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For the past fifty years, scholars and cinephiles have been drawn to psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the unconscious effects films have on their viewers. However, over the past twenty years, since the dawn of television’s Second Golden Age, there has been significantly less psychoanalytic engagement with television as a medium. Marxist theorists and critics, on the other hand, have long been interested in television. But until relatively recently, this was usually to bemoan it as an ideological product of the “culture industry.” This course draws on central texts of media studies, as well as key texts in psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, to ask some of the following questions: What is formally unique about the television episode? Are series works of art or commodities, or both? What is Prestige TV, and is it over? What role have streaming services played in the evolution of the medium? What is binge watching, and why do we both love and hate to do it? We will watch episodes of many of the most lauded serial dramas of the past few decades, such as The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Succession, as well as critically acclaimed comedies like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Office (UK), and Peep Show. We will read theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, Jason Mittell, Mark Fisher, and Todd McGowan.