Sky’s Offer You Can’t Refuse: Italian Mafia Television Abroad.
School of Arts, Culture and Language Research Seminar Series
- Location:
- Teams Online
- Time:
- Wednesday 16 February 2022, 14:00–15:00
- Contact:
- Dr Silvia Bergamini - s.bergamini@bangor.ac.uk
Southern Italy Research Seminar Series
Guest Speaker: Professor Dana Renga - Ohio State University
Abstract
This presentation discusses the premium pay network Sky Italia, addressing how, unlike Rai’s pedagogical programming and Mediaset’s middlebrow model, Sky shows are, for the most part, in line with series dubbed as “quality television.” I address how Sky series centering on organized crime depart from the American model in their focus on actual crime networks that brought about, and in some cases still generate, grief, pain, and national instability, while unambiguously place good-looking antiheroes at the narrative core. I conclude by discussing the hit series Gomorrah and addressing the series’ local/global appeal which is interesting as the reception of the series suggests that Italian mafias are not associated with Italian cultural trauma, but with an Italian cultural heritage that is “profitable and exportable.”
Biography
Dana Renga is Professor of Italian and Dean of Arts and Humanities at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in Italian film and television. In addition to forty articles and book chapters, she authored Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave, 2019), and Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium (University of Toronto Press, 2013), co-authored Internal Exile in Fascist Italy: History and Representation of ‘Confino’ (University Manchester Press, 2019), and edited Mafia Movies: A Reader 2nd edition (University of Toronto Press, 2019). She is currently working on a book called #castingstardom which is a project on casting practices in the US and in Italy with particular attention paid to recent Italian serial television and its exportation abroad.