Abstract
As frequent readers of Critical Studies in Television will already be well aware, questions of narration, seriality and complexity have been key concerns in television studies during the first two decades of the 21st century. A majority of the contributions to this scholarly discourse have had a particular interest in contemporary television and many have argued that a number of relatively recent changes within the television industry, as well as altered viewing habits and audience behaviours, have encouraged television producers to favour complex serial narrative forms and populating our screens with more complex characters. As an industry and distribution form, television clearly has a propensity for generating global exchanges that can allow its viewers a more multifaceted understanding of the world. And as a medium characterised by enduring experimentation with different types of serial forms and long-running, ever-evolving characters and personalities, it does seem to have a particular potential to express complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. Early television studies was marked by a specific, feminist concern with complex seriality as a feminine form. However, the more recent wave of television studies research on seriality has largely shifted the focus onto more ‘prestigious’ serial dramas associated with the ‘quality TV’ label and male target audiences.
In the light of this, I was particularly excited about the recent publication of two monograph-length studies that promised the long-overdue reappearance of an in-depth examination of the linkages between complex seriality and women. It seems fitting that Maria Sulimma’s Gender and Seriality and Isabel C. Pinedo’s Difficult Women on Television Drama have appeared at a moment when some of the ‘excitement [about seriality] is possibly starting to fade’ (Buonanno, 2019: 188) in television studies. Whether the return of a feminist approach to seriality manages to reignite the wider scholarly debate on the topic remains to be seen but, even if this turns out to be the end of an era, I am pleased that this period of intense interest in complex seriality was – so to speak – bookended by insightful feminist explorations of complex programmes typically addressing female audiences.
Sulimma and Pinedo each laments the lack of attention to the soap opera and, more generally, female viewers in television studies on seriality; both position themselves against the conventional focus on ‘male antihero cable dramas’ (Pinedo, p. 5). Sulimma notes that the field has failed to ‘reckon with the long tradition of equating seriality with femininity’, typically distancing itself from ‘the feminist scholarship that analyses soap opera’s storytelling, viewing communities and production contexts’ (pp. 13–14). This forgetfulness has always been somewhat surprising, particularly considering that so many of the male-centric quality shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Sopranos (1999-2007) and The Wire (2002-2008) in particular, so prominently incorporate elements of melodrama and follow predecessors like Hill Street Blues (1981–87) and St. Elsewhere (1982-88), classics which famously used ‘a hybrid mix of melodrama and action to appeal to both women and men’ (Pinedo, p. 10) at a time when US soap opera migrated to the prime time segment. Pinedo convincingly complicates the gendered associations with contemporary, serialised quality shows in her introduction and points to multiple ways ‘to reclaim the complex narrative’s connection to the culturally feminine’ (p. 11), but it is still notable that neither Sulimma nor Pinedo engage significantly with the earlier work on serial complexity in soaps.
While both books continue the established tradition of side-stepping the soap opera for the benefit of more critically acclaimed long-form serial dramas, the programmes covered are all highly interesting and both authors justify their selection of material convincingly. Sulimma’s focus is squarely on US television; the three sections of her book are each dedicated to Girls (2012-17), How to Get Away With Murder (2014-2020), and The Walking Dead (2010-present). Pinedo’s selection of shows is a little more eclectic, covering a number of US shows, including Orange is the New Black (2013-19) and Vida (2018-2020), as well as the Australian Wentworth (2013–16) and the Danish Nordic Noir crime drama Forbrydelsen (2007-2012). Nevertheless, Pinedo’s main focus is also clearly on the US cultural context, although she uses the Danish and Australian shows as enlightening points of comparison.
Hence, both books share a focus on gender and seriality in contemporary US television and both projects are situated within wider debates in television studies, offering insightful and knowledgeable reflections on the medium’s specific serial forms and audience engagements. Both authors are also fruitfully committed to questions of intersectionality and take into careful account how gender issues traverse the categories of race and class in their respective material. However, Sulimma and Pinedo approach their shared topic from distinctly different theoretical traditions which means that the discussions and insights of each book are markedly distinctive, making both welcome contributions to the field.
Sulimma’s book is distinctly situated the German-centric interdisciplinary field of seriality studies. Unsurprisingly, she is a member of The Popular Seriality Research Unit at the Freie Universität Berlin, an institution which generated a number of interesting projects during the 2010s and enabled fruitful cross-disciplinary and international exchanges between scholars interested in seriality. Sulimma is careful to not reduce serial storytelling to ‘a mere textual characteristic’ and pays careful attention to the ‘“feedback loop” between reception, series and production’ (pp. 14–15). This is a densely argued book, weaving a complex tapestry of concepts and metaphorical categories which Sulimma uses to explore ‘the processes by which serial television develops gendered identities and how these processes rely on different modes of audience feedback’ (p. 217). It is beautifully written and all three case studies are satisfyingly detailed and nuanced.
For me, it is not just Sulimma’s focus on gender but her interest in reception that makes her book stand out. Sulimma convincingly argues that each show encourages different forms of audience engagement and fan practices through distinct uses of seriality and gendered character portrayals. Girls utilises ‘thinkpiece seriality’ that addresses an audience of viewer-critics who are encouraged to analyse critically the shows relationship to postfeminist culture (pp. 25–46). How to Get Away With Murder employs ‘looped seriality’ to create a conversational feedback loop whereby the viewers are mobilised to express affective and emotional responses on social media that are both intimately personal and reflective of wider cultural and political issues (pp. 91–112). Finally, The Walking Dead uses ‘paratext seriality’ in ways that seeks to curate certain desired viewer responses (which doesn’t, however, always come to fruition) by obscuring the workings of sexism and racism (pp. 153–174). It is these terms, used to analyse different modes of audience feedback, which have the broadest potential as they could be adapted to analyse a wide range of texts
Sulimma’s attention gravitates towards female audience engagement but Pinedo, an established US media studies scholar who has a long publication record on, primarily, horror cinema and television drama, is more firmly interested in questions of female authorship. She focuses on what she terms the ‘difficult women programming trend’ (p. 175) in US television during the 2010s and her comparative approach, discussing several thematically-linked shows in each chapter, works very well for highlighting the proliferation of complex female characters. Her analysis seeks to answer the question why more female antiheroes have appeared on television at this particular point in time and she convincingly proposes several interlinked explanations, including the increased number of women working in key creative roles behind the camera and an increased number of female television critics helping to curate the audiences’ viewing choices. Pinedo’s book is a forceful call for the importance of ‘direct female authorship’ (2021: 18), as well as a pleasingly accessible book that is well-suited for teaching.
Having read both these books, I am left with a lasting sense of the complex, nonlinear and indeterminate nature not only of the serial narratives and female characters that Sulimma and Pinedo analyse, but of the television medium itself; in particular, the negotiations between television’s producers, texts and audiences. Both books reveal the unpredictability of these relationships, the inherent ambiguity of both people and cultural texts. On a wider scale yet, I’m also left with a deeper understanding of the interlinked cultural discourses on gender, class and race. Not necessarily in the simplistic sense that I now have a more comprehensive understanding of intersectionality, but in the sense of having been left with a renewed appreciation of how important it is to highlight the complexly interlaced nature of these discursive networks.