American television family dramas have long functioned for broadcast networks as a metaphoric framework to affirm the values of the American Dream. Since the 1990s, American cable television providers have challenged this long-held practice. Originally scripted programming, complete with large budgets, auteur freedom and not reliant on advertising revenue, delivered to audiences (re)worked family dramas that exposed the myth of the American Dream. It is suggested that in this shift, audiences were exposed to narratives of American decay predicated on a failing social, economic and political system. Evidence for this shift is examined in an analysis of six family dramas produced between 1997 and 2013. The aim of this analysis is to interrogate shifts as indicative of a new television landscape.

Death is no longer considered a social taboo. News coverage reports death on a daily basis. Literature, art, film, and television have a long history of portraying death. Disciplines ranging from anthropology, sociology and social welfare conceptualise death at an individual and community level in terms of ritual and power. Yet, how death and grief are performed is still largely shaped by social conventions. The critically-acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under (2001-2005) uses Gothic tropes to challenge many of the social conventions that shape how individuals perform death and grief. Set in a Los Angeles funeral home run by the Fisher family, death is voiced by the episodic dead, while the complexities of grief are voiced by the families who come to the funeral home to arrange burial services. The Fishers themselves experience death and grief in the pilot episode. At each turn, normative understandings of how death and grief are performed are challenged. While there are conventional Gothic tropes evident in Six Feet Under, notably the dead occupying liminal spaces, it is via a California Gothic trope that the fragility of the American middle class family and its precarious existence in the dystopian American suburb is explored, underpinning the discursive power of the series.

This paper argues that 'human nature' is a key factor in understanding the underpinnings of collectivism and proposes that neoliberalism corrupts the innate human need to act socially, ethically, and morally for the benefit of the common good. The evolution of humanity has been grounded in our need to collectivise and act in concert with each other in ways that improve need satisfaction. Evolutionary biology suggests that any economic or philosophical system that fails to conceptualise human systems -communities, societies, collectives- is flawed and likely to fail in the long term. Adopting this position, this paper argues that neoliberalism, in its all-consuming demand for individualism, rejects the premise and evidence of evolutionary biology. As a result, neoliberalism corrupts human needs and human nature. The lynchpin to a more civilised society rests in economic and social systems that recognise the evolutionary reality that human needs are better satisfied when they act in concert with each other, through activities such as the building of social and economic capital in the welfare sector and through unionisation.

A foundational principle of classical liberalism was freedom from social and economic oppression. The contemporary neoclassical, or neoliberal, manifestation of classic liberalism applauds freedom but seems vague about the oppression it rejects. This is particularly evident when justifying neoliberal demands for deregulation, small government and market facilitation. In embracing neoliberal ideas, successive Australian governments have ignored these logical weaknesses regarding freedom and oppression while normalising free-market public policy. This paper argues that in government and public opinion, neoliberal principles continue to dominate by stealth without acknowledgement that they are oppressive rather than liberating. Policy based on such theories needs reconsideration as the logic that justified its precursor, classical liberalism, has been generalised as justification for neoliberal policy that is not grounded in the need for freedom from oppression.