"Martin Shuster has written an astonishing book on television's recent artistic and philosophical achievements. In a series of staggeringly bold and nuanced chapters he unfolds the thought of Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Michael Fried, and others in order to paint a compelling picture of how we can make intelligible the art of television and its inheritance of other artforms, modes of being, thinking, and judging. His claim that 'the medium has come of age' is cashed out in vivid accounts of The Wire, Weeds, and Justified which establish his critical authority as the leading philosopher of this medium and its evolving art."

Jason Jacobs, The University of Queensland

"I take Martin Shuster’s New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre to be the most important contribution, since Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, to the construction of a philosophy of this genre of popular culture – the strange novel object intertwining television series, cinema, and our everyday lives. Both deep, erudite and wonderfully entertaining, New Television explores 21st century works that are now becoming classics: The Wire, Weeds, Justified,…and many others. Overcoming  generalist, theoretical, or elitist analyses of TV that simply miss the texture and the reality of our experience of moving images, Martin Shuster, following the lead of Stanley Cavell and Hannah Arendt, focuses on our shared and democratic experience of television. This fascinating book helps us understand how, and why, some TV series matter to us, how they are constitutive of our memories, how they shape our present and future lives."
 

Sandra Laugier, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

“Shuster’s use of Stanley Cavell’s work on film to discuss the ontology of television is novel, and extends Cavell’s thought into a new area. Readers concerned with the issue of the new ‘quality’ television will find much of use in this book to help them think through why such shows have the power they do and how they lead the viewer to a new self-knowledge.”

James B. South, Marquette University

"In this book, Shuster explores the genre of “new television,” which, he argues, is exemplified by the prestige cable dramas of the past two decades. . . .Drawing heavily on both Cavell and Arendt, Shuster brings the work of these thinkers together to argue that artworks, particularly those on the screen, allow the audience a view to another world. Television, Shuster contends, is uniquely suited to this worldbuilding task due to the temporal length of television series, which allow for in-depth explorations of a show’s world."

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal