HBO and Genre
It occurs to me that HBO’s most well-regarded shows, which are considered by many to be the pinnacle of the television medium, all tweak genre in some one; none of them are what you would call straight “literary fiction” or “mainstream fiction”.
The Wire, for instance, perhaps the most well-regarded of the bunch, is so much a part of the Crime Fiction world that it actually got Crime Fiction novelists to write for it. Deadwood is a Western, True Blood is about vampires, The Sopranos is gangsters. Even new stuff like Bored to Death, created by literary fiction writer Jonathan Ames, is all about tweaking the Detective genre.
