Netflix Nostalgia: Screening the Past on Demand, edited by Kathryn Pallister, and The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV: Production Design and the Boomer Era, by Alex Bevan

It scarcely needs pointing out that “nostalgia” has become a highly contentious battleground in recent years. Since the European Union referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a backwards-looking retreat into regressive nationalist mythologies has been widely understood as ideologically symptomatic of liberal democracies still reeling from the economic implosion of 2007–2008. Typically seen as a reactionary tendency of the political Right, the nostalgic amnesia of the progressive Left is equally self-evident in sentimental mourning for both the pro-hegemonic Obama presidency and the UK’s membership of a market-driven European Union.