Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Netflix's Ripley: Television Antiheroes, Difficult Empathy, and the Aesthetics of Forgery

Netflix's Ripley: Television Antiheroes, Difficult Empathy, and the Aesthetics of Forgery

McEntee, Joy

Hardcover

Series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

TelevisionFilm Studies

ISBN10: 3032053498
ISBN13: 9783032053497
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Nov 20 2025
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.18 Depth: 8.37
Language: English

This book traces the intertextual genealogy behind Netflix's new series Ripley, directed by Steve Zaillian, and offers a critical examination of Tom Ripley's enduring appeal across different media. As the series quickly climbs Netflix's international charts, this volume provides a timely and insightful contribution to the Ripleyverse, exploring the character's complex moral and sexual dimensions in today's cultural context. McEntee investigates Ripley's role within the televisual antihero genre, engaging with theories from Jason Mittell's Complex TV and Margrethe Bruun Vaage's The Antihero in American Television. While Andrew Scott's portrayal of Ripley aims to generate empathy, this book contends that traditional frameworks for understanding antiheroes are insufficient. Instead, it introduces Eric Leake's notion of difficult empathy as a more appropriate model for analyzing Scott's Ripley, offering a fresh perspective on the character's moral ambiguity. This contrasts sharply with Anthony Minghella's 1999 adaptation, where Matt Damon's Ripley elicited a more straightforward emotional response. Readers will discover a nuanced discussion of how Ripley both adheres to and subverts the conventions of the antihero genre and comments self-reflexively on the process of adaptation. The book invites scholars and students of television studies, film, and literature to engage with these themes, providing a rich resource for understanding the evolving landscape of media narratives. Whether you are a scholar of media studies or a curious reader intrigued by the complexities of modern narratives, this book promises to deepen your understanding of the cultural significance of Tom Ripley's latest iteration.

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