Logan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Over and Over: Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama, and shared the following:
On the one hand, page 99 of Over and Over is (I hope) not characteristic of what one would find and perhaps be most rewarded by across the book's length. Early in writing the book, I set myself a rule: no claims or lines of argument, no questions that propelled my inquiry forward, could be set out unless they emerged from a specific moment of television drama. So it's perhaps unusual that page 99 features nothing in the way of close reading to which so much of the book is devoted! Instead, fully two-thirds of the page is a rather abstract discursus on the affinity between the conditions of human friendship and the seriality of television drama. This is, happily, a core theme of the book's focus on television performance, and it is characteristic of the book that in this passage I am devoted to turning over the darker, less frequently considered face of this relationship between long-form television drama and long-term human relationships. Building on the work of the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, I note that while two good friends may each help the other to become who they are, "There is a dark side [...] to this promise of creation," one that also echoes the conditions of seriality. "[O]nce we feel there is nothing more in ourselves and in our friend to discover, 'once our interaction promises nothing new, freezes what has already happened ... our friendship is effectively over'. How do two people sustain their bonds and keep their promises if one or the other (or both) can no longer be seen as the person they were, or as able to be the person they wish to become?"Learn more about Over and Over at the Rutgers University Press website.
This is the core problem of interpersonal life that I identify at the heart of the moments I discuss in the book, one that serial drama is exquisitely poised to express and explore through its tensions between accrual and transience, the building of history between people and its gradual erosion or fading or deformation and development (for better or for worse) over time. If there is anything to which the book brings new attention, it is the positive valence of the provisional and transient as qualities that might limit the extent to which our lives and relationships become exhausted, trapped in sediment, "[frozen by] what has already happened".
--Marshal Zeringue
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