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from the editor's desk

Review of ‘Netflicks: conceptual television in the streaming era’ by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony. Netflicks: conceptual television in the streaming era. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2024. RRP: $22.99, 120pp, ISBN 9781760802721.

Jenny Hedley


Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s Netflicks: conceptual television in the streaming era is the first in UWA Publishing’s Vignettes series. Each bite-sized vignette promises to investigate a particular contemporary cultural phenomenon. Netflicks offers crossover appeal to both the time-poor academic and the curious general reader who craves a side of substance with their digital binge. While Hughes-d’Aeth exhibits academic rigour—Netflicks is bolstered by a notes section with further readings—his deep dive into conceptual television uses accessible language that assumes minimal prior knowledge, presented in a navigable format with simplified referencing.

Behind Netflicks is a course that Professor Hughes-d’Aeth teaches at the University of Western Australia, where he is also Chair of Australian Literature. UWA’s overview for the undergraduate unit ‘Netflicks: cinema and long-form television’ speaks to the historical influence of Hollywood’s Golden Age on structures of screen narrative, and looks at the shift from theatrical cinema and broadcast television to streaming. Hughes-d’Aeth summarises this evolution in the introduction to Netflicks, naming contemporary streamed drama as ‘the formal heir to practices of mediated dramaturgy that were formalised decisively with the emergence of classical Hollywood in the 1910s’ (8).

Today, broadcast television appears ‘as something we used to do’ (3), a mode of media consumption tied to specific channels and timetabling and at the mercy of reruns and analogue recordings. In 2013, Netflix began issuing full-season drops, both changing patterns of consumption and antiquating terminology around programs (no longer being programmed) and shows (no longer being shown). Hughes-d’Aeth posits the translocation of cinematic or broadcast drama to the digital sphere as a material cause of the ‘stylistic symptoms of contemporary streamed drama’ (8), including streamed dramas premised upon concepts such as dystopia, amnesia, repetition and dissociation. While the artifice of dramas that fall under the criteria of these four concepts would seem a far cry from dramatic realism, Hughes-d’Aeth argues that conceptual television invites us to perceive beyond the limitations of common-sense reality, as it ‘expose[s] a dimension of ourselves that we somehow already know but cannot countenance because it is incompatible with the precepts of our social realism’ (11).

The notion of the not-identical thing (not-realism) affording unique insights into the identical thing (realism) recalls Adorno’s philosophising. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno considers how objectivity might be achieved less by direct observation than by cognising a concept’s ‘innermost core’ via the ‘constellations’ revolving around that concept. In looking at social reality through the slanted modes of dystopia, amnesia, repetition and dissociation, we might arrive at a truer truth, one that is not obscured by prescriptive classifications. It is the what if of the what is not that might show us what is. For example, Hughes-d’Aeth describes how the concept of dystopia serves as a device for mediating between basic fears and hidden wishes. As a world-determining premise that challenges the limiting parameters of late capitalism, dystopia reveals the unconscious proclivities of the old world, which are made apparent in the new and diminished world:

[Dystopia] imagines a point where capitalist realism loses its totalising hold on social reality and becomes an extravagant folly, a vain overreach by humans seduced by their own grandiose pretentions. (15)

Hughes-d’Aeth’s chapter on dystopia leads us through The Walking Dead (2010–), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), The Hunger Games (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) and Squid Game (2021) as case studies that each offer an element of this social critique.

I May Destroy You (2020) and Homecoming (2018–20) are the keystone texts for Hughes-d’Aeth’s look at amnesia, a televisual concept which dramatises repression. Sometimes this effort to erase memory results in repetition: next up on Hughes-d’Aeth’s curriculum. What differentiates time-loop (repetition) stories like Groundhog Day (1993) and Russian Doll (2019–22) from the amnesia concept is the protagonist’s anxious remembering (while everyone else forgets). The futile reiteration of specific temporal locations must result in the protagonist’s acceptance or growth to disrupt the repetition compulsion. The final concept that Hughes-d’Aeth explores is dissociation—as in Severance (2022–) or Fight Club (1999)—where a splitting of worlds sets up the conditions that enable social critique.

Netflicks doesn’t claim to offer a definitive account of concepts dominant in streaming, so much as provide an invitation for others to pick up the investigatory threads of this contemporary media study. I reactivated my latent Netflix subscription upon reading this book, a book which paradoxically relieved my guilt in turning from the page. Hughes-d’Aeth reminds us that the psychological consequences of digital devices include reduced attention spans and a lessened ability ‘to deal with real life social complexity and the reality of emotions’ (103). What if we follow Hughes-d’Aeth’s lead in considering that conceptual television has evolved in response to our collective psychic vacuum, our inability to cope? So long as we’re blobbing out in front of our 16:9 aspect ratio screens, we may as well blob intelligently and consider alternate futures (not-selves) which might reconnect us to ourselves.


Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001.

The University of Western Australia. ‘Netflicks: cinema and long-form television [ENGL2401]’ in Handbook 2024. UWA, 2024. https://handbooks.uwa.edu.au/unitdetails?code=ENGL2401


Jenny Hedley’s writing appears in OverlandArcher MagazineCordite Poetry Review, Diagram, Mascara Literary Review, Verity LaAdmissions: voices within mental health and elsewhere. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website: jennyhedley.github.io/

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