There’s No Place Like HBO? The Political Economics of Race and Sexuality on American Television

This manuscript looks to HBO, in its position as a premium cable industry leader, and the
series that it produces, as well as the means of production, the audiences it pursues, the strategies that it employs, the successes and failures of those strategies and the production staff’s influential ability to affect the content of the commodities that it sells to its target audience(s). To accomplish this, I examine series like The Wire, True Blood, Entourage, Looking (and possibly others) in which queer characters of color appear to shift the balance of power in the relations of American culture. Hall’s “changing...dispositions and...configurations of cultural power” are exemplified in this research through analyses of the socioeconomic and ethnoracial composition of a wide cast of characters and those who bring them to life for our consumption. Just as these series and HBO continue this trajectory of inclusivity, my research argues that such shifts of power necessitate a reexamining of the dynamics of meaning – production” (2001,4).