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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Curtis Marez, "Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places" (NYU Press, 2025)
Description: In Producing Precarity (NYU Press, 2025) Curtis Marez examines the television industryâs practice of âoffshoringâ production to impoverished sites within the US. Marez, focuses on state efforts to attract film and TV producers to poor places with tax incentives, discounted public lands, and subsidized infrastructures. He argues that these efforts result in the redistribution of wealth from poor people of color, Indigenous people, and other taxpayers to Los Angeles-based media makers, while also diverting money that could be used for education and health care to the wealthy. The popular series produced in these places, such as Breaking Bad, The Watchmen...