The purpose of this study is to examine the popular cultural form of television within the field of gender studies. The study focuses on the representation of masculinities in the American television series The O.C. This is done by using textual analysis to gain information from the first and the second season of The O.C. The theoretical framework used is based on Judith Butler and R.W. Connell. The result of the study is that The O.C. can be said to show that alternative masculinities are less worthy and lower in the hierarchy. Another result is that the series is heteronormative.

In my dissertation entitled “The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television,” I argue that TV scholars would benefit greatly by engaging in a more nuanced consideration of the television critic’s industrial position as a key figure of negotiation. As such, critical discourse has often been taken for granted in scholarship without attention to how this discourse may obscure contradictions implicit within the TV industry and the critic’s own identity as both an insider and an outsider to the television business. My dissertation brings the critic to the fore, employing the critic as a lens through which I view television aesthetics, media policy, and technology. This study is grounded in the disciplines of television studies, media industries studies, new media studies, and cultural studies. Yet because the critic’s writing reflects the totality of television as an entertainment and public service medium, the significance of this study expands beyond disciplinary concerns to a reconsideration of the impact of television upon American culture. This project offers a history of the television critic during the 1970s, a decade in which the field of criticism professionalized and expanded dramatically. Methodologically, I am incorporating three approaches, including historical research of the 1970s television industry, textual analysis of critical writing, and interviews with critics working during that decade. I’ve identified the 1970s for a variety of reasons, including its parallels with today’s significant technological and industrial transformations. My central texts will be the industry trade publications, Variety and Broadcasting, and national daily newspapers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Viewing TV criticism as a profession, a historical source, and a site of scholarly analysis, this project offers a series of interventions, including a consideration of how critical writing may serve as a primary source for historians and how television studies has overlooked the significance of the critic as an object of analysis in his/her own right.

The increasingly popular Adult Swim series, The Venture Bros. (2003-present), created by Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick, is an animated series that interrogates established paradigms of masculinity. Combining narrative elements that are easily attributed to American action films with those of adventure cartoons, the creators of The Venture Bros. create a world where comic book and fantasy adventures coexist. The scope of this thesis narrows and focuses on the ways in which representations of masculinity are constructed and function within the series. What are the various types of masculinity represented in the series? Are the representations of masculinity reproductions of hegemonic masculinity? How is an awareness of dominant representations of masculinity and maleness expressed in The Venture Bros.? This thesis explores how previous scholarship on discourses of dominant representations of male masculinity sheds light on ways to analyze the various masculinities in The Venture Bros. / text

Colorblind TV: Primetime Politics of Race in Television Casting posits that in our current racially colorblind society, oftentimes actors of color are cast to prove that multiculturalism is important. However, the characters often have little cultural specificity and are only different in terms of skin tone. While this type of sameness on the surface may appear to offer a sense of racial parity, it actually encourages the opposite. Colorblindness works to make race immutable and objective, which inevitably disallows difference and instead outputs “whiteness” as the normative standard. Through a series of interviews with casting directors and actors guild diversity representatives as well as an ethnographic account of an actual casting audition, the dissertation argues that for the media industry, colorblindness is both a way of avoiding the messiness of race and of denying actors of color the ability to be culturally specific. This denial occurs because ultimately the desire to work supersedes the desire to reject role universality. As a case study, I examine the hit ABC primetime show Grey’s Anatomy (2005- ) as a way of illustrating how the blindcasting process became a part of public discourse that the television industry both praised and disowned. / text

The proliferation of niche cable programming in the U.S. post-network era includes a meteoric rise in food television. Indicative of this move toward an increase in food-related programming is the recent unveiling of the cable offering Cooking Channel. Creators behind Cooking Channel have worked to establish a distinct brand, describing the channel as a place for “food people” who are authentically and passionately “interested in upping their food IQ” (Scripps). The discourse surrounding the Cooking Channel launch is further complicated by the fact that men have an ostensibly larger presence on the channel. Men are featured in promotional spots, press releases, and on programs that take viewers on quests to increase their cultural food capital. This project works to unravel the gendered discourses surrounding the U.S. launch of Cooking Channel, asserting that the discursive site of the foodie is leveraged in an attempt to construct a foodie identity via gendered social distinction processes. The project initially analyzes the paratextual dialogue produced by mainstream press in order to highlight the negotiation among voices charged with creating the channel’s brand. The press – spearheaded by Cooking Channel parent Scripps Networks Interactive – provides an introduction to the channel that invokes consumption of new foodie content and a streamlined branding process that is divided along historically gendered binaries. The project then considers the ideological structures that underpin Cooking Channel’s programming and reinforce its identity as steeped in the pervasiveness of perpetual normative gender ideology. In turn, the final portion of the project uproots normative and hegemonic ideals with its focus on gender liminality, considering Cooking Channel as a conflicted site of negotiation that reflects shifting discourses of masculinity and femininity. These analyses merge to form a compelling look at how gender is situated in Cooking Channel’s construction of a niche cable brand. / text

The diploma thesis "Who are the fans of the BBC series?" deals with the BBC TV

This research seeks to unpack the narrative of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend using semiotics, particularly through Roland Barthes' work in Mythologies and A Lover's Discourse. The goal of this research is to demonstrate long-form storytelling's ability to interrogate and revisit criticism through consideration of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's role as an ongoing satire of romantic comedies. This research culminated in a thesis discussing the semiotic myths that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend interrogates, and the process of deconstruction that occurs within the text. The thesis applied the "fragments" identified in Barthes' A Lover’s Discourse to corresponding scenes in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, with a focus on the musical nature of the show. This research also analyzed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's role as a deconstruction of the romantic comedy genre, and its position as either upholding or subverting the myth of the "crazy ex-girlfriend." Through applying A Lover's Discourse to an hour-long television drama (in this case Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), this research contributes to the field of cultural studies by considering network entertainment media from a critical perspective, and utilizing A Lover's Discourse in an innovative manner.

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This thesis examines the historical connecting threads between legacy and contemporary forms of television animation. I argue that Bob’s Burgers has been neglected by animation studies due to its incomparability to the established fulcrum of television animation: The Simpsons (1989-). However, by analyzing Bob's Burgers through a historical lens that reaches beyond The Simpsons, we can begin to see what the field of animation studies has overlooked when it has dismissed animated texts that were not comparable to The Simpsons. This thesis will utilize Bob's Burgers as a primary case study and draws connecting threads between the series and Hanna-Barbera cartoons to make this argument.

This study is part of the AHRC funded project “A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989”. The research is based upon the data gathered from interviews carried out with thirty geographically and generationally dispersed women about their memories of watching television in Britain between 1947 and 1989. I have used generation and gender as analytical categories, and have paid particular attention to the role of memory work in this type of historical research. This thesis aims to build upon previous work which has investigated the connection between generation and interaction with popular culture, but which has not theorised those relationships (Press, 1991; Moseley, 2002). The shifts and, indeed, continuities in the lives of different generations of British women are considered to gain a sense of the importance of generation in the production of identity. Significant differences arose between generations in terms of reflexivity and around questions of quality, value and taste as generations intersected with feminist and neoliberal cultures at different life stages. What was particularly interesting, however, was that despite the dramatic social change wrought by this post-war period, the narratives of women of different generations were surprisingly similar in terms of their everyday lives. Their memories largely centred around domestic relationships, and the women’s role as mother was often central to these. Following my investigation of the significance of motherhood to women’s production of gendered identity I consider the moments which disrupted that pattern and where women are enabled to conceive of an identity outside their familial role. Talk around pop music programming and desire had generational significance in the production of individual identities, again pointing to the importance of generation as an analytical category.