Public Service Entertainment: Post-Network Television, HBO, and the AIDS Epidemi

This project explores the state of public service television in the post-network era. In this dissertation, the complex history of HBO, cable television, and PBS is set against the AIDS epidemic---providing an opportunity to see logics of governmental rationality, industrial change, and medical discourse at work. This project is therefore a vital intervention in studies of governmentality and popular culture, studies of HBO and post-network television, and studies of the history of HIV/AIDS media in the United States. By examining HBO through the often-competing logics of profitability and public service, it is possible to open up new and interesting ways to think about HBO and its programming---as one example of what might count as public service television in the post-network era.;Chapter one sets up the framework of the dissertation by situating my intervention in studies of HBO, public television, and governmentality. Chapter two thinks through media history in the modern neoliberal state by examining the historical juncture of the creation of public service television, the rise of cable television, and the intensification of neoliberalism. Chapter three works through the early history of HBO during a time of tremendous expansion in the cable industry due to the deregulatory environment of the 1980s. Chapter four examines the tension between entertainment, information, and education through the role of popular aesthetics in public service television on PBS and HBO.;Chapter five provides a history of AIDS media on television and in Hollywood cinema in order to situate a more complete history of PBS and HBO's engagement with HIV/AIDS programming. This history puts the twenty-two HBO programs that deal with AIDS in direct conversation with network television, PBS, and cable television as they help to construct the narrative of the AIDS epidemic. Chapter six demonstrates the way in which cultural discourse of the AIDS epidemic has changed from the late 1980s to a post-9/11 world through closer analysis of four HBO programs: AIDS: Everything You and Your Family Need to Know But Were Afraid to Ask (1987), Pandemic: Facing AIDS (2003), And the Band Played On (1993), and Angels in America (2003).;Chapter seven considers how the examples discussed in this research project suggest the need to reconsider how popular media and political activism may be linked. In this conclusion, I parse the impact of embracing governmental rationality as a solution rather than encouraging the ethical responses of individuals and collective action to pursue state-centered solutions to the AIDS epidemic and other societal concerns such as global poverty or climate change. I end by offering this research project as an example of how reconceptualizing public service television in the post-network era demands a new way of thinking about what public service looks like in the modern neoliberal state.