Liminality, Niche Television Programming, and the Adventure Drama Series

Abstract

This article focuses on how expatriate adventure drama series on early 1960s American television served as harbingers of change in network television’s content. Through examination of the context leading to those series and an in-depth analysis of two series, Adventures in Paradise and Hong Kong, it demonstrates how American expatriates served as liminal and transitional figures in geographic settings that themselves were also liminal. As such the series fit into a niche unique to the time of the late turn of the 1960s, when broader social attitudes were also in transition. Drawing upon Victor Turner’s work and Bjørn Thomassen, who has brought a reevaluation of Turner and the concept of the rites of passage as developed by Arnold van Gennep, the article documents how turn of the 1960s adventure dramas already contained disruptive storylines undercutting existing social attitudes even while continuing to reinforce systemic racism and fixed sexual identities.