The structure of Shakespearean drama does not fit easily into the novel-like episodic sequence of the television series. It is therefore no wonder that none of the serialized adaptations of Romeo and Juliet seem to have survived the first season of their broadcast. Nonetheless, the two series examined here, Star-Crossed (created by Meredith Averill for CW, 2014) and Still Star-Crossed (created by Heather Mitchell for ABC, 2017) are worthy of critical attention for a number of reasons. They appear to take radically different paths in appropriating the famously ill-fated romance to contemporary television screens, both in terms of genre and setting, language and style, and also in the way they intend to open up the play’s dramatic structure into a potentially endless sequence of episodes.

The Epilogue reads Steinbeck’s episodic novel Cannery Row as an encapsulation of Steinbeck’s previous career. Cannery Row is a difficult novel to characterize, and hence it embodies the problem of how to read Steinbeck that we have encountered throughout. Steinbeck’s ambivalence over gender and race jostles with his desire to be a big-picture thinker contemplating the nature of human happiness. The episodic structure embodies the philosophy of the book, again making us realize how Steinbeck is a highly experimental writer whose career represents a series of aesthetic transformations in an ongoing frustration with the novel as a genre.