-Opening line of Gogglebox

A TV show about watching TV, in theory, sounds more banal than most contemporary reality programming. But in the UK, Gogglebox became a hit since it premiered in March 2013. It’s the stuff of reception studies scholars’ dreams, officially called an “observational documentary.”

Gogglebox follows households from across Britain responding to relevant news stories, reality TV shows like Top Chef and Britain’s Got Talent, and popular films from Titanic to The Full Monty.

As a sleeper success that recently won a BAFTA for “Best Reality & Constructed Factual,” it may have just reached its peak. Certainly, watching the cast watch the BAFTAS is a top meta moment, but also a great scene of pure jubilation. Bill from Cambridge claimed it was the first thing he’s won since the 1975 British Chess Championship; best friends Sandra and Sandy embraced in the south London neighborhood of Brixton; and exes-turned-pals Christopher and Stephen in Brighton hurriedly opened a bottle of champagne.

The cast, who welcome viewers in their homes with uncensored and sometimes quite explicit commentary, is what really makes the show so enjoyable. The appointed “Posh Ones,” Dominic and Stephanie, are rumored to be on the next installation of Celebrity Big Brother.

Retired duo June and Leon, the quintessential “old married couple” provide cheeky banter on everything from finding the remote control to Leon’s interview for MI6 when he was in the army. I couldn’t help but tear up when they watched a recent widower speak of his late wife, or during the famous scene in Titanic when Rose lets go of Jack. Following both scenes, Leon says to June, “I couldn’t do without you.”

But the most telling parts of the series for a foreigner in the UK, such as myself, are the households’ responses to recent political events.

June and Leon are quite possibly the most liberal-minded of the Gogglebox bunch. The two cheered when the UK passed same sex marriage legislation. They empathized while watching a documentary on a group of men risking their lives to find a better life in England.

Leon is particularly supportive of immigrants, citing that his grandfather came to the country as one. He expresses his distaste for the head of the UK Independent Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage, whose party swept victories in the recent European election. Leon voted for Labour “with a heavy heart,” and the party is attempting to appease UKIP, as former Prime Minister Tony Blair has addressed.

During a news brief on David Cameron, Leon pointed out that working class citizens do not vote for “posh rich boys who look after the posh rich boys,” while Reverend Kate from Nottinghamshire stated it isn’t easy to vote for him “when you’ve seen the heart of your city ripped out by a Tory government.”

I first came to London in 2011, and most of my graduate cohort also hailed from other nations, from China to Portugal to Canada, and our British colleagues were welcoming and open-minded. Since returning in 2013, immigration issues have exacerbated. Farage spoke of “less civilized” Europeans from Romania and Bulgaria who could cause crime while taking jobs and abusing the benefits and healthcare system. The blatant xenophobia struck a chord with me as I am originally from Romania.

The reactions on Googlebox towards foreigners helped me understand attitudes towards outsiders in the UK, as foreign born residents in continue to be on the rise. Goggleboxer Andrew is a retired hotelier in Brighton, and furiously responded to an ad by the current head of the Labour Party Ed Miliband who said there is nothing wrong with employing from abroad, but that the rules should be regulated so “local people get a fair crack at the whip”:

“No, local people should be offered the jobs first, not just a ‘fair crack at the whip,’ whatever that means. They should be offered the job first because they’re born here, brought up here, their parents were born here, their grandparents were born here, so they should be offered the available jobs first. And then, if all that local labor is absorbed … bring them in and that’s fine.”

Gogglebox has essentially assembled a televised social experiment. It encapsulates pop culture nuggets from film and TV, and the most significant news events of each week, with unfiltered reactions to how it impacts individual citizens based on their beliefs, backgrounds and education. It’s only a shame the Season 3 finale ended before the results of this European election. I know Leon in Liverpool will be disappointed but not surprised. And I know I’ll be waiting patiently for Season 4.

You perhaps may only know the quickly canceled eponymous MTV show, one of biggest failures in UK to US remakes. Antenna previously discussed the series in terms of the wider trend in transnational adaptations (See: Kristina Busse’s “‘You’ll always be young, you’ll always be beautiful'” and Kyra Glass von der Osten’s “MTV Gets Some Skin in the Game.”) Additionally, Anne Helen Peterson brought her perspective to the fellow E4 teen drama Misfits in “Deracinated TV: Watching Misfits in America,” followed by Faye Woods’ breakdown of the series’ industrial identity and cultural weight in “Misfits, very British Teen TV.”

Skins initially stands out as it incorporates an entirely new ensemble cast, “generation,” or class, every two seasons.  They enter a local Bristol college, the equivalent of a US high school, in their sixth form, a la junior and senior years.  We don’t get dewy-eyed freshmen, but the roughened 16 and 17-year olds that lack any last ounce of innocence. Empathy isn’t really required from the audiences–think about Ricky Gervais’ abhorrent David Brent in contrast to Steve Carell’s Michael Scott on the likability scale of Office fearless leaders. And we of course don’t need to worry about homecomings, proms, cheerleaders, jocks, or any other American tradition vital to US teen programming.

The first class/two seasons featured former adorable youngster of About A Boy as the bad boy protagonist Tony Stonem (Nicholas Hoult), who would also go on to star in X-Men: First Class. Other notable faces include a pre-Slumdog Millionaire Dev Patel and Game of Thrones regular Hannah Murray as Cassie, who will return to Season 7 of Skins.  Each season features an episode that follows a principal character while the major drama unfolds of the group as a whole, much like the structure of the latest Arrested Development season.

The seamless flow from Season 2 into Season 3 is rooted in the handing of the torch from Tony to younger sister Effy (Kaya Scodelario), who also has two episodes in the introductory series. From 2007 to 2010, Seasons 1-4 ran the gamut in typical teenie drama subject matter, but turned up to 11: sex, drugs, and dub step. This seems to continue into Season 5 and 6, but I wasn’t pulled into the past installations mostly because it consisted of an entirely new cast not connected at all to a former character, a major flaw in my opinion. I was rooting for Fred’s sister.

Because these students attend public school, and often scoff at prissy private schoolers, class is somewhat of a signifier of the Skins group, although it’s slightly subdued. Effy’ first episode actually follows her dismissal from a posh private school. It’s interesting to note that series that highlight NY one percenters of Gossip Girl back in the US stand in stark contrast to Skins. Unlike Degrassi, that also featured more mature if not often scandalized content, or even compared to Friday Night Lights, there’s no real moral code here, and very little earnestness.  This probably explains why the Parents TV Council pounced on the hedonistic US adaptation back in 2011.

Bristol as a setting comes across as nothing too special as far as towns go, besides an apparent abundance of clubs available to under agers. The city is in actuality quite a cultural hub. Cary Grant was born there; Jeremy Irons, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Gene Wilder studied at the Old Vic Theater founded by Laurence Olivier in 1946; Simon Pegg and Nick Frost graduated from University of Bristol; and “Bristol Sound” acts include Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky.  (I mention Bristol because I’ve been noticing place a lot more ever since Charlotte Brunsdon’s “The Television City” plenary at Console-ing Passions.)

In Skins, the transition from Bristol in Seasons 1-6 to London in its 7th and final season is crucial to the character’s new lives.  It’s not a romanticized view of the city, but truly captures the vast, overwhelming, overpriced life of a young person in England and the UK’s multi-faceted capital.  The production values present also greatly escalated. We last saw Effy back home at the end of Season 4, in 2010. As a Londoner in 2013, she’s still got the same major characteristics, but is now in her early twenties seeking new opportunities.

It’s also a bit rare to return to a leading character 3 years/seasons after we last saw her, which only proves Effy’s prevalence. She’s now in the trading game in the financial district, not surprising given her addictive personality and proclivity towards high-stakes and adrenaline rushes. Yet from last week’s premiere, “Fire pt. 1,” she’s still secretly going to raves as she did during Tony’s time, contrasting her perceived new posh-like persona. Also, each character episode in Season 7 comes as consecutive two-parters. Naomi’s new slacker life was unconvincing until I read she graduated with a degree in English, kind of a brilliant commentary on what can happen to a smart and talented liberal arts grad in today’s job market, as Naomi had the best scores out of her class after they received their A levels.

There’s a a lot more to come, and the descriptions of Cook and Cassie sound spot on so far.

As I watch the beginning of the end, I’ll be constantly asking myself if the Brit series can achieve something a US teen program has never done before: convince audiences it is equally relevant after its characters left high school. If any series can do it, it just might be Skins.

Given the spatial limitations of this report, and as an American student of European origins who began her graduate education in the UK, I hope that my transnational background can assist in evaluating the benefits of this year’s Console-ing in England. With American media often at the foreground, learning of some of the most noteworthy British broadcasting is vital.

During Charlotte Brunsdon’s plenary talk, “The Television City,” the celebrated scholar first compared the representations of the cinematic city with its sister medium once considered inferior. She then focused on London in particular as both the local site in series such as EastEnders as well as a global presence on BBC News, in contrast to more generic outlets such as CNN and Al Jazeera.  She expanded on the use of London first as a multi-cultural, near-utopian trope in the 1980s sitcom set in the Peckham-Rye neighbourhoud, Desmond’s. Another major example she cited is the Victorian feel of London in crime series such as BBC One’s recently remade Sherlock, despite its actual filming in Cardiff. She recalled the establishing klick-klack sound of heels on cobblestone roads amidst a foggy backdrop that usually indicates the unfortunate demise, usually murder, of a beautiful woman, often a troubled prostitute.

This understanding of London as a social, political, cultural, and economic hub of the specific and local as well as the vast and global contributes to the overall impetus of British academia to analyze media in both the micro and macro sense.

This notion especially resonated following the foundational panel on Fandom, one of the most burgeoning areas of media studies today, when Teresa Forde thoughtfully queried Suzanne Scott on the Americannes of her presentation on “Fake Geek Girls.” For any US scholar present, or any follower from afar who read Charlotte Howell’s corresponding tweet, “One of the best parts of attending #cp2013 in the UK is that American scholars (like myself) are forced to interrogate our implicit Americanness,” a collective light bulb loomed over our heads on the need to further discuss our work in the interest of national identity in a global intellectual landscape.

Topics on British women figures were some of the most memorable that cultivated knowledge on national consciousness. Hannah Hamad spoke of how “The Austere Celebrity of Mary Portas” is yet another indicator of recessionary nationalism in the vein of recent pageantry such as the Royal Wedding, Queen’s Jubilee, and the 2012 London Olympics.  Faye Woods explained how Clare Balding, “a slightly posh lesbian, nearing middle age, with a sensible haircut,” became a British national treasure during her Olympics coverage for the BBC and Paralympics for Channel 4.

Miranda Hart

Coming from a similar background as Balding, comedian and showrunner of sorts Miranda Hart was the subject of two out of the three presentations during the Comedy and Femininity panel. Chris Becker’s American perspective on Miranda’s use of traditional sitcom conventions argued for its value alongside the cultural primacy of acknowledged single-cam quality shows, using Elana Levine and Michael Newman’s Legitimating TV as the reference for cultural legitimation of Hart’s work. Rosie White expanded on Hart’s place in both the zeitgeist of British TV and women’s performativity. Forde’s talk positioned Julia Davis’ work as transgressive TV in Nighty Night, Hunderby, and Lizzie and Sarah, noting the auteur-like qualities of the actress, writer, director, and producer’s distinctively dark comedic proclivities.

The History of Television for Women in Britain: Highlights, Insights, and Future Agendas panel detailed the De Montfort and Warwick University partnership on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that uses both archival and audience response methods to examine what TV meant for British women during the 1940s to 1980s. Helen Wood and Helen Wheatley’s presentations conveyed their goal to produce the British equivalent of the historical work of Lynn Spigel on the relationship between women and American television, and Hazel Collie and Mary Irwin’s collaboration showed the merits of the new methodologies in archival work along with in- depth interviews of TV audiences of the time to understand what the medium meant to women of the era.

Beyond the UK, Console-ing Passions at 21 brought forth some of the best scholarship on the intersection of gender and sexuality, with new views on both femininity and masculinity— from talks on The League to pro wrestling to Bronies—alongside race, ethnicity, national identity, class, as shown on fictional, reality, and news TV, social media, the internet, video games, and so much more, all packed into three days of 30+ panels.

Additionally, I greatly valued international perspectives such as Ireland through the lens of a dubious investigative series from my co-panelist Madeleine Lyes, Indian surrogacy as discussed by Sujata Moorti, and subdued Latin identity in tween programming as highlighted by Mary Beltrán.

As a first time Console-ing presenter, being a part of such an international conference, that further confirmed the rich breadth of valuable work being done in the expansive feminist media studies community across the globe, will remain one of the most invaluable experiences of my academic career.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’sAntenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.