The experts: representing science, technology, and specialized knowledge in 21st Century tv series

This issue of "Fictions" has devoted to an analysis of expertise and the modes of TV narrativization in United States. Some of the contributions engage with the Trump era, reading TV shows as symptomatic of some of the social and cultural processes that led to his election, while most others deal with the representation of 'folk experts' and with the inadequacies of these figures. Figler reads Breaking Bad's protagonist and his popular reception as symptomatic of the phenomena that would emerge in full sight with Donald Trump's election. By examining the connection between White's expertise in chemistry, his career as a ruthless criminal, and his patriarchal self-justification, Figler foregrounds the exceptionalistic nature of this nexus, in which white male power is always already taken for granted and therefore authorized. White masculinity and the Trump era are equally central to Spriggs's From Castle to Trump: he focuses his attention on the new paradoxical form of trustworthiness based on the value of shared distrust. The essay of Wlodarczyk is a critical analysis of César Millan's reality show centered on dog-training. Gianna Fusco's article is focused on the crucial economic and symbolic role of homeownership. Marina Guglielmi's case study presents an ambivalent attitude to the expert, a figure that is made simultaneously central and ineffective in 13 Reasons Why. Finally, a less ambivalent understanding of experts is provided by Sonia Maria Melchiorre's article, in which linguistic analysis meets gender studies.