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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2019
Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2019
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I’m (not) a girl: Animating experiences of girlhood in Bob’s Burgers
More LessDiscourses of girlhood increasingly acknowledge its mutability, with the ‘girl’ as a complex image that cannot adequately be conceptualized by age or biology alone. Likewise, theories of animation often foreground its disruptive potential. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses girlhood studies, animation studies and screen studies, this article analyses the representation of the two main girl characters, Tina and Louise Belcher, in the animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers (2011–present). Taking this concept of mutability as its central focus, it argues that animation is an ideal medium for representing girlhood, given its disruptive potential and non-linear capacities, whereby characters are often frozen in time. With no commitment to ageing its young female characters, Bob’s Burgers is instead able to construct a landscape of girlhood that allows for endless reversal, contradiction and overlap in the experiences of Tina and Louise, whose existence as animations reveals girlhood as a liminal space in which girls can be one thing and the other – gullible and intelligent, vulnerable and strong, sexual and innocent – without negating their multifarious experiences.
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‘They were extraordinary circumstances’: Biopolitics, medicine and the state of exception in NBC’s The West Wing
More LessIn the final moments of NBC’s series The West Wing (1999–2006), the camera briefly shows a copy of Michel Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended ([1992] 2003) sitting on a bookshelf in the fictionalized Oval Office. Coming as it does at the end of the series, Foucault’s work becomes an interlocutor of the issues, political and personal, that the show explores. Given that Foucault’s work is his first to take up biopolitics in his lectures at the College de France, its inclusion gives viewers an opportunity to explore how The West Wing grapples with the open questions of sovereignty and biopolitics in the neo-liberal, post-9/11 present of the series and of the historical moment. This article addresses these questions with a combination of Foucault’s work and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘state of exception’. By focusing mainly on two episodes – ‘17 People’ and ‘Dead Irish Writers’ – as well as the antecedent and subsequent narrative threads, the conflicts between the ancient regime of the king’s two bodies and the modern technology of biopower become clear. The biopolitical healthcare of the president’s body, I argue, complicates the clarity of the sovereign power of the president, allowing other political actors – the first lady especially – access to the state of exception. Ultimately, though the show does not offer us a pathway to liberation, it begins the arduous process of escaping from the king’s two bodies.
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‘The King’s shilling’: How Peaky Blinders uses the experience of war to justify and celebrate toxic masculinity
More LessPeaky Blinders (2013–present) is a complex and contradictory study of toxic masculinity as a set of behaviours that are destructive to the self and others. It uses the historical period, post-First World War, to explore the damage war inflicts upon the male psyche, but its sympathies for the men also reveal a darker aspect of this narrow concept of male identity. This does not only emanate from its unashamed glorification of criminality, but also from its representation of some of the deep-rooted yet contradictory beliefs that still exist in postcolonial British national identity. This article explores the role of war as a justification for continued violence, the notion that war (and associated state-sanctioned violence) irreparably damages men, the nostalgia for nationalism through working-class and ethnic identities and the objectification of the main characters’ physical and emotional identities through the ever-present potential for ‘good’ women to repair ‘bed’ men.
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Looking through the upside down: Hyper-postmodernism and trans-mediality in the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things
More LessThis article puts forward the argument that Stranger Things (2016–present) is not only an excellent example of postmodern TV drama, but it takes on what Valerie Wee has termed a ‘hyper-postmodernism’ through its heightened level of intertextual referencing that emerges ‘as text’. Both seasons of the show (thus far to date at the time of writing) also extensively break down the boundaries between film, television, literature and ‘geek’ culture. This is done within the text itself, and through the audience’s invited interaction with the text, as the show demonstrates significant awareness of the trans-medial, Easter-egg hunting tendencies of its binge-watching followers.
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Finding yourself in Lost: Viewer interpretation of the series through reader response
Authors: Meagan Standridge and Kristin M. BartonThe popular American television series Lost (2004–10) gained notoriety and a cult following for its interwoven storylines and numerous mysteries that permeated the series. However, despite the expansive amount of research that has examined and analysed the series, relatively little has explored the way viewers interpreted the series based on their respective academic, philosophical or religious backgrounds. With that in mind, the current research argues that rather than containing definitive meaning, Lost’s success is due in part to its permutability with regard to how the show could be read by viewers. As one of the ground-breaking and iconic series of the twenty-first century, it is important to understand how Lost’s approach to storytelling allowed the show to thrive in the contemporary television landscape and the impact it may have on how television is made in the future.
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Identifying systemic creativity in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad
More LessThis article considers Vince Gilligan’s highly innovative Breaking Bad (2008–13) as the outcome of a collaborative creative process shaped by the interaction between Gilligan, as the principal creative agent, with the evolving domain and field of American television. The innovativeness of Gilligan’s series is conceptualized here by means of applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view of creativity, whereby Gilligan’s access to and impact on the domain of TV production is examined: he is seen as operating within the simultaneously constraining and enabling factors of the structures inherent to American television, its modes of production and viewership. This article elucidates how the innovativeness of Breaking Bad was the outcome of Gilligan’s adherence to and departure from particular traditions of form, format and structure inherent to the production of American TV drama – in conjunction with the radical transformations that the domain and field of American television were undergoing at the time.
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Reviews
Authors: Kelly Coyne and James M. ElrodThe Killing, TV Milestones, John Alberti (2017) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 144 pp., ISBN: 978-0-81434-212-1, p/bk and ebook, $19.99
OpenTV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television, Aymar Jean Christian (2018) New York: New York University Press, 325 pp., ISBN: 978-1-47981-597-5, p/bk, $30.00
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