Breaking Back: uno sguardo dal passato, ovvero, note per una genealogia. Back to the Nineties

Fiorenzo Iuliano analyzes David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91) as a forerunner of the so-called second golden age of American TV series, hinting at themes and concerns that will become crucial in the most celebrated series of the 1990s. Its insightful representation of the collapse of the idealized image of the American family and the emergence of teenagers as a social group with its own troubles and sets of values, is in fact developed in the most popular teenage soap of the decade, Beverly Hills 90210 (1990-2000). In the 1990s adolescence starts to be represented as potentially expanding indefinitely into adulthood, as perfectly portrayed in the iconic sit-com Friends (1994-2004). These three shows, different in genre and spectatorship, collectively provide a sort of mapping of the most distinctive aspects of American TV series in the 1990s.