Dr. Television

Legitimating Television: Blogversation

2011-09-23T09:29:00.004-06:00

This is cross-posted at zigzigger.

In this post, Michael Z. Newman and I aim to offer a look into the origins and purpose of our new book, Legitimating Televison: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. We include an abstract of our argument (which is also our back cover copy), and then engage in a “blogversation” about the project and its aims.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the twenty-first century. Once looked down upon as a “plug-in drug” offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, particularly as critics hail the rise of “cinematic,” Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a family-centered household appliance, offering a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.

Newman and Levine argue that television’s newfound, growing prestige emerges in concert with the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media--and more highly valued audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating “ordinary” television associated with the past, and thereby denies the continuities between past and present. It also distances the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the “old” TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with viewers of elevated economic and cultural status. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass. In so doing it reinforces cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class.

Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the taste question of whether television is simply “good” or “bad,” and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.

Why we wrote this book

EL: While we have been excited by much of the scholarship emerging that deals with the many changes television has been facing, and continues to face (economic, technological, experiential), we also noted some gaps in that scholarship. We kept noticing these discourses of distinction in popular, trade, and scholarly talk about TV, but no one seemed to be talking about it or acknowledging their implications. And once we started noticing it, it was everywhere! I, for one, worry about all of the “future-casting” that seems to be going into contemporary talk about TV (scholarly and popular) and wanted, in part, to do the historian’s work of noting both the continuities with and the disruptions to the past in contemporary developments. So we wanted to historicize a lot of the conversation about convergence-era TV, and specifically to do so around questions of cultural hierarchy and value. In addition, we wanted to inject more of a cultural studies-influenced sense of struggle over television’s status in the cultural hierarchy, something we don’t see a lot of attention being paid to these days.

MZN: We have now seen a fair number of attempts to grapple with how television has been changing during the digital age. Some say television has changed so much that it’s not even television any more (e.g., one book has the title Television after TV), which seems like such a radical break. We wanted to make an argument about the cultural implications of convergence as it works in relation to TV, and in particular how issues of social power underlie many of the shifts we observe in TV’s identity under convergence. We see the old concept of TV as crucial to the newly legitimated medium. A lot of people seem to be aware of some of the same things we observe, but I think our concept of the legitimation of television explains recent developments in a way that has not been done, and puts their meaning into focus. The gender and class implications of television’s legitimation have not been very well recognized.

Influences

MZN: Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV and William Boddy’s New Media and Popular Imagination are most foundational in my thinking about our work, as both are ultimately concerned with how people think about television as a medium, and what place television has in our everyday lives as a result. We are also building on essays by Derek Kompare and Matt Hills about TV on DVD, and by Dana Polan and Christopher Anderson on the cultural status of Quality TV, particularly around HBO and its series. More in terms of background knowledge and approach, I am always inspired by Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which is a book I think everyone across the humanities should read. Bourdieu, of course.

EL: I come to the project with the same influences, although I would also add two other streams of work: British Cultural Studies approaches to television, especially John Fiske’s Bourdieuian takes on cultural hierarchies and appreciation of the tastes of “the people.” For me, the study of television has always been about seeking an understanding of and empathy with a culturally denigrated medium and the subordinated social positions of those who find in that medium their culture. The legitimation of the medium, as much as it is still struggling to achieve dominance, seems to me to dismiss all of that. And that feels like a betrayal of what both television and the cultural studies-influenced field of television studies mean to me. I’d additionally add feminist scholarship on TV melodrama/soaps, especially work by such scholars as Tania Modleski, Jane Feuer, and Lynne Joyrich. These scholars understand deeply the gendered nature of cultural hierarchies and attend to television’s feminized texts as a challenge to such easy dismissals.

Challenges of writing about the present

MZN: When you write about the present, you aim at a moving target. You can think you have figured out what to say about something, and just as you are saying it, the subject changes or new developments complicate your points. You lack historical distance and risk seeing change as more important than it is. We tend to think of our present moment as a break from the past, and to see ourselves as somehow special. Actually I think part of our book’s contribution is in questioning this very tendency toward misapprehending the present, and failing to recognize historical continuities. We call it a history of the present and a polemic, and I wonder if a history of the present can avoid being a polemic in some sense, as our concerns are so immediate and so present in discourses we encounter day by day.

EL: Yeah, I worry about the “ranty” nature of the book at points, but I also feel so strongly about the ideas that I’m kind of proud of the rants, too. My worry is not so much that we come off sounding cranky, but that that crankiness will soon be seen as short-sighted, in that it misses a development that is about to come. Still, we’ve been studying these discourses for a number of years and, if anything, see them increasing rather than decreasing or changing.

What do we hope will come of Legitimating Television?

EL: I hope that readers of our book will think about contemporary TV and the discourses surrounding it in new ways, that they will start to notice the discourses of legitimation all around us and the ways in which these discourses operate in tension with those of denigration. I hope that scholarship that focuses on the economic and technological convergence of TV and other media will not reproduce the classed and gendered hierarchies of so much legitimating discourse--or will at least be more self-conscious about it. I hope that the critics and other journalists talking about contemporary TV will avoid the either/or dichotomy of trash or art that pervades discourses of legitimation and delegitimation and consider the ways their words shape the way we all think about TV. Mostly, I just want to see thoughtful, socially and politically engaged work on TV that has an historical sensibility and that tries not to reproduce damaging cultural hierarchies.

MZN: I’m eager to see more scholarly engagement with television texts in aesthetic terms, and some of this book indeed works in this area, e.g., the discussions of sitcom and drama forms. My previous work on TV storytelling is also an effort in this area. But I’d like to see aesthetic considerations of television proceed in full consciousness of the power of aesthetic discourses, and to the extent possible without the naive appreciation of “good TV” or denigration of “bad TV” that reinforces the cultural hierarchies central to legitimation and delegitimation. This is a challenge to be sure, but one that I think must be undertaken if TV studies is to maintain a critical perspective. Similarly, with new technologies and audience practices, we ought to be wary of endorsing the so-called control and activity of new ways of watching without recognizing drawbacks and their ideological implications.

What you should know before you read

MZN: I wonder if some people might see the book and infer that we’re rooting for TV to be legitimated. Sometimes when I tell people that the book is about the idea that TV has gotten better, they seem excited by the thought and eager to endorse it. (Others are more cranky and say things like, “I disagree!” or “I don’t watch television.”) Our purpose is to document and analyze legitimation as the emergent common sense, but also to argue that it’s not ultimately a force for good.

EL: You put that so democratically. We say legitimation is bad! But, at the same time, it’s important that readers know: 1) We love TV. 2) We know there are some benefits to the legitimation of television, but think the discourse as it now stands does too much damage to television writ large and to classed and gendered conceptions of cultural and social worth. 3) That is not our living room on the cover.

WTF and OMG: James Franco on GH?

2009-10-01T19:31:00.006-06:00

Figures that the one day all semester when I am so tied up in classes and meetings that I spend almost zero time on the internets is the day when mondo GH news breaks. "Film Star James Franco Checks into General Hospital"! So I finally find out, I'm all excited (who doesn't love Daniel Desario?), I'm all, "but doesn't he realize that no one thinks GH is any good these days?" And then I finally get to read all about it in the soap blogosphere and the entertainment industry sites and all. And I realize this is really interesting in many, many ways.

First is the shocked (SHOCKED!) reaction amongst all commenters. No one can believe it. No one can understand it. But these shocked reactions come in at least three versions: one is from in-the-know soap types, who pretty much echo my reaction above--the "but everyone knows GH is a shell of its former self these days" take. GH is not the place to go for a quality soap experience! Serial Drama's Mallory says it; Marlena DeLaCroix says it. And here and there a commenter says it on more general entertainment biz sites.

But those sites have the much more predictable comments, the why the hell would he go to a soap at all comments, the who the hell cares about those awful soaps comments, the NO ONE actually watches those things anymore comments. These, of course, come from a much different place than those from soap viewers. Soap viewers love soaps, but rue how far so many have fallen from their days of soapy goodness. The rest of the world simply picks up the discourse of denigration long linked to the genre. Boring, easy pot-shots. The soap viewers' criticisms are much more stinging.

Then there's category three of reaction--the attempt to explain. Rumor has it he's researching a film role. He shares a manager with GH actor Steve Burton. He knows lots of famous folks once worked on soaps and wants to be like them. A friend told him that soap acting is the hardest acting gig there is and he wanted to try it. He got stoned with Seth Rogen and lost a bet.

I'd like to think that it's all linked to the education he's been getting at Columbia and, reportedly, in a queer cinema course at NYU. A while back, zigzigger linked to an interview clip with Franco expressing his admiration for Carl Wilson's awesome book, Let's Talk about Love, a volume about a hipster music snob trying to understand the appeal of Celine Dion that does an amazing job of exploring questions of cultural hierarchy, taste, and gender. I'm thinking that a little queer theory, a little Bourdieu, maybe even a little soap scholarship in one of those college courses piqued his interest and encouraged the guy to explore the genre from the inside.

Let's call the story, "James Franco challenges cultural hierarchies!" or, alternately, stealing from Wilson (who borrowed it from Idolator) "James Franco Journeys to the End of Taste." I think I may love the guy.

First Mad Men, now this?

2009-08-23T14:49:00.003-06:00

Opening an email from my friendly neighborhood Banana Republic chain, I am greeted by this:

Why, it's Claire Fisher and Ted Fairwell, the young lovers we learn in the last episode of Six Feet Under (spoiler alert) will eventually marry and live happily ever after!

I can't quite believe that BR went to the trouble to get Lauren Ambrose and Chris Messina for this ad, given that the series last aired in 2005 and the characters (not to mention the actors) are no where near universally recognizable. But I love them, as I do the Mad Men characters, and I think BR may totally have my number. If I didn't have a big ole pregnant belly right now I'd be totally tempted to use their 20% off offer just because they acknowledged my somewhat obscure TV tastes.

I really miss that Claire Fisher. And Ted, what a guy . . .

Farrah, the 1970s, and me

2009-06-26T08:28:00.005-06:00

I'm a bad blogger, or delinquent at the very least. Just wrote a little something about Farrah and the 1970s for the Duke University Press blog (publishers of my book on sex and 1970s TV). So read it over there--and maybe, maybe more here soon from me.

Busy, busy

2009-02-26T18:41:00.002-06:00

Much to do of late, as I am teaching two new courses this semester. One, a large introductory lecture, the other a graduate seminar. Both are going well but extremely time-consuming. Plus lots of TV to manage--always a challenge in Idol season. Those of you in the teaching/learning biz might be interested in the website for my lecture course, Television and Radio in American Society, and the class blog for my seminar in Gender and Popular Culture. The latter is great thanks to my super duper students. Too tired after a rousing seminar today to say much of note, but here's a few recent, random-ish thoughts on TV and other media consumed:

-- The sexism and homophobia of Idol is really bugging me this season. The excessive discussion of the female contestants' attractiveness when their singing stinks? Ryan and Simon's homophobic taunts? Yuck.

-- But I join the bandwagon of excitement around hometown boy Danny Gokey. I just want him to make it to the top 3 so I can go to his home visit festivities! Though I am convinced I know that Adam Lambert from somewhere. Anyone know if he was a student at UW-Madison or Milwaukee at some point?

-- Mamma Mia is quite absurd, isn't it? But I was amazed to see a Hollywood product so baldly designed for the pleasure of middle-aged women.

-- I liked the Hugh Jackman-hosted Oscars. The individual tributes for the acting awards were nice, but I found those for the actresses way more moving and genuine than those for the men. Better acting or just greater comfort with the emotional display?

-- Fascinated with the new Disney XD channel for boys and its flagship series Aaron Stone. I may a have a paper in me on this one.

-- Finally finished watching last season's episodes of Lipstick Jungle. Gotta say, I really like that show. I think it's a case of a show one may watch but is not supposed to discuss.

-- I was so saddened by the "special" GH reflecting on what would have happened if Maxie had died and B.J. had lived woe those many years ago when the show was THE AWESOME. Kirsten Storms gave it her all with her sassy commentary but too much of it just made no sense for those with any awareness of the show's history. Carly got involved with Tony only AFTER BJ had died. Bobbie and Tony were as solid as soap couples come before losing their child. Makes no sense that Carly would have been married to Tony in the scenario they offered. And why no recognition that Lulu and BJ were cousins? And why did Maxie's absence have anything to do with Johnny becoming a jr. Sonny? So lame. The show just makes me sad, sad, sad.

-- To end more hopefully, do you know how many free magazines one can acquire by agreeing to free trial issues with no-obligation cancellations? And once you're in the system, they just keep offering you more free issues every time you cancel.

Video catalog hits 1000!

2009-02-04T09:14:00.002-06:00

Today I enter the 1000th dvd into my video catalog. As I have described previously, I am at work on a continuous dubbing and cataloging project, recording off-air shows to DVD and transferring my large collection of videotapes to DVD, as well. I know that DVD is an imperfect archival medium but the ability to save (at least for a while) my stuff in a compact form, cataloging it in the process, is too good to pass up.

What is the 1000th disc, you ask? Why, four episodes of The Nanny from the late 1990s. I wrote a paper about the show once upon a time, still kind of love it, and will perhaps return to it again someday. Sure, the show is available on commercial DVDs, but here I have some of my favorite episodes, with original commercials, and I don't have to pay the MSM to receive them. Or maybe I'm just a pack rat.

Back to business

2009-01-26T15:17:00.002-06:00

What I have done so far today:
1) Made lunch for boy, got him to school
2) Took clothes to Goodwill
3) Assorted correspondence
4) Finished notes for this week's grad seminar
5) Reading for lecture class next week
6) Wrote lecture for said class
7) Wrote reading questions for said reading
8) Wrote exam questions for said lecture
9) Dubbed a bunch of shows to DVD and entered into video catalog
10) Finished last season's Entourage finale during lunch

What I have left to do today:
1) Create Powerpoints for above said lecture
2) Write conference proposal
3) Make dinner
4) Work out
5) Pick up boy and his dad
6) Watch TV or Netflix movie
7) Figure out what to wear for first day of teaching tomorrow

Oh dear.

Soap news

2009-01-15T15:37:00.004-06:00

I was super-excited yesterday to hear that ABC has finally made General Hospital available as a streaming video feed on its website. This is the first of ABC's soaps to be available in this format, something the network has resisted, presumably, in order to shore up their Soapnet ratings. Well, it becomes increasingly clear that Soapnet is doing all it can to jump the soap ship, and that web-based distribution is a part of the other nets' soaps game.

I began to fantasize about all of the ways this streaming video would improve my life: easy, fast GH screen caps! catching bits of episodes while eating lunch at my desk! keeping up while traveling! This may be Too Much Information, but this morning I experimented with watching a streaming ep on the laptop while getting ready in the bathroom. Even put the flat iron down for a minute to watch the intense Maxie/Spinelli scenes from the 1/9 episode.

My fantasies aren't coming true so quickly, however. The combination of my crap-ass computer (past its ideal replacement age), so-so internet connection, and the vagaries of streaming video players in general made the episode stop and start throughout, offering a not-particularly-pleasant viewing experience, even if that viewing was distracted by the putting in of contact lenses and moisturizing of face.

Plus, the soap news is so gloomy these days that it's hard to get too excited about all of the ways a streaming GH will benefit me. This piece includes some pretty devastating quotes from industry bigwigs, such as "No format has been hit harder [by the recession] than daytime serials" and that Guiding Light "isn't even treading water. It's sunk below the waves." Sad times indeed.

Showtime wants me

2009-01-12T19:53:00.003-06:00

Showtime has been trying out a new strategy for hooking in subscribers,previewing the first episode of new series The United States of Tara on over 100 different platforms over a week prior to the show's debut on the premium network. I caught it the first day it was available via the Netflix streaming video service, but it is now available much more broadly. It's a smart move, I think, in that it allows the viewer to sample what s/he might be buying if they subscribe to the service. As someone who subscribes and unsubscribes to premium channels as shows I want to watch come and go, it is particularly effective for me.

But it's really effective because I just loved, loved, loved the show. I know it's only been one episode but I am already quite impressed with its feminist sensibility. This doesn't much surprise me, as it was created and written by Diablo Cody, whose Juno script was also one of the more feminist pieces of mainstream culture I've seen of late. Unlike Juno, however, Tara jumps right into its progressive vision (I think it takes Juno until she tells her parents about the pregnancy for the tone of the film to shift and for me to start feeling really into it).

Tara seems particularly resonant with what I think of as third wave feminism. By this I mean that it is acutely aware of the multiplicity of identity. Now, that may seem way obvious, given the fact that the show's premise is our protagonist's multiple personality disorder. But that seems to serve more as metaphor than anything--it allows the show to experiment with different dimensions of Tara's identity in ways that a non-mentally ill character in a realist program could not. What stood out for me in ep. 1 was how very much the dimensions of Tara's identities served to explore dimensions of gender identity (and this before I've even seen Alice, the hyper-feminine '50s housewife alter). Hypersexual teen alter T and male Vietnam vet Buck already exemplify gendered extremes, though Alice will surely help make clear that those extremes do not appear on a linear continuum but rather a three-dimensional series of planes, with multiple versions of femininity, at least, vying for dominance.

Even better is the attitude of Tara's family toward her alters and thereby to her range of gendered identities. In the first episode they are totally and comfortably accepting. This is just the way things are for them. In fact, they seem to sort of benefit from the different identities Tara takes on, as if no singly gendered self can be the all things to all members of the family that many would wish. Whether this will turn out to be a critique of the multiple demands placed upon women, or whether it will remain an acceptance, even embrace, of the many selves we all might be if given the chance remains to be seen.

But I'm pretty sure that Showtime is going to get my subscription dollars so I can find out.

Am I a bad media scholar?

2009-01-11T14:30:00.002-06:00

Just canceled our lone print newspaper subscription--to the Sunday NY Times. We read a fair bit of it online anyway, plus we just joined Netflix and I wanted to justify the expense by cutting something else out. The media budget is just too big as it is. Sigh. Hastening the demise of print media. I feel so guilty.

Available at Target, Walgreens, and CVS

2009-01-02T16:28:00.002-06:00

Leo is quickly approaching his 5th birthday and his grasp of the world around him continues to expand. Latest on his horizon is the world of TV commercials. The kid has been a TV fan for much of his life, reared primarily on Noggin, the Nickelodeon networks' commercial-free pre-school channel. In the last year or so he has picked up some Disney Channel shows, but those, too, run in largely commercial-free blocks. I'm not kidding myself that any of this is non-commercial, despite the absence of conventional commercial spots appearing throughout the shows. This programming has well prepared him to participate in American consumer culture, chock full as it is of Dora games and Mickey Mouse nightlights and Backyardigans CDs. But until very recently the boy had seen very, very few commercial spots. Not only were his shows commercial-free they were also watched via DVR and so could be fast-forwarded, stopped, etc. at parental will.

But now he has discovered commercials. AND HE LOVES THEM.

He's been encountering conventional commercial messages in several ways: during the football games he has taken to watching with his dad, during shows in the Qubo block of programming that runs on Sunday mornings on NBC, even during some of his long-time faves I recorded to DVD off of Nickelodeon (rather than Noggin) in order to bring them along while traveling. The first signs of his fascination with actual commercials--those 20 or 30 second spots I spend much of my life fast-forwarding in my own TV vieiwng--was his use of the phrase "for real." As in, "I really like these chicken nuggets. For real." So cute, I thought, then I began to hear the phrase repeated ad nasuem on the Chucky Cheese sponsorship message running before many Disney Channel shows.

Increasingly, he has asked us to leave the commercials playing rather than fast-forwarding them (as on the home-burned DVDs I mentioned) and often seems more intrigued by the commercials than the football during his sports-bonding time with dad. But I really knew how very enamored he was of commercials when, a couple of days ago, he announced, apropos of nothing, "Available at Target, Walgreens, and CVS."

What did you say?

Available at Target, Walgreens, and CVS.

To M: Did you hear what he said?

Leo: Available at Target Walgreens,and CVS.

Yes, this delightful turn of phrase comes straight from the Chia commercial (as in Chia pets) running during Turbo Dogs, his fave of the NBC-run Qubo block, and a show during which he now expressly forbids fast-forwarding of ads.

The next day we got another of these, this time, "Canada and Puerto Rico!" As in, available for shipping to the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

There is only so long one can shield one's children from the horrors of the world.

Scene from a coffee shop

2008-12-01T15:03:00.002-06:00

As I work away diligently in a coffee shop I find myself amazed by the scene in front of me and to the right, that of a man, presumably a father, sitting with a baby, presumably his son (blue shirt). This man is working, or doing some other piece of business, on his laptop. He occasionally hands the baby a piece of cookie, or picks up his blanket from the floor. On the whole, however, he remains focused on his laptop, typing, reading, thinking. The baby? Happy as could be--looking around, smiling at other patrons, sucking his fingers.

Why does this amaze me? Not because the baby is so content--seems like a well-rested, well-fed, easygoing kid. But because the man can so readily conduct his business with the baby by his side. I could never do this.

That darn baby is now WAVING at the people around him. Dad continues to face the screen, focused.

I know that my inability to have done such a thing when my child was a baby rests in two areas: 1) my compulsively attentive parenting and 2) my internalization of a socially constructed middle class mommy role that prescribes a kind of consistent interaction with one's child. In other words, the guilt would get me. I really envy that dude, or rather I envy someone having both the personality and the social position to do what he is doing and--I suppose I am presuming here--not feel guilty about it.

Now I return to reading Judith Butler, perhaps the inspiration for my reflections on the performance of gender now before me?

My boyfriend is a vampire

2008-11-21T15:45:00.002-06:00

This weekend marks the release of the feature film, Twilight, based on the first in Stephenie Meyer’s quartet of young adult novels featuring the awkward human teen, Bella Swan and her beautiful and perfect vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen. Haven’t seen the film yet—not bold enough to venture out to last night’s midnight screenings—and promised my sister a joint outing to see it over Thanksgiving weekend anyway. But I’ve read the book and am thisclose to being done with Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final in the series. I’m pretty sure I’ve already encountered the major plot points of BD, and if there is a surprise twist I’m not expecting, well, I’ll be pretty damn surprised.

These books are not exactly stellar works of writing, or plotting, or characterization, or really any of the things one might want in a novel. But I kept reading after Twilight, which I picked up in order to be in on the tweens-and-their-moms buzz, so there must be something there that’s drawing me back.

Maybe it’s the vampire boyfriend. There’s a lot of them floating around these days. Buffy’s Angel, of course, but also Sookie Stackhouse and her vbf. (I’m trying to coin a slang term here, so please keep up) of the Charlaine Harris books and HBO series, True Blood, as well as Edward, dreamy vbf of the moment. I’ve read the first in the Harris series and have been watching True Blood, though am, per usual, a couple of episodes behind. There’s no real competition for Buffy and Angel in any of this, so I kind of want to put them aside as exceptional. But certainly all three vbf stories have something in common. (Just remembered another! The short-lived CBS series of last season, Moonlight, with the young blonde reporter and her vbf—too lazy to go look up character names.)

In vbf stories, there is an inherent obstacle to the characters’ couplehood—namely, that vbf, as gorgeous and attentive as he might be—could also kill you, or make you all coffin-sleeping immortal, or revert to his soulless origins and cruelly dump you—if his manly passions get the better of him. Girls just know that guys aren’t so good at keeping those manly passions in check and, after all, what hetero-leaning girl doesn’t want to be the object of the perfect guy’s manly passions? Herein lies the problem—the thing you want most, that wants you most, could be very, very bad for you. Sigh.

In the Twilight series, the hook, if you could call it that, is that Edward is actually very good for Bella, and good to her. He nobly restrains his passion for her, like, indefinitely, for fear of doing her in, and many others have rightly noted that this makes him a supremely safe fantasy object for very young girls contemplating heterosexual sex but freaked out about it all the same. Edward is the abstinence king who really, really loves her like crazy anyway. Interestingly, this is the dimension of the books that has kept me from really getting into the Bella/Edward romance—well, that, and the fact that Bella is a supremely uninteresting young woman. (I think this is actually part of the appeal for many—she is so plain, so unremarkable, that you could actually be in her shoes—it’s not a far stretch to imagine since she is no more impressive than you.) I’ve been much more into the possibility/fantasy of a Bella/Jacob romance, Jacob being B’s bff, rival to Edward for Bella’s affections, and oh yeah, a werewolf. Jacob’s passion for Bella is much less restrained than Edward’s, plus she could actually have a real human life with him and he is unlikely to kill her when they have sex—seems like a no-brainer choice to me but, alas, events thus far in Breaking Dawn have indicated that Jacob is totally off the canvas as a romantic possibility for Bella, which I think may be why I’ve lost enthusiasm for the books and have yet to finish the last one. Up till a certain point in BD, I held out hope for a proper romantic triangle. Now that I’m pretty sure all such hope is gone, not so into it.

The other vbf stories make the vbf a much more appealing choice—for all the typical vbf reasons listed above but also because he doesn’t go to the extreme of protecting her by squelching his passion. True Blood is getting way too much of its mileage from its premium cable raciness, but I admit that Bill and Sookie are a pretty hot pair. Bill’s got old school gentlemanly charm (he was a Civil War soldier when turned vamp) as well as manly man passion and toughness. And he respects Sookie as pretty tough herself, as well as capable of things he is not (reading minds). She’s a great character, a million times more interesting than Bella (and definitely enhanced by Anna Paquin’s performance—I like on-screen Sookie better than I did on-page Sookie). I’m not going to get into the multiple appeals of Buffy and Angel as a pair, or Buffy and Spike, for that matter (TWO vbfs! Buffy is awesome).

In any case, the non-Twilight vbf stories find ways to create dramatic and sexual tension between the couple, to put up obstacles to their romance, without requiring the woman to be helpless, hapless, and hopeless. Having a vampire for a boyfriend is quite enough of a problem on its very own.

How I Love Mad Men, let me count the ways

2008-10-28T10:33:00.005-06:00

There has been way more Mad Men blogging than I care to read roundabout the internets these days, what with the amazing second season finale that aired Sunday. I could go on and on about my love for the period setting, the beautifully crafted nature of every little moment (not a frame of that show is frivolous or insignificant), the subtle nuances of character and story, or the remarkably feminist sensibility that suffuses the whole thing. But watching the thing is a much better use of your time.

I do want to note, however, the appeal of one small piece of the show, one I noticed for the first time in this last episode, "Meditations on an Emergency." This is the wall sculpture hanging above the bar in Roger Sterling's office.

When I noticed it this week, I was pretty certain that my grandparents had had a similar piece of artwork in their home. When I asked my aunt, she confirmed that indeed they had. But, sadly, it had been sold last year after they both passed away (within a month of one another), having lived long lives into their 90s.

Seeing it on Mad Men, and connecting it with my grandparents, made me really long to have it myself, and I'm kicking myself for not asking about it sooner, as it easily could have been mine, had I remembered it and asked for it earlier.

I am on a quest to find another one, though, so if anyone knows of a similar mid-century metal wall sculpture, or can identify anything about this one that might help me find another, please do let me know!

Not sure if it's a piece of Mad Men, or a piece of my grandparents, or a piece of really cool artwork I want. I just regret that it took Mad Men to make me realize I wanted the thing at all, and to make me realize it too late.

I'm sad about my networks

2008-10-22T12:45:00.004-06:00

My 4 year old son had a phase in which he would say, at times, "I'm sad about my friends." After some probing, we figured out what he meant by this. He meant that he missed his friends, that he was sad not to be with them, that he hoped to see them again soon.

That's how I'm feeling these days about TV -- I'm sad about my networks.

It's now reached that point in the fall TV season (and, trust me, there is still a fall TV season, despite industry claims to its elimination) when I've sampled pretty much everything and have whittled down my options, settling into something of a regular line-up of shows to continue watching. It's not lookin' good. At this point, I can only think of two new shows that have achieved "season pass" status (in TiVo parlance, even though my main DVR is--sniff--no longer a TiVo). And neither of these shows is a favorite, by any means. In case you wonder, they are Privileged, on the CW, which I like for its smart, plucky protagonist, but which isn't so great on the whole, and Raising the Bar on TNT, Steven Bochco's new lawyer show, which I think I like mostly for the retro feel of it (the man DOES know how to write a lawyer show, after all), even if I find the sexual and gender politics rather retro, too. Since I'm a few episodes behind, I'll reserve further comment on that, but I do have some thoughts I'd like to share eventually.

There is certainly other competent fare on the nets these days. I thought The Mentalist and Eleventh Hour both work as procedurals with slight continuing character arcs and the charms of Simon Baker ALMOST convinced me to keep watching the former, but no. I thought Worst Week was sort of funny, and the same for Kath & Kim, which I know is heresy given the massive pan it received. But, again, no real desire to watch more of either.

I do still plan to watch at least one more episode of Easy Money, which has a somewhat new premise in its check-cashing place setting, and I think Valentine, also on the CW, is worth watching here and there for its hyper-corny Love Boat appeal. But, on the whole, I'm really sad about my networks. Other than fun reality competish shows like The Amazing Race, Dancing with the Stars and--looming in the new year--Idol, the broadcast nets just aren't bringing it.

And don't get me started on what makes me sad about the daytime soaps.

My favorite shows of late have all been on cable, and have all recently concluded or are finishing up their seasons--Project Runway, GH: Night Shift, and Mad Men. (Oops. There's also Friday Night Lights, another fave, being brought to me by Directv in advance of its NBC run next year. This show is fabulously back to season 1 greatness. But again, it wouldn't have been if just on NBC.) I don't want to be one of those high falutin' types who turns my nose up at the broadcast networks. (OK, probably not much danger of that as I continue to watch Dancing and Idol.) But I really think they ain't what they used to be, those networks. Maybe I have changed as much as have they, but I am fond of much TV and just can't get excited about any of those nets' new shows. This comes on top of last year's strike-shortened season, in which I ended up taking on very few new series, as well. Even those series that have survived since then only achieve half-hearted liking from me. If it weren't for the amazing wardrobes, jewelry, and those Chuck and Blair moments I don 't think Gossip Girl or Lipstick Jungle would be showing up on my Now Playing list at all.

As I continue my ongoing project of dubbing my VHS collection to DVD, I can see that the network TV of yesteryear had so much more appeal. Today I dubbed a favorite episode of the short-lived Herskovitz/Zwick Relativity and recently I've been transferring some mid-'90s GH (Claire Labine years, for those in the know). Shows like those could really make a person love TV.

Now I'm really sad about my networks.

Last night's TV

2008-10-15T14:25:00.006-06:00

A rundown of last night's surprisingly good viewing. Note that not all shows aired last night. Life on a DVR means that the schedule-as-programmed has little meaning.

1) Bits and pieces of General Hospital, I think from last Friday and this Monday. I'm watching so much of it on fast-forward these days that it's hard to take much away. Except I watch all Robin and Patrick scenes (except when Patrick talks about Sonny's problems) and always examine Maxie's outfits very carefully.
This one is cute but I'm ready to move on to a new day's wardrobe.

2) My viewing companion enters and we decide to watch the pilot episode of Life on Mars. It's good! I like the way it reminds me of the TV of the '80s--Quantum Leap, of course with the time travel thing--but also Magnum P.I., Moonlighting, all of those shows with episodic weekly plots but continuing character arcs that shape the whole thing. Like MZN says, more Lisa Bonet! Earns another week recorded via DVR.

3) Monday's episode of The Hills. The Justin Bobby/Audrina story has the potential to have Jason and Lauren-style drama, and Justin Bobby, while as big a jerk as all of the other dudes in the Hills-a-verse, has enough bad boy sexiness to make us understand why she would want him despite his assholery (unlike that awful Jason). But Audrina. Sigh. Poor, poor Audrina. I just don't think she can carry the storyline--just not enough going on behind the stare and smile--and without the heroine whose heartbreak we can share, it can only be a half-hearted attempt at soapy drama, not the replacement for it, a la the Lauren and Jason saga.

4) Dancing with the Stars results show-- on major FF, but aired earlier the same night, so I'd like some points for timeliness, please. Usual boring recaps, goofy bits, blah, blah, blah, then -- POW! An all-male Pussycat Dolls troupe starts strutting all over the dance floor, and soon doffs their already-revealing jackets. Riveting for a second, but soon back to fast forwarding. Then the kids start their competition and the ff grinds to a halt. Those kids are awesome, if a bit creepy, and make at least a few minutes of the results show worth seeing.

5) Normally, I would have called it quits for the night and headed off to read a bit of Breaking Dawn (I know--it's really bad, but I have to know what happens. Team Jacob!) But last night was the first of the two-part GH: Night Shift finale and I had to watch. Started on a slight DVR-induced delay but soon caught up and actually SAT THROUGH THE COMMERCIALS because I was seeing the most compelling hour of TV I've watched in a long time. They re-created Robert's living room set from the '80s! They put Robin in the flowery dress and had her say, "Hi. My name is Robin"! Anna wore that mantilla! And had that big bump in the front of her hair! They acknowledged Holly's absence! And Sean! And Tiffany! And Love, the doll! I can't even believe I got to see all of these people and this place again. I was back in 1985, in the happiest of my GH days. The other parts of the ep were good, too, especially the touching story of Kyle and the Chad Allen character, whose name is escaping me now.

As if I were not already primed to kiss the feet of the amazing Sri Rao for bringing this to my TV, today I read his interview with TV Guide Canada and discover that My So-Called Life is his favorite show (I married a guy for this very reason) and Herskovitz and Zwick are his TV writer idols. Mr. Rao, if you even find yourself in Milwaukee, I would be honored to have you to dinner. I think you are my new BFF.

A few more thoughts . . .

2008-10-14T15:29:00.007-06:00

A friend told me he heard a rumor that I was "boycotting" the Flow conference, a rumor surely inspired by my last post. I told him that I wouldn't call it a boycott, rather that I thought it impossible for me to attend a conference held on Yom Kippur, given my personal situation.

I don't know who labeled my situation a boycott, but it seems to me representative of a certain view of the work and life of academics, or at least of the academia I know, in that it assumes that I must have made a choice against the conference rather than having to grapple with a tension between my identity as a media scholar and my other, more personal, roles. Rather than a choice against the conference this was a situation shaped by choices I have made in my personal life that are not readily accommodated within academia. These choices are not about religion, but rather about sustaining certain kinds of personal relationships (in this particular case, to my immediate and extended family) for which there is no clear place in academia. These relationships include those with my partner (in that it would be inequitable for only one of us to attend a conference in which we are both interested), with my child (for whose care I am responsible), and with my extended family (whose babysitting generosity and religious observance I respect). Perhaps I should include my relationship to the Jewish community here, but my particular dilemma in this case was more about the Jews in my family than a community at large.

These thoughts are really not specific to the Flow conference, rather they are about the academic culture in which I take part. The academic culture in which I have been socialized (primarily through graduate school and the world of my "field," with which I engage most regularly through conferences) is one that seems to assume a 24/7 living and breathing of the work. In part, this may be because we study media, and thus cannot escape our object of study even when in our "down time." I imagine this may be different for the chemist or perhaps even the literature scholar, though other fields surely feel the same 24/7 work mentality in their own respects, as well as some shared ones.

Now, please understand that I love this aspect of being a media scholar--that the work, the ideas, suffuse all of my life, not just some segmented "work time." I would love to be able to live in a world in which I am always surrounded by others as interested in and passionate about media, especially TV, as I am, and who want to talk about it in the ways I do. This is in large part what I loved about graduate school, that immersion in a world of people and ideas focused on similar interests and passions. When I came to graduate school, I couldn't believe my good fortune in finding such a community of like-minded people. And in many ways, I still reap the benefits of that, as I live with a like-minded media scholar and so get to experience that 24/7 world moreso than might someone who is single or partnered with a non-academic or even an academic in another field.

And yet. The real world is not graduate school. And the harsh truth that I think many of us must encounter when we move into jobs (hopefully) and other responsibilities is that a 24/7 life of the mind, of scholarly passion and commitment, is kind of impossible. Even if one chooses to keep one's personal ties limited and to focus on the work as a result, it can be difficult in the world post-grad school to find the like-minded souls you once knew. Many of us work in places where we are not surrounded by people engaged in the same ideas and interests as we are and thus we make other kinds of friends. So my real life, day to day friends are not necessarily fellow media scholars, but psychologists, and doctors, and stay at home parents, people with whom I've found other ways of connecting than our intellectual passions. And I have family members, both older and younger than me, who need my attention and time, or to whom I owe certain considerations (as in the case of not being able to ask anyone to babysit over Yom Kippur).

My point is that the ideal of 24/7 intellectual immersion that academia demands/promises/threatens is not a practical one for most of us. It is a patriarchal ideal, as well, in that it assumes an academic who can be readily freed from real world obligations and commitments in pursuit of the scholarship. This person has of course traditionally been male. Male academics have always had connections and obligations outside of their work (to partners, children, etc.) but have also lived in a culture in which it is assumed that their work can and must supersede those private links and that someone else (typically a wife) will be there to take care of them. The picture of an academic, male or female, who cannot or will not subsume those links fits less well into an academic culture that sees all else as secondary to the intellectual (and social) pursuits of the professorial life.

Dr. Crazy wrote about similar issues a while back, talking about the ways that academia is inhospitable to a personal life and I really liked what she said but couldn't figure out how to articulate my take at the time. So this is my awkward attempt to do so, not to complain about any one problematic policy in academia, but instead to reflect on what I see as the patriarchal roots of academic culture, roots that assume an ease of separation between academic life and personal life that is not always possible, and that has consequences that we are not all willing to accept.

UPDATE: Just saw this column at the Chronicle of Higher Ed that reports on the impact of such matters for women in the sciences.

Religion, culture and the politics of academia, or why I'm not going to Flow

2008-10-07T11:42:00.007-06:00

Sorry to break my blogging silence with the screed I'm about to write, but something is bugging me and I want to have my say.

An exciting development in the world of TV and media scholarship in recent years has been the advent of Flow, an online forum for somewhat informal, timely writing by media scholars. Published by graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, the journal also spawned a conference two years ago, which I attended and enjoyed. The second Flow conference is being held this week in Austin, and I'm not going. Why? Because the first day of the conference overlaps with the Jewish high holiday, Yom Kippur, often regarded as the holiest of holidays in the Jewish religion.

I'm Jewish, but am not religious. For my immediate family, Jewish holidays are occasions for family togetherness, but not especially for religious observance. I don't go to synagogue services or participate in other religious rituals. In this respect, I might have attended Flow without it impeding on any particular religious conviction. But attending the conference would most definitely have been problematic for my cultural identity--and for the practical realities of my life as a Jewish parent, daughter, and daughter-in-law.

As a Jew, even a non-religious one, I find offensive a culture that takes Jewish observance for granted and sees it as insignificant. The Flow organizers have been apologetic about the conference scheduling but I still find the choice to schedule it on this day to be insensitive and culturally myopic. I do not believe that an academic conference would be scheduled over Christmas or Easter, even if many of the academics in the field had little or no religious investment in the holiday. And the organizers' offer to schedule Jewish participants' panels on days other than the holiday and to direct those interested to the campus Hillel services fundamentally misunderstands the community- and family-based nature of Jewish culture.

While I chose not to attend in part in protest of this kind of cultural prejudice, I also felt that my participation was impossible for practical reasons, even though those reasons are also culturally contingent. I am married to another Jewish media scholar, and so any time we both want to attend a conference we must make arrangements for the care of our 4 year old son. We typically manage this about once a school year with the generous assistance of our extended families, who travel to our home or take our son into theirs when we both attend the same conference. (Sure, we could bring him with us, but his presence requires that one of us NOT be involved in the conference at any given time--not a very acceptable situation to either of us.) Each of our extended families are more religiously observant than are we, so it would be impossible for us to ask them to care for our son on this holiday. And I, for one, would be ashamed to ask, knowing full well the significance of this particular holiday and the general disregard for Jewish culture in American society more generally. Asking my family to babysit on this day would reproduce the insensitivity that the Flow organizers have perpetuated, albeit unintentionally.

That's why I'm not going to Flow.

ABC invites its soaps to the dance

2008-08-25T18:35:00.003-06:00

The soap internets are all aflutter today over ABC's newest fall promo, set to the jazzy "Dancing in September" and featuring stars of ABC daytime right alongside those of ABC prime time. One minute you're lookin' at Derek and Meredith, or Samantha Who, or Sawyer, and the next it's Gigi and Rex! Here's the promo:

The excitement over the inclusion of ABC Daytime in the promo is understandable. Daytime programming has long been isolated from the prime time business of the broadcast nets. And no one at the nets seems too keen on the soaps these days. But the ABC soaps are in an enviable position in an era of integration and conglomeration. Because ABC Disney owns its shows (the only net to do so) the company has a different kind of investment in its soaps than do CBS and NBC. ABC Daytime prez Brian Frons has repeatedly spoken about his conception of the areas he oversees -- daytime, Soapnet, syndication -- as the different nodes in a cross-platform brand. Soap fans have some justifiable problems with this logic, mainly because it denies the genre-specificity of soaps. But it may be the justification that is helping to keep ABC's soaps on the air and even putting them in promos that don't differentiate between daytime and prime time. If ABC's soaps are just nodes in the cross-platform brand that is ABC Disney they can work interchangeably with other elements of the brand.

Plus, the promo makes crystal clear that ABC wants women viewers. The emphasis on female-led shows, on romantic elements of action shows like Lost, and the inclusion of the soaps suggests that they are pitching the fall line-up squarely at the femmes. At least they acknowledge that some of those women might actually like the net's daytime soaps, too.

Who to praise? Who to blame? Daytime soaps and the mystery of the head writer

2008-08-06T12:51:00.002-06:00

My perusal of soap discourse online these days tells me that soap viewers spend a lot of time discussing the shows' head writers. When shows go bad, the head writer is to blame. When they're good, the head writer is praised. Hence the consistent Guza-bashing, Higley-mocking, and Carlivati-worshiping that fills the soapy internets of late. My sense is that head writers have not always been attributed with this degree of power. The best example of this I can think of is the Gloria Monty tenure at GH. A number of different writers served under Monty's command, but everyone always attributed the show's ups and downs to Monty. Today, we seem to hear much less about EPs in daytime than we do HWs.

Soaps are of course quite different from prime time TV in that, in prime time, the primary creative force behind most shows is a hybrid writer-producer--a Joss Whedon, a Shonda Rhimes, an Alan Ball. Creators are executive producers are head writers in prime time. In daytime these are two distinct roles, at least they are most of the time. The primary exceptions I can think of are the Bell shows, where Bill Bell was HW and EP for Y&R and Bradley Bell still fills both roles for B&B. If I am remembering correctly, this was the formula tried for Lynn Marie Latham at Y&R, as well, and, while I don't watch the show, many seem to think Latham's tenure there was a disaster. Since so few soaps follow this model, I've got to think that the intense production models these programs follow necessitates this sort of split in duties.

I've always had a kernel of skepticism for fans' effusiveness of praise and/or vitriol for the head writers of soaps. I can't help but think that the forces shaping the creation of these shows are too complex for their success or failure to be attributed to a sole cog in the machine. But I think I may be starting to believe that the HWs really are the source of all good and all evil in soapland. The significance of the role has become especially clear to me with the new season of GH: Night Shift, which is being written (and produced) by non-GH folks (in contrast to season 1 of the show, which was helmed by GH HW Bob Guza and EP Jill Farren Phelps). I've already made clear my despair at season 1 and my hopefulness about season 2. That hopefulness continues to gather steam three episodes in.

GH: NS is being written by a newcomer to soaps, Sri Rao. Rao is a difficult figure to suss out. The guy doesn't even have a Wikipedia page! But his production company has a way-cool website that presents Rao and the company as "indie" creators of TV. My preliminary digging tells me that Rao positions himself as a writer-director-EP, that he has written a play, made an indie film, and created teen series for The N (as far as I can tell, this series has never aired). He's also a self-proclaimed GH fan (since age 8, he declares--and given his early 30s-seeming age I think this dates the beginnings of his GH viewing to the same period as mine). He's also a Wharton School of Business grad. (I dated one of those once upon a time and, trust me, not what you'd expect of a soap writer.) In all, he seems like a young, cool, smart guy who, unexpectedly, also knows about and loves soaps, GH especially.

While NS is not perfect (I'm with most other critiques I've read on the "no, just wrong"-ness of the new Leo Julian and his pairing with the lovely Saira Batra), I'm enjoying it immensely more than I do GH these days. Robert Scorpio's return and brain-tumor induced confusion that made him run around acting as if it were the 1980s were about as perfect as I'd want them to be. (My favorite was the tossed-off crack to Jagger: "Where'd you get your training? DVX?") And I was all choked up at Robin's reactions to everything. Funny, touching, nods to GH history all over the place--what a soap-wonderful treat. This show is so vastly different from the Guza-written daytime GH that it seems to me to be the alternate life the show might have had, had it veered differently in, oh, the late '90s or early 2000s or so, when I think so much started to go south.

In any case, I'm encouraged that the ABC Disney/Soapnet brass had the good sense to hire Rao and I will continue to harbor my secret fantasies of him taking over GH proper. That said, no doubt head writing a 5 day a week daytime show is way different than a 13-week season of of a p-t spin-off. But perhaps someone like Rao is the fresh perspective daytime--and GH in particular--so desperately needs.

GH: Night Shift was really pretty good?

2008-07-23T15:47:00.002-06:00

Astounding soap fans worldwide, last night's season premiere of General Hospital: Night Shift on Soapnet was, well, it was, it was . . . good. Now, while the first season of Night Shift drew decent numbers for Soapnet (note, however, that these numbers were especially high for the first ep and not as much thereafter), all the soap fans and bloggers I've encountered online pretty much agree that it stunk. Bad in so many ways, more than I choose to recount here. For me, the greatest testament to its stinkiness was the fact that I did not watch all of it. Me, the most obsessively completist TV viewer I know, and a 25+ year GH fan to boot, simply could not handle watching all of that godawful show.

So promises of Jagger and Robert aside, I approached the new season quite warily. Now, it had plenty of faults, like some super-cheese acting, some excessively obvious Grey's Anatomy aping, and some wackadoodles character shifts. But, on the whole, it was . . . good. What was good about it?
1) It was funny. Yes, I said funny.
2) It returned Antonio Sabato, Jr. to my screen. And in a towel, no less. And his enunciation has much improved since his first GH stint 13 or so years ago. And he's still totally charming. And his connection to Robin was so meaningful to anyone in the know.
3) Robin and Patrick were truly at the center of the story. And they were as adorable and full of chemistry and interesting as they always are (in their too-too brief appearances on GH proper).
4) It made sense, told its story well (and coherently--big ups for that!--ahem, season 1), was entertaining, drew effectively on GH character history. The good parts made me remember why I like soaps, and especially why I like (or, rather, used to like) GH so much.

Not so good was the recast Dr. Leo Julian's personality transplant. The old Dr. Leo was a laid back dude, bopping around the hospital with his earbuds in place, rock t-shirts upon his chest. New Leo is a big grumpy grouch, beating up on the interns.

Although the George and Izzie reboot intern characters were a bit too much copycat to take, I give the NS folks props for having the guts to make the "George" (Kyle, right?) actually gay. And even in its train wreck first season, NS was much better than GH at racial and ethnic diversity. That seems not as explicit a purpose this time around, although characters of color do have much more to do here than on the mothership. (I was even happy that the holistic medicine doc--sorry, names fail me now and too lazy to look anything up--who seems to be ethnically "other," albeit vaguely so at this point--is Robin's old med school pal. This is what today's GH is missing--one of many things, of course--multiply linked connections for each character on the canvas.)

The faults of GH proper (and surprising goodness of NS) are all the more clear to me in my first couple of weeks of OLTL viewing. I really don't have time for this, but I decided to see what all the OLTL fuss was about. And I think I kind of get it. First, funny! Campy, at times, but all in good fun. And so, so many links between characters and stories, much more so than on GH, where characters with no links to anyone appear and stay in their little story bubbles. Plus, I realized something totally missing in the GH male characters of late--no goofiness! OLTL's young stud, Rex (not to mention the hilarious David Vickers) is traditional soap hunk-looking, but full of goofy charm. He reminds me of GH's Frisco Jones in the '80s. GH's Spinelli is all goof and little else, and is not allowed to be a hunky, romantic lead (Bradford Anderson could do it if given the chance).

Just my rambling thoughts. Couldn't let the fact that NS was actually . . . good pass without remark.

DVR drama

2008-07-17T12:32:00.002-06:00

Here's a problem for you: one nearly-full DVR leased from a certain satellite company, with an on-the-blink remote reception thingy. A DVR with only like 6% available space that cannot be operated with a remote control. Which means no fast-forwarding. Of commercials. No searching for titles to record. Playback is OK, operable from the receiver itself, but no pausing while playing, and NO FAST-FORWARDING OF COMMERCIALS.

Not a big problem for the boy's shows, as they are commercial-free anyway. Bigger problem for mine. I've started recording everything on the other DVR in the house, so I'm covered there. But said satellite company, finally recognizing that the problem is not with the remote but rather with the receiver/DVR is sending a new one. Current one--remember 94% full hard drive--needs to be returned to company upon receipt of new one. So what to do?

I have a LOT of hours of TV to watch and no ability to fast-forward while watching. Do I go on a watching binge, filling up commercial time with bits of work, reading, house cleaning? Or do I let go some of the backlog of shows? As a TV completist, it kills me not to see all of something that I decide to watch. I admit it will be some relief to start fresh with an empty DVR, but the mountain of shows before me (WITH commercials) makes the new DVR seem as much of a burden as an opportunity.

This is one of those moments when real life and research life oddly coincide. Early this week I spent time researching the history of Nielsen's measurement of time-shifting--the problematic inclusion of VCR recording, but not playback, in the live program ratings as well as the current C3 compromise of average commercial minute ratings based on live viewing plus 3 days' DVR playback. Because I was researching this in the context of the recent history of the soaps, I had to think about the ways in which time-shifting figures into soap viewing and also about the ways that keeping these shows viable is so dependent upon those time-shifters playing rather than fast-forwarding commercials (so that the viewing counts in the C3 ratings system--all of this only being relevant for Nielsen households, of course). Now, if I had the good fortune to be a Nielsen household (a lifelong dream, I typically tell my students) I would play, play, play those commercials on all of my shows. But, alas, Nielsen has not come knocking and thus I can imagine little more painful than sitting through the many commercial minutes of a daytime soap. I know that many viewers do, but I just don't get that. My time-shifting habits are too deeply engrained.

Damn it, I've been watching the first episode of Soapnet's Canadian import, the hockey soap MVP, as I write this (during commercials) and I like it. Means I have 3 more backlogged eps to catch up on, with commercials, before the DVR switch. Such is the burden of television.

Swingtown

2008-07-08T18:38:00.004-06:00

Several requests later, I am finally blogging about Swingtown, CBS's summer drama about sex and the '70s. As I've written a book on American television and sex in the '70s, some friends seem to think I must have lots to say about the show. I kind of don't, but I do like the show and so thought I'd say a bit about it here.

I'm a sucker for all things '70s, so I'm surely an easy target, but I've enjoyed the show from the get-go. The pilot laid on the cutesy nostalgia a bit thick--pilots, bah!--but since the series has been a bit more subtle in its efforts to evoke a different time and the possibilities it contained. The show is a bit too much in love with what it sees as the sexual freedom and openness of the '70s. My own sense is that this spirit of liberation was certainly there, but not nearly as widespread as the series makes it out to be, nor as good for men and women alike as it makes it out to be.

That said, the last episode aired, "Go Your Own Way," began to nuance the show's portrait of the times in ways I found interesting. Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman," playing over the final moments was NOT one such nuance. No, it pretty much smacked you over the head with its announcement of Susan's growing awareness of herself as an autonomous being. But who doesn't like that song? So even though it was way unsubtle as the closure to the episode, I enjoyed it anyway (kind of my story about the series as a whole--not all that impressive, but I enjoy it anyway).

My favorite part about this episode was that Trina and Sylvia were throwing a benefit party for Harry Reems, the Deep Throat actor that was threatened with legal reprisals for his participation in the film. Harry was portrayed as a nice guy, a bit geeky even (or maybe that's just my 2008 interpretation of the mustache), who found himself in a circumstance much bigger than he had ever imagined. While I somehow doubt that Reems was as innocent a figure as he seemed here, I loved that the porn actor seemed one of the least sexually threatening men on screen.

The episode was most centered on Molly Parker's Susan. (upper left corner; I love Parker and am eager to see her other work. She's an amazingly likable actor.) She defies her husband, Bruce, in attending the Reems benefit, and is thrilled not so much by the porny titillation but by her newfound sense of social justice in participating in this anti-censorship action, as well as by her circulation in the public sphere without a man at her side. Susan's teenage daughter, Laurie (bottom row, center; with period-perfect Laurie Partridge hair) is an extremely self-possessed young woman, and she cheers on her mother's efforts at independence. I'm totally rooting for those two.

I think I liked this episode most of all so far for several reasons: 1) it showed some glimmers of awareness of women's liberation alongside the gender-neutral sexual liberation that most other episodes have considered. I'm hoping this means this will be a continuing arc. 2) It referenced the media world of the '70s--porn film, not the PG-rated "porn" of TV--but '70s media nonetheless. And 3) it really began to pay off my viewing investment. This deserves a bit more explication, so here goes.

One of the things I love about series television is the way it can pay off your viewing investment. You give it enough time, enough attention, you open yourself to it, and you can get big rewards. What are these rewards? Seeing characters you've come to "know" act in expected--and unexpected--ways. Having knowledge you've acquired about characters inform something those characters do, and thus allowing you to see multiple levels of meaning in their actions or words. And the way that, when done well, you don't really have to work all that hard for those meanings, those levels, they are laid out for you in aesthetically pleasing but relatively straightforward ways. Anyone can "get" it, anyone, that is, who has put in the time and the attention, something not everyone is willing to do for their TV. That TV rewards time and attention, commitment and patience, is one of the things I love about it. And it's a reward I felt I got in Swingtown's "Go Your Own Way."

From the video catalog . . .

2008-07-07T12:38:00.004-06:00

I described my homemade video catalog and collection in an earlier post. A must-share from today's dubbing, the short-lived 1981 series The Brady Brides, one of the first programs recorded and perhaps even the first archived from my family's first VCR. The good folks at YouTube are of course already on top of it, as this snippet of the credit sequence shows. But MY copies come from the original 1981 NBC broadcasts, not some recent-years Family Channel repeat, so there!

From the land of soap research

2008-07-02T14:40:00.003-06:00

Just read Barbara J. Irwin's 1990 dissertation, "An Oral History of a Piece of Americana: The Soap Opera Experience,” which I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't seen before. It's a valuable document, full of material from her interviews with many soap industry folks, including now late greats like Bill Bell and Doug Marland. But I wanted to share a couple of quotes, and contrast them with something more recent, from network daytime execs:

From Judy Jenkins, Director of CBS Daytime:
"Our job is to allow art to happen. To protect and nurture and allow art to happen . . . " (p. 177)

From Jackie Smith, head of NBC daytime, and former VP of ABC Daytime:
"My job is not to think of it too much as a business. I have millions of people around me reminding me of the money and the ratings. My business is to think of it as creative. I'm being paid not to think so much about the other things. To be aware of them, but to really think about creating a novel and helping those people that are working, writing, and producing these shows to be more creative than they might be on their own . . ." (175-76)

Contrast these with this from Brian Frons, currently head of Disney-ABC Daytime, from a 3/31/08 Broadcasting & Cable article:

“I want to look at our business as a studio business,” says Disney-ABC Daytime President Brian Frons, who oversees the daytime shows, Soapnet and the Buena Vista studio. The division produces some 1,000 hours of original programming per year, including Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Ebert & Roeper.
“Our job is to get as many people watching us as possible—daytime, Soapnet, international. It's a more holistic revenue-driven model and gives people the confidence to know we're sticking around. Advertisers do like having this platform to reach women on an efficient basis, so they need to know that.”

I know, I know, different contexts --Frons was speaking to an industry trade paper while Jenkins and Smith were speaking to an academic--but I found the differences in perspective quite striking nonetheless. Is it possible that the network execs responsible for daytime have abandoned all investment in creativity, art, storytelling in exchange for a a focus on "holistic revenue-driven models"? How much might conglomeration have to do with this (e.g. Frons is now a Disney exec managing a number of brands rather than a network employee responsible for a daypart)?

Even more sad? Irwin's interview with then and now Days of Our Lives executive producer Ken Corday about the future of daytime -- again, from 1990, folks:

"There is a law of diminishing returns here, and the handwriting is on the wall . . . I would say, in my heart, I hope it's on 25 more years, but realistically speaking, I can't believe it's going to make it that long. I can't believe there's going to be a market for soap operas in 20 years, or even in ten years, that there is today . . ." (191)

We're at about 18 years since Corday said this. Like sand through the hourglass . . .

Cable first to go in economic downturn! But the rubes who stay will still watch the commercials!

2008-06-27T10:10:00.003-06:00

I'm pretty floored by this "3 Minute Ad Age" video featuring an ad exec reporting on recent market research on consumer spending habits in our economic downturn (people might actually cancel their cable!--seemingly sad news for the ad biz) and its ad biz upside (those stupid Americans still watch the commercials! Even with their DVRs!). What gets me most? The treatment of the American public as mindless boobs? The faith in market research? The potential disappearance of old-fashioned viewing? Most go back to writing, but much to ponder in Ad Age's video snack.

Fitting it all in

2008-06-27T09:11:00.003-06:00

One of my goals for the summer and my fall sabbatical is to do large amounts of reading and viewing--project-specific stuff but also general stuff, such as shows backlogged on the DVR (Heroes, I'm lookin' at you), journal articles I've gathered as they've passed by in content alerts, new and newish books. But I find it a constant struggle to read and watch and listen to everything I want. I kind of blame the internet, as there is so much to read and watch and listen to online that it detracts from my time to do so otherwise. Yet new media technologies have of course also expanded where and when I can consume--not only the video iPod at the gym, but the DVDs on airplanes (perhaps the greatest thing to happen to air travel EVER) or when visiting family. I read articles during T-ball practice, listen to podcasts while making lunches, catch snatches of NPR during my brief times in the car. But still not enough. I'm rather noise-averse, so no background music or radio or podcasts when I'm working, or when I'm talking to another person in a car, or trying to get a wiggly 4 year old out of a bathtub. Perhaps I'm too single-channel for a multi-channel world. I think scheduling reading and watching times may be the answer. I kind of do this already with the gym, with my new habit of Dark Shadows eps while waiting to be sure the boy is asleep in the evening, with prime-time DVR catching up. Will try to report back as I try to jam more media into my days.

Women take over box office!

2008-06-01T19:22:00.003-06:00

No, my baby-sitter-less weekend failed to deliver me to either Indiana Jones or Sex and the City--either of which I would have loved to have seen, mediocre reviews aside.

But I am cheered by the headline Variety just sent to my email Inbox: "Sex and the City whips Indiana." I'm far from the world's biggest SaTC fan (I like it and all but have no special devotion). But I was really ticked off by all of the press coverage the last couple of weeks about how SaTC would ever manage to do decent b.o. if men weren't going to see it. "Anticipation for Sex high, but will men see it?" kind of headlines.

The media industries have for too long trusted in the idea that women will see men's movies (girls will play with boys' toys, etc.) but that the reverse won't work. Glad to see those SaTC ladies prove them wrong.

Soapy Research Questions

2008-05-27T19:02:00.003-06:00

The Ryan's Hope viewing experiment continues. I need to spend a bit of non-workout time with an episode or two to count the number of scenes per episode and their length, but there is no doubt that scenes go on for much longer in the RH of 1975 than they do on any soap today. A couple of other observations/questions (mostly so I can remember these thoughts when I eventually try to turn some of it into an argument):

1) the show seems to have multiplied its number of sets as of episode 17. From that point, we're seeing new sets each episode. None are fancy; all are very bare bones, but it's nice to get a wider view of the community this way. My guess is that they could only build so many before production began but, as of a few weeks in, more were up and running.

2) Men keep asking women out for meals and I'm having a difficult time reading the social mores of the time because I'm often not quite sure if this is an invitation to a date or just a friendly gesture. In the case of Bucky's offers to Faith, I know it is a date. His interest in her, and her oddball standoffishness, are at the center of the story. But I don't know how to read Ed Coleridge inviting Nell Beaulac, who is recently estranged from her husband, out to eat. Or how to read Roger Coleridge (Ed's son!) similar offer to Nell. [Update: Just saw ep. 21, when they do go out and Roger DEFINITELY sees it as a date.] Or Roger's offer to Mary, who seems more age-appropriate for him. And I think maybe Bob Reed also asked Mary out to eat. Are these the equivalent of the present-day soaps' "chemistry tests"? If so, they are so much more subtle that it is difficult to tell what they are suggesting. In fact, most things are much more subtle than in the present day soaps (or at least in that sinking ship, GH, which may very well be the worst I've seen it in my 25+ years of viewing). But RH keeps me guessing. Do Roger and Bob have things for Mary? Do Pat and Faith have a past? Does Delia really know that Frank and Jill are having an affair? I'm watching for clues to all of these questions as much as for the big plot points. Either it's really careful soap plotting or I just don't get 1975 social cues.

[Update: I think it's really careful plotting. In episode 20 we get the first real clue that something may be physically wrong with Nell--the dreaded soap headache!--while in the entire first month of the show she just seemed oddly determined to move on with her neurological research. But that determination is slowly, slowly going to be revealed as a cover for something else going on with her. Such careful long-range plotting! Love it!]

I've also been making plans to move forward with my soap research this summer and fall. One archive I plan to visit is UCLA's Film and Television Archive, as they have the most extensive collection of actual soap episodes anywhere I've seen, including episodes from the '50s, '60s, and '70s, the pre-home VCR era and thus the era before fans were archiving episodes themselves. The most amazing part of their collection is a nearly full run of General Hospital from its debut in 1963 well into 1970. Both the fan and the scholar in me are beyond excited at the possibility of watching GH from the beginning. But.

Researching soaps = not easy. First, of course, is the time factor. I can't watch 7 years of GH episodes in an archive in California unless I were to live there and to view regularly for months. Even if this were possible, there's another but.

Some of these episodes are what the archive considers "archival copies." This means that no one can see them. Ever. The copies are too poor or fragile or something to be available for viewing. This is not just the case with some of the GH episodes but with MANY of the other soap episodes they list in their catalog (such as early '70s All My Children--the Erica abortion story!--and many others). I'm not a trained archivist, of course, but I just don't understand why they would hold such materials in the collection with these constraints.

Another problem: many of the GH episodes, as well as many other of the older soap episodes in the collection, are classified as "research copies." This means that the archivists must transfer the copy to VHS for me to view. The catch is their policy on such copies, which is to copy no more than 10 hours of programming per researcher. Now, the archive has other copies readily available for viewing, episodes that, presumably, others have watched in the past and that have thereby been transferred to VHS already. But this is a scattered selection, and one that does not include some of the real gems in the collection. With much advance notice, the under-staffed and under-budgeted archivists seem willing to stretch those 10 hours a bit for me. But it is doubtful that they will be willing/able to transfer the 30 or so (if I'm being honest, it's more like 40) hours I would most like to be able to see during my trip.

So my next task is to try to prioritize the list of what I would like transferred. I've already decided to limit my viewing to material before the early 1980s as the home VCR era that ensues thereafter makes it more likely that I will be able to see some of that material via fans' collections (plus my own memories and tapes). But, beyond that, I have several possibilities. Possibility no. 1: do I see as much GH as I can and have an in-depth sense of one show's past? (Keep in mind that that depth is inherently limited, as I can't watch all the episodes they have.) Possibility no. 2: If I do focus on GH, do I scatter my viewing across the years they have, or focus it so as to watch a particular story unfold? If the latter, how to choose an entry point? Or (possibility no. 3) do I spread my viewing across shows and time periods, to be more representative? (But how can you really get a sense of how a soap storyline is told by watching an episode here and there?)

I get irritated by claims that researching soap history is "impossible" because of such constraints, so don't think I'm saying that (and don't tell me that in comments, either!). But such are the practical considerations any archival study entails, albeit with particularly constraining constraints for the study of soaps.

"Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?"

2008-05-23T18:30:00.003-06:00

Just a linky little post to share this Inside Higher Ed article, reporting on a study addressing the above question, including the matter of differences in the experiences of male and female academics. Note the comments, as well. There's plenty of awareness of the problems academia may raise for parenting there, but also a defensiveness that I find disturbing, an urge to blame the (female) academic for her disinterest in childbearing and rearing in some instances and also an assertion that sacrificing academic life for motherhood is sometimes a necessity.

Nothing infuriates me more than the suggestion that we should accept the limitations of the institution. Urgh!

What's next?

2008-05-21T08:38:00.003-06:00

That's the question of the day, as I finally put my semester's work behind me and plot out my plans for the eight (8!) months of unstructured time ahead of me this summer and this fall, when I have a sabbatical semester. I've been eager to get to this time for weeks. Now that it's here, I'm a bit intimidated by it. I'm sure to feel better by the end of the day, when I hope to have a specific plan of what I hope to accomplish when. Three key activities are on the agenda: 1) reading, 2) writing, 3) research. I'm off to map the future--

On my iPod, it's 1975

2008-05-12T18:27:00.002-06:00

I finally finished my viewing of the first 4 seasons of Entourage. I had recorded the series to DVD from HBO, transferred the episodes to my iPod, and watched them at the gym while working out on the elliptical trainer (and sometimes the treadmill, which is really too bouncy for such a tiny screen and my workout effectiveness is ENTIRELY secondary in priority to my iPod TV watching). I've written before about how much I love being able to watch TV while working out and how that feeling seems to transfer itself in full to whatever I am watching. So I totally enjoyed Entourage, which may be the subject of another post. I'm sure my pleasure was in part due to the efficiency/pleasure combo of the situation, but I also got a kick out of the show's unabashed masculine fantasy. But more on that later, perhaps.

I've decided that my next iPod TV project is going to be my backlog of Ryan's Hope episodes. I've been archiving these from Soapnet for the past couple of years, determined to save them all. I've watched bits and pieces, but have long wanted to start from the beginning and plow through. So this week I've begun with episode 1, from July 1975. RH was a half-hour soap that aired from '75 to '89 on ABC. Created and run for many years by Claire Labine, one of my fave GH headwriters of yesteryear, it's a soap that seems to be remembered fondly by many. I watched a bit in the '80s, but certainly not in the '70s. I'm just a few episodes in, but I'm really enjoying it so far. Again, iPod/workout magic is surely in effect, but so far it's an expertly told story. We are introduced to 9 regular characters in the first half hour ep (more like 20 minutes without commercials), all of whom have identifiable traits. The first week included location shooting in NYC (RH has been one of the few US daytime soaps set in a real place) and the seeds for some real soapy goodness--bantery romantic relationship between Mary and Jack, classically manipulative villainess in Delia, twisted familial dynamics between Faith and Papa Coleridge. And aside from the clothes and hair, it is not reading as dated to me.

Soapnet stops its RH reruns at the end of 1981, reportedly because the onset of popular music on the soundtrack thereafter has created rights issues. (This is also reportedly the reason why the much beloved, short-lived NBC soap, Santa Barbara, has not made a Soapnet appearance.) I'm not promising I'm watching straight through '81 at this point--I may take a break to watch something else for awhile--but now I'm definitely plotting when I can get to the gym to watch some more.

When it comes to gender, how real is MTV keepin' it?

2008-05-07T10:40:00.003-06:00

No, this is not going to be one of those posts about how fake The Hills is. If it bothers you that the producers set up Lauren's dates or Heidi's "job", it's not the show for you.

But this is going to be a post about the gender politics of some recent moments on The Hills, and on The Paper, MTV's new must-see reality drama, the show that allows high school newspaper editors of yesteryear to relive/shrink in horror at their glory days.

When I wrote about The Hills for the online TV studies journal Flow a couple of seasons ago, I lamented the gender politics of a MTV's new-fashioned soap, pointing out the difference between The Hills' take on heterosexual romance and that of the daytime soaps (at least the soaps as they should be, but all too often are not these days). I wrote this after the gut-punch of Lauren's decision to forgo a summer-in-Paris internship for a summer in a Malibu beach house with her abusive boyfriend Jason. I wasn't so much upset with Lauren as I was with the program's representation of Lauren's choice as the height of romance, and of Jason as just so adorably in love that he couldn't bear to be away from her.

Since then, The Hills has taken a decidedly different turn, one also indebted to the daytime soaps. Lauren's real-world break up with Jason during the Malibu beach house summer forced a storyline reboot in which Lauren became single gal unlucky in love (and wary of awful dudes like Jason) and the primary drama shifted away from boys and toward the relationships between the girls--a dynamic always present but soon heightened by the breakdown of Lauren's friendship with Heidi.

Now, the daytime soaps grapple with relationships between women as well. But the kinds of problems that place daytime's women at odds with one another tend to be of a more melodramatic nature--baby swaps, man stealing, and lies, lies, lies. The tensions between the women of The Hills are more quotidian, but also painfully close to many girls' and women's actual experiences of friendship drama. OK, maybe a sex tape is not at the center of most women's friendship tension, but the issues underlying L and H's sex tape battle are all too common -- feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of rejection.

The problem for The Hills these days is that Lauren and Heidi are seemingly splitsville forever--these two ain't gonna be friends again and Lauren, at least, seems to have little interest in engaging with Heidi at all, even to accuse and argue. So where's the new drama? It seems to be brewing between new roomies Lauren, Lo, and Audrina, as Lauren is placed in between her actual, for-real childhood pal Lo and her MTV-generated friendship with Audrina.

Granted, this totally works as relatable drama. But. It is placing Lo in the position of villainess, and this I just can't take. Lo is one of the few young women gracing the Laguna/Hills-averse that seems to have some smarts. She's witty, clever, just seems to have thoughts going on behind her sparkly blues. (I really don't mean to diss the others, especially not Lauren, who delivers some bon mots of her own from time to time.) In this latest friendship drama, Lo is being depicted as forcing Audrina out of Lauren's life while Audrina is the sad victim of Lo's actions. [Important aside: Isn't Justinbobby's transformation a-mazing?! Sobriety has made him actually really and truly attractive! He looks great, and is a sympathetic boyfriend/friend/whatever to Audrina!]

The soap villianess is a crucial character, but in the daytime soap world her villainy comes from somewhere--usually insecurity or desperation or revenge--and her challenges to patriarchal strictures of femininity are a pleasure to love (or love to hate). But Lo is so not this character. No, the brainiest girl on The Hills is cast as the bitch, for no real reason other than to stir up drama. Disappointing, again.

The Paper features another brainy girl in the role of villain. But Amanda Lorber is no existing genre's idea of the female foil. This series chronicles the experiences of the new regime of editors at a high school newspaper in Florida. Amanda is the new editor in chief, a girl unlike any we typically see on American TV. Others have described her better than I could, but suffice it to say that she is super-ambitious, super-enthusiastic, super-nerdy, yet supremely confident. Others have compared her to Election's Tracey Flick, a great teen girl character if ever there was one, but Amanda is much less cutthroat than Tracey, and also more vulnerable and more likable. Most of Amanda's underling editors are guys, also super-nerdy but so ensconced in their nerdy guy world that they don't really notice or care.

The main thrust of The Paper's story so far is the rest of the editorial staff's indignation at Amanda's appointment as in-chief. The other kids mock her, criticize her, pretty openly hate on her. At first I thought I couldn't watch the show because they were so mean to her, and she was such a comedic figure that I thought the show wanted me to side with them and laugh at her, too. But the Amanda-love I encountered online, as in feminist-leaning sites like Jezebel, encouraged me to take another look.

I'm pretty certain now that The Paper has a more complex story to tell, one in which the editorial staff (mostly straight-acting boys, but also one girl-who-hangs-with-the-boys and one seemingly gay guy) may turn into the real villains while we are invited to side with Amanda, however misguided she may seem. This became especially clear to me when it was revealed that Amanda has a past of sorts with Alex, perhaps her greatest male adversary, the paper's Managing Editor and Amanda's second in command. Alex admits to having had a crush on Amanda in 9th grade and the two clearly share a long friendship, one now somewhat fractured. In part this seems to do with their competition for the top spot at the paper, but I'm thinking it has more to do with his teen boy assholery, his need to prove his manhood by asserting his superiority to her, by aligning with his buds against her. And he is not looking good in the process. Week by week, Amanda in all her goofiness is coming off as the one to root for.

I'm still a bit uncertain as to where this will all lead, and I still worry that Amanda is too much the butt of the joke on this show to make her the sympathetic heroine I want her to be. I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that she doesn't get the Lo treatment--no room for smart girls on MTV after all. Meanwhile I'm rooting for the girl to prove her haters wrong.

P&G wants you!

2008-04-29T13:14:00.003-06:00

Procter & Gamble is conducting two phone polls, through the same number: (1(800) 331-3774). One asks about whether the company should continue to advertise on MTV and BET. This is in response to a number of complaints about the "inappropriate" content of music videos aired on these channels. The other is about the Luke and Noah ("Nuke") same sex romance playing out on P&G's As the World Turns these days. I've called twice now--yesterday P&G thanked me for my opinion and ended the call (you can press 1 for keep going with Nuke, 2 for ending the story). But in today's call I was informed that the information gathered in this poll will not determine story but will provide company executives with useful information. Guess they are anticipating major outcry no matter which direction they go.

The soapy blogosphere is all over this story, so I won't go into more detail here. But the old-fashioned nature of the phone-in poll strikes me as a bit odd--perhaps just a way to appease the protesters, making it look like P&G is addressing the matter as they proceed with a story that seems immensely popular with fans?

Update: Here's Ad Age's take on P&G's polls and their possible outcomes.

Reality bites

2008-04-04T15:34:00.003-06:00

Light blogging of late, I know. But the above title popped into my head and I couldn't let it pass unused as a wrap-up of several points I've been meaning to make:

-- light on blogging = heavy on everything else. Real life is just too busy these days. Everyone bellyaches about late-in-the-semester crunch time, but gosh-darn-it, it's true.

-- Watching Bravo's Top Chef for the first time this season. I like, though it's no Project Runway. I think the biggest problem is the fact that we CAN'T TASTE THE FOOD. It's hard to have a strong opinion on the relative merits of the different contestants' creations when we can't taste them. Yet one can be as opinionated as one likes about the Runway fashions. Fascinated by the emerging tensions between those who cook all avant-garde and those without that sort of training/orientation. Having not watched before, I don't know if one approach tends to win out on this show, but I like the way these tensions about food and taste and cultural hierarchies inform so much of the contest.

-- I think David Cook is my new fave Idol. This is perhaps quite unoriginal, as the judges themselves have begun to fawn of late, but I don't watch this show in an effort to resist the mainstream. But I really wanted to mention the emotional gut-wrench of the tears and hugs these days at elimination time. The end of the elimination eps have been getting me all teary --it's like those speeches from the teams about how much they've learned about their relationships after the Amazing Race eliminations. Tear jerkers all!

Trials of ebay

2008-03-24T14:20:00.003-06:00

Over the weekend I stayed up way past my bedtime to bid during the final minutes of several ebay auctions. What was I bidding on? Full year runs of Soap Opera Digest magazine from the late 1970s. Did I win these auctions? Hell, no, as they quickly became too rich for my blood--the last going for $102.

A single seller is offering up her lifelong collection of SODs, year by year, as she prepares to move. You may think this sort of thing would sell for a few bucks, but their rarity makes them quite valuable to those in the know. The winners of my failed auctions seem to run TV collectible businesses and so surely know the market for such things. Most old soap mags sell on ebay in single issues, and most are from the 1990s on. I'm sure these folks will be able to sell off the collection they are acquiring, probably issue by issue, making back their money and then some.

But my desire for these yellowing stacks of industry propaganda comes from a different place. Lots of TV ephemera is hard to come by, but little of it is as difficult to track down as the soap press. Very few libraries retain their holdings beyond a couple of years, and some libraries (ahem, Milwaukee Public Library System) don't have any soap publications, past or present. As a graduate student, I was blessed by the South Central Wisconsin Public Library system's collection of SODs from the '70s on (when the mag began), all handily stored in Madison's Central Public Library. I spent many delighted hours there devouring these magazines, which offered me story details, the occasional feature story of interest, and lots of letters to the editor full of great audience info. Made my dissertation, and the subsequent book, much better.

Now, as I begin to work on another book project exclusively focused on soap history, I very much want access to those old SODs again. One problem: the Madison Public Library THREW THEM OUT. I found out about this last year and so my indignation has (barely) abated, but I can easily get worked up about it again. Please note: this is one of a HANDFUL of libraries in the country that have any run of SODs beyond the past few years. According to Worldcat, only the Popular Culture collection at Bowling Green has a full run (not even the Library of Congress keeps them, though they do have Daytime TV, a now-defunct pub of the same genre that was also quite helpful to me in past research).

When I saw that this ebay user was selling off a nearly complete collection of SODs I had fantasies of owning the whole lot, of turning myself into the archive no one else cares to maintain. Alas, the financial investment seems too great and so I will likely trek to Bowling Green for a few fleeting days with these texts.

I do admit that the huge challenge of doing this sort of work is pretty appealing to me--brings out my youthful ambition to be a private detective, a la children's lit heroine Trixie Belden (Nancy Drew was too wimpy for my tastes), or an intrepid spy, a la Harriet the Spy, also a favorite read of my past. While I do believe strongly that our libraries do a disservice when they neglect to archive popular publications or, for chrissakes, THROW THEM OUT, the persistence required to actually track these things down is part of the fun of researching denigrated cultural products like soaps.

Girl TV Update

2008-03-19T18:55:00.006-06:00

Some new shows, some old shows, here's what's up with my TV watching for and about the ladies:

-- Because of my last, glowing post about quarterlife, I want to make clear that, while the episode I praised, "Goodbyes," was super-fantastic, the rest--not so much. To be honest, we have yet to watch the final 3 or 4 segments of episode 6 (the final ep). We'll do so, but the show just did not live up to the best of the Zwick-Herskovitz-averse. Except for "Goodbyes"--a must-see for all MSCL fans.

- Two new woman-centric sitcoms on my viewing schedule these days: The Return of Jezebel James, created by Gilmore Girls' Amy Sherman-Palladino, and Miss Guided, the ABC show featuring the wonderful Judy Greer. Fox is clearly trying to burn off the Jezebel James eps, airing them on Fridays with little fanfare. From the first two eps, I can say it is definitely not great, but it has some winning elements, including some trademark ASP laughs and a great mom character played by Dianne Wiest. But Parker Posey, usually a great presence, is just . . . odd here. MZN and I keep thinking of all the great comic TV actresses who would work better in the part, taking on Sarah's annoying quirks while still making her sympathetic. Lauren Graham, of course, but also a Jennifer Aniston, a Courtney Cox, a Judy Greer!

Which brings me to Miss Guided, which had me laughing hard enough to pause the DVR. Here's one of the promos. The brief shot of her crying, in the green Homecoming dress, was what got me (it's a longer bit in the actual episode):

Maybe I'm a sucker for anything that lovingly mocks '80s high school geekdom, but I'm thinking that Greer's Becky Freeley may be up there with Tina Fey's Liz Lemon for me as a welcome kind of relatable sitcom heroine missing from TV for too long.

- Another update on a previously mentioned show. I somewhat sheepishly admit to having continued to watch Lipstick Jungle. It's not what I'd call good, but the fact that I watch it before the other series with episodes stacked a mile high on the DVR (Grey's Anatomy, I'm lookin' at you) says something about the pleasure it must be giving me. In part, I'm pretty sure this is because of the clothes, which are FABULOUS. Here's one image of the ladies in their fabulous coats:

But I've just spent way too much time searching for pictures online. NBC's "Shopisodes" will be happy to show you more. I think I just fell deep into a target marketed hole.

But in addition to the clothes, I like the fact that these beautiful women have relatively realistic bodies and faces for their age--well, except for Lindsey Price, and I think Kim Raver looks like this because she's pregnant, but still.

- I could say more about General Hospital, especially my growing discomfort with Sarah Brown's cartoonish proportions, as well as my appreciation of her compelling acting, but some Idol results await.

An academic conference is like graduate school--but without the bad parts

2008-03-11T18:41:00.002-06:00

I've been slowly readjusting to "normal" life after the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia last weekend. Being childless in a swank hotel in a nice city is pretty great in and of itself, but this year's conference really emphasized for me the true value of academic conferences once one is post-grad school and moving along career-wise. It seems to me that these events offer brief interludes of return to all that was good about grad school. Think about it: the intellectual stimulation of hearing people's ideas, of engaging in group discussions and debates, even of critiquing that which really does not work. While I have moments of this sort of thing in my daily professing life--during an especially good on-campus talk, or in a rousing graduate seminar--on a regular basis it really does not approach the rapid-fire grappling with ideas that makes graduate school such an exciting, exhausting, and absorbing place. To me, this general sensibility and climate outweighs my reactions to specific papers and panels. For more on those, check out my travel companion's take, and his links to others'.

Conference life also brings a social dimension that I'm now convinced gets better and better over time. After all, over time you know more and more people and have more and more life to catch up on with friends old and new. But it's a particular kind of socializing, one that carries with it that grad school kind of fun--everyone is passionate about the same kinds of things, everyone is smart, with great ideas and often great wit. Also, in terms of those friends from grad school with whom one is reunited in conference life, there is a shared bond of trial by fire, and of intellectual exploration, and of you-had-to-be-there remember-whens. Socializing with new people is also a great part of conference life, of course, just of a different variety than the old grad school pals kind.

I've had old friends on the brain lately, too, because of this being the year of a certain anniversary of my high school graduation. Either due to this or just to the expanding reach of Facebook to the rapidly aging, I've been hearing from more and more high school friends, which has been great fun. I feel tied to these people, too, though in a very different way than to the grad school folks. While it's difficult to connect the me of today with my high school cohort, the life-changing experience that is grad school (at least that it was for me) makes my connection to those I associate with that time much clearer and much more directly linked to the me of the present. I can only assume that my high school classmates feel a similar sense of both connection to and remove from me and each other. Who knew that conference life would take me back not only to grad school but to, gulp, high school as well?

Video Games Live!

2008-03-05T14:57:00.002-06:00

So last weekend included my first, and Wisconsin's first, video games concert--Video Games Live. When I found out about this months ago, I was amused by the idea--it's a traveling show that features local symphony orchestras playing video game scores with video from games playing on the big screen backdrop--and thought it would be fun to check it out. It was fun, but fun in a sort of "I'm a tourist in an foreign land and don't really understand everything that's going on" way.

Part of my cultural difference was gender-based. There were SO MANY boys there. Yes, there were girls and women, too, but a LOT of 18-25 year old guys. Not all that surprising, of course, but quite noticeable when one is in the midst of it, albeit pleasantly so in the non-existent line to the women's bathroom. (When's the last time you attended an event where that was the case?) Sitting behind my friends and I were a particularly, um, vocal, contingent of these aforementioned attendees. Now, this was not a docile crowd. Part of the reason the show was so much fun were the impassioned responses of the crowd--yelling, hollering, riotous applause--these people were fans of the most unabashed kind, a sentiment I can well appreciate. Even if the fan expressions more familiar to me are those of the screeching and crying variety rather than of the guttural yell mode. So these guys behind us made me feel like I was getting the real, the authentic experience of the show, but also made me kind of cranky and irritated. To wit: host Tommy Tallarico yells, "Let's hear it for girl gamers!" when two teenage girls take the stage to compete in the live Frogger contest. One of the charming gentlemen behind me hollers back, "Especially the hot ones!" You get the picture.

Even as one pretty uninitiated in the gaming world, it was clear to me that this was but one segment of that world, as exemplified by the kinds of games featured, if not by the crowd. Those with Hollywood film-like scores dominated, which seemed to me to be most standard to the action and fantasy games. So no sports games, no games geared mainly to kids, no indie games. To be fair, the show was put on by the industry and so it understandably focused on the most popular games--Halo, Final Fantasy, Mario, etc.--and the audience was not complaining. Indeed, the orgasmic shouts of . . . pleasure, I guess, whenever a new game was introduced or another Japanese composer appeared on-screen were intense.

Some more specific reactions: I thought the Metal Gear Solid visuals, from cut scenes produced for the game, were amazing, really visually compelling, very much drawing upon the iconography of the Hollywood blockbuster, but in a good way--with all the emotion and drama and epic scale such imagery can carry. Two moments of intellectual property defensiveness stood out: Square-Enix's refusal to allow the show to use game footage from Final Fantasy and from Kingdom Hearts. The FF music went video-less, KH featured a montage of Disney characters. Seemed way too cutesy for the crowd, but what do I know? Native informants-OK, my one native informant--tell me that Square-Enix was holding out for the $ VGL wasn't coughing up. And the serious serious History Channel produced montage of suffering WWII-era Europeans during the Medal of Honor music seemed to me quite a stretch. This is a first person shooter war game, a bang-bang-you're dead game, dressed up to look historically significant and honoring of the civilian casualties of war? No, I haven't played it, but the VGL version seemed way too ain't-war-honorable for my tastes.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the evening was when host Tommy Tallarico (what a show biz name) busted out an electric guitar and jammed along with the orchestra. While the crowd went rock concert-wild with this, I was kind of embarrassed for the guy. He had just told us of his youthful fantasies, how he played air guitar to game soundtracks for his neighborhood pals. But then he was playing a real guitar, on a real stage, in front of thousands of screaming fans! I wondered if he'd created this whole show in order to live out this adolescent male fantasy. Yet the adoring throngs seemed to be living it through him. The same guys gathering around the Guitar Hero competition screens in the lobby before the show and during intermission seemed to want nothing more than to rock away amongst the crowd of admirers--the everyday experience of Guitar Hero in the living room made a little more public, a little more thrilling, yet, sadly, paling beside the on-stage triumph Tommy achieved. It's a good thing Tommy so happily shared his moment of glory.

In Treatment

2008-02-28T16:56:00.003-06:00

As you know if you are a regular reader of zigzigger, HBO's In Treatment is a major pleasure around the zig's and my midwestern bungalow these days. In addition to being a soapy treat, filled with the revelations of small gestures and expressions, laden with juicy tension, sexual and otherwise, it's also led to some provocative conversations with friends. Through a series of circumstances, some of our closest friends in MKE are psychologists, clinicians who are either university faculty or private practitioners. And their reactions to the show have been revealing of the different investments of differently positioned viewers, as well as of the curious ways in which psychologists define their relationships with clients (my friends call them clients, In Treatment's Paul calls them patients).

A central story arc of In Treatment is Paul's relationship with his patient, Laura, a woman 20 years his junior who declares her love for him early on in the series. Soon we learn that Paul, living in an unhappy marriage to his wife, played by Michelle Forbes, has some pretty hot and heavy feelings for Laura, too. This situation of "erotic transference" and "counter-transference" forms the moral, ethical, and emotional dilemma at the heart of the show. Not all of my shrink friends have watched enough of the show to offer much of an opinion on this relationship. But a recent conversation about the series made clear their inability to suspend their disbelief. They were incredibly worked up about the "bad" kind of therapy Paul offers--all that talky psychodynamic stuff (these folks are cognitive-behaviorists)--and couldn't stop talking about it at that level. When the subject of Paul's relationship with Laura arose, they really got worked up, only grudgingly admitting to the potential pleasures for viewers of the forbidden romance plot underlying the ethical dilemma Paul faces.

Their reactions to the In Treatment plot have also made me think about what seems to be a tendency amongst my psychologist friends to have very strong feelings about the inviolable lines between therapists and patients/clients--a dynamic that In Treatment mulls in really thought-provoking ways. It makes perfect sense to me that, amidst the kind of emotional discourses between therapist and patient, there can be all kinds of feelings, ideas, fantasies, etc. This is what makes IT relatable and emotionally believable, even for the non-therapized (although perhaps not for the actual therapist). Interestingly, my friends have similarly rigid takes on faculty/student dynamics. Of course, I understand the power imbalance between faculty and students and strongly believe in the importance of faculty always being cognizant of their relative power and avoiding the kinds of romantic entanglements Paul and Laura are experiencing as a result.

Yet there is also a way in which faculty/student dynamics can be like therapy, or at least like the TV version of therapy we can now watch on HBO. By this, I don't mean that the professor serves as personal counselor, though of course one finds oneself in such situations from time to time. Instead, I'm talking here about the kind of mental and, sometimes, emotional, connections that professors and students can have--connections that they should have, I think, when ideas and learning are engaging and provocative for all. Such moments can be exciting, and they can result in strong ties between all involved, whether in a one on one teaching context or in a classroom setting, in which the ties can be between peers as well as between teacher and student. Such moments and the relationships they produce can and do change people, as learning to think in new ways inevitably does. And there can be an intimacy and an emotional experience tied to that that may, in some way, approximate Laura's experience with Paul, and Paul's with her.

In the meantime, I remain captivated by the show and the ways in which it makes the smallest details of the utmost importance. As MZN has discussed on zigzigger, new camera set-ups, characters standing up, wearing their hair differently, etc. are incredibly exciting moments, and always pregnant with meaning. (Paul sitting on the couch with Laura in the 3/3 episode, slouched down, with his foot up on the coffee table?!! Amazingly revealing, given his typical posture across from the couch in the leather chair.) MZN compares this to Warhol, but I say that these are the kinds of details beloved by soap fans, used to wading through hours of boring for the smallest moments of revelation. Maybe that's another parallel to the teacher/student thing: hours of boring, not much happening, interspersed with the rare moments of big excitement when ideas click and you see new things about yourself, others, the world.

Sex, violence, and pole dancing, or What the hell is up with ABC Daytime?

2008-02-27T19:23:00.004-06:00

I've been mulling over a GH post for a few days now, one about what I'm kind of liking and kind of hating on the show these days. Then I found out about the pole dancing on All My Children. And the smack-you-over-the-head product placements on GH (watch to about 4 minutes in for the moment). And I realized I may be trying way too hard to justify my allegiance to my show. Here's the scoop:

In a week in which CBS, Guiding Light, and P&G mount an all-out promotional assault to tell us about the debut of their new shooting style, ABC Daytime pulls out the stops the old-fashioned way: sex, violence, and pole dancing. Let's start with the pole-dancing. I had been feeling more hopeful about All My Children lately, what with the glowing reviews of the Jesse and Angie reunion of recent weeks, and the pretty location shooting to match it. Then the good folks at Daytime Confidential brought this to my attention: the young women stars of AMC taking pole dancing lessons from Dancing with the Stars' Maksim. I can deal with the cross-promotion, even with a cheesy "let's learn to dance" sequence, but the soft-core porny music video montage of the ladies working it out on the pole--in their office? Yikes.

Then there's my show, GH. The internets are all up in arms over the hypocrisy of the oh-so-serious PSA airing after one of last week's episodes, when pre-teen Michael Corinthos accidentally set off a gun, shooting his dad's lady love. The actors portraying said lady love and the young mafioso-in-training solemnly came on screen thereafter to tell us violence is bad. The great wits of Serial Drama, both columnists and forum posters, have painstakingly detailed the seemingly endless acts of violence portrayed on GH ever since. It's a long list.

I'm totally with these folks in denouncing the hypocrisy of it all. And yet. Here I am, hard at work on my gymnastic efforts to read much of the business on GH these days differently, even sympathetically. For example, the reveal of Diego Alcazar as the Text Message Killer (for the uninitiated, no he doesn't kill BY text message, he just likes to taunt his victims VIA text message) is, indubitably, preposterous. As zarathelawyer reminds us, the character is dead, and dead in a pretty "yeah, he's definitely dead" way. Yet I kind of don't care about how very much the story asks us to suspend our disbelief. I'm just so glad it's almost over. I think the interim writers, whose work is still playing out, desperately grasped at whatever end they could give the story that would give the killer some plausible reason for committing his murderous acts. I still can't imagine how they will explain him offing Georgie (haven't watched today's yet, so don't tell me if it's been addressed), but he has something resembling a motive for the rest of his victims. More outrageous to me is the decimation of one of the few characters of color to grace this show in recent years. It began when he was, inexplicably, made into a sex criminal by taking naked pictures of roofied girls a few years ago. And now this. Nothing about the character ever signaled these sorts of acts of misogynist degeneracy--except that they told us he did these things. And he wasn't white.

I know. I'm making all of this sound really despicable. And in many ways it is. And yet. At least they're getting us out of this damn story, and placing blame on a character who has long been destroyed anyway.

Meanwhile, I continue to find ways to see the development of Sarah Brown's mob-girl Claudia Zacchara as an interesting characterization. Claudia is aggressively sexual, like, so aggressively sexual that it's freaking Sonny Corinthos--he of the Fonz-like sexual magnetism--out. But unlike the earlier female mobster, Faith Roscoe, Claudia's sexual aggression may actually have a cause. There have been hints that she was sexually abused by her father when she was a child and Sarah Brown's magical vulnerable bravado thing is making me believe that her present-day aggression, sexual and otherwise, is all about reacting to this painful past. And so I find her sympathetic and compelling.

In contrast, Sonny and all of the other typically dominant characters (and I mean dominant in that we are typically expected to take their perspectives and attitudes as those we should accept and adopt, as well) are falling to pieces. Sonny is running around town accusing all the wrong people of shooting his lady love and kidnapping his boy, all wild-eyed and gun-wagging. Frankly, he looks like a wack-job. Meanwhile, Carly is all a-fretting and a-wailing about her missing son, the aforementioned accidental shooter, Michael, believing he's another victim of Sonny's mobbin' ways (a view shared by the other GH dominants, Jason and Sonny) when in reality the kid is just totally frakked up, wielding guns and then running for his life because he thinks his pops will respond to violence with violence. Wherever did he get that idea? So here's what I'm liking: Sonny and Jason and Carly look stupid and wrong and misguided. I DON'T think I'm supposed to accept their worldview as mine. Meanwhile, saner citizens of Port Chuck speak sensibly: Jacks wants to call the police because a kid is missing. Sensible! Ric continues on his path of redemption, making nice with Alexis and kicking Trevor to the curb. Sensible! Johnny Zacchara wants to ignore all the mob business and snuggle up with his new sweetie. Sensible!

I may be trying way too hard to find the happy in GH these days. But in a world of sex, violence, and pole dancing, I take what I can get from the ABC soaps.

The greatness of the group

2008-02-22T14:07:00.002-06:00

I'm definitely enjoying the return of American Idol to my TV watching these days. As deadly boring as some of the episodes can be (I couldn't watch without benefit of a DVR), as irritating as the judges' banter can be, as ear-splitting as some of the singing can be, a new season of Idol, especially once the competition is on, is pure pleasure. Which of theses kids will become my faves? What kinds of theme weeks will we be subjected to next? How will the "packages" that feed us tantalizing bits about the contestants turn them into characters we know and love--or hate?

After making it to the 5th (yes, 5th!) hour of Idol this week, I was rewarded with one of my favorite kinds of Idol moments--the group number. The series typically delivers group numbers on results show nights, though not on every such episode. With this week's '60s theme and full roster of 24 contestants, we were primed for a group number and, boy, did we get one, complete with '60s get-ups right down to the girls' hair and makeup, which were adorable.

Group numbers like this embody Idol's cheese factor in all its glory. Which is not to say that I enjoy them in a so-good-it's-bad kind of way. I love them instead for their honest-to-goodness wholesomeness. It really matters to these kids' futures that they perform well, that they make us like them, and that earnestness makes such Idol moments sincere. In fact, they remind me most of those icons of wholesome sincerity, the Brady kids, and of those awesome Brady moments when the kids became a singing group and not just a bunch of step-brothers and sisters:

I was way disappointed when the second Idol concert I attended, for season 5, the year of my beloved Elliott Yamin, had many fewer group numbers than the first show I'd seen, the Clay, Reuben, and K.Lo. year, which was pure joy in its plethora of group acts. The reduction in these numbers over the years of the concert seemed to me a sign of the tour becoming more and more of a money-making machine, one that saw no need to invest in the production of new numbers when the fans would still pay money for the tickets and the Idols could just recycle songs they'd sung on the show. I'd still go to another concert, if I were to have the same attachment to the finalists as I did the two years I've attended in the past, but for now I'm holding onto the group numbers I'm getting on screen. Let's hope the bloated results show has the decency to include another next week.

Wanna feel old?

2008-02-18T19:05:00.004-06:00

Molly Ringwald turns 40 today. Defamer Australia brings us this lovely tribute to Molly in all her '80s glory. My favorite parts are the Facts of Life clips and Breakfast Club dancing scenes. How is it possible that I still covet Molly/Claire's brown boots after 23 years?

Please note as well the brief glimpse of Andrew McCarthy's mug in Pretty in Pink. I never got the appeal of the bland Blane, especially with James Spader's sleazy bad boy and Jon Cryer's geek-adorable Duckie hanging around. Nonetheless, I was excited to see Blane all salt-and-pepper-haired and charming on the Lipstick Jungle pilot recently. He's playing a bazillionaire sweeping the Linsday Price character off her feet. I found Brooke Shields pretty insufferable, but Nico, the magazine editor played by Kim Raver, was likable. I've only watched the first episode so far, but would rank it higher than Cashmere Mafia, its fellow Sex and the City clone, which was ten kinds of awful. Jungle had a better sense of humor, a more sympathetic character in Nico, and Andrew McCarthy, after all.

The Breakfast Club was the first movie I sat through twice. That's two times in a row. In the same theater. Watched it once and stayed to watch it yet again. I think it may be the only movie for which I've ever done this. There's something about being a teenager, and seeing a story of your world (or kinda your world, with a bit more "typing" going on than might be the case in daily life) beaming out from a screen. Unfortunately, I've yet to have the same kind of experience as a thirtysomething. Lipstick Jungle? Cashmere Mafia? Not my world. Maybe we become less susceptible to the fantasy that our lives are worth screening as we get older, so we're less likely to believe that an on-screen world resembles our own. Or maybe the media industries have little interest in capturing the lives of real-feeling adult women. It's moments like this when I miss Lorelei Gilmore, a real-feeling adult woman, a TV friend, existing in an unreal world I wanted to visit every week.

Technology meltdown

2008-02-15T16:53:00.002-06:00

It's been quite a week--a host of technologies, old and new, have been acting up in my world--working poorly, not working at all, gumming up the works nonstop. Here's a list of technologies in my life that have required repair, replacement, or reworking this week:

refrigerator
car
cell phone
iPod
DVD recorder
email program

And now a child and his father beset by icky flu-like bugs. I will return to a happy place soon, I will return to a happy place soon, I will return to a happy place soon.

Games of yore

2008-02-07T19:19:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned before that my dad was an early adopter--we often had new media technologies in our house in the earliest years of their consumer popularity.
So we had our first VCR, a top-loader that looked something like this (courtesy of TotalRewind.org) in 1981.

There were also a host of video game consoles in my house. I think my dad always wanted to be a serious gamer but only had brief periods of infatuation with a console or a game before his acquisitive desires took over and he was on to the next. But he didn't get a lot of encouragement in his gaming, either. My sister, my mom, and I would be somewhat amused by the latest toy but never kept our attention on it in a way that would have stoked his enthusiasm. Nonetheless, I have crystal clear memories of the various consoles that passed through our house in the '70s and '80s. When I started to look around online for images, I spotted the games we had right away. Surely the earliest was this Bally Professional Arcade.

Next was Intellivision:

This was the era of Atari being all the rage, but no Atari in our house. I'm sure my dad had his reasons--probably an electronics magazine that told him about the superior technologies of other brands--but I would always admit rather sheepishly to kids at school that we had one of these other games when asked about my experience with an Atari title.

There may well have been other consoles along the way, but the next that I remember came much later, after I was out of the house: 3DO. My strongest memory of 3DO is of the controversial live-action game Night Trap, in which you had to stop a bunch of masked bogeymen from grabbing Dana Plato and her giggly slumber party pals. The game stirred up controversy for being sexist and violent and today it ranks on serious gamers' lists as one of the worst video games of all time. Mostly, it was pretty goofy. And I liked it--perhaps indicating that I'm never going to see eye to eye with the gamer boys who write lists like the "crapstravaganza" on which Night Trap ranks. But, c'mon, Dana Plato! As an undercover officer on a mission! And it was my job to help her! I loved the live action sequences and the semblance of narrative, the thing I found missing in too many of the games I played, however briefly, with my dad.

I've been pretty much out of the gaming universe for years now, except for reading a bit of the small but growing world of gaming scholarship and talking with a student or two who knows way more about it all than I do. But I remain kind of intrigued by the whole thing-not so much as something I want to spend time doing, but as something I want to understand--especially to understand why games so compel the attention and devotion of their largely male players (yes, I know, of course there are lots of girl and women gamers, but it is no doubt a masculine culture on the whole).

Maybe that's why I'm looking forward to attending the Video Games Live concert here in Milwaukee next month, where the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra will play video game scores as massive screens display game visuals. I'm sure my dad would have gotten a kick out of the idea. No chance they'll play the Night Trap theme song, is there?

Kinda glad I'm not voting today

2008-02-05T10:34:00.000-06:00

Bitch Ph.D. has written the post I would write, if I could think this carefully about my conflicted attitude toward the US Democratic primary.

If Angela and Brian had sex . . .

2008-01-31T16:02:00.000-06:00

Among my all-time favorite TV producers are Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. Their Bedford Falls company has generated a number of series whose characters have lived on for me long past their initial runs. There is probably no series on TV I have re-watched more than My So-Called Life, but their other prime time dramas are also faves: thirtysomething's '80s angst, Once & Again's it's-all-just-so-hard multi-generation tales, even the somewhat lackluster Relativity. We've even named our kid Leo in part through the inspiration of the Leos that have populated the Bedford Falls-averse (Michael and Hope's infant son, Relativity's leading man, the hunky younger-man doctor Karen Sammler dates).

Because of my love for all things Zwick/Herskovitzy I was so, so excited when the duo's new series, quarterlife, began its life as an internet-only series. Since then, NBC has picked up the already-produced episodes for broadcast, and I look forward to seeing them on air this February. But we've been keeping up with the online episodes, nonetheless, and I am happy to say that they've finally gotten really good, finally are beginning to live up to their producers' impressive cred.

The online eps of quarterlife range from about 7 to 14 minutes each, but these segments are clearly that--segments of hour-long TV episodes chopped up for twice-weekly internet streaming. It's a clever idea and all--finding a way to distribute a series when the nets decided not to pick it up--but it seems a bit disingenuous to call 44 minute broadcast TV episodes chopped into bits an internet series.

Just aired are the segments that make up what would be the 4th broadcast episode. Written by Devon Gummersall, also the actor who played MSCL's unrequited lover/uber-geek Brian Krakow, "Goodbyes" has all the markings of great prime time drama, and of Bedford Falls drama in particular--parallel plotlines that enrich each other in the similarities and differences of the characters' experiences, subtle dialogue that exposes character, sweet humor laced with awkwardness, Snuffy's music--just lovely and perfect.

Most perfect, however, was the story told in this episode about the growing romance between Dylan and Eric. I've liked both of these characters all along, but "Goodbyes" moved them up a notch for me into the pantheon of great Ed and Marshall couples or, better still, Ed and Marshall maybe-couples and sort-of-couples, for romance in the Bedford Falls-averse is always fraught and painful. In particular, the story of Dylan and Eric in this episode fulfills my fantasy of seeing what would happen if MSCL's Angela and Brian were to finally, actually, and really get together, a possibility only briefly hinted at in the final moments of that series. Dylan has always been an Angela-esque character and, in "Goodbyes" Eric proves himself to be the sensitive, if slightly bumbling, man that Brian always seemed he could become. Their scenes in bed make this particularly clear, but I also see it in some brief moments of this "episode":

Dylan and Eric coming inside with their bikes is sweetly reminiscent of Angela and Brian's bike straddled talks. And the moment when Dylan walks upstairs evokes for me the shot of Angela walking upstairs in the MSCL credit sequence (and taken from the pilot episode):

Too much of the early quarterlife episodes dealt with Jed and Danny's frustrated efforts to become filmmakers-- a plot way reminiscent of Michael and Elliott's story on thirtysomething, an arc I love in that show but that reads as old and boring when it features Jed and Danny. Now, however, thanks perhaps to the intervention of Brian Krakow himself, quarterlife may be becoming more My So-Called Life than thirtysomething. I always knew that Angela and Brian were destined for each other--or at least for a really awkward attempt at destiny.

You are your psychographic profile

2008-01-28T15:23:00.000-06:00

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is a lovely place to live, but historically has not been much of a shopping mecca. In the five and a half years I've lived here, however, the number of upscale national retail establishments that have come to town have grown greatly. This has been a boon food-wise: Trader Joe's! Whole Foods! Housewares-wise: Crate and Barrel! And, increasingly, clothing-wise. Most recently, the city has welcomed the jointly owned Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. Did you know that Anthropologie is supposed to be where grown up Outfitters head when they begin to feel a tad too mature (read: old) for Urban's hipster-wear? I didn't know the two companies were related until I fell under the Anthropologie sway and, as a good little academic and cultural omnivore, had to know more about the magical place and did some research.

That's when I found this amazing article about Anthropologie's corporate philosophy. As I read this, much as when I visited the store itself, I felt a swell of excitement and recognition: they know me! They like me! They want me to have clothes and housewares that speak to me! That I love! I also felt pretty embarrassed. Having a corporation place you so blatantly in their sights, pegging you with their psychographic babble, is more than a little creepy:

Ask anyone at Anthropologie who that customer is, and they can rattle off a demographic profile: 30 to 45 years old, college or post-graduate education, married with kids or in a committed relationship, professional or ex-professional, annual household income of $150,000 to $200,000. But those dry matters of fact don't suffice to flesh out the living, breathing woman most Anthropologists call "our friend." Senk, 46, says, "I like to describe her in psychographic terms. She's well-read and well-traveled. She is very aware -- she gets our references, whether it's to a town in Europe or to a book or a movie. She's urban minded. She's into cooking, gardening, and wine. She has a natural curiosity about the world. She's relatively fit."
While most retailers today are obsessed with the highly lucrative and populous "tween" (preteen and young teen) and boomer markets, Anthropologie has cultivated an understanding of and connection to the ultimate tweener: the thirtysomething sophisticate, once known as a Gen-Xer, who has carried her mildly rebellious, against-the-grain independence into a serious career and family life. She's defined less by static qualities and more by a set of dynamic tensions. If the tween anthem is Britney Spears's "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman," the Anthropologie customer's plaint is more Alanis Morissette: "I've got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is giving the peace sign." Translation: "I can't pick up my children or sit through a meeting in low-rise jeans, but I'm not nearly ready for an elastic waistband."

The Anthropologie customer is affluent but not materialistic. She's focused on building a nest but hankers for exotic travel. (She can picture herself roughing it with a backpack and Eurail pass -- as long as there is a massage and room service at end of the trek.) She'd like to be a domestic goddess but has no problem cutting corners (she prefers the luscious excess of British cooking sensation Nigella Lawson to the measured perfection of Martha Stewart). She's in tune with trends, but she's a confident individualist when it comes to style. She lives in the suburbs but would never consider herself a suburbanite. (This is where Senk's kinship to his customer is most apparent. He had lived in cities all over the world -- London, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia -- before settling in an elegant turn-of-the-century house in the Philadelphia garden suburb of Chestnut Hill with his partner, Anthropologie antiques buyer Keith Johnson. Says Senk: "We're city people -- we'd never dreamed of moving to the suburbs. But Chestnut Hill is sophisticated. It's like a suburb in the city.")

The Anthropologie woman is not so much conflicted as she is resistant to categorization. Her identity is a tangle of connections to activities, places, interests, values, and aspirations. She's not married with two kids: She's a yoga-practicing filmmaker with an organic garden, a collection of antique musical instruments, and an abiding interest in Chinese culture (plus a husband and two kids). It's no coincidence that Julia Roberts is the celebrity avatar of Anthropologie. Not only is she a frequent shopper (along with many of Hollywood's strongest-minded women, including Susan Sarandon, Sharon Stone, and Madonna), but her bohemian-chic wardrobe in The Mexican was Anthropologie sourced.

The big problem here is that the household income thing is a bit off, so I can covet like crazy but can never really become the Anthropologie woman so irritatingly described here. I'm sure they're happy to have aspirational consumers like me, too, who may buy from time to time even if they can't commit to regular purchases. And I can always make a slightly more affordable purchase at Urban, right? Wouldn't that be part of the psychographics, too? "She's happy to pick up an item or two at her younger sib's store, when it suits her casual-day whimsy."

Stunt casting and the writers' strike-era soaps

2008-01-24T12:25:00.000-06:00

The soaps are all about the stunt casting right now--bringing back the old faves, welcoming non-daytime actors to daytime, generally doing whatever they can to keep viewers tuning in (or even to bring back some lapsers) during these generally rocky times for the genre. ABC Daytime president Brian Frons, a man whose "insights" usually hold little weight with me, and who is pretty widely reviled amongst soap fans, explains this development quite perfectly, however, in that he points out that many actors are hungry for work right now. Uncertain as to when the WGA strike will end and prime time production will pick back up, more and more actors seem happy to receive a daytime paycheck as the soaps continue to chug along.

ABC whacked viewers on the head with its casting news when All My Children re-upped three departed actors this month and it looks like the heavy sell is now on for GH. In this case, Sarah Brown returns to the show--but in a different role than the one she originated in the mid-'90s. That role is now on its 4th actress, but Brown is appearing this time around all dark-haired (as opposed to the blonde-y Carly she last played) and mobbed up.

I admit that I totally love this promo. A second one that shows the Claudia and Sonny characters hitting the sheets was fun, but this one camps it up like crazy. Brown's Carly was paired with Sonny in her last GH gig, so long-time (or longish time) fans will get a kick out of seeing them together again. But I'm most excited to see what the interim writers, who are still a significant improvement from the regular regime, do with a woman mobster. GH's track record on this is, well, horrifying, as the last great woman mobster, Faith, was the misogynistic target of any number of sexist slurs and denigrating treatment (while male mafiosos Sonny and Jason are crowned the show's heroes). But I think Sarah Brown has too much clout to get that kind of treatment--and the writers these days actually seem to like and respect the female characters in a way we haven't seen for a long time.

Just a quick note to end: while this stunt casting seems pretty industry-wide, there have also been some high-profile firings in the soap world of late. Hard to know exactly why, but there is no question that the writers' strike is shaking things up in every way across daytime.

Abortion and the soaps

2008-01-22T19:48:00.000-06:00

It's blogging for choice day and, while this post doesn't really follow the "why you should vote pro-choice" theme of the day, in honor of the occasion I wanted to post a bit about some soap storylines I've been tracking lately. I became interested in the ways that soaps handle abortion when GH had a very thoughtful story about teenage Lulu Spencer's unplanned pregnancy in the summer of 2006. Unlike the typical plot of most American entertainment programming, in which the woman considering the abortion changes her mind at the last minute, or has a last minute miscarriage or, in the latest round of reproductive comedies, never gives abortion serious consideration, Lulu actually had the abortion in the GH story. And while it was a trying experience for her, and one she remembers with some pain, she suffered no long-lasting negative consequences, no "subtle" form of punishment for her decision. It was really an amazing and moving story, careful to present all "sides" in the issue, but never wavering in its assertion that Lulu had every right to make the choice she did and even asserting that this was a good choice, the right choice. Most of the other characters supported her decision and defended her right to choose and the ones who did not--such as her brother Lucky--had some mitigating circumstance that explained their perspective (Lucky was a messed up drug addict at the time--not exactly a ringing endorsement for the anti-abortion cause).

As I began to research past abortion stories on soaps, I found that many seem to have fallen into the more typical patterns of this kind of storytelling in American media. The earliest such story appeared on Another World in 1964, when Pat Matthews' illegal abortion almost killed her. The first legal abortion was of course Erica Kane's on All My Children in 1973--an event the show notoriously negated in recent years when the fetus Erica thought she had aborted appeared in Pine Valley, fully grown after having been miraculously saved by the unscrupulous doctor who had performed the initial procedure. Needless to say, this "unabortion" had soap fans in a serious uproar, incensed not only at the absurd revision of history but even more so at the political ramifications of undoing this landmark event.

There have been many more soap abortion stories over the years and the process of researching them is a long and challenging one. But I have no doubt that viewers have seen some thoughtful deliberations on the part of characters they care about while watching these stories. Some surely have included subtle and not-so-subtle messages about the evils of abortion, but others, like Lulu's story, have presented much more careful consideration of the matter than we tend to get anywhere else in our popular culture.

iPod TV

2008-01-21T11:45:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned previously watching video on my iPod while working out, so I thought I'd post a bit more about this. I've always thought that I would be much more motivated to exercise if I could watch TV while doing it. As I've never really had the space or desire to fill my home with serious exercise equipment, this means that my workouts typically take place elsewhere (e.g., my neighborhood gym, which is actually a community fitness center). The standard TVs that appear in most gyms do no good for my TV-watching-while-exercising desires. I don't want to watch just any TV, I want to watch things I want to watch. I do love TV, but I never said I wasn't choosy about the TV I love to watch. So the introduction of a video iPod into my household within the last year has been a great addition.

This past fall, the networks' new practice of offering the pilots for many new series for free on iTunes greatly assisted my old practice of watching all network (and most cable) scripted series at least once. I'm still a free iTunes junkie and will watch a wider range of shows there than I might otherwise choose to record and watch. So I recently got to check in with Kyle XY again (still don't think I'm missing anything there) and got to watch the first episode of the endearing Scott Baio is 46 . . . and pregnant. As a childhood Happy Days devotee and a generally proud product of the '70s, Scott Baio is of course very close to my heart. I got a real kick out of Scott Baio is 45 and single last summer, and so was happy to get to see the next phase in Scott reality TV drama. This series is shot in the Laguna Beach/Hills model--no "confessionals," no talking head interviews--just you-are-there footage of Scott and his buds bumbling through middle age. An added bonus is that one of those buds is Jason Hervey, the actor who played Wayne Arnold, Kevin Arnold's obnoxious big brother in one of my '80s TV faves, The Wonder Years. (Hmm . . . I'm sensing something about my past preferences for nostalgia TV . . . ) So I get Chachi and Wayne--what more could a girl want? [Sometime I'll have to write about my fondness for the animated kids' show, Oswald, a fondness primarily rooted in my adoration of Fred Savage, who voices octopus Oswald and was, of course, the Wonder Years' darling protagonist.]

But I really, really digress from the iPod at the gym thing. Today I began to watch the pilot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles while at the gym. Now, I'm not done with it yet but I like it so far--strong women characters, lots of action. There is no way the money that was put into this pilot will appear in the later episodes and I can see how the on-the-run formula might get old. But here's my secret: I like pretty much anything I watch on the iPod at the gym. I think the fact that I am watching TV that I want to watch at the same time that I am working out is just too perfect a confluence of efficiency, productivity, and pleasure to make me anything but gleeful. (Maybe this explains my pleasure in the Lost recap, too.)

That said, I do find that I especially enjoy sitcoms and other half-hour programming viewed this way. Perhaps if I had a fancy new iPod Touch or some other device with a bigger screen and a better quality image, I'd enjoy dramas more. But the bright lighting, clear sound, and easy-to-follow plots of half-hour comedies fit that little screen and my sweating self just beautifully.

Why does this make me like LOST more?

2008-01-17T12:48:00.000-06:00

This isn't the newest news, but ABC's Lost in 8:15 summary is floating around out there to help viewers catch up/remember where things stand with the Flight 815 survivors as the network prepares to launch the show's new season.

This is a clever little video that had me chuckling out loud from atop the elliptical machine at the gym the other day (thanks to one of the great additions to my life as a result of convergent media culture, the video iPod--more on that another time). As I watched, I thought how much more I like the show in this summary than I do during the episodes proper. I think this is because the recap video has a sense of humor about itself and places the series' bizarre narrative in what I think is its most fitting context--that of a pulpy, over-the-top, melodramatic yarn. I think the show works really well on this level and enjoy it as such, but I also think that it (and much of the critical discourse around it) takes itself too seriously, too self-importantly. Lost, like so many other contemporary prime time series, is trying so hard to be "quality," to be "important," to be "cinematic," that it fails to recognize its real strengths, which lie in schlockier, pulpier, more histrionic realms. Lost in 8:15 embraces such pleasures openly. It made me wish for more of the same in the series itself.

Soaps and the writers' strike, Part 2

2008-01-14T14:51:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking about the position of soap actors and crews during the strike, and the ways in which they are in such different circumstances from prime time casts and crews. In many ways, the fact that soap production continues speaks to the soaps' cultural standing, a standing that places the genre at the bottom of the medium, at the lowest levels of the cultural hierarchies that position HBO series at the pinnacle. There is seemingly an assumption in the industry and in the culture that soap production will go on, that soap actors will report to work, that the little matter of who does the writing is inconsequential enough for the programs to go on without it. No one has suggested that prime time series go on with scab writers, that ABC Studios hire some dudes to write and, hell, produce while they're at it, the season's back-end episodes of Lost. The late night and mock news shows seem to tread some sort of middle ground here--they go off air for awhile--their productions presumably halted without writers--but then return to air, as if they can run without writers (although of course Stewart, Leno, et al. are writing for themselves).

It's not as if Stewart, Leno, etc. have not be criticized for writing when they are purportedly on strike, so these shows' position as somehow acceptably in production after an interlude is complicated. I also see how the showrunner model of prime time, in which writing and producing are duties held by the same person, complicates the idea of keeping prime time shows in production with scab writers. Still, I do think there is something that reads as categorically different, both within the industry and outside it, for the soaps. I see this in the fact that prime time and film actors' refusal to cross a picket line kept the Golden Globes off the air, rather than the absence of a producer (an awards show would have separate people writing and producing). Like the Globes' potential producer, the soaps' producers are still working, as writing and producing duties are also separate in soaps, unlike in most US prime time series. And soap actors are still working--no Golden Globes-like refusals to cross lines there.

I'm not trying to be critical of soap actors' choices, just curiously asking why it is that there seems little doubt such workers will do their jobs while others, in other genres, will not. I know some soap actors have spent time on the picket lines and others have voiced public support for the writers' position. I also know that prime time and film actors have no contractual commitment to appear at something like the Globes, while soap actors are contractually committed to their shows. Still, I have a sense that the unquestioned continuation of soap production is attributable, at least in part, to the worker-bee identity assumed of soap workers of all kinds. Of course these folks would go to work, such an assumption would hold, as they are more like laborers than artists, more like clock-punchers than creatives. There are many concrete reasons why soap production continues unabated, but the cultural implications of those reasons are worth contemplating, as well.

Not in my high school

2008-01-12T10:16:00.001-06:00

This is not what the boys in my high school looked like.

Friday Night Lights is so not the greatness it was in its first season, but it still has Tim Riggins . . .

Soaps and the writers' strike

2008-01-11T19:31:00.000-06:00

As the WGA strike wears on, I have moments of panic about what it all means for the future of TV. I'm still full up on shows to watch, from those stockpiled on the DVR, the few still trickling across the pipeline, and DVDs too numerous to list. I'm also still getting my daily soap dose. General Hospital, my soap of choice for, well, ever has finally run out of episodes written by the show's regular writing team and is now airing episodes credited to just one writer. This writer is a regular staff member who has presumably gone "fi-core," which I understand to mean officially giving up his WGA membership but still paying guild dues and receiving guild benefits. The LA Times and NY Times have both covered the matter of late, mentioning that some soap writers have taken on this status, including the head writers for ABC's All My Children. Presumably neither the AMC headwriting team (of 2) or the GH writer who has been credited on the episodes I have seen thus far (I'm perpetually a few days behind in my viewing) could write five one hour scripts per week, so I assume other, uncredited writers, a.k.a. scabs, are pitching in.

From a storytelling standpoint, the GH situation is especially fascinating. Audiences have been EXTREMELY disgruntled with the show lately, as these criticisms of the regular head writer show. Now, the internet has made the grumbling of soap fans especially amplified, but the level of vitriol on the part of fans seems stronger than ever to me these days. I myself am religiously devoted to the show--I've probably missed only a handful of episodes over 26 years--and have been so, so unhappy with it lately. The detailed reasons why are too involved to explain in full here, but some of these include storytelling that moves very quickly and without much narrative logic, little to no time on character development, such that it is difficult to understand the characters' motivations for anything they do, and a disturbing amount of misogyny.

That is, until the fi-core writing began. Granted, I've only seen a few days of this so far but . . . I kinda like it. I need to watch more before I figure out exactly why--and see if this impression holds--but the show has incorporated humor again, something sorely lacking of late; it has humanized characters (I'm thinking here primarily of Ric Lansing, for those familiar with the show) whose traits had previously seemed entirely plot-dictated (bad guy one day, without a clear motivation, good guy the next); and, most importantly, I think it has been taking the time to give us scenes about little more than characters interacting, or thinking about one another, or having experiences that are revealing of them as characters but not especially focused on plot development. If indeed this is the case--and I do need more time to be sure--I'm certain it is a deliberate strategy to stretch things out, to fritter away some time until the "real" writing resumes. But it has taken me back to some of the things I've always liked best about soaps, and about my soap and its characters in particular. I like just wandering around their world, knowing it intimately.

I've always said that my favorite days on GH are holidays because on those days nothing really happens. Lots of characters are on and they hang out and celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving or the 4th of July. Sure, they talk about things related to the current stories, but these days are typically just about spending time with my TV friends. I'm starting to think it might be Christmas every day on GH for a awhile.

genderandpolitics

2008-01-09T11:18:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to link to a few of the great posts and articles I've been reading about gender and the the US presidential primaries, particularly the reactions to Hillary Clinton. With all this great writing out there on the subject, I feel like I sometimes did in graduate seminars back in the day--with so many smart people saying so many smart things, it's hard to figure out what I could add. Here's some of my faves on this one:

Gloria Steinem in the NY Times

Dr. Crazy

Chuck at the Chutry Experiment

Dumbo

2008-01-07T16:15:00.000-06:00

In recent weeks, my son Leo, soon to turn 4, has discovered the movies. He's a regular and devoted TV viewer, natch, but until very recently, hadn't seen many feature films. He's seen just one in a theater (Ratatouille), and had watched pieces of one (Finding Nemo) on DVD. His only repeated movie on DVD until recent weeks had been Cars. With a holiday break from day care, however, we decided to show him a few more animated features as a way to pass the time. Most he seemed to enjoy, but none seemed to truly resonate with him the way that Dora, or Blue's Clues, or Max & Ruby does. That is, until he watched the 1941 Disney film, Dumbo, this past weekend. His intense response to the movie has both increased my already prodigious admiration of and fondness for the little guy and made me fret about the impact on media content upon him, an issue on which I have previously written.

Dumbo is the story of a baby elephant with extremely large ears. When his mama, Jumbo, tries to protect baby Dumbo (she names him Jumbo, Jr., but others dub him Dumbo to mock his unusual appearance) from some bullies who pick on him, the circus-runners lock her up, labeling her a "Mad Elephant." Dumbo is left to fend for himself, until an entrepreneurial mouse named Timothy befriends him and, eventually, helps him learn how to fly, using the prodigious ears as wings. Once Dumbo can fly, he becomes the star of the circus, is universally beloved, and is reunited with Mama Jumbo, who now gets the royal treatment as mother of the circus star.

Leo was initially devastated by this story. He sobbed at Dumbo's torment, at Jumbo being chained up, at mama and baby being separated. I repeatedly offered to turn the movie off and kept assuring him all would be well in the end, but he insisted on continuing to watch. Eventually, I managed to fast-forward a bit to get to the happy ending and Leo calmed down. Michael and I were amazed at the depths of Leo's emotion and his comprehension of the story, but also rather upset at Leo's distress.

The next day, Leo asked to watch the movie again. We talked about how it made him feel and he assured me that he still wanted to watch it, that he knew he would feel sad for some of it, but that he knew all would end happily. So we watched it again. Still emotional, not as dramatically so, but we watched the whole thing this time and Leo has told us ever since how much he likes the movie.

Was my little boy enjoying the intense emotional ride that a powerful narrative can offer? Or was he having to deal with a story beyond his ability to cope? I worried, as well, about the racist representations throughout the film, from the blank-faced, black-skinned workers singing about their submission to the hard work of putting up the circus tent to the minstrel performance of the black crows (including one named J. Crow) who help Dumbo learn to fly. Leo seemed to have no awareness of the racial dimension; in general, he seems to notice differences in skin color interchangeably with differences in eye color or hair color and seems to find little relevance in any of it, but I worried about the extent to which the film's representations of blackness would participate in shaping his future awareness of race.

Still, the more pressing question for me (as a white person, no doubt) was the emotional impact of Leo's experience. I think of my consumption of all kinds of narratives as being primarily about the emotional experience they offer me. I want to experience the emotional highs and lows of characters; this is the source of much of my narrative pleasure. Leo seemed to be saying he was getting the same thing from Dumbo. Had I just introduced my son to the profound pleasures of narrative, then, or had I given him a traumatic experience beyond his years?

I know how Mama Jumbo felt; protecting your baby ain't easy as he discovers the pains and pleasures of the world.

Tangled up in The Wire

2008-01-07T13:35:00.000-06:00

This is why it's best for me to watch my TV in weekly doses as opposed to a DVD binge. M and I are deep into The Wire on DVD (late in season 2 right now) and I'm having dreams about Frank Sobotka and cans missing from the stacks. I can't fall back asleep at 2 AM after replacing the blanket of an almost-4-year-old because I'm too busy thinking about Stringer Bell. Am I really supposed to be able to work with these characters marching through my brain all day and night?

Video catalog

2008-01-05T14:29:00.000-06:00

I've been a TV time-shifter since the early 1980s, when my family purchased our first VCR. My early-adopter dad got a top-loading VCR in 1981, right around the same time my mom and I were hearing so much talk about this Luke and Laura and this General Hospital. We decided to check it out, as we could videotape the show during the day and watch it after school/in the evening. The rest of that tale is a history for another time. But I soon began to videotape and time-shift my viewing of most everything I watched, a practice that became a full-fledged part of my life when I went off to college later in the '80s. I wasn't particularly concerned with archiving most of what I taped; I time-shifted then (as now) for convenience and efficiency of viewing, and to avoid commercials (no, I am not one of those DVR users who still watches the ads). But I did begin to save tapes of some of my favorite episodes. As I began to study television more formally in college, some of this taping-and-saving was for particular uses--a paper I was writing, etc. But most of my archival practices were still fan-motivated. I kept this up during my few years between college and grad school. By this point, however, I was pretty clearly a media-scholar-to-be and so I began to get more serious abut what I saved. With graduate school, I continued to tape and save, though still selectively. Unlike at least one of my graduate school colleagues, I did not save everything I recorded. Still, over the years I built up a nice library of tapes, including some off-the-air recordings from the '80s and early '90s.

Over the last few years, I've been working on transferring all of these tapes to DVD. It is still, of course, an imperfect archival medium, but schlepping boxes and boxes of tapes from move to move was seeming more and more ridiculous with the streamlined world of DVD there for the taking. I have reluctantly disposed of the VHS tapes as I've gone along, but it is always a bit painful to let them go. The dubbing project is going somewhat slowly, in large part because I'm always doing some sort of over-the-air archiving at the same time. My biggest ongoing over-the-air effort is saving all of the Ryan's Hope episodes airing on Soapnet (the channel runs the soap's episodes from its debut in 1975 to the end of 1981. Though RH aired until 1989, I have been told that music rights issues keep Soapnet from airing the post-'81 eps). But I've been archiving lots of other soap material, as well, and have saved full or nearly full runs of various prime-time series, too.

All of this may seem somewhat futile and old-fashioned in an age of YouTube and TV-on-DVD, but so much material remains unavailable in these formats, so much of it still seems fleeting (on YouTube today, gone tomorrow), and so much of it is partial (either clips of episodes or less than full runs of series) that I remain a tenacious archivist. I seem to get more and more serious about this as I get older. Perhaps it is nostalgia for the past; perhaps it is an inherent suspicion of new technologies; perhaps it is just experience that has taught me how devalued most TV still is.

The best part of these efforts has been my simultaneous creation of a video catalog that allows me to find whatever I need quickly and easily, and that gives me a collectors' geeky pride whenever I look at it. I'm getting close to having a thousand disks (most of which have from 2 to 13 TV episodes on them) and this darn catalog is as much a point of pride for me as is my book, or my child (OK, OK, I'm pretty much kidding there, but I do love my Excel spreadsheet beyond reason). To love a thing like television is to be protective of it--little boxes on a spreadsheet and a line-up of disc carrying cases is one of the best ways I know to preserve a piece of my own connection to the tube.

Giving blogging a whirl

2008-01-03T20:29:00.000-06:00

So I've decided to give blogging a try. Not sure exactly why, as I've been resistant to its time-suck capacity for a long time. I think I may be a wee bit frustrated by the media scholar blogosphere, at least that of it that I have discovered. It's pretty boy-centric, and really, really serious. I spend plenty of my time doing scholarly writing. If I'm going to blog I'd like to have a little more fun with it. I'm also perpetually frustrated by more popular writing about media, especially TV, so I hope that my scholars' perspective will offer something different. That said, I'm hoping that this blog will combine some of my favorite elements of other blogs I enjoy. I'm quite the lurky fan of Dr. Crazy's Reassigned Time and hope to achieve her blend of the personal, the political, and the professional. I admire lots of the academic feminist blogosphere, and am happy to track the few feminist media scholars' blogs written by women (if there are more of you out there, please let me know!). I do love lots of non-academic but still sharply critical media writing to be found online, especially sharp soap opera criticism, which is abundant these days in the increasingly disappointing world of US daytime soaps (this is way pre-writers' strike, so don't blame the scabs). I guess we'll see where this blog takes me. I hope to keep posts kinda brief and to write about things I am reading and watching and thinking about. This may at times deal with ideas I'm struggling with in my teaching or my research, but it may also deal with the hairstyles of the General Hospital actresses. Take these for example (screen caps from the great Serial Drama):

The blondification of these gorgeous brunettes is a crime. Stop the highlighting!

Also on the soap front is this exciting new promo for Guiding Light's new shooting style (also to be used on P&G's other soap As the World Turns):

This cheaper production mode is looking mighty good here. In a time of great threat to the soaps' survival (not just the writers' strike but declining ratings all around), there are some fascinating instances of creativity and innovation at work. I don't think that the soaps are bound for extinction, as some have predicted, but change is definitely afoot. With so much of it for worse, I'm hoping that P&G's experiment in borrowing reality TV-style shooting is as promising as it appears here.