TV Studies 2024

By Kate Ward

Sex and the City was huge. It influenced a generation of women to move to Manhattan, attempt to order cosmopolitans at their local college bar, and debate with their friends which of them got to be Carrie. As I have begun to watch the show in the past few weeks I’ve wondered: Can I like this show and also think it’s a little problematic? I will be using Stuart Hall’s dominant/oppositional/negotiated framework to parse through the public and my reaction to this cult classic.

A dominant reading could be: This is a comical, yet heartfelt show about 4 friends navigating the romantic and sexual culture of late 90s/early 2000s Manhattan. It is realistic about the experiences of 30-something, professional metropolitan women in the dating scene.

An oppositional reading may be: This show is not funny or heart-warming. This is not at all representative of the romantic or sexual lives of 30-something women, disempowers them, and reinforces sexual stigma and stereotypes. This show centers on the heterosexual, cis, white, and wealthy experience while ignoring or disrespecting the experiences of LGBTQ+ people and people of color.

I have a more negotiated reading of the show where I pull from both an oppositional and a dominant reading. I think I skew closer to the dominant side as I share many traits with the main characters (I am also an adult white woman with deluded ideas about romance, stupid things to say, and a love for a cosmopolitan cocktail). I also appreciate how Sex and the City paved the way for other shows representing women in control of their sexual lives and health. It shows “older”¹ women having exciting and fun sex, as well as fulfilling careers and female friendships.

I do think that my most oppositional stance to the show is how it portrays LGBTQ+ people, working-class people, and people of color. But as those criticisms are fairly documented in literature about this show, I will instead unpack how it reinforces sexual stigma and gender roles.

Although I can sometimes relate to the dialogue between the women (as my roommate said, I am clearly a Charlotte), I think some of how they talk about sex, sexuality, and gender are very dated. The Sex and the City women often sit around brunch on weekends for a gab-sesh. It is not uncommon for these gab-seshes to contain dialogue that reinforces sexual stigma or gender roles like, “She’ll never find a husband if she keeps sleeping around” or “I don’t know why he can’t just be a man about it”. These are not exact quotes from the show but are fairly similar to real conversations on it. I would not say that every conversation goes down this conservative/problematic path but it only takes one every few episodes to sour my feelings for the characters.

I will definitely keep watching Sex and the City to see how the “will they/won’t they”² of Carrie and Mr. Big turns out, but not without a serious cringe here and there.

1. these women are not actually old, but considered old for tv ↩︎
2. I wish they wouldn’t already ↩︎

Written by Florence Basile

Growing up, I always knew how to avoid watching ads on cable: just letting them run while going about my business, muting the TV, or (and this is the best option) pausing and then trying to press play right when it started again. The other day I was watching Only Murders in the Building on Hulu, to which I have the lowest subscription possible and therefore commercial breaks are part of the bargain (basically a modern version of cable), and found that someone ratted us out! No longer can I avoid watching commercials by pausing and skipping ahead. Instead, I’m forced to sit through them. But hey, we all know that by this point I’m too hooked to stop watching. I guess I’ll just go with the flow…

Let’s just say that I wanted to watch the newest episode of season 46 of Survivor. Let’s also say that I wanted a blast from the past where my whole family gathers around the TV at 7pm to watch it live on the broadcast network CBS. If my Television Studies Seminar class counts as my family, then I did just that. Even more so, because I watched an approximately 60 minute show in 90 minutes. Thank you commercials!

Consumers are often oblivious to the interaction occurring between their show and the array of “random” commercials. I’ve decided to narrow down what I observed while watching CBS to a 20 minute segment that aired from 7:57pm to 8:17pm. Of that 20 minutes, I watched 11 minutes of Survivor and 9 minutes of commercials. However, this came as no surprise to me. I was an hour into the program and hooked – CBS showrunners simply took advantage of that. Even with the abundance of commercials, 19 to be exact, I had to know what would happen next on Survivor.

From 7:57pm to 8:02pm, I watched 5 minutes of drama unfold. The purple team, winner of that episode’s challenge, discussed who they wanted to vote off of the show – MORIAH or VENUS?! At one point, a banner appeared advertising CBS’s streaming of the CMT Music Awards; there had been an advertisement regarding this in the previous commercial break. It didn’t appear at a random moment in the episode, but when the suspense was at its peak, when CBS knew I was at the edge of my seat.

Then, commercials returned from 8:02pm to 8:06pm. In addition to a Chewy, Progressive, and Twizzler commercial, I was reminded that CBS’s The Amazing Race was coming up next and that CBS had new episodes of Elsbeth being aired the next day. Both CBS trailers were televised last when it was most likely that viewers would be returning to their seats before Survivor began again.

I watched 6 more minutes of Survivor, with tensions rising as it came time for tribal council night, until another commercial break came on. I noticed that the target age group of the advertisements widely ranged just as the show Survivor’s does. Several aired, some for medications and others for dog food or insurance. Halo on Paramount+, a platform I later learned is owned by CBS, was promoted through a trailer. Just as the CMT Music Awards banner was displayed during the show, the Survivor industry advertised their show’s new virtual reality game during the commercials. Towards the end, CBS showed trailers for what they’d be streaming in the future such as Finding MN, Fire Country, a Billy Joel concert, and Elsbeth. This was the second time that Fire Country was being advertised and I noticed that it was a quick snippet compared to the first. In fact, I found that with all the shows CBS needed to promote, the full-length trailers were shown in the first few commercial breaks when everything was still fresh for the viewer (perhaps when they didn’t need a bathroom break quite yet). The following would be shorter, acting as a reminder.

For better or for worse, commercials create a different kind of viewer experience. The experience is not random, of course, but has a thoroughly, curated flow. Even the reality TV-show Survivor is not 100% reality with a selection of shots and angles meticulously put together to evoke certain emotions in the audience. With advertisements placed throughout and within, CBS hopes that a consumer will buy a pack of twizzlers and watch an episode of Elsbeth or Fire Country afterwards. I mean… I’m in!

By Yeseo Jeon

Love Island USA Season 3 is a reality TV show premiered on CBS on July 7, 2021. The show captures single men and women spending time together in a luxury villa in Hawaii as they try to find love. During their time, the islanders are presented with challenges and games to test their compatibilities with one another. The overall winning couple win a grand total of $100,000 and leave the island together.

Stuart Hall notes three hypothetical positions from which decodings of television can occur: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional narratives. Analyzing the three narratives for Love Island USA Season 3 can allow us to understand how the show functions and interacts with its audience.

First, a dominant position of decoding would encompass the decode of formal and ideological concepts with the encoder’s intent. In the case of Love Island, a viewer may understand that the show is about single men and women trying to find true love as they overcome challenges and games together. The viewer would also understand the entertainment that lies in the psychological and social dynamics on the island and relate to the reflections of real life scenarios in a more intensified setting. For example, the audience would recognize the show’s exploration of intimacy, cheating, compatibility, communication issues, alliances, and relationships. When Cashay is heartbroken over Cinco’s inability to choose between Trina and her throughout the show, the viewer feels empathy for her, upset about Cinco’s lack of commitment.

For an oppositional narrative, viewers may interpret the show in a way that challenges or opposes these dominant readings. The audience may understand the connotations of the show, but decode the message in a contrary way. For instance, many viewers criticize Love Island’s heteronormative focus and lack of inclusivity as well as its way of perpetuating sexual double standards. Audience members with a lack of similar perspectives and life experiences as the show producers may respond in an oppositional manner to the show, finding it disturbing and not relatable.

Finally, a negotiated position would be a way of decoding somewhere in the middle of these two ways of reading. While Love Island is a popular show loved by many, it has also understandably been received with much backlash. Many viewers may find it entertaining to watch due to the show’s psychological and suspenseful catches, but may also find some points disturbing and problematic.

I recently found out about Netflix’s TV adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley through a friend, and, being a huge fan of the original film adaptation starring Jude Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philipp Seymour Hoffman, I dug my computer out of my backpack and began watching. Of course, adapting a book into a movie into a limited series for Netflix comes with its challenges, the most obvious being the stretching or squishing of a narrative to fit the roughly 10 hours of screentime. However, what caught my eye first was the choice to shoot in black and white, dating the narrative far more effectively than the mise-en-scene in the film did.

This eye for more historical detail shows in some of the other choices made by Netflix’s writers and crew. I wanted to pay particular attention to how the queer subject matter was treated, and in the second episode I was treated to a change that called upon my ability to distinguish between my affect in the moment and the ideological or aesthetic evaluations I would make about the show. The character of Freddie, originally portrayed by Philipp Seymour Hoffman as an American ex-pat whose boisterous personality matched his expensive taste and snooty attitude, is now cast as a local Italian woman whose gender expression more closely reflects the queer life in Europe at that time and plays well with Dickie’s character.

My immediate reaction was disappointment in the new portrayal of Freddie, particularly the performance on the part of Eliot Sumner (who also happens to be Sting’s child). What made me particularly aware of my affect was that I felt confused by it. I was surprised by my own disappointment in this somewhat historically accurate queer representation, one that more effectively uses codes that popular audiences recognize to draw attention to Dickie’s queerness as well. What I ended up determining was this: My immediate reaction to this interpretation of Freddie Miles as a character is that it deflates my excitement about the series as a whole, and that aesthetically it intentionally moves away from the film adaptation’s focus on luxurious European living and towards a focus on the queer thriller aspects that the film flirted with. In addition to this, my ideological evaluation of this moment is cautious but hopeful. While it feels that (shockingly) the film’s queerness had a plausible deniability that popular, mostly straight audiences could work with, the TV adaptation has begun to push that across the line towards explicitly queer identities being shown. While the queerness on-screen has become more and more lengthy (just as Griffin points out in “Evaluating Television”), it still feels limiting or too flippant a change to imply Dickie’s queerness simply by placing him in relation with queer-presenting characters. Despite the film having that sense of plausible deniability, the visual metaphors it employs to signal queerness (such as games of chess or casual nudity between the two men) feel far more rich and descriptive than this narrative change does.

Sadly, I’m scared to continue watching the series, since it has been pretty disappointing overall through the first three episodes, but I also want to stick it out because I love the film adaptation and I love Andrew Scott as well.