Written by: James N. Gilmore, Malaysia Barr, Eliza Moore, Marie Quaranta
For this summary post, we discussed what we thought were the most important connecting threads between our pieces. We’ve come up with three: the project of making things visible as a goal of critical analysis; the theme of ‘strategic absences and inclusions’ across the three case studies; and various calls to action to the television industry that reflect our shared commitments.
- Making visible through continued engagement. One of the things we most wanted to do in this series was to see what close reading and textual analysis of different television shows would indicate. For us, textual analysis was not just a way to look at the overriding meanings in a show, but to look for what is also not visible. These close readings were often done at the scene-by-scene level, breaking down how individuals are composed, how their interactions are framed, and how different sequences might contribute to the overall ideological dimensions of a given show.
- Strategic absences. This emphasis on representation in the text led us towards a crucial question: What gets included? While representation is often (and rightfully) focused on what is in the frame and how it is constructed, scholars of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other markers of identity have long recognized the importance of considering how the frame creates a box structuring what is and is not there in the “world” of the television show. For Eliza’s analysis of Gilmore Girls, this entailed an understanding of how tokenism operates on the show, treating people of color not with complexity or nuance but in broad strokes, especially as they relate to the largely white population of the show’s fictitious town. For Marie’s analysis of Big Brother, these strategic absences occurred less in the scripting and shooting and more in the editing—trying to trace how racism on the show weaved in and out of the differences between the live feeds and the produced episodes, Marie’s analysis points to how issues of production help craft not only the narratives in reality television, but also the politics and ideologies the show’s producers feel comfortable confronting. Malaysia’s examination of Love and HipHop: Atlanta offered a contrast from these two in examining a more inclusive version of reality television focused on modeling how people of color react to important social events and how parents on reality television might use the platform as a means of modeling behavior for others to consider. Collectively, this work helped us understand the various decisions in writing, filming, and editing television that allow some things to be included and others to be excluded from the frame.
- Calls to action. The students chose these shows in part because they enjoy them, care about them, and find meaning in them. One of the important things we reiterated in summarizing the work we did is that we did not see this as a “takedown” of these shows or a means to undermine the value that we and others find in them; rather, it comes from a desire to make television better and confront sociopolitical situations rather than shove them to the side or edit them out. Television has clearly always done this to a degree, and while representation still lags in many areas there are many more programs available representing a wide array of lived experiences. While the three case studies we chose cannot, clearly, capture the breadth of television programming today, we found issues with casting (Big Brother) and writing (Gilmore Girls), while positioning the educational and pedagogical capacities of television (Love and HipHop: Atlanta) as something that can be more aspirational and foregrounded across more programs. While we are not so misguided as to think these small posts will meaningfully impact the media industries, they are perhaps better understood as position statements for the student authors, reflecting their commitments and hopes for change as they prepare for graduation. Collectively, the pieces ask for greater complexity in the lived experiences of those represented on television, with greater space for modeling positive pedagogical work.
This series was a valuable experience in looking at the sociopolitical dimensions of television in terms of that tension between inclusion and absence. Overall, we wanted to work on how to balance a critical examination of a television program with the relatively short word count of a blog post, keeping us bounded to 1500 words for each post. We hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and that it has inspired you to look at your favorite television program differently.
