Abstract
Gender studies has, in the field of film, media, and television criticism become synonymous with women’s studies since the second-wave feminist movement, and it is only recently that theorists have begun to interrogate representations of masculinity in the entertainment arena. Seminal work exists to account for the representation of hegemonic masculinity in a range of Hollywood texts, men’s lifestyle publications, advertising, sport, and videogames, and it is to this broader debate concerning media depictions of masculinity that Lotz is contributing. Although extant literature such as Feasey (2008) examines and unmasks representations of masculinity, machismo, and the male role on television, this work focuses on those popular, mainstream images of men who populate terrestrial television channels. Lotz negotiates such work by focusing her analysis, nearly exclusively, on cable programming. The author makes it clear that she did not seek to focus her work on such texts per se, but rather that in her quest to consider the complex representations of men in the male-centered serial, she was drawn, repeatedly to such programming.
Representations of masculinity have historically dominated fictional entertainment, and television is no exception, and yet Lotz is not using the term “male-centered” to simply foreground a set of shows that have a male protagonist or a slew of male characters at the forefront of the narrative; rather, she coins this term to refer to those contemporary cable productions that tell stories about men in both their personal and professional roles, in order to examine “the entirety of men’s lives” as they are presented in the text (p. 55). In this way, the book offers critical insight into the depiction of men and their conflicted masculinities in shows such as Boston Legal, Scrubs, Psyche, Nip/Tuck, Entourage, Rescue Me, The League, Men of a Certain Age, The Sopranos, The Shield, Californication, Breaking Bad, Hung, Dexter, and Sons of Anarchy.
Lotz points to The Sopranos as a seminal text in this regard. First, she mentions that it was unusual if not unheard of for the central protagonist to be something other than a “good” man historically, with character complexity, uncertainty, and a blurring of hero and villain then becoming a somewhat predictable trope of future “male-centered” productions. Secondly, this popular and long-running fictional crime drama challenged existing notions of television creativity because it thrived on its attempt to appeal to a niche cable demographic rather than a broader mainstream audience. However, although the volume addresses the institutional specificity of cable television, the medium’s industrial context is not the focus of the work here.
The book draws on the wider realm of film and television studies as it employs a textual consideration and desk-bound interrogation of masculinity, presenting an entirely accessible and approachable volume that is clearly organized and thoughtfully written. Whereas previous books on masculinity and television have offered a genre approach to the study of the male role or taken a single theme or position such as friendship or marginal masculinities as their focus, Lotz takes the notion of conflicted masculinity in the male serial as her starting point, foregrounding numerous televisual texts throughout the work in order to substantiate the argument concerning contemporary masculinities on the small screen. The volume introduces relevant academic themes and broader sociocultural conditions, as they are relevant to the discussion before introducing the male-centered serial as a televisual form. Lotz goes on to focus on misogyny, homophobic banter, the homosocial environment as a deliberate refuge for the male protagonist, and the notion of male friendship, camaraderie, and intimate nonsexual relations between male characters. The notion of hegemonic masculinity (the notion that some instances of masculinity are more highly ranked and valued than others) is central to this and other work on masculinity within and beyond the television landscape, which is why this volume is relevant to not only the field of television studies but to readers in media, gender, cultural studies, and sociology. Cable Guys questions the status of both patriarchal and more feminist masculinities, and in doing so, encourages readers to look again at representations of masculinity both within and beyond the small screen.