Woman Up

Invoking Feminism in Quality Television

Julia Havas

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814346570
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della televisione

While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Julia Havas'scentral argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television" culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticized this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend—30 Rock (2006–13), Parks and Recreation (2009–15), The Good Wife (2009–16), and Orange Is the New Black (2013–19)—Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicized rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. Woman Upwill most appeal to students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.

1

Quality TV, Gender, and the Politics of Cultural Transgression

The Quality Television Debate

Television scholars have been intensely debating the definition and usefulness of the term quality television at least since the turn of the millennium. To some extent this debate derives from the fact that the phrase—similar to postfeminism—originates in popular discourse and thus eludes rigorous definitions. The term itself is not new—it has been circulating in American popular discourses and in scholarship since the 1970s—but its understanding has changed significantly in the postnetwork era, in concord with shifts in the industry and in the medium’s public image.

Even though quality TV is considered a distinct category of television, scholars also acknowledge that traditional televisual genres continue to operate within it, and they frequently distinguish between quality comedy and quality drama. Nonetheless, when describing characteristics of “quality” in terms of what sets it apart from other TV forms, academics tend to emphasize commonalities among quality programs to highlight definitive features. For instance, Jason Mittell (2006) analyzes in detail both quality drama and quality comedy programming to demonstrate how “narrative complexity” works in each form. Similarly, when Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (2007b) examine HBO programs’ strategies of using explicit content, their examples include both The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–). However, despite considerations of different form and genre traditions in these examples, theories about quality TV tend to concentrate on quality drama as the default genre on which its working mechanisms are most effectively illustrated. This follows from drama and comedy’s historically different cultural estimations: Comedy, being a genre of lower cultural status, may gain the “quality” descriptor, but because drama and tragedy are positioned in Western culture on a “higher dramatic plane” (Rowe Karlyn 1995b, 97), in the longitudinal evolution of quality television, the quality drama’s emergence is considered television’s artistic peak.

Jonathan Bignell (2013) identifies three main characteristics of quality television. First, quality programs have an aesthetic ambition “with the literary values of creative imagination, authenticity and relevance” that differentiates them from other, “generic” and “conventional” programming. Second, such programs exhibit high production values that “prioritize strong writing and innovative mise-en-scène.” Third, they are targeted to “valuable” or quality (middle-class, educated, affluent) audiences, ensuring these programs’ economic value (179). Bignell’s definition is aligned with earlier television scholars’ discussions of the term, including the argument that quality television is best understood as a genre (R. J. Thompson 1997; Mittell 2006; Cardwell 2007). Its theorization as a genre, then, contradictorily involves the notion that it resists the “generic,” or formulaic, dimensions of television narration. Sarah Cardwell (2007) in particular goes to great lengths to conceptualize quality TV in these terms, arguing for stripping the word of its evaluative implications and highlighting specific genre features instead, which presumably creates a more democratic and objective atmosphere for critical judgments about any type of television (23, 32–33). Such an argument thus sidesteps the term’s origins in evaluative critical judgments and cultural hierarchies, which are predicated on privileging certain types of evaluative subjectivities. This becomes clear in the term’s historical development, to which I now turn.

Before the 1990s, American quality TV primarily meant programming aimed at the “quality” demographic (Feuer et al. 1984). This definition also cultivated an aesthetic that was “clean,” “least objectionable,” and profoundly televisual (Lentz 2000). Mittell (2006), in explaining the emergence of “narrative complexity” (his influential term for a new feature of American TV programs), provides an exhaustive account of the factors that changed institutional practices in the 1990s to facilitate a different kind of programming. In his book Complex TV (2015a), Mittell expresses his disapproval of the term quality for its hierarchical connotations, instead proposing complex TV, an expression signifying a TV text’s aesthetic efforts while, purportedly, avoiding an elitist hierarchy between “complex” and “simple” TV, similar to Cardwell’s (2007) concept.1 Narrative complexity is partly facilitated by creative personnel’s new understanding of television as a territory of artistic freedom, explaining why so many of them arrive from careers in cinema. Mittell’s (2006) explanation for the trend of cinema personnel’s discovery of television is the medium’s presumed amicability toward innovative storytelling, as opposed to Hollywood cinema’s preference for visual spectacle (31–32). The move of film directors and screenwriters toward television is thus mutually beneficial: Film creatives gain more room for artistic experimentation, and the television industry capitalizes not only on new and innovative products but also on the higher regard in which these producers and creators are held, given their association with cinema. Quality in television is therefore formulated in relation to cinema, rooted in the latter medium’s cultural estimation as superior to television. As such, the transition toward television by cinema directors and writers is a form of cultural colonization, a process in which representatives of the putatively aesthetically superior medium appropriate the spaces, discourses, and working mechanisms of the conquered medium, which is deemed inferior for its practitioners’ assumed incapability to realize its full potential. Inherent in quality television discourses about saving television from mediocrity by excavating its aesthetic capacities is, then, a continued contempt for existing television culture.

Jane Feuer’s (2007) critical analysis of quality television further specifies the importance of television and cinema’s different cultural status. She postulates that when creative personnel are lured away from cinema and toward television, they arrive with an aspiration to associate quality television with art cinema (as opposed to formulaic genre cinema). Thus what is regarded as certain television programs’ higher artistic value and originality than the assumed norm implies a cultural hierarchy between the two media that is extended to a parallel hierarchy among television genres and programs. Feuer’s criticism of this cultural hierarchy is echoed by a number of television theorists (e.g., Newman and Levine 2012; Mills 2013).

A further aspect of the role that cultural hierarchies play in the emergence of millennial quality TV is the medium’s relationship to so-called explicit content. McCabe and Akass (2007b) highlight that the process in which HBO created its “not TV” brand in the 1990s involved capitalizing on its exempt status from broadcasting regulation practices as a subscription-based premium cable channel. That is, the graphic sexuality and violence that is a frequent feature of HBO’s (and, later, other cable channels’) original programming contributes to its brand identity as a trailblazer of quality television. In HBO’s practice of “courting controversy,” the discourses about the quality of such series as The Sopranos and Deadwood (2004–2006) justify the explicitness through “creative risk-taking and artistic integrity” (McCabe and Akass 2007, 69). HBO and its auteur producers legitimate “illicit” content by linking it to exceptional aesthetics, authenticity, and “dramatic verisimilitude” (70–75). Although McCabe and Akass (2007) do not emphasize it, their case studies also illustrate how the idea of cinema as the bearer of higher cultural value surfaces for The Sopranos and Deadwood in genre terms. Both series draw on American cinema’s legacies of so-called tough genres (the gangster film and the western) and as such are deeply embedded in discourses about nation and masculinity.2 However, HBO’s self-promotion, which constantly seeks to reconfirm its headliner programming’s high cultural status through associations of the illicit with cinematic and literary values and authenticity, betrays an anxiety about the cultural positioning of illicit content (73). A clear sign of this in the 1990s and 2000s was the channel’s much more muted promotion of its consequently lesser known but just as explicit programming, such as its sex documentaries; HBO’s “internal regulation is cautious in handling the salacious and gratuitous, and absorbs the illicit into the serious business of making original groundbreaking programs” (73).

HBO’s frequent rationalization of the incorporation of explicit content into its flagship programs exemplifies the anxiety with which industry and media discourses about quality TV (not just on cable) strain to reposition and redefine the term’s meanings. The appeal to the cinematic or “above TV” status creates a paradoxical situation, because scholars and TV critics praise quality TV as profoundly televisual in maximizing medium-specific characteristics, as seen in Mittell’s analysis of narrative complexity. Mittell (2006) describes this as “a redefinition of episodic forms under the influence of serial narration” that uses the seriality of soap operas, while “rejecting . . . the melodramatic style” (32).3 Although highlighting the legacy of the culturally derided soap opera in the formation of narrative complexity, and as such contending that it uses narrative forms specific to television, Mittell’s rhetoric also asserts the relative cultural position of these two types of TV: “While certainly soap opera narration can be quite complex and requires a high degree of audience activity . . . , narratively complex programming typically foregrounds plot developments far more centrally than soaps, allowing relationship and character drama to emerge from plot development in an emphasis reversed from soap operas” (32). Because Mittel’s purpose is to demonstrate how this new type of TV is “innovative” as opposed to “conventional” programming (29), he makes clear which kind of storytelling practice (foregrounding plot versus foregrounding relationship drama) is deemed more valuable. At the same time, Mittell rhetorically distances complex TV from soap traditions by drawing comparisons with cinema. By defining complex TV’s “operational aesthetic” as a set of narrative devices that bring viewer attention to the mechanics of plotting, he juxtaposes this with the cinema of attractions: television’s “narrative special effects” appeal to viewer appreciation akin to cinema’s narrative-stopping visual spectacle (35).

Mittell’s account of narrative complexity is representative of the discursive struggles around positioning quality TV in the cultural hierarchy of the two media. These discourses regularly invoke the cinematic to provide aesthetic validation and downplay the television heritage to insist that quality TV may have grown out of this heritage but has definitely outgrown it. Quality television’s decades-long aesthetic validation, championed prominently by Mittell, has effected an intense debate, evidenced in rebuttals from Feuer (2007), Kackman (2008), Imre (2009), Newman and Levine (2012), Mills (2013), and Nygaard and Lagerwey (2016), among others. These scholars problematize the notion of quality or complex television by bringing attention to the inherent elitism of its discursive development on the grounds of classed and gendered ideals of cultural value. The influence of melodramas and soap operas on television’s generic and political traditions features significantly in these arguments, evoking Lynne Joyrich’s (1988) interrogation of similar phenomena two decades earlier.4 Patrice Petro (1986) and Charlotte Brunsdon (1990) also brought attention to these questions through examinations of cultural valuations of Anglo-American media just when our current understanding of quality TV was about to emerge. Joyrich’s, Petro’s, and Brunsdon’s arguments are echoed in contemporary critics’ political interrogations of television’s aesthetics, stressing that quality TV emerges from a rhetorical distancing from feminized and classed television culture. Their interventions stress how gendered and classed power structures operate in the canonization of a category whose common defining point derives from critical and institutional gatekeeping and whose concentration on aesthetics glosses over this practice’s profoundly political nature.

Gendered Quality TV Culture in the 2000s

As discussed, one strand of television scholarship contends that the evolution of contemporary quality TV is embedded in gendered and classed understandings of cultural value. There is some consensus about quality TV’s rootedness in the narrational and characterization heritage of soap operas and melodrama, even in the discursive distancing from these lesser valued forms on narrative-generic grounds. Kackman (2008) also reminds us that discursive formulations of quality TV, by “re-embracing the gendered hierarchies that made the medium an object of critical and popular scorn,” sidestep in the process feminist scholars’ historic contribution to the emergence of television studies (see also Nygaard and Lagerwey 2016). But even though gendered hierarchies previously manifested through contrasting evaluations of different media (TV versus cinema), now that TV has become eligible for aesthetic judgments, this differentiation continues within television, in the gendered cultural hierarchy between quality and “other” programming.

The emergence of contemporary quality TV is therefore founded on classed and gendered differentiations from so-called average TV, igniting a debate in television studies between scholars celebrating television’s aesthetic revolution and those criticizing its gendered and classed hierarchies using cultural studies approaches (Zborowski 2016). In the following discussion, I combine the aesthetic and political approaches to map how the gendered hierarchy works not only in the quality versus conventional opposition but also within the millennial quality TV paradigm. This gendered differentiation follows from the economic incentives, governed by fragmented audience targeting, of multichannel-era television: Quality TV’s appeal to urban, high-income, educated viewers involves a gendered division (among others) of viewership. The history of quality TV since the 1970s is founded on differentiations between the feminine and the masculine in terms of target audiences, production practices, genre and textual features, and journalistic discourse. In the postnetwork era the industry’s gendering of audiences produces a dualistic formation of quality TV texts: masculine-coded quality drama on one hand and feminine-coded quality television (mostly dramedy) on the other.

The quality television of the 1990s and 2000s links high aesthetic and production values with the exploration of white masculinities (Lagerwey et al. 2016; Nygaard and Lagerwey 2016). Series that helped to shape this canon, such as The Sopranos, The Wire (2002–2008), 24 (2001–2010), Breaking Bad (2008–2013), Lost (2004–2010), Mad Men (2007–2015), Game of Thrones (2011–2019), Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), Deadwood, and True Detective (2014–2019), share not only obvious generic-aesthetic features (markers of their quality) but also a preference for concentrating on and dissecting variously troubled masculinities. These programs introduced the figure of the complex hero or antihero whose stories reflect changing ideas of American masculinity, society, family, and identity (Lotz 2014; Albrecht 2015; Mittell 2015b). Although these texts offer themselves for analyzing the complexity of their portrayals of troubled masculinities in relation to broader crisis narratives about social, political, and cultural changes (Albrecht 2015), omitted from their examinations are critical inquiries into how and why these cultural anxieties appear to be embedded in quality television’s genre-hybridizing and cinematic apparatus as profoundly male experiences. Lacking this scrutiny, masculinity remains an inherently assumed (whether celebrated or lamented) feature of quality drama’s novelty aesthetics.

But postnetwork TV also produced feminine-coded quality television, characterized by the use of female leads and an ideological connection to postfeminist cultural discourses. The emergence of postfeminist TV programming has its own extensive literature in feminist television theory, with scholars investigating its relationship to neoliberal consumer culture, (post)feminist gender politics, and American television history’s relationship with feminism, among other concerns. Representatively, two urtexts of postfeminist television, Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), have been the objects of study in McCabe and Akass’s anthology series Reading Contemporary Television (2004, 2006), which features TV programs based on their prominence in shaping television culture. Yet studies of millennial postfeminist television from the perspective of its relationship with quality TV discourses have been scarce. One exception is Diane Negra’s (2004) work on Sex and the City, which examines the program’s articulation of quality through its address to upscale female audiences and its connections to postfeminist consumer culture. Negra’s argument that quality here has to be understood in the series’ relationship to postfeminism means that quality becomes defined by the text’s treatment of gender politics, that is, by its representation of contemporaneous concerns about the millennial female subject and by its ambiguous relationship to (post)feminist politics. In other words, quality here is defined not so much as an aesthetic category but as a political one: Questions of aesthetics and narrative are articulated through questions of gender politics.

This observation can be extended to other female-led quality series that emerged after Sex and the City’s trendsetting success, even its short-lived copycats The Lipstick Jungle (2008–2009) and Cashmere Mafia (2008) or the more lasting Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy (2005–). In these programs the notion of quality is tied to their negotia...