Cult TV Heroines

Angels, Aliens and Amazons

Catriona Miller

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350194175
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350163928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

From Mrs Peel to the first female Doctor Who, this book offers a timely focus on the popular phenomenon of the cult TV heroine. The enduring phenomenon of cult TV itself is carefully explored through questions of genre, the role of the audience and the external environment of technological advances and business drivers. Catriona Miller then suggests a fresh account of the psychological dimension of the phenomenon utilising Carl Jung's concepts of the transcendent function and active imagination.

Her analysis of the heroines themselves considers the workings of the audio-visual text alongside narrative and character arcs, exploring the complex and contradictory ways in which the heroines are represented. Established cult TV favourites such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X Files, and Xena: Warrior Princess are examined alongside more recent shows such as Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Jessica Jones and American Horror Story: Coven.

1

The Cult TV composite

Cult TV is a media and cultural phenomenon which appears in the mid to late twentieth century and refers to a broad range of television programmes that audiences relate to in particularly passionate ways. As the title suggests, this book is a broadly gendered approach to Cult TV and as such the obvious place to start is with the twin questions of genre and of heroines: what is Cult TV and how does it depict its female characters?

However, many books on Cult TV begin with an account of the diversity of programmes that could come under such consideration. Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson (2004) note discussions about the inclusion of The Simpsons and the World Federation Wrestling at the start of their book. David Lavery likewise begins The Essential Cult TV Reader (2010) with an account of a disagreement over whether Gray’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–ongoing) should be included (Lavery, 2010, p. 2), despite being a medical precinct drama in a realist style. The term Cult TV has ranged through sf, horror, fantasy, children’s television, nostalgia texts and beyond, remaining an alarmingly expansive term.

The programmes under discussion in this book are not so variegated. They are all drama and all fall towards the fantasy end of Cult TV. In choosing to focus on the fantasy end of the spectrum, I do not mean to suggest that other types of programme are not ‘cult’, but rather that when looking at the role of women in such dramas, the combination of ‘what is’ and ‘what may be’ is highlighted in illuminating ways within fantasy shows. However, in accepting a narrowing of the type of programme under discussion, questions about the nature of genre itself and its place for both industry and audiences are raised. Cult TV is not a traditional genre. It is a complex amalgam of activities, effects and affects. It is a mosaic; a molecule rather than an atom; a composite cultural construction: all of which goes some way to explaining why it is so difficult to conclusively define. However, the first chapter of this book will try to sketch out the fuzzy boundaries of this composite phenomenon through a three-part approach.

Firstly, the ‘external environment’ is explored: the role of technology, the importance of the audience and finally the response of the industry to the business potential of the phenomenon. These interactions have acted as a kind of virtuous cycle for the television industry which at least partly explains Cult TV’s subsequent shift from niche to mainstream.

The second part of the composite is the text itself. Although the role of audiences in Cult TV has become the dominant debate in academic circles, I will argue that the text itself has a key role to play. It is a liminal space, or it creates a liminal space, for the audience to indulge in its imaginative, creative, ludic activities. Here we will tackle the question of genre and fantasy, and the role of imagination. Drawing attention to the liminality of the text which demonstrates its action in linking the external environment of production context, with the internal environment, the final element of the composite.

The ‘internal environment’ denotes a psychological element which has been partially explored using Freudian/Lacanian approaches or Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects, but I will be referring to Jung’s model of the psyche with its view of the unconscious as an active agent, and the related concepts of the transcendent function and active imagination.

This tripartite model of Cult TV allows for a fuller explanation of the psychological attraction of the phenomenon than has been attempted before. There is a sticky, permeable boundary between the viewer and the text, or perhaps a liminal space made of viewer and the text, that warrants further investigation, but in choosing to focus on the heroines of the dramas, in this book the text will remain the primary site of investigation.

The external environment: Business, technology and audiences

The first focus of the Cult TV composite is the external environment to understand how and why programmes come to be made and how they are consumed. Public service broadcasting notwithstanding, television is primarily a business with the aim of making programmes that audiences want to watch in order to attract advertisers. Technological changes affect both audience consumption practices and business strategies, and for Cult TV this led to a virtuous cycle.

Technology has long been a driver of change in the television industry forcing adaptation of business models as producers go in search of audiences. These shifts have come to be characterized as TV I, TV II, TV III and perhaps now TV IV. This terminology was originally coined by TV industry magazine editor Steve Behrens in 1986, who used the term TV I to refer to the era of network dominance in US television, roughly 1948–75, and TV II as the post-network era when other forms of broadcasting, such as satellite or cable, became more available. In 1996, Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein began discussing further technological change in television exploring the effect of The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2018) on US television, revisiting their definitions in 2002. They proposed the term TV III to cover a post-1995 era of growing digital broadcasting with even more channel availability placing ever greater emphasis on brand identity. In 2018 Dunleavy reworked some of their points to include the term ‘multiplatform’ and the growth of nonlinear broadcasting and streaming services, but Jenner (2018) made the case for streaming services led by Netflix constituting a further major shift in the industry, justifying its categorization as TV IV. Cult TV dramas such as Star Trek have often been at the forefront of such changes.

Video was another disruptor, which became available to the general consumer from the early 1970s with Sony’s Video Cassette Recorder (VCR). Audiences could now purchase their favourite programmes and watch them as often as they wished, whenever they wished. Control was shifting towards the audience, but there was an even more disruptive technology emerging in the late 1990s: the internet. However, this was not just another means of ever-faster content delivery to the audience, the rise of what was dubbed by DiNucci in 1999 as Web 2.0 marked a transition from essentially static web pages to an ever greater emphasis on user-generated content and social media tools. This gave everyone (with enough economic capital and education) the ability to publish directly to the web. It became easier and easier for Cult TV fans to find each other, to chat online and share not only reviews but other kinds of creative work, creating along the way communities of taste, explored at length by Henry Jenkins in 2006, 2013 and 2016. We will come back to Jenkins’s important contribution to the Cult TV debate in due course.

These were all changes key to the development of Cult TV audiences. It was a dramatic shift from scarcity, controlled by the television channels, to an abundance of always-available content largely controlled by the audience, a trend that has only intensified with the growth in subscription services such as Netflix. So over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, technology had revolutionized the availability of television content, leading to changes in the habits of audiences who now take scheduling into their own hands. The role of Cult TV in this landscape has been of increasing business importance with its ability to aggregate what had been relatively niche audiences dispersed in space and time. Cult TV texts also fostered intense fan engagement that lasted, meaning that ‘cult’ has been shifting from the margins to the mainstream for some time. MIPCOM, an annual conference of major international industry content providers and distributors, noted in 2018 that 29 per cent of all Netflix Originals that year were science fiction or fantasy as these were the most preferred genres amongst Netflix subscribers (McLaughlin, 2018).

As we can see, it is difficult to discuss one aspect of the Cult TV composite alone: technology and audiences are intimately intertwined, for as technology granted audiences more control over what they could watch and when, their choices began to affect commissioning decisions.

The term audience ‘refers simply to the act of viewing, reading, or listening to media texts’ (Casey et al., 2008, p. 22), and whilst of course, audiences are essential to any form of television, for Cult TV they have become central to understanding the phenomenon. ‘Cult’ comes from the Latin word cultus meaning ‘worship’ as in a religious cult, so a cult audience is one which demonstrates fervent devotion to their show. This term was used in the early days of academic interest in Cult TV, to emphasize the idea that what Cult TV audiences were doing was a niche activity and not mainstream audience behaviour. Cult TV audiences, it was argued, were different. They were worshippers of the programme – ‘fan’, being an abbreviated version of ‘fanatic’ which Jenkins traced back again to the Latin word fanaticus, which originally meant ‘a temple servant, a devotee’ (Jenkins, 2013, p. 12) which of course circles back round to the meaning of the word ‘cult’.

Cult TV fans watched their shows with great attention, but they also did things with it. Trekkers and Whovians showed their devotion in a number of ways: an encyclopaedic knowledge of the storylines, episodes and characters, as well as cast and crew, including special effects, and writers; writing songs; writing and re-writing stories for characters; art work of all kinds; and more complex pursuits such as learning the Klingon language. In the days before the internet, knowledge of this kind of behaviour had a limited circulation through fan clubs, newsletters, fanzines and conventions, but after the internet the reach grew exponentially and the sharing tools of Web 2.0 made it far easier for fans to connect with each other.

There have been many studies of the Cult TV audience in the age of Web 2.0, tracing their activity at various levels as they work (or perhaps play) harder than a typical mainstream audience at collaborating with the text in order to create meaning, seeming to delight in decoding the narratives, sometimes playfully and idiosyncratically. Most books exploring the phenomenon of Cult TV included at least some material on the activity of fans, but Bacon-Smith (1992) was an early look at Star Trek fandom, while Jenkins & Tulloch (1995) studied the audiences of Doctor Who and Star Trek. More recently the academic conversation has opened out to include fandom in many guises – see Gray, Harrington and Sandvoss (2017) and Booth (2018). There has been a significant shift in the Academy away from the analysis of texts, towards investigating what audiences are doing with texts (of all kinds, from film to music to gaming).

So technological changes in the latter part of the twentieth century meant several things to the audiences of Cult TV shows. Firstly, they were able to watch their favourite shows without having to rely on the vagaries of TV scheduling via linear broadcasting, initially through video and DVD distribution, then through other online routes. Secondly, as personal computers became more affordable and connection to the internet faster, they were able to interact with their favourite shows more directly sometimes writing their own stories, sometimes working with images from the show as stills and sometimes even re-editing their favourite scenes in a variety of different ways. This had the effect of allowing audiences to engage even more deeply with the programmes and then share the results with other fans. The growing availability of the internet and its increasing speed, and the rise of Web 2.0, meant that the opportunities to share this creative and imaginative passionate engagement with other fans have grown. There are for example many easy hosting options for websites developed and maintained by fans, such as http://fandom.wikia.com, a wiki site which runs its own contributor programme, where the reward for writing articles is not wages, but ‘swag’ as they put it, but what amounts to special access to industry events and conventions.

The growth in fan activity has also meant that although earlier Cult TV was often relatively low budget, production money has followed the audience and many of the shows mentioned in this book are big budget, quality productions. As Johnson (2005) has convincingly argued, the place of Cult TV in contemporary scheduling was no sudden aberration but a logical development of trends in American television, while Abbott (2010) pointed out that there had been a blurring of lines between what had been thought of as Cult TV and what had been thought of as quality drama. Globally the smaller cult audiences are aggregated through subscription video on demand services, and with the growth of binge watching and long form drama, a ‘cult’ audience has become more valuable than ever. However, technology and production priorities alone do not account for the special relationship between audience and Cult TV text.

Having established the external environment that encouraged Cult TV to flourish, we must now turn our attention to the second element of the Cult TV composite: the text itself, the touch point between the external environment of industry and the internal environment of the audiences’ psyches. Although the focus of media studies has certainly shifted towards fandom, the text remains the catalyst, the filling in the sandwich, the agent provocateur even, for all the activity which takes place with it and around it.

The text: Genre, fantasy and liminal space

Inevitably, any discussion circling around Cult TV texts has to pass through the question of genre. What type of text is under discussion? Is Cult TV a genre? It is a reasonable question. If we can identify a group of texts that seem to have something in common, and there is a label for such texts, then we ought to be able to define them as a genre, but this question is asked of Cult TV over and over again without easy answer. Defining boundaries, outlining stylistic hallmarks, or repertoires of elements and narrative structures in anything like a concise way becomes very quickly difficult and leads to the conclusion that perhaps it is not a genre, after all, at least not in any traditional sense. To paraphrase the point Buscombe made about Hollywood Westerns back in 1970 – if we want to know what Cult TV is we must look at certain types of programmes, but how do we know which programmes to look at until we know what Cult TV is? This section will explore some of the issues around genre, look more closely at the question of the fantasy genre and then conclude with a discussion of the particular question of ‘style’ in Cult TV.

At its most basic, genre is a kind of taxonomy, a scientific term for classifying animals and plants, for example, based on their shared characteristics. At its core, genre is simply a way of classifying objects based on their similarity and difference to other objects. However, the association with scientific principles can be misleading because it assumes that these ‘classifications are like standards: formalised, durable rules’ (Frow, 2015, pp. 56–7), but problems emerge when attempting to find such durable rules for cultural objects because boundaries in culture tend towards fuzziness rather than clarity.

Within literature the attempt to classify output has a long history, though it is one of many stops and starts. One writer suggests that genre theory ‘possesses one of the oldest pedigrees in the history of Western, Eurocentric literary and cultural criticism’ (Caraher in Strong & Stevenson, 2006, p. 29), a pedigree which confidently and regularly stakes a claim to its origins in Ancient Greece, so often seen as the foundation of western culture. This claim for the longevity of genre’s history typically references Plato’s Republic (circa 373 BCE) and Aristotle’s Poetics (circa 330 BCE) as the origins of the concept. In the Poetics, as well as outlining ideas on narrative structure, Aristotle put the poetry of his day into types: Epic (or narrative) poetry such as The Illiad; Tragedy; Comedy; Dithyrambic poetry for the God Dionysus and Satyr (or fertility) plays. Besides narrative, Aristotle also discussed plot, character and the style of writing as well as melody and music, in fact giving us many categories that we might still use today in discussing genre.

However, this version of the history of genre is rather misleading, as it seems to suggest a continuity and evolution of the term that is not there. Altman calls it a ‘zig zag trajectory’ (Altman, 1999, p. 1), because after Aristotle, the idea of ‘genre’ as a way of discussing literature dropped out of sight until the Poetics was translated from Greek into Latin by William of Moerbeke in 1278 some 1,600 years later! Even then, the Poetics was virtually ignored for another 500 years and it was not until the sixteenth century that Italian scholars began to re-examine Aristotle’s treatise (see Javitch, 2000). Along with much else during the Renaissance, an ‘origins story’ looking back to Ancient Greece was projected onto the history of genre.

There was another problem. In reality, the sixteenth-century revival was a combination of Aristotle plus the Roman poet Horace, whose Ars Poetica, written in 19–18 BCE, was an extension of Aristotle but it had been written with quite a different aim in mind. Rather than describing the different types of poetry that already existed, Horace laid out rules to which the poet should adhere, thus establishing a prescriptive rather than descriptive approach to genre. In fact, such ‘rules for creating poetry’ were the norm until the Romantic movement in literature towards the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantics sought to break free from such edicts and create poetry which was more emotionally authentic. However, even this did not entirely break down the rules-based approach to literature, which lasted into the twentieth century.

Finally, in 1902 a direct theoretical attack on this way of thinking was launched by Benedetto Croce who sought to liberate art from the ‘dogmatic restraints which the standards of the classical “literary genres” had imposed’ (Moss, 1990, p. 17) suggesting that genre was only useful for arranging books on shelves. Theories of genre, he argued, ‘impoverish artistic creation and criticism alike, inhibiting originality, setting up erroneous standards of judgement, and belying the tendency of true art to break rules and violate norms’ (Duff, 2000, p. 25). This is a point of view that resurfaced in the mid part of the twentieth century when film theorists began to pit the ‘genre director’ against the auteur.

Given the earlier discussion about the audience in Cult TV, it is noticeable that genre theory, whether descriptive or prescriptive, paid no attention to the audience: literary critics were not very interested in readers. However, as genre theory was more fully debated within the film academy, several things began to happen. The idea that genre could be a blueprint for production success was allied to a view that it could also be a marketing label for distributors and audiences. Thus genre became a tag that, in most senses, was defined by the film industry but understood by the film going public. Whilst this did at least open the door to including the audience, it also assumed that they were told what genre was.

Within television studies, genre was seen in a similar way to film, primarily as a marketing tool, working within schedules to craft audience expectations of television’s continuous flow of programmes. However, things began to change with Fiske’s Television Culture, originally published in 1987. He made clear that television was a highly generic medium, but described a triangular relationship between producer, text and audience, paying particular attention to audience practices around television. In 2004, Mittell focused once more on the question of genre and television, arguing that whilst genre is best understood as a process of categorization, ‘it is not found within media texts, but operates across the cultural realms of media industries, audiences, policy, critics, and historical contexts’ (Mittell, 2004, p. xii), thus placing the emphasis on production and audience, rather than on the nature of the text itself.

So in television and film studies there has been slippage from consideration of textual hallmarks as a descriptive way of defining genre towards audience activity. This ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of illustrations
• Prelude: The Thirteenth Doctor
• 1 The Cult TV composite
• 2 Two heads are better than one
• 3 Witches: Between feminine and feminist
• 4 Warrior women
• 5 Hybrid evolutions
• 6 A question of command
• Coda: To boldly go …
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint