This is a call for chapter proposals on the FX Channel's 2023 docuseries "Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur" for the FX Reader, an anthology of FX's best original TV series, which is under a two-volume book contract with Syracuse University Press.  The docuseries explores the lives and legacies of Tupac Shakur and his mother Afeni, who was a Black Panther Party activist. This collection will serve as a valuable resource for TV scholars and educators on FX’s history and its most critically acclaimed, noteworthy series.  The chapter is expected to focus on each series’ creation and production history, its overall aesthetics and key performances, core themes, its association with genre conventions, and relevance to the FX Channel. Each chapter will be simply identified with the series' title and author(s).

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words identifying your chosen series accompanied by a short third person author bio (100 words max) to david.pierson@maine.edu as a Word document by September 20, 2025.  Final chapters should be 5000 words including references, and will be due on February 15, 2026.   For inquiries and questions on the availability of series, please feel free to contact David Pierson at david.pierson@maine.edu, or Brian Faucette at brfaucette@gmail.com.

Editor Bios:  

David Pierson, Ph.D.is a professor of media studies at the University of Southern Maine.  He has published an edited collection Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498532327/Breaking-Bad-Critical-Essays-on-the-Contexts-Politics-Style-and-Reception-of-the-Television-Series), a monograph on The Fugitive TV series (https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/fugitive), along with published chapters and journal articles on such TV series as Better Call Saul, Black Mirror, Breaking Bad, Combat, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Mad Men, Seinfeld and The Shield.  

Brian Faucette, Ph.D. teaches film and English composition courses at a two-year college.  His research focuses on the representation of American masculinities in contemporary and classical American film and television and American crime dramas in television. He is the author of Hawaii Five-O (2022) which is part of the Wayne State University TV Milestone series. He is the co-author of the book Cop Shows: A Critical History of Police Dramas on Television (2015). His most recent essay “It is Difficult to be a White Man in America: White Male Supremacy and the Alt-Right in HBO’s Watchmen” appears in the After Midnight: Analyzing the Post-Watchmen Sequels Ed. Drew Morton Univ. Press of Mississippi (2022). He has also contributed three new essays on Black Mirror, The Flash, and an Overview of Comic Book TV Shows for The Television Genre Book 4th edition (2023) edited by Glenn Creeber.