in the USA.