Somewhere around the time of the second season of The Sopranos, people at dinner parties stopped gossiping about their friends' sex lives and started talking about American television shows, later designated 'box sets'. Nowadays, it's all anybody ever talks about, and the quickest way to feel old or out of it is to find oneself unable to speak, in detail, about why Jeremy Piven is so brilliant as the agent in Entourage. You can watch educated people shrivel with a sense of inner defeat on realising that they don't really know the difference between your average Twilight kid and the kind of vampire you get on True Blood. Question: was every generation as imperialistic in its interests as my own?

LRB 10 June 2010 | PDF Download