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A return to form? : postmasculinist television drama and tragic heroes in the wake of The Sopranos.

This article brings together debates in television studies with knowledge and ideas drawn from theatre history and from feminism, queer and postcolonial theory. It proposes the notion of ‘postmasculinist television drama’ in correlation to a body of works that have been repeatedly identified with postfeminism. This concept is deployed as a means of challenging some critical assumptions about the politics of a number of television dramas that can be seen to follow in the wake of The Sopranos, especially The Wire but also Mad Men, Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy. A key focus is how these works re-claim and re-inscribe the position of the Aristotelian ‘tragic hero’ for the white (middle class) male, restoring this figure to ‘the centre’.