Television Sitcom Research Articles

Film Review: <em>Us</em>

Film Review:Us David C. Wall (bio) Jordan Peele, Us (2019) Jordan Peele's horror film Get Out (United States) was one of the most profitable movies of 2017, generating box-office returns of over $250 million on a budget of $4.5 million.1 It was also critically acclaimed, receiving multiple accolades, including Academy Award nominations in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor (Daniel Kaluuya), going on to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.2 Like notable earlier films such as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, United States) and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968, United States), Get Out self-consciously utilizes the formal and thematic conventions of genre film in order to engage in significant social commentary. In a disturbing vision of the hidden racism of apparently well-meaning white liberals, Get Out is an excoriating critique of the racial underpinnings of American social relationships. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the horror genre has proved a productive form for narratives of the African American experience, from Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess (1973, United States) and William Crain's Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976, United States) to Rusty Cundieff's Tales from the Hood (1995, United States) and Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014, United States) (a revisioning of Gunn's earlier film.) As does Get Out, Peele's latest film, Us (2019, United States), falls very much within this tradition, though its darkly comic satirical edge is far more pronounced. It is a satire on many things, not least of which is the notion of aspirational living, one of the staples of film and the television sitcom, which it recalls and riffs upon. Tonally it sits somewhere between horror and comedy and sometimes falls uneasily between the two stools. But comedy and horror are a compelling mix, sharing as they do profound structural similarities, not least of which is the literal or metaphorical—and frequently both—entrapment of the characters. Each form is dependent on the inability of characters to simply leave, which, if it were an option, would make their narratives redundant. But Us moves far beyond the social satire of aspirational living. Indeed, this is black comedy in every sense of that word. [End Page 457] The notion of "black" comedy here is critical in terms of its multivalence. It is black comedy in the traditional sense of being darkly satirical; and it is black comedy also in that it is a black American filmmaker employing the appropriate tropes to create a horror film that constantly gestures toward the absurdity in which the social realities of race and class are rooted. And those two meanings sit at the heart of this film which, at a second-order level, is speaking to the grim history of race that is the beating heart of the American experience. From one perspective this might be seen as the darkest, most violent and absurd of all comedies but one that, in the end, leaves little to laugh at. As many critics and reviewers pointed out upon the film's release, the title itself works as a pointed and ironic statement on the nature of unity within the context of the United States, in which e pluribus unum gestures toward a world in which "US" is synonymous with "us." Peele seems to refute this notion by presenting a world in which the very foundations of life and identity are predicated on the most complete and utter distinctions between "us" and "them." However, the twist at the film's end demonstrates that it is not that straightforward, as it reveals that in reality "they" are "us" and "we" are "them." This is by no means some vacuous call to unity and a shared humanity that might overcome all differences. There is nothing so trite or facile in Peele's construction. He is not saying that if we recognize the reality of our mutual racial and social subjectivities that we might reach a point of communion, but that the world is predicated on a profound (and perhaps ineradicable) social inequality of which race is one—perhaps the...

More “team” than “fame”: spin-off success in the US television sitcom industry

This article presents an application of recent management theories concerning the effect of pre-entry experience and knowledge transfer within the context of creative industries. The setting of the empirical research is the television situation comedy (sitcom) industry in the United States between 1949 and 2011. Specifically, we explore the factors that explain the survival rate of sitcoms and their spin-offs. We develop two sets of indicators to explore the effect of pre-entry experience: team similarity and star power based on the character/actor. Our findings show that spin-offs, or sitcoms that inherit character/actors and theme elements from a successful parent sitcom, have a greater likelihood to survive than de novo sitcoms. Even further, the greater the number of team members that not only worked with each other on previous shows but worked together on the same parent show, the better the performance of the spin-off. By contrast, star power, or the fame of the character/actor(s) that passes from the parent to the spin-off, shows no significant correlation with performance. We suggest that these results provide initial evidence that, consistent with the literature on spinouts in manufacturing industries, knowledge endowments represent an important source of performance heterogeneity in project-based industries.

Examining how scientists ‘do’ gender: An analysis of the representations of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity on The Big Bang Theory

Abstract The television sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–present) portrays the lives of a group of highly intelligent but socially awkward scientists. The show consistently attracts an audience of approximately fifteen million viewers each week and thus offers a powerful opportunity to examine how scientists are represented in popular fiction. Drawing on sociological gender theories, this article examines episodes from the first seven seasons of the show to explore how it depicts scientists as individuals who fail to live up to standards of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Implications of such imagery for public understandings of scientists and for issues of gender inequality are discussed.

“There’s Plenty More Clunge in the Sea”: Boyhood Masculinities and Sexual Talk

This article sets out to analyze the dominant sexual discourses embedded and negotiated within the television sitcom The Inbetweeners. Sex is a highly visible element of the program, marking it as a prevailing feature of the life of the teenage boy, paradoxically natural yet problematic. The performances draw upon and reproduce governing discourses of sexuality and gender. Of the potential themes, three are considered here. First, sex is represented as ubiquitous within the boys’ narratives, an assumed attribute of (the transition to) the performance of successful adult masculinity. Second, individual (hetero) sexuality is policed through peer-led homophobic banter and humor. Third, girls are objectified by boys, demonstrating the role of gendered relations in the governance of femininity and the discursive sanctions, which define masculinity through objects of desire. This article reveals some of the sexual subjecthoods made available to young men through televised representation, and considers their position within the wider sexual landscapes of boyhood.

Gender and Parenting: A Content Analysis of the American Sitcom

The purpose of this study was not only to get a better understanding of what types of gender and parenting norms exist in television sitcoms, but to see if the same gender and parenting norms that were displayed in the 20th century would be displayed in a sitcom created 30 years later. This was done through a content analysis of the television sitcoms All In The Family and Modern Family. The researchers found that traditional gender norms still existed in both sitcoms, but that the gender roles and parenting norms were reversed in Modern Family.

Humor and Latina/o Camp in “Ugly Betty”: Funny Looking

Humor and Latina/o Camp in “Ugly Betty”: Funny Looking

Entertainment-education effectively reduces prejudice

We show that entertainment-education reduces prejudice and does so more effectively than several established prejudice reduction methods. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to an educational television sitcom with diverse, yet relatable Arab/Muslim characters had lower scores on implicit and explicit measures of prejudice than participants exposed to a control sitcom featuring an all White cast. The prejudice reduction effect persisted 4 weeks after exposure. In Experiment 2, viewing of a 4-minute music video that portrayed Arabs/Muslims as relatable and likable resulted in a larger reduction in prejudice against Arabs/Muslims than two established prejudice reduction methods ( imagined contact exercise and group malleability article), which produced no improvements. In both experiments, increased identification with target group members was associated with greater prejudice reduction. Entertainment-education, in addition to being scalable, is likely to be one the most effective methods for improving intergroup relations and promoting diversity.

The influence of presentation modality on the social comprehension of naturalistic scenes in adults with autism spectrum disorder.

The comprehension of dynamically unfolding social situations is made possible by the seamless integration of multimodal information merged with rich intuitions about the thoughts and behaviors of others. We examined how high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder and neurotypical controls made a complex social judgment (i.e. rating the social awkwardness of scenes from a television sitcom) across three conditions that manipulated presentation modality-visual alone, transcribed text alone, or visual and auditory together. The autism spectrum disorder and control groups collectively assigned similar mean awkwardness ratings to individual scenes. However, individual participants with autism spectrum disorder tended to respond more idiosyncratically than controls, assigning ratings that were less correlated with the ratings of the other participants in the sample. We found no evidence that this group difference was isolated to any specific presentation modality. In a comparison condition, we found no group differences when participants instead rated the happiness of characters (a more basic social judgment) in full audiovisual format. Thus, although we observed differences in the manner with which high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder make social judgments compared to controls, these group differences may be dependent on the social dimension being judged, rather than the specific modality of presentation.

O uso da figura do estereótipo nos programas de humor na televisão brasileira: uma análise linguístico-discursiva acerca dos efeitos de sentido humorístico em gêneros de humor

Os estereótipos são formas de pressupostos linguistico-discursivos mais ou menos padronizadas que circulam na sociedade, orientados pela cultura. Em geral, aparecem nas práticas de humor por ser uma modalidade na qual o jocoso permite que o discurso seja livre e aberto a quaisquer colocações semânticas. É nesse sentido que os estereótipos compreendem as formas humorísticas a fim de retratar o ridículo ou o diferente em vários aspectos. A importância deste estudo se dá pela investigação de como esses estereótipos apontam o humor ao mesmo tempo em que se consolidam ainda como preconceitos na sociedade. Sendo assim, partiu-se para uma investigação para a depreensão da construção e divulgação dos estereótipos e a influência desses na produção de humor da mídia nacional, em programas televisivos de humor, e evidenciar a influência dessa imagem na sociedade brasileira. Como aporte teórico, utilizou-se a teoria da semântica do humor de Raskin (1944), os postulados de Bobbio (2011), referente aos mais diversos tipos de preconceitos, defendendo a ideia de que há duas formas de preconceito: o individual e o coletivo, sendo este último o objeto de investigação deste estudo, pois pretende explicar por que o humor é construído sobre alguns estereótipos que são compartilhados socialmente e o discurso das mídias como mecanismo de persuasão, na obra de Charaudeau (2006). Foram feitas transcrições dos programas televisivos e análise discursivas para verificar a incidência da crítica humorística respaldada nos moldes estereotipados. Como resultado, pode-se constatar que em todos os programas selecionados a presença do estereótipo se fazia presente considerando os modelos: pobre, gay, gago, gordo e deficientes. Observou-se, pois, um modelo socialmente constituído dentro dos estereótipos clássicos, o que permitiu concluir que o humor é também cercado de preconceitos, um reflexo da visão da sociedade, que embora perceba esses modelos, ri e se diverte sobre tais condições.

An investigation of brand placement effects on brand attitudes and purchase intentions: Brand placements versus TV commercials

Brand placements are gradually becoming an important part of promotional toolkit of many major companies. However, despite the increasing volume of research on brand placements during the last decade, several important questions still remain unanswered. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of brand placements in television sitcoms and contrast it with the effectiveness of 30-second commercials. The authors administer a quasi-natural experiment to a sample of research panel participants to investigate how brand placements in television sitcoms affect their attitudes and purchase intentions. Results of the study suggest that people have a more positive attitude toward brand placements than toward traditional television commercials. Moreover, placements can be more effective than 30-seconds commercials when targeting audiences with low attitude toward advertising. Finally, a combination of a brand placement and a commercial within one program doesn't significantly increase brand attitudes and purchase intentions compared with sole exposure conditions.

Mais humor, menos política: Uma certa tendência no drama contemporâneo brasileiro

Resumo A partir do estudo de adaptações teatrais e televisivas realizadas nos últimos anos, o artigo procura investigar uma tendência existente no drama contemporâneo brasileiro: a atualização de obras escritas por autores oriundos do Teatro de Arena, voltadas originalmente para a centralidade da crítica ideológica, a partir do esvaziamento da contestação política e da ampliação do humor por meio da comédia de costumes. Com o intuito de defender essa hipótese de leitura, vista como um dos modos possíveis de apropriação das heranças do engajamento artístico no tempo presente, o texto concentra-se na análise de uma remontagem da peça Eles não usam black-tie, dirigida por Dan Rosseto em 2011, e na nova versão do programa A grande família, produzida pela rede Globo entre 2001 e 2014. Trata-se, sobretudo, de verificar uma linha conversadora de recuperação das obras outrora realizadas por Gianfrancesco Guarnieri e Oduvaldo Vianna Filho.

The Asian American Next Door

This essay inquires into the aesthetic modes that made the concept of “the model minority” legible for mainstream white American audiences during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Specifically, it looks to the television sitcom, as both the television industry and Asian American communities rapidly established themselves in California during this period. In multiple instances, Asian integration into white suburban neighborhoods met with resistance (and counter-resistance) that drew local, national, and even international attention. Through archival research and close readings of episodes of the popular sitcoms The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958–1966) and My Three Sons(ABC, 1960–1965; CBS, 1965–1972), which center Asian American actors, I explore how television and its various stakeholders negotiated the incursion of Asian American neighbors. My focus on the domestic sitcom suggests the importance of looking to the domestic as that which generates the gendered and sexualized differences through which race beco...

A One‐Inch Mound of Flesh: Troubling Queer Identity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Enemies and adversariesThey try and tear me downYou want me, baby, I dare youTry and tear me down.-Tear Me Down, Hedwig Schmidt,Hedwig and the Angry InchGender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred.-Judith Butler, Gender TroubleIntroductionIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent film studios produced an array of films that candidly explored the lives and experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans gender, and individuals, inadvertently launching what B. Ruby Rich infamously labeled the New Queer Cinema.1 Among other things, these films helped foster visibility, making identity a more integral part of the mass media and lives a larger part of the national conversation. commercial success of these films led Hollywood to follow suit, and within a few short years the studios were also producing films with subject matter.2 By the mid-1990s, gay-themed storylines and references to homosexuality were also plentiful on network television.3 1995, Entertainment Weekly, then the foremost arbiter of popular cultural tastes, published a special issue on The '90s, claiming that entertainment had come out of the closet. the cover story, John Cagle discusses gay-friendly entertainment, which he sees everywhere in the 1990s, citing the success of films such as Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) and the appearance of gay characters on television shows such as Roseanne, Friends, and Simpsons. Given this, Cagle quite optimistically says: In 1995, the gay stream flows freely into the (23).4In her introduction to a special Trans gender Issue of GLQ in 1998, Susan Stryker similarly notes the sweeping changes occurring in professional and popular attitudes toward trans gender phenomena, pointing out that representations of cross-dressed, transsexual, gender-ambiguous, or otherwise gender-queer figures are ubiquitous in venues such as drag-queen and -king shows, gay and lesbian film festivals, and she-male pornography, as well as in television sitcoms, major motion pictures, billboard advertising, and a variety of mass media print sources (146). Gay, lesbian, and representation within main- stream media became even more widespread (as well as more lucrative) at the end of the 1990s and the start of the 2000s, as evidenced by commercially and critically successful films such as Birdcage (1996), & Out (1997), Chasing Amy (1997), Gods and Monsters (1998), and Boys Don't Cry (1999); by popular television shows such as Ellen (1994-1998), Will & Grace (1998-2006), and Queer as Folk (2000-2005); and by the dramatic increase in advertising aimed at the niche market of gay and lesbian consumers.5 October of 2000, Entertainment Weekly published another special issue on gay culture, this one promising to take us Inside the TV Revolution and to let us hear Gay Filmmakers Sound Off. There was little here that was new or news, but there was a good deal of celebration over the high visibility and acceptance of gay characters, actors, writers, directors, and producers, which made it quite clear that the previous decade marked a significant increase in the representation of identities in the mainstream media.The media's treatment of identities calls for a serious critical inquiry among media scholars, one aligned with the academic discipline of queer media a merger of well-established film and television studies practices with a queer perspective. antecedents of theory can be traced to earlier work on social constructionism found in women's studies and gay and lesbian studies, and to poststructuralist literary and cultural theory, but two works in particular have been taken as foundational texts for theory: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). …

The Superhero Film Parody and Hegemonic Masculinity

The top-ranked television situation comedy The Big Bang Theory (Chuck Lorre, 2007–present) has been credited with helping to popularize geek culture. The four main male characters (Leonard, Sheldon...

Minoritarian Interventions and National Identity: Reading Oz With Kashua

This article attempts to read Amos Oz’s celebrated autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness , with Sayed Kashua’s autobiographical texts Dancing Arabs and Let it be Morning , as well as his television sitcom Arab Labor . Differences between the two authors are immediately apparent. More than perhaps any other writer, Oz represents the Zionist core of the political and literary establishment in Israel, as his autobiographical novel depicts one of the most important families in the early Israeli intelligentsia. Conversely, Kashua is a Palestinian Israeli and thus part of the most marginalized minority in Israeli society. I would like to complicate this picture of center and periphery by bringing out the major writer in Kashua and the minor writer in Oz. It is also my intention to expose the complimentary and reciprocal relations between the positions that they occupy. Thus, the article attempts to argue against a simple one-to-one correspondence between the centrality or marginality of an author’s political position and the centrality or marginality of his or her literary endeavors. In addition, both writers mobilize their own minority narrative and appeal to the traditional minority position of Judaism to bring about positive transformation.

Comparing Brand Placements and Advertisements on Brand Recall and Recognition

ABSTRACT Despite the popularity of brand placements in television programming, little is known about their effectiveness when they are used separately compared with when they are combined with television commercials. The current study confirmed that brand placements in television sitcoms elicit lower levels of recall than, but similar levels of recognition to, a 30-second advertisement during a commercial break in the show. The study suggests that the ability of consumers to remember specific brands might be enhanced by a combination of brand placements and television commercials. This can be explained by the beneficial synergy effects of using a mixture of promotional tactics.

The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey J. Kaye (review)

Reviewed by: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey J. Kaye Dean J. Kotlowski, Professor of History (bio) Harvey J. Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 292 Pages, ISBN. What did the United States fight for during World War II? In an episode of the television sitcom All in the Family, Mike Stivic poses the question to Archie Bunker, who replies that he fought because he was drafted. The characters were fictional, but Archie’s response contained a grain of truth for many veterans, as Norman Lear, the show’s creator, knew. Now, Lear has provided a back-cover endorsement of Harvey J. Kaye’s new book on the origins and the fate of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (Freedom of Speech and Religion, Freedom from Want and Fear) for which Americans purportedly fought in World War II—and then forgot about in the decades that followed. Kaye argues that FDR and the country were on the same page during the 1930s and 1940s. “Americans did not simply suffer and endure the Great Depression. They confronted it,” he asserts. “They did so by electing a man to the presidency who believed in America’s democratic purpose.”1 That was just the beginning. Roosevelt set out to “restore America to its own people” by getting government to work on behalf of average folks rather than corporate elites.2 His New Deal embarked on “a grand democratic experiment of renewal and transformation” by providing price supports for farmers, collective bargaining for workers, pensions for the aged, and public works jobs for the unemployed.3 Most Americans responded to their president’s words and deeds: “They would organize themselves—as workers, as consumers, as citizens—to demand their rights. And they would make America freer, more equal, and more democratic.”4 That impulse continued during World War II, especially after FDR enunciated the concept of the Four Freedoms in his 1941 State-of-the-Union Address. The president’s speech, according to Kaye, “gave voice to the widely held presumption, the boon to the lived experience of the New Deal, that the American experiment was unfinished.”5 Kaye has much to say, and he says it well. The Fight for the Four Freedoms makes a persuasive case that the New [End Page 808] Deal did not end with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the subsequent attack of congressional conservatives on Roosevelt’s domestic agenda. Rather, during World War II, Roosevelt told Americans that Dr. New-Deal had merely shared his practice with Dr. Win-the-War. To prove the point, FDR pushed an “economic bill of rights,” albeit without success, as well as the G.I. Bill of Rights, which Congress enacted.6 Meanwhile, average Americans continued to join labor unions; civil rights organizations boosted their membership and clout; women entered the workforce; and the US government celebrated the country’s ethnic and racial diversity. Moreover, democracy in general and the Four Freedoms in particular became chic in mass culture. The words and imagery of the Four Freedoms figured in a Treasury Department war-bond drive, the title of a symphony by Robert Russell Bennett, a graphic-design contest organized by “the ten-thousand-member-strong Artists for Victory,” and, of course, Norman’s Rockwell’s famous drawings for the Saturday Evening Post.7 Yet, as Kaye deftly illustrates, corporate interests appropriated the concept of the Four Freedoms to advance their own ends. The United States Junior Chamber of Commerce added a fifth freedom—freedom of enterprise—to those voiced earlier by FDR. After the war, business leaders and their conservative backers sought to co-opt what had been a plea to end poverty and fear as well as to defend First-Amendment freedoms. For example, the president of the American Medical Association cited the Four Freedoms in attacking President Harry S. Truman’s proposal for national health insurance, arguing that if passed the measure would “subjugate American medicine.”8 Kaye notes how conservative organizers of the postwar Freedom Train...

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

‘That's the Last Time I Play the Tart for You, Jerry!’: Penelope Keith and British Television Situation Comedy

Women's historical role in British sitcom has been critically regarded as both limited and limiting. Yet, any exploration of the historical representation of women in British situation comedy reveals that women have frequently been cast in leading roles. Penelope Keith is a key figure in any consideration of women and television situation comedy, and her long successful career is explored in this article. The re-evaluation of the television comedy careers of women such as Keith means we can reinsert and reposition women into critical and popular narratives of British television comedy.

‘Don't Tell Me I'm Still on That Feckin’ Island': Migration, Masculinity, British Television and Irish Identity in the Work of Graham Linehan

The article examines how, through such means as interviews and DVD commentaries, television situation comedy writer Graham Linehan has discursively elaborated a distinctly migrant masculine identity as an Irish writer in London. It highlights his stress on how the working environment of British broadcasting and the tutelage of senior British broadcasters facilitated the satirical vision of Ireland in Father Ted. It focuses on the gendering of his narrative of becoming in London and how his suggestion of interplays between specific autobiographical details and his dramatic work have fuelled his public profile as a migrant Irish writer.