When attorney-on-the-partner-track Julia Braverman-Graham of Parenthood quit her job, I was upset, but patient. Having adopted a 10-year-old boy, Julia found her demanding job did not allow her to mother the lonely boy as she felt necessary. As the weeks have passed, however, and as Julia has had zero reaction to quitting the legal career she spent years building, I’ve begun to wonder where this storyline is headed.  So far, it is headed nowhere, at least in terms of a broader commentary on the difficulty of balancing home and family. I continue to wait because the show enjoyed only a short season and because I have confidence in Parenthood in the long run.

But Julia was the least of my problems.

Mindy Kaling brought her new show to Fox last fall, and I have been continually stymied by her odd embrace of a retrograde romantic ideal. Continually privileging an exploration of Kaling’s character’s personality quirks over her professional struggles as an OB-GYN, The Mindy Project often defies its audience to connect with the character. More problematic is the program’s broader gender politics.  In one episode, for example, Mindy “won” a battle of the sexes by forcing her co-worker to give her a breast exam.  In another episode, Dr. Mindy stormed into the office of two (male) midwives, accused them of being amateurs, forced them to call their patients “clients,” and reminded all pregnant women in the office that unless they were 22 and thin, they likely would have complications in labor requiring the assistance of a real MD. I simply can’t figure out what I should do with this program’s seemingly illiberal representations (and neither can Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress).

But nothing—nothing—has exceeded my disappointment more than the transformation of Up All Night.  No, I’m not referring to its forthcoming transformation from single- to multi-camera; instead, I want to discuss its two (dramatic) upheavals prior to this forthcoming change. I started watching Up All Night because its premise featured a female television producer, Reagan, returning to work after the birth of her first child, while her lawyer husband, Chris, quit his job to stay home with the baby. A central tension of the show was Reagan’s struggles as a working mother–she struggled not so much with her decision to work but rather with the fact that her husband was developing a unique bond with the baby.  Up All Night‘s subversion of the typical expectation that a mother’s love predominates fascinated me, and it made for bold television.[1]

Half way into the first season, Up All Night‘s conceit dramatically altered. Reagan learned that the talk show she produced had been purchased by a new (female) boss. For a brief moment, it seemed an even more powerful woman had arrived on set to inspire talk show host Ava and producer Reagan to new professional heights. This, however, was a red herring, as the female boss immediately left town and left in charge a male show runner. His relationship with Ava and Reagan was immediately adversarial and contentious.  This shift—in plot and tone—was dramatic. It detracted not only from the focus on Reagan and her husband, but it also suggested that the female power dynamic of Reagan and her partner Ava required the insertion of a male antagonist for proper drama.

This change, too, was short lived, for in the second season of Up All Night, Ava and Reagan’s talk show was canceled entirely. So long, every single character involved with the talk show. So long, Reagan as mother working outside the home.  Now, Chris is starting a new business, while Reagan is developing a new life as a stay-at-home mother.[2] I do not begrudge a new program struggling to find its way, but I absolutely question the political shifts evident in this ratings-challenged series—a suggestion that network executives worry Americans prefer a traditional division of gendered labor on their TV.

Of course, I may be overreacting, and these are only three programs among many.  Yet between Mindy’s odd conservatism and the rejection of a balanced life of work and home by Reagan and Parenthood’s Julia, I’m wondering where a feminist can go on network television to find a satisfying depiction of the genuine struggles of contemporary women who work, who mother, who partner, and who develop individual goals, dreams, and values.

[2] I should also note that this storytelling choice has reeked of privilege, as the characters have suffered no seeming financial anxiety or duress.

This time of year is always particularly interesting for me since I have no real interest in the holiday: I don’t particularly like candy, I’ve never been a fan of suspense- or fear-driven activities, and since it doubles as my older brother’s birthday it was always “his” holiday. And yet I find Halloween episodes of television fascinating because of the unique opportunities available to writers and producers.

Take, for example, this week’s Halloween-themed Modern Family: in “Halloween,” the curmudgeonly patriarch ends up dressed as a gargoyle, while the rebellious teenage girl starts off with a “naughty cat” costume – both costumes are aggressively on the nose, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s meant to be a moment of recognition, where we realize that Jay really is a like a gargoyle and Haley would dress up as a naughty cat. The show isn’t interested in the transgressive nature of Halloween costumes, as evidenced by the lack of connection between the episode’s costumes and the conflict between Jay and Gloria in regards to her accent; instead, the show is interested in the idea that it’s fun to see the characters the audience loves dressed up in extremely elaborate Halloween costumes, a simple pleasure and little more.

Although many Halloween episodes boil down to this sort of narrative, what makes the holiday so interesting is its versatility. It operates more or less independent of class: Modern Family’s characters are considerably wealthy (just look at the quality of their costumes), but the blue collar family on Raising Hope is also able to take part in Halloween festivities in their own way. It also works across all demographics: the cast of Friends or How I Met Your Mother aren’t going to go trick-or-treating, but between being a kid and having kids there is a stage where Halloween is an excuse to party. The holiday is similarly versatile in terms of situation, as it is just as relevant to a workplace environment or educational setting (like tonight’s episodes of The Office and Community) as it is within a more domestic space.

However, the quality I think creators find most appealing about Halloween is that it blurs the line between fantasy and reality. It gives The Simpsons the license to abandon its normal structure for the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes, which are sort of the cornucopia of Halloween television tropes: casting the show’s characters within famous works like The Shining, Nightmare on Elm Street, or The Fly is similar to putting characters into costume (which also happens on occasion), and within the series’ twenty-one specials (the latest of which airs next Sunday) the show has tackled the holiday from almost every imaginable angle. Halloween is associated with so many gruesome and compelling ideas that it seems as if this trend will never run out of ways to represent the holiday.

To my surprise, though, there is some room for innovation in how these these elements of fantasy are used to a show’s advantage. Last week, Parenthood built its Halloween episode around Max, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. Having been sheltered from the holiday by his concerned parents, Max’s determination to take part results in a dissection of the Halloween experience: his mother has him practice trick-or-treating with his sister, they ask neighbors to replace candles with glow sticks (since Max is afraid of fire), and they plan out a route to avoid the elaborate haunted house in their area. And yet, after discovering that his younger cousins are willing to face their fears, Max insists on going to the haunted house’s door.

It’s a great scene because it uses the same tools as one would expect from a horror film: time seems to slow down, Max’s senses become highly active, the camera takes on his point of view, and his family waits anxiously as if they have just sent Max into an actual haunted house. And yet, the horror dissipates: Max screams, but of joy rather than terror. While the episode has the costumes we expect (including a bit of meta-humor in Mae Whitman, late of Arrested Development, wearing a Banana costume), it is less interested in humor of recognition and more interested in showing us a perspective on the holiday that we have likely never seen before, but through the use of a set of fantastical tropes we come to expect from the holiday.

This is a particularly populated year for Halloween episodes: since last year’s success stories mostly avoided the holiday (outside of Community, which is doing it twice), this is the first year for full-on Halloween episodes for Modern Family, Cougar Town, The Middle and Parenthood, and news shows like Raising Hope, Better with You, and Outsourced are jumping right in. It’s an ideal test case for the effect on ratings and critical success of such episodes (ABC’s Wednesday comedy block was up sharply, for example), so I am curious whether anyone else has felt tricked or treated by this year’s crop of ghoulish takes on your favorite (or potentially least favorite) shows.

As I tell my students as I try to lead them to critical media consumption, my goal is not to make them dislike their pleasures, but to be able to recognize the operation of ideology amidst the candy-coated fun. Thus my pleasure in this show often runs up against its occasional foray into politically-charged representational terrain as gender politics are somewhat an inevitability (perhaps someone else can raise the series’ handling of race and interracial parenthood). I’ve particularly found myself holding my breath as the series tiptoes through the minefield of questions of women and work.

On the surface, legal eagle Julia and her stay-at-home husband may seem the central character pair for these topics, but the series notably offers a range of strategies, choices, and takes on motherhood and work. To the series’ credit, it often “goes there”—into those contentious waters of clearly gendered dilemmas about women’s work, motherhood, and guilt that were a mainstay of a lot of 1980s and 1990s drama. I also get the sense the writers know the complexity of the politics—complexity that most recent depictions of adult women have chosen to simply avoid by uniformly writing characters with highly professionalized careers—but hold my breath because charting a way through remains unclear, whether for television characters or in conversations with moms at the park. Thus, while there have been some missteps this season (why couldn’t Adam have not just supported the idea of Christina going back to work, but pushed back at Christina’s assessment that her children needed her too much “right now” in the final seconds of an episode that did an otherwise brilliant job of depicting the challenges women face re-entering the work force or feeling like their work in the home matters?), I credit the series with providing viewers with a stay-at-home mom and a mom who is trying to find her calling instead of staying in the safe zone of personally troubled but professionally successful women that are have been the new norm.

In many ways, Julia is the prototypic late 20^th century female character as a tough, motivated lawyer who is the sole breadwinner for her husband and grade-school-aged daughter. Yet she is also a generation younger than the women who embodied these dilemmas in the past—instead she grew up appreciating and assuming the benefits of Title IX and gender equity. The fact that the series really hasn’t devoted plot time to debating its stay-at-home father is notable for its normalization. I appreciate that the series doesn’t depict this role reversal as easy; parenthood, in any configuration, isn’t. The multi-generational aspect of the show also offers rich context, with family patriarch Zeke ‘s advice that Crosby tell his girlfriend to give up an out-of-state opportunity wisely going unheeded and no doubt setting up a central problematic for next season.

[A]s much as I love her, Lauren Graham was miscast.  / After 7 yrs. as Lorelai, it was just too much. Couldn’t get past it in the pilot; swear I heard Sam Phillips’ “la la las”

In a recent Twitter exchange, Derek Kompare and I were discussing the new NBC series Parenthood, and while there were several issues we disagreed on, his ultimate argument was incredibly visceral and personal: Lauren Graham didn’t work for him as a single mom in her thirties with teenage kid(s) who’s imploring her parents for help. Or rather, it seemed that for him Lauren Graham was too much Lorelai Gilmore to fully inhabit this new role – a role not fully alike, but ultimately too close.

Among actors, character bleed usually references the way days and weeks of playing a character can be difficult to shed right away. Method acting, in particular, is often caricatured as a full immersion that extends into the actor’s real life. I want to think of character bleed not as a function of the actor but rather as a function of our reception. In other words, character bleed is the aspects of a character that we as viewers bring to the text.

In a comment discussion about Treme here in Antenna, one of the most interesting things to me was the way we all brought our different viewer expectations and contexts to the show and to a degree expected others to have similar associations. So while I might realize that my interlocutors didn’t go to school in New Orleans and thus have a different sense of the city, it was much more difficult to talk about what watching Treme against The Wire brought to the text for every one of us. It’s not just that audience reception is multiply complex but that the same intertexts can create fundamentally different responses.

Likewise, seeing Graham as Sarah Braverman evokes for both Derek and myself her role of Lorelai, but whereas I emotionally view Sarah as maybe a little snarkier and wittier than she’s written in the show, for Derek the roles crash. The bleedover breaks the illusion, or maybe it’s simply snarky thirtyish mom with teenager overload.

As a fan scholar who is interested in media fandom and fan works, I’m all too familiar with this readerly/viewerly character bleed. Fans follow actors to new shows and often the fannish characterizations are indebted to earlier roles. Sometimes this is done explicitly in truly marvelous and imaginative narratives. Supernatural’s John Winchester here can also be engaged to Grey’s Anatomy’s Izzy Stevenson, since Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays both roles. Amnesia and undercover police procedures can explain how The Professional’s Ray Doyle is indeed the same character as The Chief’s Chief Constable Alan Cade, both played by Martin Shaw. And Stargate Atlantis’s John Sheppard can have a past that includes being Murphy Brown’s much younger lover of one episode or that connect him to his FBI past in the TV movie Thoughtcrimes (all three characters played by Joe Flanigan).

But more interesting are actually the implicit and possibly unconscious bleedovers where characters get written with particular habits that may indeed be attributable to another character. If Ray Kowalski in Due South fan fiction smokes a lot, I lay that mostly at the feet of Callum Keith Rennie’s role of burnt out punk rock star in Hard Core Logo. Likewise, SG-1’s Jack O’Neill is often characterized at surprisingly adept at McGyvering his way out of situations, which may very well be the result of both roles being played by Richard Dean Anderson. The actors themselves may bleed over into their characters’ fannish representations as in the multiple present day Merlin AUs in which Merlin is written as a vegetarian, one would assume because Colin Morgan is.

Whereas these character bleeds are writ large via collective community assumptions, all of us certainly have these moments where our previous encounters with the actors and the characters they have embodied influences our affective responses. At heart then remains the question as to how much of a character is steeped in the writers, the actors, and how much we bring to it as viewers.