Television & New Media

This article analyzes the male-only spaces present in four television series, FX’s The Shield, Nip/Tuck , Rescue Me, and ABC’s Boston Legal, which each include a gendered territory as a recurring feature. I argue that these homosocially segregated environments enforce boundaries against women and shelter intense bromance relationships that foreclose romantic relationships of any kind, acting as physical incarnations of troubling retrograde sexual politics and ideologies. I also assert that the “boys’ clubs” in which these narratives take place, enabled and empowered by the aesthetic dimensions of architecture and design, help establish workplace patriarchy as commonplace, reasonable, and benign. This article reveals that in these television boys’ clubs, problematic gender ideologies are protected and celebrated, misogyny is naturalized, and patriarchal beliefs and behaviors legitimized.

Since its release in August 2013, the critically acclaimed exploration game Gone Home has been mired in controversy, with politicized debates centering on its status as a game as well as on the much-lauded coming out narrative at its center. This article uses the varied response to Gone Home’s narrative and mechanical structures as an opportunity to reframe the discussion around the game in terms of how it invites players to engage with the objects and temporalities that compose its environment or, more specifically, its archive. Drawing from queer theory, historiography, and game studies, I argue that although Gone Home gestures toward the radical potential of archives, it ultimately undermines this potential by adhering to design conventions grounded in normative and normalizing logics. Through this analysis, I also suggest ways in which digital games can help us think through the politics of archives and of queerness as a historiographical method.

This article examines media participation through affective political economy, using as a case study the documentary Knuckle, a profile of Irish Traveller fighting. The film incorporates videos recorded by fighters and their families. Boasts and threats from one clan to another expand in circulation and become increasingly monetized as they are repackaged. Combing media political economy with Sarah Ahmed’s concept of affective economies, this article explores how, through such circulation, the videos help accomplish the affective work of world building, not only within Traveller society but also beyond it in realms such as mixed martial arts (MMA).

This article analyzes how producers of advertising construct children as an advertising audience. Previous research has argued that marketers are bound to present children as competent and savvy to legitimize their own practices. Drawing on interviews with Swedish producers of child-directed online advertising, this study shows that marketers are not destined to portray children as competent as the idea of the vulnerable and incompetent child was an important construction among the Swedish producers. The Swedish producers constructed a multifaceted and ambivalent image of children, mixing the idea of the vulnerable and dependent child with the idea of the competent child. This study contributes to the wider understanding of media producers’ constructed audiences, particularly regarding how culture and media regulation shape the notion of the child audience among producers.

Windowing—the process of managing the release sequence for content so as to maximize the returns from intellectual property rights (IPRs)—is changing because of transformations in the way that television is distributed and consumed. Drawing on original research into the experience of leading international television producers and distributors, this article breaks new ground by examining how rights owners are adjusting strategies for exploitation of the economic value in their content. Findings show how the rise of digital platforms and outlets whose footprints are diffuse and boundaries are porous is disrupting traditional windowing models. This has necessitated new thinking about how best to organize the sequential roll out of content so as to build audience demand, avoid overlaps, and maximize returns. This article argues that changes in the dynamics of television distribution have altered not just processes for exploiting the value in IPRs but also content and content production, with implications for audiences as well as industry.

Trump is more than a symptom of manipulative infotainment and cultural decline: His political ascendency speaks to reality TV’s long-established role in governing practices.

Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene as the realization of the obscene figure of enjoyment that Slavoj Zizek associates with the decline of “symbolic efficiency.” The symptoms of this decline include the debunking of representation associated with a fragmented and conspiracy-theory-ridden public sphere coupled with attempts to resuscitate direct access to the “real.” Reality TV is one cultural manifestation of this combination and Trump has become its political avatar. The demagoguery and resurgent forms of political violence associated with Trump’s campaign demonstrate the authoritarian tendencies of this combination.

This brief editorial links Trump’s popularity to reality television’s messages of promotionalism and the spread of overt forms of self-branding and reputation-seeking across the population at large thanks to social media. Against the backdrop of growing economic insecurity, most people must now assiduously self-promote and hustle in order to find or protect their jobs. Trump supporters are not ‘dupes’ buying the hype then; they recognize that Trump’s brand is his skill set, admire it, and see it as all the qualification he needs to become president. While Trump’s ‘brand’ is figured as the result of his own personal style and power, it is actually the product of the underpaid, highly exploited labour of thousands of workers. Trump the Brand and reality television’s gauzy promise of mini-celebrity are symptoms of, and alibis for a flawed and failing political economic system. It will take the concerted, collective power of people in the streets, demanding something better, to stop him.

Seen through the lens of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s reality TV program ‘The Apprentice,’ his promise to American voters that they’ll tire of “winning” under his regime takes on a darker meaning. This article identifies ‘the loser’ as a potent new political symbol emblematic of ‘contestants’ who in the face of mathematical loss become ‘bigger’ losers if they fail to assert their right to a non-meritorious victory. The fact of one’s loss is not as important as one’s reaction to it. To lose is possible, but to be a ‘loser’ is the ultimate humiliation that justifies taking extreme, even immoral measures. Contestants who are willing to ‘do anything’ to win are rewarded more generously often than those who, in reality, are the rightful winners. Such a perspective rationalizes a politics of exaggerations, lies and defamation. Extending Couldry and Littler’s discourse of passion, we identify the mechanism that enables and compels some voters to embrace Trump’s divisive politics of ‘otherism’ as astute ‘game playing.’ In Trump’s world, to win means many more must lose. Just as in the reality TV world, however, Trump alone holds the power to annoint winners and exile losers, meaning there is no guarantee of success for anyone but him.

Donald Trump, known as a mogul and reality TV celebrity, is presented as horrific in the press now that he wants to be President of the United States, a position requiring controlled and civil behavior, which he cannot master. Comparisons between his candidacy for president and a reality TV show abound, forcing us to contend with the conventions, privileged behaviors and ethics of the current culture of surveillance (which includes reality TV), arising in contexts of surveillance but now exceeding these. The crossover from reality TV celebrity to presidential candidate is troubled, highlighting the uncomfortable intersection of Trump’s whiteness and wealth with his crass behavior. The reality TV genre is seen as trashy, featuring people without class in behavior and often in social and financial status. The presidency, however, is for the elite white upper-middle or upper-class (usually male)—Obama negotiates the politics of respectability to fit this ideal. Popular articulations of Trump demonstrate the uneasy alignment of elite whiteness with white behavior marked as working class or poor, displaying panic about a president unable to exhibit appropriately classed behavior. This dangerously elides the larger machinery that is the government and big business, belying our cultural preoccupation with individualism and obfuscating the systemic. Taking Trump for the system negates how the current machinery has in fact produced a string of Trumps (Palin, Bachmann, Cruz), leaving us longing for the more civil days when white elite men knew how to speak their hatred in a civil manner.

The spectacle of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign calls for a reconsideration of some of the key arguments we made in our 2009 book, Demystifying Business Celebrity. In that book we downplayed the significance of individual celebrity personalities in order to highlight the importance of the industrialized process of celebrification. But Trump’s very singular personality clearly exerts its own form of agency—somehow appealing to his supporters, and increasingly alarming to many others. In tandem with a set of cultural anxieties, gendered and racialized phobias, economic disparities, and new social media avenues for the expression of populist violence and rage, the industrialized process of celebrification we described in our book has functioned to elevate, and not to diminish, the significance of the particular set of reactionary and narcissistic pathologies Trump embodies. Whether he succeeds in his campaign or not, we should all be worried.