Contemporary American Television Research Articles

‘Thanks for being here with us’: Para-social interaction and the effects of pundit talk on the Hannity and Maddow shows

Contemporary American television news centers pundits as key voices in national political discourse. The most prominent pundits anchor their own programs, often during primetime hours, reaching large audiences . This paper analyzes pundits’ performance of a type of news talk that is designed to appear unscripted and therefore authentic, enhancing parasocial interaction (PSI) with viewers and affirming pundits’ roles as experts. Data collected from two of the most-watched pundit-helmed news shows— Hannity and The Rachel Maddow Show—suggests that pundits use greeting tokens, personal pronouns, repetition, and rhetorical questions during their opening monologues. We discuss the mechanisms through which punditry may contribute to political polarization by creating emphasis frames.

Visual rhetorical analysis of Queer visibility strategies active in contemporary American television

visual rhetorical analysis of Queer visibility strategies active in contemporary American television

The Serial Will Be Televised: Serial Television’s Revolutionary Potential for Multidisciplinary Analysis of Social Identity - Reviews of <i>Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure</i> by Dennis Broe, Wayne State University Press, 2019, and <i>Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television</i> by Maria Sulimma, Edinburgh University Press, 2021

This review examines how two recent books use a multidisciplinary approach to examine seriality as both technology and narrative mode in contemporary American television. Both Dennis Broe’s Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure (Wayne State University Press, 2019) and Maria Sulimma’s Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) examine the impacts of the interactivity between socio-political climates and the unique formal aspects of serial television has on social identity, relationality, and the potential for resistance within the medium.

The left-wing legacy in ’70s Hong Kong television: Chameleon (1978) and Lee Sil-hong’s Rediffusion (RTV) tetralogy

A missing chapter in the history of postwar left-wing Hong Kong cinema involves the channeling of its energies into television in the 1970s. At Rediffusion (RTV), producer Lee Sil-hong – son of director Lee Sun-fung – mobilized veterans from the classical period of the left-wing studios to produce a tetralogy of serialized television dramas that represent the apotheosis of the jiating lunli pian, not only resurrecting the spirit behind such classic Union melodramas as In the Face of Demolition (1953) or their celebrated adaptation of Ba Jin’s “Torrents” trilogy, but doing so with an epic ambition with regard to historical scope and scale that had been inconceivable even in the heyday of left-wing Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s. Providing a panoramic account of twentieth-­century Chinese history, Lee’s tetralogy – Chameleon (1978), Gone with the Wind (1980), Fatherland (1980), and Hong Kong Gentlemen (1981) – predates by at least a decade attempts by China’s Fifth Generation, New Taiwan Cinema, and the Hong Kong New Wave to address such subject matter in comparable fashion through the social epic or family melodrama. Factors that made possible Lee’s achievement include: (i) the central importance of television as a medium for the expression of local cultural identity during the period of Hong Kong’s economic takeoff, (ii) the renewal on television of left-wing filmmaking philosophy and practices inherited from Thirties Shanghai and Fifties Hong Kong, and (iii) the social realist sensibility of the left-wing tradition – along with its strong interest in the transcultural adaptation of foreign literature – that allowed it to frame local experience in terms of the global, benefitting from an awareness of both the 19th-century European novel and the contemporary American television epic. Situating Lee’s tetralogy within the broader historical context of persistent Chinese left-wing efforts across generations to contest politically rival screen practices, this essay analyzes Chameleon for its distinctive worldview and methods characteristic of the jiating lunli pian, while assessing its functional aesthetic as rooted in the literature-inspired realist melodrama with didactic aims – an inherited tradition to which it contributed a magisterial endpoint but beyond which it was unwilling to advance, unlike the groundbreaking modernism of the Hong Kong New Wave’s television work.

Transgressing the Controlling Images of African-American Women? Performing Black Womanhood in Contemporary American Television Series

Drawing from intersectionality theories and black feminist critiques of white, masculinist, and racist discourses still prevailing in the American popular culture of the twenty-first century, this article looks critically at contemporary images of African-American women in the selected television series. For at least four decades critics of American popular culture have been pointing to, on the one hand, the dominant stereotypes of African-American women (the so-called controlling images, to use the expression coined by Patricia Hill Collins) resulting from slavery, racial segregation, white racism and sexism as well as, on the other hand, to significant marginalization or invisibility of black women in mainstream film and television productions. In this context, the article analyzes two contemporary television shows casting African-American women as leading characters (e.g., Scandal, 2012-2018 and How To Get Away With Murder, 2014-2020) to see whether these narratives are novel in portraying black women’s experiences or, rather, they inscribe themselves in the assimilationist and post-racial ways of representation.

Do teatro ao museu de horrores: estratégias de autorreflexividade no seriado de televisão Penny Dreadful

contemporânea, abordado por Jason Mittell (2012), que elege a autorreflexividade como um dos elementos complexos na narrativa televisual dos séculos XX e XXI, este artigo objetiva discutir os elementos metaficcionais e autoconscientes no seriado de televisão anglo-americano Penny Dreadful. Assim, escolhemos analisar estratégias de performance e simulação que atuam através de dois espaços ficcionais na série, o teatro e o museu de cera, além de outros elementos que materializam o discurso autorreflexivo do programa televisivo ao longo de duas temporadas. Os estudos de Jost (2007, 2012), Eco (1989), Schechner (2013), Lee e King (2016), entre outros, serviram como base teórica e crítica para esta investigação.

A linguistic typology of American television

AbstractThis paper presents the first entirely linguistic typology of contemporary American television, derived from a multi-dimensional (MD) analysis of the USTV corpus. The USTV corpus comprises 930 texts from 191 different TV programs, classified into 31 different registers (including nine telecinematic ones: drama series, miniseries, movies, sitcoms, soap operas, general animation, children’s animation, short-feature animation, and children’s and teens’ shows). The linguistic typology we present in this study is based on the linguistic characteristics present in the individual programs, with no a priori textual categorizations. A cluster analysis grouped the individual programs into clusters that shared similar dimensional profiles. The resulting typology comprises nine different text types – namely Presentation of information, Opinion and discussion, Analysis and debate, Description, Interactive recount, Engaging demonstration, Playful discourse, Simplified interaction, and Simulated conversation. The paper discusses and illustrates each text type and considers how telecinematic discourse relates to each of them.

“Pulling Up a Wild Bill”: Television Post‐Westerns

:This article examines the concept of the post‐Western and its presence in contemporary American television. The displacement of the Western myth in these series allows their creators to take the audience into a post‐Western “space of reflection” and look for new ways to articulate fears and worries in contemporary America.

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Hip Nostalgia

The opening episode of season two of the AMC series Preacher begins with a big reveal that sets in motion the season’s subsequent action: God has come to earth and gone missing. The protagonists—a preacher possessed by the powerful, but amoral offspring of the illicit coupling of an angel and a demon, his contract killer girlfriend, and an Irish vampire—track the almighty to a small town strip club in East Texas he has been rumored to frequent. God is not there, mayhem ensues, and in the club’s office the manager—before succumbing to a gunshot wound—tells the preacher, with a sigh, ‘God didn’t come for the girls, you idiot. He came…for the jazz.’ The show then cuts to the club’s performance space where a piano-less trio led by veteran New Orleans drummer Johnny Vidacovich offers a Coltrane-inflected, hard bop-style tune while pole dancers writhe at the edge of the screen. Jazz is here partly, it turns out, to give the showrunners an excuse to set the season in New Orleans, but it is also here for more than simple exigency. This article plumbs the place of jazz in three contemporary American television shows’ soundtracks: AMC’s Preacher, Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, and F/X’s Louie. Together they represent a distinct cultural phenomenon in a distinct historical moment: the embrace of jazz as a music signifying creativity and the new; hipness and the bohemian margins of polite society; and elite, left wing intellectualism in an America riven by hope, change, and retrenchment. It is perhaps no surprise that each of these shows has a similar soundtrack—not only inasmuch as each includes new jazz recordings, in fact, but also in the range of other music compiled for their scores. They share a format—the ambivalent ‘dramedy’—an auteurish quality, an embrace of indie film aesthetics on the small screen, and a target audience. God aside, each of these shows participates in a signifying chain that links jazz to other aspects of American entertainment that once thrived together in a kind of demimonde, and which have since largely become uncoupled from each other; a Cold War-era world of Playboy clubs and the Rat Pack.
 What, this article asks, might be at stake in reattaching jazz, stand up comedy, and strippers in these television shows? What does their target audience want from that set of associations? Answering those questions requires a close look not only at the narrative frames in which jazz is made to participate and the televisual techniques with which it is shown, but also at the particular sonic qualities that define jazz for these shows. Jazz is, of course, a famously varied genre label. Each of these shows features the same kind of jazz: an eclectic style based in Miles Davis’s approach to texture and form and in John Coltrane’s harmonic explorations as elaborated since the 1970s. Notably, in using this style of music they have found a jazz that is neither strongly associated with the middleclass Black project of the ‘neo-traditional’ resurgence of historical styles starting in the 1990s, nor associated with the Black radical project of hip hop and R&B-tinged Afrofuturist jazz growing in popularity at the time the shows were released. It is not so much that the vision of jazz these shows produce is white, as that it occludes its racial signifiers altogether. In the most critical assessment one might say that this is a (mostly) white, (mostly) male attempt to recapture a moment of white hipness: a chance to make Bohemian America great again. A more sympathetic interpretation may use Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia to argue that the desire is to recapture the possibility of a different future offered by a selective memory of the past. These shows all make gestures toward a more multicultural world, and a world impacted by feminist and queer movements. This article holds open the possibility that by longing for a moment when jazz was hip these shows may be articulating with an audience’s desire for a more critical, more aware, more just future.

Dimensions of variation across American television registers

AbstractThe goal of this study is to identify the dimensions of variation across American television programs, following the multidimensional analysis (MD) framework introduced byBiber (1988). Although television is a major form of mass communication, there has been no previous large-scale MD study of television dialogue. A large corpus containing the key types of contemporary American television programs was collected, annotated with theBiber tagger, and subjected to multi-dimensional analysis, which indicated four factors of statistically correlated linguistic features. Each of these factors was interpreted communicatively to reveal the underlying dimensions of variation on American television, namely “Exposition and discussion vs. Simplified interaction” (Dimension 1), “Simulated conversation” (Dimension 2), “Recount” (Dimension 3) and “Engaging presentation” (Dimension 4). This article presents, illustrates, and discusses each of these dimensions, showing the macro linguistic patterns in use across hundreds of American television programs.

Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s <em>The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten</em> as Serial and Trans-Serial

Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s <em>The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten</em> as Serial and Trans-Serial

On the Couch: The Alpha Male in Therapy in Contemporary American Television Drama

As ideas of masculinity have changed in the United States, so too has the presentation of men on television. This article, then, explores a range of characters that have characteristics associated with the alpha male in the unusually vulnerable position of the patient, in a variety of programmes from generic detective dramas through to critically acclaimed productions, to analyse how programme makers navigate questions of masculinity against the cultural backdrop of the most recent fin de siècle. It also demonstrates a range of responses by programme makers, including some that question hypermasculine tendencies only to ultimately reinforce them.

Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Storytelling

In many ways, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Storytelling is the culmination of an idea that Jason Mittell has been advocating for over a decade. The concept of ‘complex TV’, at various times also termed ‘narrative complexity’ by the author, has been a consistent feature of Mittell’s work since at least 2006, when his essay ‘Narrative complexity in contemporary American television’ appeared in the pages of a special issue of The Velvet Light Trap. Since then, Mittell has argued for the existence of narrative complexity as a distinct narrational mode across a range of platforms, whether in academic papers, conference appearances, blog posts, or in his social media presence. Complex TV, as Mittell terms it, is an attempt to ascribe a name to a particular type of contemporary US television drama or comedy that has captured the imaginations of scholars, critics and, to an arguably lesser degree, viewers. Such programmes (among them the post-2000 output of networks such as HBO, AMC, Starz, F/X, Showtime and, more recently, traditional networks like NBC and ABC) have captured the zeitgeist and even inspired statements in the press to the effect that television has overtaken film on the cultural hierarchy.

‘Walking the line between saint and sinner’

This article considers how the notion of care, whether as an act of kindness or as a moral ethics, is reflected and worked through in the contemporary American television series, Nurse Jackie (2009–2015). Nurse Jackie, a comedy drama set in a fictional Catholic New York City Hospital, explores the ‘line between saint and sinner’, in the life of an emergency room (ER) nurse. This article considers how Jackie’s character negotiates moral boundaries in a way that allows for a reconsideration of both the complexity of care practices in contemporary society and the gendered nature of these practices.

The Accented American: The New Voices of British Stardom on US Television

This article investigates the cycle of British performers in contemporary American television drama and what is at stake in their adoption of a US accent. British actors have been increasingly heralded for their ability to adopt credible foreign accents, marking a negotiation of ‘Britishness’ and assumed vocal ‘foreignness’. By examining several pilot episodes of contemporary US dramas, this article poses the hybrid voice of the ‘accented American’ as a privileged and self-reflexive form of sonic spectacle. This is a voice narratively ‘othered’ to reinforce the screen presence of the British actor-as-American, soliciting spectators’ attention to their extra-textual identities as non-natives, while paradoxically consecrating ‘Britishness’ through the individual actor's assured command of American language. The article concludes by scrutinising the post-9/11 captive narrative of successful US drama Homeland (Showtime, 2011–). Through its themes of dubious patriotic allegiance, Homeland inscribes the cultural discourses surrounding Damian Lewis's starring role and falsified Americanness. The series also operates as a valuable commentary upon the wider proliferation of British talent across American television, revealing the ways in which such small-screen dramas are helping to regenerate prior conceptions of British stardom.

Remembering through Retro TV and Cinema: Mad Men as Televisual Memorial to 60s America

This article examines ways in which some contemporary American television and cinema set in the 1950s and 1960s such as Pleasantville and Mad Men share a critical engagement with the period they represent. The engagement is through the twin processes of identification and dissonance. The article describes this way of reviewing the past as retro representation. The article further explores the idea of retros as televisual memorials for the present, as they contribute to preserving memories of the represented period. Mad Men is examined as such a televisual memorial of the 60s.

‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’ of cult TV: Fans, followers, and fringe religions in Strangers with Candy and Veronica Mars

Abstract This article explores episodes of the contemporary American television programmes Strangers with Candy (Comedy Central, 1999–2000) and Veronica Mars (UPN/CW, 2004–07) so as to ascertain and discursively frame the complex relationship between cults (or neo-religious organizations) and cult TV. Although different from one another in many respects, these two TV series share an interest in the cliquish formations of high-school life that divide students into warring camps of insiders and outsiders. Moreover, both programmes contain pivotal episodes in which the ritualistic practices of fictional cults are presented ambivalently – as a source of humour yet also as a gateway through which the unconventional female protagonists pass on their way to self-discovery. That journey has extraordinary resonance for fans or ‘followers’ of these programmes. As argued by Jonathan Gray in his recently published work on ‘affect, fantasy, and meaning’, fans and followers are viewers who are ‘most involved in their consumption’. As such, Strangers with Candy and Veronica Mars deserve scrutiny as steadfastly worshipped texts conducive to the kinds of meta-consumptive discourses and practices that might shed light on culturally entrenched attitudes related to neo-religious activities.

“Welcome Back to the Living”: Twilight Memories of Martin Luther King Jr. in Contemporary American Television

In this essay, I read the image of Martin Luther King Jr. in contemporary television as a site of anxieties about temporality, contemporary black politics, and charismatic black leadership. Reading a 2003 episode of The Twilight Zone through a black feminist analytic and in the context of a post-2000 public culture of mourning for slain black leaders, I argue that the resurrections of King in contemporary American television series reinforce normative notions of black nationhood based in inheritance and masculine authority. Extending Andreas Huyssen’s notion of “twilight memories”—generational memories that fade into the horizon as the lights of a modernizing urban landscape push them out of view—I argue that postmodern, or postsoul, African American culture is driven to a large extent by the twilight memories of civil rights-era charismatic leadership.

“Respect My Authori-tah”: South Park and the Fragmentation/Reification of Whiteness

As a postmodern parodic television cartoon, South Park has much more to say about race than its crudely stereotypical and even crassly juvenile depictions of the racial Other would suggest. This study argues that the text is a potent example of a contemporary American television landscape that communicates difference largely in and through the absence of the Other. Exploring the program's dialectical role in both effacing and fostering a desire for difference, I conclude that South Park recenters whiteness by presenting the position in contrast to conceptualizations of liminal whiteness in the form of the cartoon's core characters. South Park's persistent messages about the racial subject position are also reinforced through its active relating to other texts within the cartoon genre.