Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The editors at Antenna graciously have invited me to contribute a series of posts upon the release of a new book I’ve edited, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century (University of Illinois Press). The book explores a range of recent media and cultural forms associated with femininity, including investigations of the social and economic forces that shape this culture, the ways such products speak to and about feminine identity, and how audiences, readers, and users engage with and experience such culture. This post focuses on the genesis of the project and its central claims.

The origins of this project come from my experiences as a teacher and researcher. Over the past few years, I have taught a graduate seminar on gender and popular culture several times. While the course inevitably considered some questions of representations of gender IN popular culture, I have always structured it more specifically around how and why various popular cultural forms are gendered and how and why the audiences and users of such forms do or do not identify along gendered lines in their practices of cultural consumption. To me, these were the more interesting and pressing matters, the broader “so what?” to which inquiries about gendered representation point. One trajectory of the course had been to read, contextualize, and extrapolate from the history of feminist scholarship on gendered cultural forms—foundational work on the woman’s film, romance novels, and soap operas, as well as studies on masculinized culture such as sports and video gaming. As the course shifted into the present and the contemporary context of postfeminist culture, however, it was hard to find as substantial a body of work on gendered forms and the experiences of their audiences and users.

At the same time, my research on the history of the U.S. daytime television soap opera was leading me to think about the decline of the soaps industrially and culturally. My hunch was that, while the soaps might no longer be as meaningful to as many viewers as they once were, the needs they fulfilled and the pleasures they delivered had not disappeared—they had shifted into newer cultural forms and experiences. I had my pet theories about where that might be (lookin’ at you, reality TV and social media), but I wanted to know more.

I also wanted to understand how the influences of postfeminist culture, neoliberalism, digital culture, post-structuralism, multiculturalism, queer theory, and transgender theory had shaped feminized popular culture, user experiences of it, and scholarship on it. These were big questions, and the potential sites of inquiry were vast, given the rapid proliferation of media in a digitized and niche-ified world. There was no way I could grapple with all of it on my own. So I sought out colleagues across the worlds of media and cultural studies to help me understand it. Their contributions make Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn a provocative start at reopening this once robust arena of scholarly inquiry.

While I hope you will read the book to better understand my argument about what may have occasioned the scholarly shift away from analyses of gendered culture, suffice it to say that I see two opposing forces at work. One of these forces is the insidious dominance of a postfeminist sensibility, one so powerful, and so common-sensical, as to turn even feminist scholars away from conceiving of culture as gendered. Indeed, the postfeminist sensibility assures us that gender specificity is old-fashioned, that it re-inscribes inequalities that have been overcome. While there are of course notable exceptions to this tendency (I see studies of girl culture as a prime example), I think it has affected scholarship as well as shaping popular culture itself.

The other influencing force is wholly different, in that it is the progressive impact of post-structuralism, queer and transgender theories, and intersectional feminism that have helped us to understand how impossible it is to talk about women or even a more flexible category like femininity in any definitive way. When we accept that a gendered identity is as variable as occupation, skin shade, body shape, personality, and a thousand other traits, both individual and social, it is rather paralyzing to consider it at all. While we need the provocations of these theoretical and political interventions, we might use them not to avoid considering gender as an experiential category but rather to push us to imagine gender differently.

While I went into the project with these principles in mind, as well as with a list of objects for analysis that I was determined to include, it was only through the scholarship of the contributors that I really began to see the ways that early 21st century feminized popular culture was being circulated and experienced. Their work helped me to recognize the three chief ways in which this period of feminized popular culture has been developing. While I have categorized in this way, the book as a whole demonstrates how intricately these categories intertwine.

The first of these is “Passions,” meant to characterize the intensive affective and identificatory aspects of feminized cultural experience, whether labeled as fandom or simply as pleasure. This section includes chapters on readers of Fifty Shades of Grey (the “ladyporn” of our title), Scandal fans, Lifetime Television, and celebrity gossip media.

The second category is “Bodies,” given the ongoing conception and experience of femininity as an embodied state, a situation that provides both constraints and freedoms for differently embodied people. This section explores pregnancy apps, fashion and nail polish blogging, and somatic experiences of spirituality.

The third category is “Labors,” the one that I see as most noticeably reflecting the altered social, economic, and political contexts of early 21st century femininity. The chapters cover “chick lit” and economic precarity, reality TV figures Bethenny Frankel and the Kardashians, Pinterest and the “mamasphere,” and the cupcake craze. These cases point to the imbrication of labor and leisure, pressures and pleasures, in the feminized popular culture of the early 21st century.

We now live within and beside all of these cultural forms and experiences; Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn aims helps us to understand them a bit better. In subsequent weeks, several of the book’s contributors will offer examples of the kinds of analyses the book offers. Stay tuned for the delicious details . . .

Monica the Medium (premiered ABC Family, August 25 @ 8/7) trailer here

ABC Family is aggressively pursuing the lucrative demographic of Penn State student-mediums who have never played Flip Cup by featuring their very own Monica Ten-Kate with this reality show.

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This show is trolling anyone who has ever said that “kids these days” are self-obsessed, spoiled, and narcissistic. Monica, in case you hadn’t guessed, is a medium. She claims she’s also just a normal girl trying to find a job and a boyfriend. Her search for the job in the pilot is comical, inasmuch as it’s dominated by her concern over whether she should come clean that she is a medium, when everything else in the pilot suggests she’s incapable of not telling people she’s a medium (‘cause, you know, when I meet someone, this is the first thing about them that I want to know). Cutaways to the people to whom she gives “readings” are all sympathetic and glowing, meanwhile (as when a young woman expresses amazement at the fact that Monica knew her mother’s cancer had metastasized, a detail she didn’t share with anyone, but, erm, if you die of cancer, doesn’t that kind of require metastasization?).

Indeed, not once are we treated to someone who is skeptical of her abilities, motives, or mental health. Instead, the show seems intent to use her being a medium, and her friends’ and potential suitors’ acceptance of it, as a parable for how we should all be more accepting and understanding. Monica the Medium should just be allowed to be Monica the Medium, it seems to be saying … even when that involves accosting strangers with manipulative, trite sentiment about dead loved ones. Admittedly, reality television’s bread and butter lays in offering us people to judge, and boy do I judge her, but the pilot’s unwillingness to cast even an iota of doubt on her claim to talk to dead people, or on her insistence that she must pass on messages from these dead people whenever she feels like it, had me wondering whether to despise the show or Monica the Medium more. Bad joke, real sentiment: this show is now dead to me.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and is currently studying media dislike, while disliking this show.

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“It’s really hard trying to find a guy while you’re a medium and you’re a college student. It’s next to impossible, actually.”

It would be easy to write a derisive review of ABC Family’s new foray into reality TV, Monica the Medium. I could say that Monica the Medium is certainly no Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite Monica’s repeated uttering of bastardized versions of the core themes of that beloved series. Where Buffy intertwined humor and depth, here the sense of lightness and loving parody is missing. (I mean, there are some pretty funny lines in this series, but I’m guessing that their humor isn’t intentional…) I could also say that despite sharing a network and arguably a target demographic, Monica the Medium is no Pretty Little Liars—that ABC Family juggernaut that has managed its mix of multiple filles fatales, whiplash plot, and questionable fashion for six seasons and counting.

What Monica the Medium does offer is a somewhat awkwardly constructed glimpse into the lives of a group of college students not marked clearly upper class (a la The Hills) nor lower class (a la Jersey Shore) who cringe as their friend Monica goes into regular situations—parties, workplaces, a fashion boutique, a nail salon—and brings her emotional conversations with dead people (talking with “the spirit” as she calls it). She inserts the inappropriately emotional and the “spiritual” into each space, rupturing expected norms of behavior and replacing pleasantries with tears and cherished or (supposedly) suppressed memories. Somehow she seems to know the intimate and private and makes it public before returning to the closure of a sequence; (she does indeed finally buy an outfit and get a manicure, after in both situations speaking to multiple dead people related to the various staff).

Look, I’m not saying this is great TV; (it’s certainly no Unreal, nor even Everlasting, the fake reality show on Unreal) and I don’t know if it will find an audience, be that an audience that laughs at it or with it. But for its insistence on bringing emotion and “spirit” into the everyday (and not via horror movie tropes or destructive femme fatales), combined with its seemingly unintentional ridiculousness, it might see viewers sticking with. I for one will give it a few more episodes and will be keeping an eye on the reviews to see what pleasures it offers its viewers.

Louisa Stein (Middlebury College) is author of Millennial Fandom and studies gender, media, and audience culture.

Todrick (premiered MTV, August 31 @ 10/9) trailer here

We’re just gonna quote MTV on this one: “quadruple-threat Todrick Hall lets fans into his creative factory and introduces them to the passionate troupe of creative collaborators who pour heart and soul into his weekly videos. Unwilling to wait for Hollywood to make them stars, Todrick and his faithful crew write, choreograph, style, and direct full-scale productions weekly – all while balancing side jobs to pay the bills – to try to make their dreams come true on their own terms.”

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Todrick’s title theme song gets one point clear: this is a show about Todrick being Todrick in “Toddywood.” Todrick even assures himself in his own theme song that the show is, in fact, about him: “Just making sure!” Todrick tells Todrick. And this makes it confusing because I’m not sure how meta the first episode is meant to be. Todrick has a video idea of critiquing celebrities who will do anything “crazy” or “freaky” to extend their 15 minutes of fame. But is this a critique of himself—a castoff of American Idol Season 9 who desires fame—as he goes around town doing self-defined crazy and freaky things for attention? Perhaps he knows this, but the show and his crew don’t really seem to even be aware of this point.

Even when Todrick isn’t about Todrick, it is about Todrick. A subplot involves the upcoming birthday of his makeup artist, Nicole, but the show is less concerned about her and more focused on Todrick’s benevolence in planning a surprise birthday video (and downplaying the issue that he is forcing her to work on her birthday). Also, Todrick manages to track down one of Nicole’s (supposedly) favorite music artists, Kelly Rowland, but in Todrick fashion, he films himself with Rowland giving a shout-out to Nicole. You know, instead of giving Nicole the day off to actually meet Kelly Rowland.

However, the subplot is probably needed because the show is literally a behind-the-scenes look at Todrick’s YouTube channel, and sometimes feels it would be better just as a YouTube video. With that said, Todrick is undeniably talented and it does give a sometimes interesting, if slightly fabricated, look at the frantic and DIY nature of producing YouTube videos. Yet, as someone indifferent to Todrick, I would prefer the condensed YouTube version.

Tony Tran (University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches Vietnamese diaspora and new media in urban spaces.

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Early into the pilot, Todrick’s star writes a song as a gift for his make-up artist, Nicole Faulkner. With clipboard in hand, Todrick Hall enumerates his vision for “The Birthday Dance,” which producer Jean-yves “Jeeve” Ducornet quickly assembles by a wall of monitors and synthesizers. Hall then records his vocals, “the easy part” of the song’s compressed (and unreliably plotted) journey to becoming YouTube ephemera. Hall and his team also record a video, find costumes and develop choreography for it, and integrate fan-made clips and singer Kelly Rowland’s birthday message into it. Faulkner also sacrifices her birthday for the production, which overlaps with the shoot for Hall’s riff on tabloid culture “Who Let the Freaks Out.”

Hall’s studio visit takes two minutes of screen time, but it’s a formative moment. When MTV launched in 1981, it would have been more interested in putting “The Birthday Dance” into rotation than in crafting a narrative around its creation. Of course, Todrick benefits from a post- political climate supposedly removed from MTV’s original, racist “rock videos only” mandate (a lie Nicki Minaj challenged by asking “Miley what’s good” the night before Todrick premiered). But MTV has always commodified pop stardom as a lifestyle, with music functioning as part of an artist’s brand. In that regard, Todrick honors a programming tradition that stretches back to Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1985-1987). It also reveals the chipper resourcefulness and pathological entrepreneurialism often required to “put on a show,” whether the performer is a vaudevillian entertainer or a YouTube celebrity with an army of telegenic industry hopefuls, Toddlerz (Hall’s term for his fanbase), and the off-screen hand of manager Scooter Braun to raise him up. The music is incidental, but Todrick’s half-open window into pop celebrity’s psychology and invisible labor is nonetheless compelling and ripe for critique.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

Suddenly Royal (premiered TLC, September 9 @ 10/9) trailer here

An American auto repair advisor researches his ancestry online, only to find out that he’s actually royalty, heir to the British Isle of Man. So he and his family pack up and move to their kingdom. A Princess Diaries whose star will likely never end up playing Catwoman, this seems so much like it’s faux, yet it seems it’s for real (well, as real as reality shows are), and that dude honestly thinks he’s a royal, and has done so since 2007, though he only recently moved there.

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Hey, if Donald Trump or Scott Walker could become President, why can’t David Drew Howe become King of the Isle of Man? The premise for this show is pretty amazing, as Howe finds he likes his ancestral line better than Ben Affleck likes his. This situation doesn’t exactly occur every day, which produces a fascinating generic hybrid – there’s an “outsider in bucolic England” angle that feels a lot like one of the BBC’s favorite genres (except that many of those involve murders, so oddly I was watching very closely to see who would have a motive to kill, say, the royal secretary), mixed with a bit of House Hunters International and its ilk, as middle America deals with smaller beds, horses next door, and insufficient numbers of local takeaway restaurants. Yet undergirding it all is run-of-the-mill reality television being run-of-the-mill reality television: the cutaway counterpoints, the closeups on smirks, etc. And thus watching Suddenly Royal produced an interesting experience that was both utterly familiar and fresh.

Howe may need grooming into royal material, but he’s absolutely ready for television, as I found his sense of humor a lovely mix of homey Dad-joke and dry, delicately edgy (when his daughter expresses concern about how they’ll make money on the Isle of Man, for instance, he dryly offers the possibility of plunder and pillage). Howe’s wife Pam plays his straight (wo)man well, so there’s some comic schtick on offer. And all three family members’ attitudes to their circumstance is amusing, even refreshing. This is TV being TV really well, and an engaging hour. I expected to dislike or be bored by this, but instead I will definitely watch more, and encourage you to give it a shot, even if only to experience the odd genre hybrid for an episode.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and evidently prefers would-be-king narratives to entitled teen medium narratives.

Uncommon Grounds (premiered Travel, September 14 @ 11/10) no trailer available at this time

After having searched the world for rare coffee in Dangerous Grounds, host Todd Carmichael obviously still has more high-flying international coffee man of intrigue business to conduct in this new show that will explore various countries’ culture through their coffee.

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There is nothing particularly uncommon about this documentary-style reality program. The premiere’s flimsy narrative sees the La Colombe founder immersing himself in Japanese culture so as to secure an agreement with the company UCC to mass-produce his new coffeemaker, ‘The Dragon’ (a hybrid between a siphon and pour-over device). Along the way, Carmichael and his cameraman ‘Hollywood’ experience a night out in Tokyo with Japanese businessmen, a visit to a Sake plantation, and an Aikido lesson.

One of the program’s persistent themes involves Carmichael’s fish-out-of-water status – “I’m the loudest person in Japan, even when I’m using my indoor voice” – and its partial resolution through the identification of common cultural touchstones with respect to life and business. This is where the series is most interesting – and most revealing with respect to the current cultural moment. In Carmichael’s admiration for Japanese obsessiveness, efficiency, and precision, we see the basis for a common ground between Japanese culture and the relentlessly-driven entrepreneurialism of contemporary US culture. With Carmichael’s background as an extreme endurance athlete and risk-taking businessman, he finds a lot to admire in the Japanese work ethic and obsession with perfection. All he needs is a basic understanding of the conventions of Japanese business culture to secure the deal.

The final scene before the climactic business meeting encapsulates the banality of this instrumental approach to cultural immersion. As Carmichael meditates in a traditional temple, a voice-over relates his thoughts about the upcoming meeting. An activity that is ostensibly devoted to peace and wholeness becomes the final step in preparing to seal a business deal. This dynamic is emblematic of a program that might have offered earnest cultural exploration and exchange, but which ultimately functions primarily as an extended commercial for American entrepreneurialism, Carmichael’s company, and his new brewing device.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches public media, digital culture, and consumer-citizenship.

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According to Uncommon Grounds’ host Todd Carmichael, “Japan is the third-largest coffee importer in the world. They’re known to spend upwards of $1,000 a pound for the best beans.” On his previous show, this piece of information would initiate a trans-Pacific boondoggle for the daredevil co-founder of Philadelphia’s coffee roaster and café La Colombe Torrefaction to find the best coffee the country has to offer. But for the premiere of his new Travel Channel show, Carmichael sets his sights on Japan to find a manufacturer for his new glass brewer, the Dragon.

Carmichael anticipates that his maverick businessman posturing will create friction with Japanese commerce’s supposed “penchant for precision and detail” (though, conveniently, he forgot to pack a suit). To prepare for his presentation for Ueshima Coffee Co.’s executives, Carmichael and his cameraman Hollywood spend a week in Tokyo and Kyoto drinking with businessmen, eating sushi on the Shinkansen, visiting the Chikurin Sake Brewery, taking in a fish-cutting presentation and a multi-course meal with its owner Niichiro Marumoto, learning Aikido’s basic principles, and meditating (!) on the Travel Channel’s dime. Unsurprisingly, Carmichael hoists a box of UCC-produced Dragon brewers during the end credits–the price of doing business on basic cable.

The Travel Channel likes to cast middle-aged white male gourmands as rock stars whose escapades viewers can enjoy from safe distances. It’s a branding strategy that reeks of chauvinism, regardless of how many Uzbekistani weddings Anthony Bourdain attended on No Reservations. Uncommon Grounds doesn’t challenge this, in part because it presents culture’s commodification as international currency without problematizing the U.S.’s position in this exchange. But when the product is a coffee maker—an appliance that processes an ecologically and politically fraught consumer good—there needs to be a deeper discussion than the one Uncommon Grounds is willing to engage.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

The Bazillion Dollar Club (premiered Syfy, September 22 @ 10/9) trailer here

A six episode docu-series that follows two startup incubator founders in Silicon Valley as they try to advise companies towards, well, a “bazillion” dollars by offering such gems like “if you’re not willing to risk everything, you’re going to fail.” Rinse and repeat with HBO’s Silicon Valley afterwards.

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This is a formulaic documentary-style program based on a 16-week startup accelerator ‘boot camp’ offered by the angel investors and startup gurus Dave McClure (of 500 Startups) and Brady Forrest (HighwayOne). Over the course of the season, these two will endeavor to help six different startups to ‘accelerate’ their growth in terms of revenue, customer, base, and, most importantly, fundraising.

The first episode sees the duo dispensing tough love and hard-bitten wisdom to Ethan Appleby of Vango, which seeks to be ‘iTunes for art’. The Fassbender-esque CEO is feeling the pressure of trying to keep his dream alive while following through on behalf of the other core workers who have sacrificed time, money, and energy to contribute to the project. This becomes a plot point as Monique, the effervescent and industrious client relations specialist, requests a raise. Appleby cannot afford to lose ‘Mo,’ but he also can’t afford to ‘give her the raise she deserves.’ The only solution is to find some more money – somehow.

The fate of the company – and Mo’s raise – ultimately seem to come down to a 3-minute talk that Ethan is to give to potential investors on a 500 Startups ‘Demo Day.’ Will Ethan be able to distill his message down to its essence and deliver it with confidence, charisma, and enthusiasm? In effect, the question is whether Ethan can effectively sell himself and embody the promise of the idea he represents. In this respect, BDC provides a straightforward reflection of a society in which many believe that the path to freedom and fulfillment involves the marketing of the self and the building of something that can be validated in the marketplace. It is an unexceptional reality program, but its portrayal of startup life is likely to appeal to those viewers who themselves dream of beating the odds to achieve exceptional success on America’s tech frontier.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies public media, digital culture, and consumer-citizenship.

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My experience of watching of this show is a testament to the power of flow, not simply in the all-on-television form famously explicated by Raymond Williams, but including the ebbs and flows of social and cultural context. I watched this while waiting to see billionaire bigot Donald Trump interviewed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, hoping that Stephen’s satirical fangs were still in tact. And I watched on a week in which the news was dominated by three stories: (1) young CEO Martin Shkreli deciding that his company Turing would increase the price of Daraprim – a drug used to treat patients with AIDS – from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill, (2) young-ish former Boy Wonder of the GOP, Scott Walker, announcing the suspension of his campaign to become President, in the wake of failing to secure enough investment in either cold hard cash or likely voters, and (3) British Prime Minister David Cameron being allegedly revealed to be, quite literally, a rich pig-fucker. And thus I was so very primed to dislike the young white entrepreneurs of this show. As Vango’s head expressed regret that he “couldn’t” pay a valued staff-member what she’s worth, I wondered how much his shirt cost. As the coaches told him how to present himself, so that people will give him their money, my mind drifted to thinking about Walker boring live audiences, unable to get yet more donor money. And as the show marched its way through a tour of how wonderfully awesome, smart, and able young white CEOs can be, I thought of Shkreli, Walker, Cameron and their egos. I’ve seen too many instances of the corporate world’s excesses this week, and of “the art of the deal” hubris. Admittedly, if the show was actually gripping, I might have stayed in the here and now, instead of floating away on a current of flow, but it isn’t: it’s just yet another celebration of the uncelebratable.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts.

Road Spill (premiered truTV, September 23 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Focusing on what people really talk about in the privacy (or, nationally televised, reality television “privacy”) of their own cars. Also promised by truTV are hilarity, road rage, and moral dilemmas.

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People Other Than Comedians In Unremarkable Cars Being Unremarkable. So, here’s how it works: regular people get in their cars and drive around, then answer tepid questions pitched at them, such as “is it too intimate to share the same toothbrush?”, “how far out of your comfort zone have you gone to please a loved one?”, “who is grosser in the bathroom? Men or women?”, or “what do you think about men in Speedos?”. I’d spare the judgment if this was something that someone did with a cheap camera and put on YouTube, but it’s so weird to see this on non-public-access, commercial television in 2015 – and a whole half hour of it – especially when some people are saying there’s “too much good television.” It might work as a radio show, albeit a boring one, but the visuals are entirely irrelevant here. Then the commentary is like something you’d overhear on a bus, in a restaurant, or at the mall. You might chortle a little and note it to someone you’re sitting next to, but you’d then go back to your conversation and zone out. So here’s my suggestion, to round out the review: next time a student wants extra credit, tell them to watch a season of this and write a 20 page paper. Make em work for it. Harder than anyone involved with this show seems to be working.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) already has too many bios on this page.

Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe (premiered Lifetime, September 24 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Stylist and designer Rachel Zoe hosts this talk show focused on fashion, “beauty,” and pop culture.

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It was only three minutes into the premiere of Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe that I was thinking about Watch What Happens Live!, the Bravo late night chat show hosted by Andy Cohen. That’s not surprising given that Zoe stepped out of the shadows of her celebrity styling clients for her Bravo series The Rachel Zoe Project. It’s also not surprising given that WWHL! has been an incredible success for Bravo, and Lifetime is clearly patterning Fashionably Late in its mold, positioning it after Project Runway, which they directly nabbed from Bravo. But Fashionably Late doesn’t only carry vestiges of WWHL!—it’s also obviously attempting to mimic E!’s Fashion Police following its dramatic fall from grace this year following Joan Rivers’ death, Giuliana Rancic’s racist comments at the Oscars, and Kelly Osbourne’s departure. In fact, the segment “#whatwereyouthinking,” in which Alba was asked to reflect on some style choices from her past is a direct steal from Fashion Police.

It’s probably telling that I spent the majority of the episode thinking about all the things it cribbed from other cable channel weekly chat shows—the show itself was not terribly compelling, feeling mostly like a rehash of concepts I’d seen before. As someone who really enjoys Rachel Zoe, who has always appreciated her quirks, her unapologetic style, and her catchphrases, I felt like this venue muted her. Maybe she was so busy being crammed into different existing boxes that she wasn’t allowed to be Rachel Zoe. In truth, I enjoyed the teaser segments that aired in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the premiere much better. (See here for one example) Here’s hoping the format loosens, Lifetime stops trying to steal its competitors’ ideas, and Zoe finds her groove. I’m not sure I’m going to hang around to find out, though.

Erin Copple Smith (Austin College) studies media industries, focusing specifically on product placement and conglomerate cross-promotion.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (CC, September 28 @ 11/10) promo here

Noah faces the daunting task of winning over would-be audiences likely divided into those who regard Jon Stewart as amazing and likely irreplaceable, and those whose lack of interest in Stewart or active disdain for him likely overflows to the show and the format in general. But with Trump and Walker still in the GOP race, at least the jokes and criticism will come easy.

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Note that we will post a separate discussion of The Daily Show after it’s been on for one week

I’ll Have What Phil’s Having (PBS, September 28 @ 10/9) trailer here

Media scholars may best know Phil Rosenthal as the protagonist telling Russians why they suck in Exporting Raymond, the documentary about his attempts to translate Everybody Loves Raymond to Russia. Apparently, he’ll now be telling other people of the world why they suck (even if their food doesn’t always) in this food and travel show.

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I was worried that the appeal of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having would hinge entirely on how easily one could digest an hour of Phil Rosenthal’s mugging. Thankfully, that’s not really the case. For the most part, the program realizes that the food and the city (here, Tokyo) are the true stars of the show. On the surface, there’s not a whole lot that distinguishes this from No Reservations beyond the hosts’ very different personae (Rosenthal’s vacillation between wide-eyed excitement and wider-eyed incredulity vs. Anthony Bourdain’s labored, hypermasculine cool). Like Bourdain, Rosenthal cracks wise through a tour of local food that covers street grub, haute cuisine, and little in between.

Although the program follows American food TV’s disappointingly traditional convention of ensuring that the viewer has a compatriot tour guide/avatar to lead our way through the unfamiliar terrain, it’s reasonably light on the Othering that winds up insulting the host city and the audience’s intelligence in equal measure. Which is not to say that it’s absent—there are a few groan-inducing references to a “Blade Runnerish” collection of bars and some exaggerated, bug-eyed reactions to still-living sashimi, but Rosenthal’s approach to cross-cultural encounters is somewhat more earnest and playful than one might expect.

But again, I’m really here for the lovingly shot food and cityscapes. On that front, the show more-or-less delivers. I’ll Have What Phil’s Having doesn’t quite reach the heights of what food television can achieve (for my money, that would be Netflix’s recent Chef’s Table, a beautifully shot, warts-and-all exploration of the equal measures of genius and madness required to be one of the world’s greatest chefs). But it’s a decent-enough food travelogue, even if it’s not adding a whole lot that connoisseurs of the genre haven’t already seen.

Evan Elkins (Miami University) researches and teaches issues pertaining to the media industries, media criticism, globalization, and digital technologies.

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PBS’s new program “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” suggests in its title an equivalence between its host, Phil Rosenthal (Hollywood showrunner, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond) and the audience, but you can only be a peer of Rosenthal’s if you have quite a bit of money—or fancy friends. In the premiere episode, Phil eats at a range of restaurants in Tokyo, Japan, but the majority of them are super, duper fancy (molecular gastronomy fancy). In my less generous moments, I viewed Rosenthal as a dilettante. Yet his manner is what makes him more of an “everyman,” for he balks at the most exotic fare, including eel (bones and all), ants (they taste like lemon), and freshly killed (and uncooked) shrimp.

This program is aiming for the niche covered so well on basic cable by fellow travel food hosts Andrew Zimmern (Bizarre Foods) and Anthony Bourdain (Parts Unknown). What this program has not yet figured out, though, is that Zimmern and Bourdain thrive, in part, based on the personality of their hosts. Zimmern is childlike and bold in his enthusiasm for all things gross; Bourdain is all sharp edges, but he is also an incredibly knowledgeable chef with noble aspirations. Rosenthal lacks expertise, but what he can offer is humor and a deeper look into his personal life. In particular, the show is missing its biggest possible appeal in the fact that Rosenthal’s brother is the producer! When Phil skypes with his parents from Tokyo, his father repeatedly asks for the unseen brother, Richard, much to Phil’s chagrin (“here is the son you actually love,” he complains as the camera turns towards Richard). The entire show came alive in this moment of relatable family joshing. With so much food TV out there, this show needs Rosenthal to let us see him as a father, son, husband, and brother, because those are the things to which his audience can relate.

Karen Petruska (Gonzaga University) studies the media industries, television history, and media policy.

Adam Ruins Everything (truTV, September 29 @ 10/9)

Adam Conover moves his show from a College Humor web series to the big time (if truTV counts as the big time). You can see an example of his College Humor show here, and quickly get the idea: brief explorations of a wide variety of issues, trying to uncover things and go against the current of popular belief, with comedy and irreverence.

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Adam Ruins Everything has bold ambitions. Its first episode sees the host tackle a series of beliefs around “giving.” He notes that diamonds as emblems of romance are completely a product of De Beers’ advertising, he explores the silliness of Tom’s Shoes promising to give a free pair of shoes to a random African kid for every pair you buy, he interrogates the (il)logic of canned food drives, donating blood after natural disasters, and saving ring tabs for charity. It’s visually interesting, too: Daily Prophet-style, authors’ dust jacket photos come alive and talk to him, plenty of animation and CGI are used, and there’s a pace to it. He even gets bonus points for having professors on and (!) for using footnotes on screen to show his sources. It’s trying to be edutainment for adults, and I appreciate the attempt to debunk that which needs debunking.

But holy moly is this a big stinking pile of mansplaining. The pilot consisted mostly of host Adam Conover telling an oh-so-naïve young white woman how dumb and ill-informed she is. She was set up as one half of a couple, but somehow her fiancé didn’t need the lessons like she does. Even worse, she’s a teacher, so Conover’s performance is predicated on telling a woman who thinks she’s smart that, no honeycakes, actually you’re not. Then, when she’s disappeared, as a coda to the show, he accosts another wrong-but-pretty white woman at a bus stop. Admittedly, he embraces and owns the fact that he’s annoying, but never that he’s a sexist jerk. The show reminds us he’s “ruining” things for people too often, virtually suggesting that he’s (a very, very white) Morpheus come to give the women and schoolgirls of the world the red pill. Indeed, the CGI and animation set him up as some omniscient, omnipresent being. As much as the show seems to want to be educational, it’s draped with the ickery of talking to a male audience who are presumed to have had the blue pill, and who just need a few more factoids as arsenal in their mission to fix all the pretty little heads of the universe. Maybe future episodes will see him lecture dudes too, but it’s utterly tone deaf for a pilot to be this full of mansplaining, so I’ll just put the show down over here and not come back to it.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has numerous bios up this page.

The Brain with David Eagleman (PBS, October 14 @ 10/9) trailer here

A six-part study of the brain, how we think, how we feel, and how it all works, hosted by neuroscientist and best-selling author Eagleman.

UnREAL, Unwatched

Myles McNUTT, Old Dominion University: It seems important to acknowledge in any conversation about an original scripted cable drama in the contemporary moment that, if it’s not The Walking Dead, chances are very few people are watching it. In the case of UnREAL, this is particularly true: the ratings have not been good, despite Lifetime going out of their way to give the first four episodes available to binge for free after the premiere.

That UnREAL lives to see a second season is, itself, not a huge surprise: it’s one of the first Lifetime dramas produced in-house, the critical acclaim gives them a foothold to brand rearticulation, and the show’s strengths give them a chance to woo the Hollywood Foreign Press Association into some valuable Golden Globes attention. A second season is the kind of calculated risk that the primary profit participant in a TV drama tends to take: if the show streams well, and if critical acclaim helps international sales, and if live viewership manages to tick upward, there’s a chance this turns into a hit.

UnREAL says a lot about the reality TV industry as a text, but it also says a lot about cable branding, discourses of quality, and metrics of success as a product of the television industry more broadly. How far is Lifetime willing to hold onto a show like UnREAL for theoretical value to its brand if no one is watching? It’s easy to look at the ways that UnREAL helps Lifetime’s cause, expanding its brand to audiences that may have previously dismissed it. But at what point do they stop touting the “viewership across platforms” statistic—still mostly meaningless to advertisers—and give up if they fail to see tangible improvement?

Phillip Maciak, Louisiana State University: If I say Lena Dunham’s name one more time she’ll appear, right? I’m not invested in any qualitative comparisons between Girls and UnREAL, but it’s hard not to notice that the numbers UnREAL is sporting right now that are causing us so much concern are very similar to the numbers Girls has been pulling for four seasons. There are differences in streaming platforms, OnDemand numbers, etc, but it seems like we’ve got yet another water-cooler favorite of the critterati taking up proportionally more space in arts and culture verticals than its viewership would seem to warrant. As you mentioned before, though, Myles, this show is radically off-brand for Lifetime. Or, at least it’s pushing hard at the edges of the brand. Is it possible, do we think, that UnREAL‘s financial success might mean less than its perceived critical success for the network? In other words, is it more important for UnREAL to lure viewers or for UnREAL‘s critical success to lure writers to produce a different kind of content for Lifetime?

Myles: After I wrote my response, FX’s John Landgraf suggested they follow a “2 out of 3” model for renewing their shows: FX, “Experts,” and viewers (or ratings, if we prefer) all get a vote, and if it gets 2 out of 3, it’s getting renewed. It’s far from an easy calculus, but it gives you an example of how a basic cable channel with experience in programming sees that uneasy mix of needing to compete on a branding level with premium channels but also have to be more aware of the number of people watching (versus simply the type of people watching, which serves HBO well in the case of Girls).

The issue with drawing a comparison between Girls and UnREAL, though, is that I’m pretty sure we—as in academics/critics/journalists—are the only people talking about UnREAL. This isn’t an actual watercooler show: it’s a watercooler show in the corners of the internet we frequent, and a complete non-entity everywhere else even despite Lifetime’s pretty significant efforts to get it out there. While it certainly has a bit more buzz than something like Terriers—which is an historical example of FX overriding their “2 of 3” model—it still strikes me as something that has had very minimal “cultural impact” once we move beyond these circles.

Jason Mittell, Middlebury College: One series that UnREAL reminds me of a lot in a number of ways is The Joe Schmo Show, which is one of my favorite unheralded television programs of the century. Joe Schmo also provides a critical take on reality TV, albeit through the “reality hoax” mode rather than scripted drama, and the amazing second season offered a similarly biting critique of The Bachelor (seriously, if you haven’t watched Joe Schmo Show 2, it’s dirt cheap on Amazon and I promise you won’t regret it!). Joe Schmo aired on Spike TV, Lifetime’s binary counterpart branded as “The First Network for Men” (apparently, besides all the other ones…). Both programs simultaneously fit with and resist their home channel’s brand identity—although Joe Schmo did often include events with bikini models or porn stars to pander to the assumed Spike audience, it was far more critical than celebratory of the bro lifestyle. Likewise, UnREAL seems to be addressing a much different type of viewer (or at least, mode of viewing) than Dance Moms or Bring It! This makes me wonder if UnREAL becoming a hit (if it builds a following once the first season is available on streaming and attracts attention through awards and year-end accolades) might actually be a danger to Lifetime’s brand—after all, the temptation to go upscale and legit might be too tempting for parent company A&E, whose various networks have all struggled to find their equivalent of The Shield or Mad Men that might give them a foothold into the quality brand.

Kristen Warner, University of Alabama: I wonder if a better parallel between series trying to push the edges of their current brand is UnReal and USA’s Mr. Robot? Both shows push their respective networks into darker content while simultaneously targeting different demographics than they’ve been able to capture previously. Is Mr. Robot, despite its premiere at a film festival, its tie to Anonymous Content and ultimately to David Fincher, and its (annoyingly heavy) borrowing of style from high brow auteurs, similarly unwatched?

Myles: It’s drawing close to twice as many viewers as UnREAL, but compared to what USA used to draw in the era of Monk, no one is watching Mr. Robot.

Kristen: Interesting. So do its similarities keep it as a potential comparison?

Myles: I think both offer a case study in how much discursive framing of “success” is becoming a creative exercise in the television industry right now—whether it’s USA picking up Mr. Robot before its premiere or Lifetime releasing all four episodes of UnREAL online, they’re asking us to see a show as successful so as to attain brand value from that. And there’s a point at which the “Emperor’s New Clothes” model of brand development starts to fall apart.

Christine Becker, University of Notre Dame: One of my mom’s must-see shows is Devious Maids, which airs before UnREAL on Lifetime’s schedule. On a recent family vacation, I tried to convince her to watch UnREAL with me, but she showed no interest and seemed to not even know what it was, despite the fact promos for it surely aired during Devious Maids (maybe she’s watching on a DVR and fast-forwarding through the ad breaks—the challenge of marketing a series/channel lineup today). I now regret not digging deeper into her reluctance, especially given that she’s the one who first instilled a love of melodrama and soap opera in me. But this example would seem to affirm that UnREAL is outside of Lifetime’s typical purview. My mom doesn’t like it when her soaps get too “real” or violent (she stopped watching General Hospital because of the mob stuff, as sanitized as it is there compared to, say, The Sopranos). And UnREAL might look too intense to her. She also doesn’t really watch reality TV, so that could be another reason it wouldn’t hook her. Finally, I don’t watch Devious Maids, but I do know that it has “Erica Kane” (perhaps my mom’s favorite character/actress of any medium ever), plus, putting together the title with the cast list, I presume it features Latinas as maids, so it might stay within my mom’s acceptable range of racial representations too. Which leads to another topic I’d like to see discussed:

UnREAL and Race

Christine: And here I gratuitously invite Kristen to chime in, because she has expressed on social media such insightful readings of the show and of reality TV from a racial perspective, and I want to hear more. I’ve found the racial critique UnREAL offers to be among its most revealing aspects, perhaps because the gender critiques are more familiar to me, so the deconstruction of the rigged racial game in reality TV, both on screen and (especially) offscreen, feels even more revelatory.

Kristen: Oh Chris, where to begin? Regarding its take on industry, in many ways UnREAL proves that with mild exception (and the exceptions in the instance of this series fail), the film and television industry really reproduces itself in the image of those who run it: i.e., white men and women. There’s very clearly three generations of white lady producers (and I mostly predicted that all three would be producers prior to the finale so where’s my ribbon) who all are at different phases of the same career. And while these white women face very real and painful oppressions, I am still gobsmacked that no one has noticed how, it is the certainty of whiteness that allows them to push through those constraints (at all kinds of costs) and succeed.

Nevertheless, the exceptions like Shia and Jay don’t. Also at all kinds of costs—and firings. So this little micro model is useful in thinking about the difficulties that folks of color face in breaking into industry work while getting close enough to see the next level—even trying to create opportunities for themselves at the cost of some moral and legal scruples—but still unable to make it because they aren’t in the image of the person in charge. What’s more, thinking more about Shia, in an interview Sarah Gertrude Shapiro talked about how she feels sympathy for Shia because she’s been misunderstood: “she just wants to be loved.” “She’s not as pretty or whatever.” Besides the obvious yet unintentional infantilization of that woman of color that quote implies (who to be honest I was glad to see go as that character was far too on the nose for my liking—her strategies negotiating her precarity didn’t prove to me she realized she was living that precarious life—a pitfall of blindcasting I would argue), Shapiro didn’t seem to realize she played into the very tropes that her show within the show tried so hard to bust up from the very beginning. Simply put there’s no future for Shia. We knew this going in. Just like we know there’s no future for Shamequa or Athena.

Last point: While UnREAL is so astute about explicitly stating what people REALLY say about racialized bodies (the first five minutes of the pilot, the scene between Jay and the two black competitors, the moment where Adam’s grandmother tells him they don’t marry the brown people), there’s still huge blind spots among their own reflexivity at the level of production.

Phil: Yes to all of this. And, just to tie in Kristen’s comments with earlier discussions of labor and competence, it’s interesting (troubling) to me how Shia was presented, from the very first episode, as the kind of inverse of Rachel. So much is made of Rachel’s genius as a producer for this show, but we learn that Rachel’s special by repeatedly seeing how Shia isn’t. Seeing Shia struggle is how we understand the grotesque artistry of what Rachel and Quinn do. Rachel has a natural facility with manipulation; Shia’s attempts are forced and awkward. Rachel operates precisely and responsibly, cutting just enough to hurt but not enough to kill the patient; Shia operates sloppily and irresponsibly, blood spraying everywhere, corpses piling up. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a compliment to say that Shia isn’t quite the virtuosic sociopath that Rachel is, but, within the economy of the show, it means she’s less worthy of everyone’s time. (Literally so, inasmuch as she disappears from the series.) In any case, it’s curious not only that one of the show’s few people of color is marginalized but that we’re supposed to see that marginalization as deserved. Shia isn’t allowed into the structuring female mentorship relationship at the center of this show, and the show is very clear that it’s because Shia’s missing something innate that Quinn and Rachel have.

Jason: One thing I struggle with is how much this portrayal of the perpetuation of white success within the industry is presented as object of critique, the simple reality of how it works, and/or an unquestioned normalization. I want to believe the former is the dominant tone, and that they chose to make the racial critique overt in the production of Everlasting but more subtle in the production of UnREAL. After all, the three producers are explicitly pitted against each other in a contest. The failure of ethnically-unmarked-but-nonwhite Shia leads to her erasure from the cast, just as most of the non-white contestants disappear once suitor Adam has not found anything noteworthy to hold onto; likewise, Jay is sent packing once both shows have no need of the “black bitch.” Madison’s unexpected (to everyone but Kristen!) elevation mirrors the last-minute return of Britney to the cast, both elevated by Chet in reward for their oral services, highlighting that “success” is open to white women willing to leverage their sexuality. UnREAL highlights the role of sex as career advancement (including one of my favorite lines of Chet’s utter sleezeballery—in defending his Madison dalliance to Quinn, his exasperated explanation is “she’s a mouth!”), but leaves the racial dimension unspoken. I noticed the parallels, and took it as a subtle commentary to avoid on-the-nose gesturing, rather than unquestioned normalization, but I grant that when it comes to such matters of calling out white privilege, subtlety is dangerous.

Kristen: It’s very dangerous, Jason. So much so that subtlety to most untrained eyes who never see the precarity of intersectional identity in industry labor called out explicitly—unless it’s by racialized bodies who they can then characterize as being too sensitive or overly cautious—will be able to ignore it or just miss it completely. And, listen, on a show that examines how white women explicitly navigate the labor game through whatever strategies they can maneuver, it’s not a difficult thing to ask that they be explicit about the fact that it’s THEM who keep and maintain power because it’s their “mouths” that are desired. The Latina contestant is probably the closest voice to one who acknowledges how stuck she is between the trope she fulfills and the fact that she knows she has to play that trope in order to get to where she wants to be. That is most certainly a labor issue and it is handled well. But it reveals, similar to the conversation Jay has with Athena and Shamiqua, Shapiro’s comfort discussing race, gender, and talent as labor but not race, gender, gatekeepers, and labor. And that is unfortunate because as Phillip mentioned earlier, if we do not signal for the fact that Shia is a woman of color in an industry where she is always already at the margins, how do we understand her utter failures and Rachel’s inate “know-how” as anything outside of the traditional binaries of racial competencies? This show ain’t subtle about shit so I can’t buy that it’s taking a quiet tack on the race stuff. It’s more likely that its writers just missed it on that front in the service of diversity without considering for the problems that may occur or the reinforcement of the status quo they’ve maintained (which, I mean, it’s true, so…).

Chris: I was going to reply to Jason’s comment with something along the lines that none of the other critiques made by the show are subtle, which makes me question if they’d make the racial labor critique subtle, but Kristen takes care of that just fine with “This show ain’t subtle about shit.”

Jason: Okay, I’ll grant that my reading of the parallels between producers and contestants as a veiled racial critique is overly generous. And “This show ain’t subtle about shit” is as good as a conclusion as we’re going to find!

Thanks to everyone for participating in, and reading, this conversation! Continue on in the comments…

A Savvy Romance

Jason Mittell, Middlebury College: One thing that fascinates me about the show is how it simultaneously dismantles the romantic fantasy peddled by The Bachelor, and offers its own savvy version. Framed by its presentation on Lifetime, the series is targeting female viewers who “know better” than to be duped by conventional reality TV (a savvy attitude that Allison Hearn has argued is core to reality TV fandom). The narrative constructs Rachel as the stand-in for such savvy viewers—and yet makes her the object of desire for both the hunky cameraman Jeremy, and the hunky “suitor” Adam. Despite the fact that her life (and hair) is a total mess, Jeremy finds her hotter than his perky blond fiance, and Adam seems ready to choose Rachel over the line-up of primped and perfected contestants.

If one of the appeals of The Bachelor is the vicarious desire for women to imagine that if only they were in the competition, they could beat out those other shallow boobs for his heart, then UnREAL dramatizes that by putting a viewer surrogate for women who might scoff at such desires behind-the-scenes, and then making her inadvertently beat out all of the shallow boobs. She is the savvy viewer incarnate, and she wins the hearts of the show’s only two attractive straight men by being smarter than the other women, without even showering!

So I’m curious if others found themselves motivated by these romances? Any shippers? Or were you with me, on the sidelines rooting for the show’s purest “romance,” Quinchel?

Melissa Lenos, Donnelly College: I know I’m in the minority with this opinion, but I find the romance elements to be the least interesting part of the show. While I get the structural intrigue of framing a sort of anti-romance within the staged romance of Everlasting, I like the show best when it’s focusing on Rachel’s (and Quinn’s!) character development and motivations and general messiness as a human.

Kathleen Battles, Oakland University: You are not in the minority, Melissa. I also found the romances to be the least interesting parts of the shows, especially Rachel’s. Quinn’s “romance” with Chet was far more interesting, particularly as it was mediated by Quinn’s especially non romantic idea of love.

I also find myself deeply uncomfortable with the idea of “shipping” Quinn and Rachel. I found their relationship to be, as I said on Twitter, the central “romance” of the show—but that is different than shipping. Theirs is a complex relationship of teacher/student, boss/worker, idol/worshipper, etc. I also find the poster above deeply, and hilariously, ironic.

I can’t say how much I enjoyed the last minutes of this show (minus Jeremy’s visit to Rachel’s mother—which I only saw later as my recording clipped the end). The scene of Anna taking her moment (I love how self-aware the contestants were) and claiming something better for herself in her white dress followed by Quinn and Rachel discussing the coming season of the show was wonderful on so many levels. Their spat out “I love yous” were a perfect end. The show is unrelentingly grim, as many have noted, but I find the constant tension between the allure of romance and the realization that it is unattainable utterly compelling.

Phillip Maciak, Louisiana State University: I totally agree with your take on the final minutes of the finale. UnREAL is a show built around this narcotic, corrosive relationship between Quinn and Rachel, their shared competence, its costs, etc. But it was fascinating to me that the season didn’t actually end there and, instead, cut to that seedy bit of business that your DVR mercifully edited out for you. (The cut to Jeremy was even aesthetically disappointing, given that we’d just had that crane shot as a nice visual punctuation mark.) This was a great finale, but I thought that final twist was both a move to the show’s weak side—Margaret Lyons referred to Jeremy as a “humanoid henley”—and an uncharacteristic hedge. That “I love you” exchange, preceded as it was by Quinn’s essential admission of her betrayal and some pointed references to murder, left plenty of questions open for us. We don’t have to be shipping Quinn and Rachel to know that their relationship is both more interesting and more important than any of the erotic relationships on the show. Dredging up an essentially abandoned subplot from earlier in the season—one that was excessive even by this melodrama’s standards—to amp up the stakes seemed both confusing and confused. And so did the shift of focus back (away) to Jeremy, especially in context of Kathleen’s earlier point that the heterosexual couplings mostly serve to shift our gaze to relationships between women. I had kind of hoped we were heading into a glorious season two without either Jeremy or Adam, but Fake Chris Pratt isn’t going away that easy, I guess.

Melissa: That moment in the finale when Rachel says, “I don’t think our audience is interested in girls with jobs” felt like a shout out to those of us watching for the Quinn/Rachel relationship—and watching these women work is so satisfying!—rather than the romance. To me, this was first and foremost a show about a woman who is very good at her job, and sometimes loves her job, but also knows that her job isn’t very good for her. Sound familiar, academics? (I’m 30% joking.)

Myles McNutt, Old Dominion University: I definitely felt the chemistry between Rachel and Adam, but the show has an uneasy relationship with romance—its takedown of Everlasting‘s forward-facing romantic framing is thorough and matter-of-fact, but at the same time it leaned on the love triangle, and although the finale shifts to more complex “romances” like Rachel and Quinn there’s still the reliance on a more conventional romantic thrust when it comes to promoting the show. The original key art for the show somewhat inexplicably featured Jeremy, for example—the key art eventually shifted to Adam (the romantic partner with a clearer link to the themes of the show), but in both cases you see the show leaning on a more traditional Lifetime framing even as the writers showed more interest in other areas.

I feel this is a space the show could evolve in future seasons—the depiction of Everlasting itself ended up very scattershot, and unfocused, and while this is not a show about the contestants, I do feel it’s a space to clarify and focus—and evolve—its position vis-a-vis “romance” as it continues to live and breathe in this world.

Melissa: That’s what I was wondering by the end, Myles—if future seasons will embrace the less obvious—but ultimately more interesting—tensions explored in season one.

Kristen Warner, University of Alabama: I know how y’all feel about the romance function of the series. But I’m here for it! I love the romance genre and all of the many ways that it finds itself deployed in series where it may or may not be warranted (looking at you Homeland and The Good Wife) or may or may not be considered ironic like UnReal. So, yeah—give me all the lingering stares and the angsty dialogue and the flirty banter and the hay rolls and the scorched earth manpain and the romantic jitters. Haters gonna hate.

While I vigilantly tried to remain “shipper agnostic” in my choice of suitor for Rachel for many reasons (my distrust of Marti Noxon one of the biggest with regard to triangles—best not to unpack that 15-year-old-suitcase), it was fun to watch Rachel enact different versions of herself with both men. To Jason’s earlier point, I’m most certain our identification is linked to Rachel (although I have seen a number of women stress how much they wish to be Quinn especially because of the messiness of her relationship with Chet) and that she is indeed the best at making us “normal” girls feel powerful in how she pulls these men folks’ strings. That IS the quintessential essence of good fantasy. I mean, at one point she and one of her men roll around in a bale of hay for Crissakes. They are clearly playing at well-known romance conventions: the “Rustic bodice ripper” versus the “Billionaire English Gent” types to be specific.

My point here is that I don’t think UnReal is necessarily subversive in the way it sells the romance to the consumerable “savvy” viewer; I can think of a host of “new era” romantic comedies that do similar work. However, I do think the show excels in identificatory suture in that it makes it super clear that the things that excite and arouse women aren’t just hard bodies—although say what you want about Jeremy, but between the henley, the clawfoot tub, the glass shower and the log cabin house, I’d find myself at peace, I’m just saying—but that the personas she performs with each of those men are all wonderfully fantastical and immaterial. For me the scene that sums up the moment of meta romantic fantasy is when Rachel discovers that watching the fantasy version of herself and Jeremy on that beach talking about love and their future and (cis, white, hetero) normalcy is what ultimately gets her off after all of her previously failed attempts. Meta because as a viewer watching her watch a fantastical version of herself be happy how different is that from reading the romance novel or watching a soap opera and suturing yourself into it? Not really much difference at all.

Dana Och, University of Pittsburgh: Yes, all of this. That moment of Rachel achieving orgasm finally with that video of her and Jeremy is the indelible moment of the show to me. It is easy to mock the various romance myths being overtly marketed in dating reality shows—though another great moment was the horse riding scene—but this moment cuts to the myths of romance that we spin in our real lives (and then post on Facebook). Smart.

Jason: I totally agree with Kristen that Rachel as savvy romantic heroine has a long lineage in various genres and media, but I’m particularly curious about its articulation to the reality dating show. The Bachelor and its ilk seems to be television’s most unreconstructed site of conventional romantic fantasy, or at least it seems to be to me as an outsider who rarely watches them. As y’all have said, things have gotten (or have been for a long time) darker and more complicated on soaps, Lifetime movies, romcoms, romance novels, and prestige prime time dramas—but not (ironically, I guess) “reality.” Does UnREAL throw down the gauntlet to dating reality shows to acknowledge and complicate the fantasy?

Kathleen: I think the show actually reveals how complex the fantasy already is. If anything, the show doesn’t so much throw down a gauntlet to reality TV as to show how complex the work of building even the most basic fantasy of romance really is. Let’s not forget one of the series writers came from the world of The Bachelor. Here is a show that yes, asks a lot of hard questions, is filled with cynicism, but also keeps reminding us just how damn good Quinn and Rachel are at creating this fantasy world. Sure the fantasy is trite, but this show reminds us over and over again just how much work it takes to make it actually happen.

I really appreciate Kristen and Dana’s points about the ways that the show also includes so many nods to romance beyond reality. The love triangle itself is a pretty well worn trope central to so much fiction aimed at women—as in the various “teams” women can join. This show also plays with the good boy/bad boy set up well (Jeremy/Adam, Dean/Jess, Angel/Spike). I think we see moments where both Rachel—in the wonderful scene discussed above—and Quinn—between getting her ring and catching Chet—submit to the fantasy, even though they are ostensibly savvy.

I also feel like this comment might refer to the above two threads, but in this whole discussion, I just keep wondering why a show needs to be “dark” or “complex” to pass some legitimation test. I think one thing the show perversely does is demonstrate the extreme complexity of managing and running a reality show where unlike a scripted show helmed by the auteur showrunner, producers are forced to make something out of a hodgepodge of events. And though it doesn’t focus on the contestants enough, I think it also demonstrates a range of complex reasoning among the them. Why must we consistently equate “darkness” or “anti-ness” with “complexity” as well?

Reality and Pedagogy

Jason: One of UnREAL‘s hooks, especially with savvy viewers, critics, and scholars, seems to be the speculation over what we’re seeing is “real” concerning how the reality TV industry works. Knowing that Sarah Gertrude Shapiro worked as a producer for The Bachelor before applying that experience to the fictional world of UnREAL fuels such matters, despite her (assuredly lawyer-mandated) insistence that all actual events and characters are fictional. Whether specific events are fictional or fictionalized versions of real “reality,” there is no doubt that the series captures the underlying realities of reality TV production, where drama is created both on-set and in the edit bays, where casting is as crucial as it is in a Hollywood film, and where savvy contestants are self-aware of their own performances, potential leverage over producers, and possibilities of post-reality notoriety. In other words, nobody involved in making reality TV has any illusions that there is anything “real” happening—and I would argue this extends to a great deal of the audience as well.

Thus the series serves a pedagogical function, teaching viewers how to watch reality TV with an expanded understanding of what might be happening behind the scenes. Although I’ve read enough about reality TV that I felt sufficiently savvy, I was surprised by the role of “reality fluffers” like Rachel, working off-screen to heighten drama and point characters in the “right” direction. This pedagogical impulse interests me in large part because I’ve decided to teach the first season as the semester-long case study for my Television and American Culture course next spring. It will replace Homeland‘s first season, which I’ve used three times before—while Homeland worked well to teach serial narrative, explore premium television’s industrial strategies, and raise issues around representations of nation, gender, race, and religion, it has grown a bit tired for me. UnREAL allows more conversations about the meta representation of television itself, foregrounds questions of genre, and most importantly, highlights how television can be “worth” teaching beyond the elite realm of HBO/Showtime (and I know some of my bro-ier students will squirm productively at watching Television For Women!).

So how do the rest of you view the series pedagogically? How might you teach it productively? And how would you deal with inevitable questions that students will ask about “how real is it?”

Dana: I would pair it with Big Brother (a show that actually does have a very short window between events happening and then being constructed into storylines and aired, as well as one live show a week), Big Brother After Dark (“You will not talk about production” bellows over the loudspeaker endlessly while we watch unedited live feeds of “houseguests” eating pudding and talking about stubbed toes), and the final episode of The Hills. These texts offer a range of reality show examples for how the construction of the “real” is already visible and open to interrogation, not to mention the ways that these discussions of manipulation are part and parcel of audience investment, discussion, and resistance (in particular with the racism scandal unveiled and mainstreamed by Twitter users during #bb15 but visible in banal ways daily on Big Brother live feed, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblrs, blogs, and message boards). A quick peek at the #bb17 hashtag on Twitter will reveal lots of fans talking not only about how CBS shapes narratives for the three hours per week of televised shows, but also the “houseguests” misconceptions about playing to the audience. If so much of the denigration of soap operas and reality television is wrapped up in the projection of a naive and unsavvy feminine audience, a consideration of online discussions and artifacts could complicate and—gasp—maybe even dispel some of the horror at being aligned to Television For Women.

Phil: I’m with Dana. For me, I think the pedagogical value lies, not necessarily in its journalistic expose of how the sausage gets made, but rather in its up-front visualization of the constructedness of the “reality” space. I teach a course called “Multimedia Realisms,” for instance, and I think the pilot at least will be able to serve as a zippy introduction to the labor of manufacturing a documentary aesthetic during the weeks when we discuss Reality TV and its single-camera comedy offspring. The thing I like about it, though, is less in the way it explicitly teaches us about the genre (here’s how we do the talking heads, here’s how the narrative comes together, etc.) than in the way that it frames that mediation visually. For example, I love how many screens this show has constantly zipping in and out of frame—the dailies, the surveillance cameras, even the iPhones—and I look forward to having students literally name and peel away the layers as we move into discussions of texts for which those layers are not so readily visible.

Melissa: There was a moment early on—it’s after Adam cuts Britney—when Quinn walks down a wall tearing down a timeline with pieces like, “Britney hogs Adam at the Ballroom Dance, Britney ruins Pepper’s first kiss with Adam”—she’s making the point that they’ve already structured the entire season (before the second episode!) around the “character” Adam has just cut. Quinn is adamant that—above all other “types”—they must have a villain for the program to work. The wall has other things written on it—scheduled catfights and skinny dipping sessions—and when I first saw this scene, all I could think of was how I can’t wait to use it when I talk about narrative structure in any of my classes—media studies, film or literature-based. In the past, with first-year students, I’ve used the basic structure of Cinderella (and the old Classroom Jedi trick of having them try to name a story that isn’t basically some version of Cinderella)—I think a few screenshots of Quinn’s timeline could do a lot of that same work … while also fulfilling all of the same Cinderella narrative arc-points.

From episode 1.2, Quinn shows how “we built a whole season around Britney,” not accounting for her getting voted off in the first episode.

Next time on the finale of AnTENNA UnREAL: Branding and Race!

Jason Mittell, Middlebury College: Just to launch the conversation, I’m wondering if people can share what brought them to UnREAL, and what assumptions they brought to the series.

I’ll start: I’m certainly not in the target demographic for Lifetime, so I was unaware of the series until I started seeing some of the early strong reviews, specifically pieces by Todd VanDerWerff and Linda Holmes. Then I heard the segment on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and I was intrigued enough to check it out. Part of that was the praise for the program’s execution and “quality,” part was the involvement of Marti Noxon as a producer with a strong track record, but it was mostly because it was about television. I’m a sucker for the meta, so I’m onboard with anything that provide a window into its own medium. Based on that advanced info, I wasn’t surprised that it was great—but I was shocked by how unrelentingly dark and scathing it was, shattering my assumptions of what tone a “Lifetime series” might offer.

Myles McNutt, Old Dominion University: I came to the series knowing about its development, a byproduct of following the trades too closely: there, it was defined by Noxon’s participation and Appleby’s casting, which joined my Twitter feed’s dissection of the news relative to both the talent involved and—if I recall correctly—the similarly premised (but much lighter thematically-speaking) TV Movie I Want To Marry Ryan Banks, later retitled The Reality of Love, which features a post-Alias, pre-movie stardom Bradley Cooper.

But ahead of viewing it, I had a discussion with a reviewer who was somewhat incredulous to the idea that the show being on Lifetime would be a hindrance to viewers, comparing them to AMC before Mad Men in their lack of significant dramatic programming. And while I admired his optimism, Lifetime has spent the past half-decade developing series that actively played into their “Television For Women” branding, tied unequivocally to its Lifetime movies that so welcome parody Lifetime actually aired one. Despite the fact that Lifetime—albeit with an acquired network castoff, The Days And Nights of Molly Dodd—was the first cable channel to earn a lead acting nomination at the Primetime Emmy Awards, and despite the fact they went through the same experimentation phase of sitcoms, dramas, and reality as original cable programming expanded exponentially in the late 2000s, it was all done under the auspices of that “Television for Women” brand, which perhaps explains the way critical discourse has overenunciated its (deserved) praise of the show in an effort to cut through the years of delegitimation.

Melissa Lenos, Donnelly College: I heard about UnREAL pretty quickly through other media studies people and the positive NPR press (as someone who is primarily a film scholar, I don’t tend to follow the TV trades; any scoop I get is from Myles on Twitter). I’d been under the impression that Lifetime was moving in the SyFy direction: sort of embracing the popular association with camp and launching their own Sharknados. Everyone I know talked about watching the Flowers in the Attic adaptation. Very few people I know actually watched it.

I wasn’t sure I was the target audience for UnREAL because I have a very hard time watching dating game shows, but I gave it a shot and fell pretty hard on episode one. I then agreed to continue on this journey for another week.

Kristen Warner, University of Alabama: I saw folks on Twitter talking about it after the first episode aired and thought I would give it a try. And the smart marketing move of releasing the first four episodes all at once bound me to the show fairly quickly. I had misgivings about the series as I have a longstanding mistrust of Marti Noxon (I’ll never forget) but I enjoyed the series she wrote for Bravo Girlfriends Guide to Divorce so I thought it could be equally as interesting.

My assumptions were wholly incorrect. Initially I thought it was some kind of horror anthology series akin to American Horror Story. I was (pleasantly) mistaken.

Phillip Maciak, Louisiana State University: I’d heard about UnREAL via Emily Nussbaum and Willa Paskin’s raves. However, as my television slate was already pretty full with fancy serial dramas and, well, this season of The Bachelorette, I took a pass. But my friend Rachel kept texting me about it, so I tried the first episode. After that intro, I shotgunned the first six episodes pretty quick, loved them, and wrote a fast piece on it for The Los Angeles Review of Books. The social media response I got was unbelievable! So many people wanted to talk about the series. I feel like everyone who watched this show quickly became an evangelist for it, which is what happens, I think, when people are genuinely surprised by something on TV. (If not because it’s wholly new, at least because they didn’t expect it.) So I’m very happy to help spread the good—or ambivalent, but mostly good—news here.

Christine Becker, University of Notre Dame: As with seemingly everything in my life these days, I was lured to UnREAL by my Twitter feed. In particular, I saw multiple TV critics tweeting praise about the show’s high level of insight into reality TV production and representation, and especially as a TV studies teacher always looking for meta fodder to bring into the classroom, I was very intrigued. But that critical buildup turned out to be a detriment for my initial viewing. The show’s early points about the sexism endemic to romance competition shows seemed overly familiar to me (an academic who has, for instance, read both editions of Murray and Ouellette’s Reality TV cover to cover). Even the much-acclaimed ironic overhead shot of Rachel wearing the “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt struck me as pouring it on thick. (And my problems with the production-within-the-production contrivances never fully went away, a point for another section). But then the story and character complexity really started to kick in. I think it was episode four that really grabbed me, where the story threads started to coalesce so that I felt like I was experiencing a cohesive narrative, not just contrived plot points. So I’m not sure if my initial resistance was due more to the show’s clunkiness or my own resistant frame of reference, but maybe that’s indicative of how hard it usually is to parse out one’s initial reactions to any show.

Dana Och, University of Pittsburgh: UnREAL was promoted pretty heavily on ABC Family, so I expected that the show would be a combination of savvy soap opera and pretty people. I was a bit reluctant at first because of the dating show angle: while I adore the early cycle of campy dating shows that aired on VH1 and other networks (Rock of Love, I Love New York, Flavor of Love, Temptation Island), I have little interest in shows that promote ideas of traditional romance (or even the facade of traditional romance). Twitter of course played a role in me deciding to watch, as a few of us decided to watch and I am a sucker for group watching.

An Anti-Heroine?

Jason: The inspiration for this forum came from the robust conversations that we all were having about UnREAL on social media, and no topic generated more heat than framing Rachel as an anti-heroine—specifically the “first female anti-hero” of the modern drama age—with explicit ties to Breaking Bad as a reference point. This was fueled by a Vanity Fair article arguing that Rachel was “TV’s First Pure Female Antihero,” and subsequent interviews with producers where they talk about how the writers search for “Walter White moments” in Rachel’s character.

I’m not particularly invested in arguing about “firsts” or the parameters of being an anti-hero—I am more interested in the framing of the character and how Breaking Bad is used as an inspiration and comparison, issues that I’ve explored in a chapter of my book Complex TV. I do find UnREAL‘s investment in Rachel’s moral choices and dissolution to be in keeping with anti-hero model that dominated one vein of prime time television for the past decade, but it is interesting in how her power and persona is quite different than the typical male anti-hero. Rachel’s “superpower” is her ability to manipulate via empathy, spinning a contestant or colleague to do her bidding by creating an emotional bond, a stark difference from the modes of bullying and belittling more common to male counterpart characters. The results are similar—she destroys lives out of rationalized self-interest, and even admits to effectively killing someone in the finale—but the methods and emotional palette are distinct.

I know that many of my colleagues were “vexed” by this framing and comparison. So what vexes you most?

Kathleen Battles, Oakland University: The set-up of this particular issue already directs answers towards thinking of Rachel in terms of male anti-heroes. The origins question is an important one to a lot of people, myself included, because the show is in many ways a straight up soap opera. I mean this as a compliment. Like many good soap operas, a lot of the narrative energy is not tied to heterosexual coupling, rather coupling becomes the springboard to represent the relationship between women. I also don’t know why it would be striking that a female anti hero would NOT be different than a male one. Men and women (and right now we are speaking primarily of white, heterosexual, men and women) operate under different sets of conditions. To me one of the best parts of of UnREAL is precisely its consideration of the ways that patriarchy shapes the lives of women, from its unrelentingly cynical take on romance to its consideration of workplace politics. But more than that, I find some of the discourse in these reviews troubling as the reviewers themselves seem to want to work hard to like Rachel, like the review that mentioned her “doe eyes” over and over.

The other thing about the anti-hero focus (as the marker of “quality”) is that it ignores the other terrific character, Quinn. To my mind, Quinn is one of my favorite television characters in a long while. Her talents, command of her world, intelligence, and cynicism make her a force to be reckoned with. I loved every minute she was on screen, and I suspect I’m not the only one. #quinning

Melissa: Kathleen, by the time the finale rolled around, Quinn was my favorite part of the show. And I agree that the anti-hero argument is beside the point—for me mostly because the writers went out of their way to drive home that Rachel is a complex character who is (among other characteristics) struggling with possible (likely?) mental illness. By the end of episode nine I felt guilty for my level of frustration with her—that she simply seemed to be bouncing back and forth between Jeremy and Adam and unable to do anything on her own—or in her own self-interest. That tension as a viewer—for me—was heavily dependent on the focus on Rachel’s mental health, something that the Vanity Fair article, if I remember correctly, doesn’t even mention. (Although they do mention the “doe eyes” at least once.) If Rachel’s hyper-empathy and ability to manipulate people are—as her terrifying mother claims—actually part of an illness, can we really tag her behavior as “anti-hero”? Even if she seems to be getting pleasure from her destructive influence? Or is she a character who suffers, and then causes suffering and feels incredible guilt for what she’s done? She’s so very well-written.

Jason: Melissa, I’ll jump in here just to say that mental illness doesn’t disqualify a character from being an anti-hero—after all, the current wave of prime time anti-hero dramas was launched by The Sopranos, whose concept was defined as “gangster in therapy.” Which of the prominent TV anti-heroes couldn’t be diagnosed with some sort of mental illness?

Melissa: Sure, Jason, I can see that. But my question is something like, “do we have a responsibility to reconsider a character’s agency when writers pointedly foreground serious mental illness?” And I’m sure someone’s already written something very brilliant on this idea that I should go look up. Something I am very interested in, though, that the Vanity Fair article mentions, is the move away from the focus on “feminine likeability.” But UnREAL feels more like that glorious Amy Poehler “I don’t fucking care if you like it” moment than anything to do with Lena Dunham.

Kristen: I’m the one who was vexed by the anti-hero discourse emerging about this show. I get why the comparisons are there and it makes sense. But it vexes me because 1) the whiteness of anti-heroness (the Vanity Fair article suggests that Empire‘s Cookie Lyons and Scandal‘s Olivia Pope can’t be anti-heroines because they’re really heroes fighting men. HAAA. Christ. Deliver us.) and 2) if you’re going to make an anti-heroine for WOMEN why on earth would you parallel it to characteristics of the anti-hero placed on a man?! Those comparisons assume the author is only familiar with those examples when, in fact, we have tons of prime time and daytime soap characters who embody the essence (even at a “proto” level) of women we love to hate who do what they do because they get off on causing havoc and yet also have feelings and want love and also to destroy everyone who has hurt them and maybe possesses mommy/daddy/social issues. For example, during a Twitter conversation, some were asking for early analogs of Rachel and the first person who popped in my head was All My Children‘s Kendall Hart aka Erica Kane’s illegitimate daughter (the child she conceived after being raped and subsequently giving up for adoption). While Appleby’s character certainly has nuances and tonal shifts that strongly differ from Sarah Michelle Gellar’s daytime character, I would argue that she still serves as part of the “proto” anti-heroine genealogy that this newest descendant benefits from. I point that example out because it is absolutely absurd that an entire genre is continually left out of the conversation and reinforces that television criticism always needs to legitimate these kinds of texts as “masculine” and “non-histrionically, soapy.”

Which brings me to this point: I feel like the analysis of UnREAL is going to push us all into our separate camps like The Killing did but in reverse. For me The Killing felt like a feminine text–it had the ambience and affect of what soap tries to generate (maybe unconsciously; maybe unintentionally) with something of an antiheroine in its lead (and as its showrunner). While UnREAL placing itself in the genealogy of Breaking Bad is a smart self-fashioning auteuristic tactic in this contemporary era where awards and critical praise demand such lineage, the core of the series is female melodrama AND fantasy. As I said elsewhere in response to this lineage thing: Daytime soap is to many who do TV criticism as the grandchild of a stereotypical downtrodden prostitute. The grandchild is cool; the grandma? Not so much. Popular TV criticism says, “oh that child looks just like his respectable on the up and up granddaddy.” But that baby looks (and acts) like his grandma too. It’s crude but it is the best metaphor I can draw to describe how legitimation and bastardization work. Lastly, I would submit that female audiences who recognize feminine texts in “wolf’s clothing” KNOW how to root for a lead despite everything that suggests they shouldn’t. Female audiences know how to deal with Rachel AND Quinn and it’s certainly not biologically inherent knowledge. On the contrary, it had to have been a knowledge gleaned from texts they’ve seen before and I think it most certainly is that.

Phillip: I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that that Vanity Fair piece is less about anti-heroines and more about anxiety! The anti-heroine discourse as it’s presented in Vanity Fair piece strikes me as really condescending for a few of reasons. The first is the one Kristen rightly points to here: the rhetorical gymnastics the writer goes through in order to disqualify legions of previous anti-heroines kind of enacts the absurdity of its own critical project. Why do we need to immediately find this show’s precise position in the line of succession from Tony Soprano to Arya Stark? All hail her grace Rachel Goldberg, first of her name—long may she reign!

The second is that it’s such a bald attempt to legitimize a show that doesn’t especially need legitimizing. I understand the impetus on the part of the showrunners to invoke Breaking Bad as a structural model—though I think the better comparisons are Damages and Mad Men—but, as this brief conversation has already shown, there are many more interesting ways to talk about this show than as a Lady-Ghostbusters version of Breaking Bad. To me, the Vanity Fair essay was very similar to a piece in The Atlantic called, I’m not kidding, “How Lifetime’s UnREAL Turned The Bachelor Into Literature.” (The TV-Is-The-New-Novel Discourse is Dead; Long Live TV-Is-The-New-Novel!) The author, Megan Garber, writes, “It does, instead, what the best literature does: It leaves itself open to interpretation and argument. It asks its audience to think, and analyze, and come to their own conclusions. It makes a point of its own ambiguity.” Okay, yes, that’s what the best literature does, but isn’t it also what the best TV does, what the best cinema does, what the best art does? These pieces both seem gripped by the same high-culture/low-culture panic. The invocation of the novel or the anti-hero serves less as substantive critical lens than as permission to write in praise of a show about trashy Reality TV broadcast on the trashy Lifetime Network.

Christine: I’ve seen multiple reactions along the lines of “Who knew I’d ever like something on Lifetime?” or “I’m a guy actually watching a Lifetime show!” Not to unnecessarily muddy the waters here, but it struck me as similar to when someone tweets a link to a smart news piece on BuzzFeed and feels compelled to express surprise that it’s on BuzzFeed and is not a listicle, as if those formats can’t co-exist on one platform. As if newspapers never had comics and as if comics can’t be as profoundly gratifying as something on the front page. But here, of course, it’s the assumption that “television for women” can’t possibly be insightful and must by definition be a guilty pleasure that is only apologetically enjoyed. Though I fully grant the reservations expressed, I can live with the Walter White comparisons, because the creator herself invited it and at least it’s staying within the realm of TV. But the “It’s ambiguous so it’s like literature!” take makes me want to cordially invite that writer to take my History of TV class.

Kristen: Just jumping in here to tag Chris’s point: Lifetime viewers well acquainted with the network and all of its content will be quick to remind you that their “bad women” films are some of the most highly popular programming. How many times have some of us watched Meredith Baxter play Betty Broderick (PLEASE read the comments) and felt like, “I mean … I don’t agree what she did was right but…she kinda had a point.” All I’m saying: The anti-heroine has a LONG history … on Lifetime.

Dana: And this is key to why the Walter White comparison actually does drive me up the wall. Yes, I get why the creator invokes it as legitimation, but that doesn’t mean that we have to also take it up. Walter White is interesting to me for the way that he is introduced in a manner that invites the viewer to assume the best about him: he is a normal guy with a good heart who is forced into unlawful activities due to circumstances beyond his control. Walter White is interesting, that is, for the way that the viewer is manipulated over the seasons to eventually realize that he is much more a villain. Our own assumptions about white male leads (and maybe even patriarchy) are revealed. Now, with Rachel, we are told right off the bat that she is unstable, ruthless, and unethical. And we can roll with that without having to be manipulated (a bit more like Tony Soprano than Walter White considering the habituation of generic structures and types) because whether it is Kendall, Erika, Dorian, Carly, or Alexis—let alone Brenda, Valerie, Amanda, Blair, Alison, Katherine, or Sutter—we fully expect a female character with dimensions, motivations, and the ability to exist as more than just a projection of male desire. The reading frames are already there, so the show can simply signal them and move on.

Jason: I agree with most of what everyone says here about legitimation, but to return to my initial prompt on this issue, I’m curious if others find the “hook” of the show to be framed around Rachel’s morality. One thing I find so compelling is to watch her do things she knows are wrong politically and ethically, but she convinces herself that she has no choice so she rationalizes her behaviors in an assortment of ways. As the season progresses, she becomes more emotionally invested in the show and her role in it, letting go of the rationalizations and just embracing her power to ruin people for fun and profit. Meanwhile, Quinn is the embodiment of Ayn Randian self-interest (but in a fun way, rather than Rand’s own leaden drama), setting up an ethical pole that Rachel wants to distance herself from, but keeps moving toward. This moral dance, which is obviously much more than just the “Breaking Bad but with a lady!” frame, is what kept me rapt throughout the season. And, since I don’t know many of the examples of precedents y’all have mentioned, this figuration of the feminist reluctantly working to uphold the worst of patriarchy seems innovative to me. Do those precedents similarly rationalize their knowing misdeeds as being for the greater feminist good?

Christine: I see that too, and I particularly found the Faith hometown visit episode to be a really interesting pivot point in the season in that regard. (Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also right when I started to get consumed by the narrative, not just the show’s meta elements.) Rachel seems at her most altruistic there, albeit utilizing her usual manipulative skills, but then she gets trumped by the production’s usual larger dark forces. It seemed like a key turning point in her emotional relationship to the show and the other producers.

Kathleen: I see the point about the “dance,” but it’s a familiar one to some viewers. Since the 80s scholars have noted that soap opera viewers prefer their villainesses to other female characters. As Kristen noted, Lifetime viewers (myself included) will prefer the “bad girl” movies. If anything, industrially speaking, Lifetime is already positioned as “darker” than its current actual competitor, the Hallmark Channel (I get that’s not how any of this is being positioned in the trades, as Lifetime wants its reputation stock to rise. But from a viewer perspective, they offer similar kinds of programming with very different tones). The relationship between Quinn and Rachel is a complex one, but I wouldn’t put it in such stark moral terms or such polarized terms. I think the season starts that way, but I think as we see Rachel make increasingly bad decisions, we also see Quinn increasingly humanized. In other words, I enjoyed the dance between the characters, but not as something particularly innovative, but as something very well done in the case of this show.

Next time on AnTENNA UnREAL: Romance and Pedagogy!

This is especially true of a show like Project Runway, which in recent years has seemingly been on every time you turn around. Thanks to the series’ forced hiatus as a result of lawsuits regarding its move to Lifetime, Runway aired three seasons – 49 episodes in total – in just 14 months between August 2009 and October 2010. This was exaggerated by the sixth season being “on the shelf” for a lengthy period, and the seventh season being rushed to counteract poor viewer response to the franchise’s Lifetime debut, but the series’ omnipresence is demonstrative of general trends within the genre (if in an exaggerated form).

However, the same period has been marked by the absence of two of the series’ most prominent international spinoffs: both Project Runway Australia (2008-Present) and Project Runway Canada (2007-2009) debuted in their respective countries to relative success, earning second seasons and, in the case of the Canadian version, even moving from a niche cable outlet to a national network. Each show largely followed the formula of the American series, with a famous fashion model host (Kristy Hinze in Australia, Iman in Canada), a fashion industry mentor, and a collection of celebrity guests and judgmental observers to complete the package.

The basic format of the series may have remained intact when the show made its way to other countries, but the scheduling model has been lost in translation. Both the Australian and Canadian series aired only one season per year, and both dealt with substantial hiatuses: this is particularly true for the Australian series, which has been off the air for nearly two years. While America’s love affair with reality television has had international ramifications when formats like Project Runway which originated in the U.S. are spread to countries around the world, the way in which the series are scheduled seems to have been considerably less influential internationally.

Some of this certainly has to do with simple industrial realities. American cable networks have the luxury of appealing to niche audiences, with networks like Bravo and Lifetime able to position shows like Project Runway as signature series designed to deliver female viewers to their advertisers. International producers, meanwhile, are working with less industrial infrastructure in general, and most likely less in the way of targeted cable networks that seem a fit for narrowcast reality programming as well. They simply don’t have the resources to schedule two seasons in a single year, which makes emulating the American schedule more challenging.

However, I find myself curious if there are more cultural reasons for the vast proliferation gap between Project Runway and its international adaptations. If we look at the vast array of versions, the longest-running has been the United Kingdom’s Project Catwalk, which lasted three seasons from 2006-2008. While I haven’t seen the series, I do wonder whether its relative longevity stems from the prominence of London as one of the world’s fashion capitals, at least relative to Melbourne or Toronto. Even within the American series, location and setting seem to play a prominent role: viewers and critics alike panned the series’ move to Los Angeles in Season Six, prompting Lifetime to promote the return to New York as the defining feature of the seventh season. Perhaps the same principle applies internationally, and certain locations can only sustain a couple of seasons before fading away into local pop culture history.

And yet, some part of me wants to believe that this may be a purposeful choice on the part of international producers. While these changes are perhaps facilitated by concerns over financial commitments and cultural limitations, there seem to be creative benefits to this scheduling model. Personally, despite having seen countless seasons of the American series beforehand, both the Canadian and Australian versions felt remarkably novel. The format was more or less the same, but the wait between seasons made their introductions more eventful, and their conclusions more effectively bittersweet. The return of the American series feels like routine, but is reality television not (like television in general) more effective – and affecting – when we anticipate its return with baited breath?

With a new host secured, Project Runway Australia will return for its overdue third season later this year (although on a new network). In an era where the American version has shifted to overstuffed 90-minute episodes and barely takes a breath before plunging into a new season of “making it work,” there is something wonderfully refreshing about the notion of Project Runway being a scarce commodity; it’s too bad, then, that most American viewers rarely get to experience such a feeling.

For the past three seasons, Army Wives has projected its white, privileged image—with an abundance of white chicks and officers and a dearth of minorities and enlisted men.  It has also done a fine job of minimizing the apparent threat to or discomfort of the troops/families who have been manning the two American wars for nearly a decade.  Deployments run short.  Telephone conversations are extremely easy to come by.  Special Ops soldiers are on and off of the base (and seemingly home more often than long-haul truckers).  Money might be a little tight, but no big deal.  Child care is never an issue.  Officers’ wives and enlisted men’s wives just rally around each other, become best buds, and help each other out in all circumstances (protocol be damned).   For the most part, images of trauma—emotional or physical—have been done away with quickly (PTSD = a one or two week problem, tortured prisoners aren’t really in that bad of shape, injuries are minor and really just mean that soldiers get to come home sooner, so no worries).  Anything really unfortunate on the show will likely happen to someone who is not a regular and might very likely be an ethnic minority.  For the first three seasons, main characters (constantly deployed) have been spared any extreme trauma.  Its flag waving, soap opera, Little Mary Sunshine quality makes it a fascinating fictionalization of today’s international conflicts and a polar opposite to Stephen Bochco’s short-lived, violent, politically ambivalent Over There.

I have found these narrative patterns somewhat disconcerting (though predictable).  What I find most interesting about Lifetime’s development of the show both on and offline is their use of non-diegetic cast appearances at military spaces (e.g., online PR spots with cast members at VA hospitals, deployment ceremonies, Red Cross events, etc.), integration of country music stars into storylines (e.g. Wynonna, Shelby Lynne, Jack Ingram), giveaway hookups with NASCAR, Avon, and Big Lots, and online spaces developed specifically to bring together real-life army wives.  The show/network seems to illustrate nicely the opportunities available to today’s television bigwigs as they try to hawk their wares.  While the show seems to strongly avoid any gleam of the reality of wartime, the folks at Lifetime are doing a fine job using today’s online opportunities to make an appearance of class diversity and a concern for military families and their realities.  I find this to be one more fascinating example of the ways in which media convergence encourages multiple divergent readings and a widened sense of marketability.  That said, I admit this season—which ends next weekend, I believe—has offered a little more excitement, with divorce (although so far, little concern for money woes and the army wife being booted off of the post) and a traumatic brain injury for one of the main characters (of course the woman).  Next week almost everyone will be shipping off to Afghanistan for a year.  I’ll be waiting excitedly to see how the 2011 army wives deal with their spouses’ absences (and might start a pool regarding how long it takes the husbands to really come home.  Perhaps they are counting on Obama decreasing troop levels to shake up deployments and bring the men back into the main narrative.).