FrontCover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction -- Invisible Italian TV drama -- The structure of the book -- 1. Building the Nation: The Origins of Italian TV Drama 1. -- The words to say it -- The domestic stage -- Literary adaptation -- Electronic library -- The implication approach -- The foreign sources of a national genre -- Literature and history -- 2. The Cinematic Turn and the Americanization of the Television Landscape -- Keeping the cinema at bay -- The cinematic turn -- The rise of the miniseries -- The flood of American imports -- The Italian response to Dallas -- 3. The Political Career of a Popular Fiction: La Piovra (The Octopus: The Power of the Mafia) -- A phenomenon of popularity -- Bond and beyond -- An intertextual octopus -- The origins of La Piovra's success -- Mafia plots -- Social melodrama -- The fascination of the loser -- Italian-style serial -- Television event -- The Mafia and politics -- 4. A Place in the Sun: The First Italian Soap Opera -- Escape from fiction -- Turning point -- The close encounter of local and global -- An Italian sense of place -- A seminal story -- 5. Mimetic Heroes and Ironic Leaders: The Genesis and Evolution of Italian Police Drama -- The season of the detective story -- Stories from the sea -- Stories from the soil -- The funny detective -- The hero is 'one of us' -- A 'heritage' trilogy -- Squads -- The girls with a gun -- Women on top -- The merging of sailor's and peasant's storytelling -- 6. In the Footsteps of La Piovra: Twenty years of Mafia stories in Italian TV drama -- Mob stories are always hot: a tour d'horizon -- A 20-year cycle -- The centrality of Cosa Nostra -- Facts burst into fiction -- Heroes and villains -- A male-dominated genre and its exceptions -- The Mafia is everywhere.

7. Life Stories: A Heroic Enclave and the Rise of the Religious Biopic -- The rebirth of the biopic -- Anti-heroic society -- The biography genre and the shifting definition of the fame -- A heroic enclave -- The Bible Project -- A plural catholicism -- 8. The Re-enactment of the Past and the Politics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Drama -- The temporal turn -- Past and present -- Television as historian -- Divided, denied, shared memory -- 'We are not like them' -- Conclusion -- The convocative power of the mainstream drama -- Visibility for what? -- References -- Index -- BackCover.