By Joe Linstroth
Before the emergence of its most recent golden age, television as a communications and entertainment medium had long suffered from negative stigma, especially when compared to film and books. Think couch potatoes staring at the 鈥渂oob tube.鈥
But when viewed with a more critical eye, which is what media and cultural studies assistant professor Brad Stiffler and his students do in his course 鈥淥n Television,鈥 what is depicted and most-watched on the small screen reveals a lot about who we are and what we value (or don鈥檛) as a culture and society.
Q: The guiding principle of this course is that TV matters. Why is it important to have a deeper understanding of television culture in America?
A: In class, we read a lot about what鈥檚 called TV鈥檚 installation period, when it was a new medium for Americans and they had to learn how to incorporate it into their homes, how to watch it, how to interpret and engage with the kind of information there. We compare it to cinema, radio, and newspapers to think about what makes television its own specific medium in that moment. As consumers, we go through this same process all the time with other new media. By looking at the example of television, I think it helps us to see similar things happening in the current moment and ask critical questions about them.
Q: How did early television in the postwar era shape Americans鈥 view on family?
A: The nuclear family as this supposedly universal way of life was something that had to be invented. For a lot of Americans, even in the mid-twentieth century, living at home with two parents and just the kids in a single-family house was not the most common way of life.
From television鈥檚 earliest moments with programs like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, the characters were still living in apartments with neighbors right on top of them. There鈥檚 more of a collective and communal life depicted. By the time you get to the mid-1950s and 鈥60s, many of the shows are taking place in suburbs and everybody is white and middle- to upper-middle class. Characters aren鈥檛 working class as much anymore, like The Honeymooners鈥 Ralph Kramden, who was a bus driver.
Television, both as a site of representation and as a technology, helped ease the transition for people who were moving out of urban areas to the suburbs. The TV became this replacement for collective artistic, cultural, family, and community life that they left behind in the cities. On the other side, television also gave people in rural communities a way of connecting with and seeing parts of the world that they would have never seen in their daily lives.
Q: You point out that in the mid-twentieth century there was a symbiotic relationship between the civil rights movement and TV news outlets. How did that play out?
A: This is an argument that comes from Sasha Torres鈥 book Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights. During the installation period, TV news was a brand-new institution that people didn鈥檛 really know how to engage with and didn鈥檛 trust.
We often think the civil rights movement courted news coverage, which it did. They wanted news cameras out there to cover their demonstrations and to show people the brutality of racist segregation in the South.
The symbiotic part was that the TV news institutions needed a story that they could cover in a way that newspapers and radio couldn鈥檛鈥攁 uniquely visual story. You could see the clash of peaceful sit-in protesters at Woolworth鈥檚 counters and the violence of the white mob. Covering the civil rights movement gave TV news a kind of cultural legitimacy that it didn鈥檛 have prior to that.
In addition, newspapers and radio stations were largely regional. So, the coverage that you would get in the South, for instance, in the mainly white-run press, was either largely ignoring the movement or giving a much more establishment, white supremacist view. The national TV news gave a sense that this was something that people should care about outside of their own regions. It was a story of national significance and could be told in a way that wasn鈥檛 as highly censored.
Q: In the course鈥檚 section on reality television there鈥檚 a screening of an episode of America鈥檚 Next Top Model. What is instructive about that show?
A: We鈥檙e in this neoliberal moment in which younger people are not necessarily expecting to have lifelong jobs. Instead, they are more trained to promote themselves as brands. That鈥檚 not too different from how students are taught to formulate their own careers鈥攖o think about themselves as a brand they have to cultivate in order to sell to prospective employers. Shows like America鈥檚 Next Top Model, through gamified reality competitions, show how to perform competitively some version of yourself for a market.
Modeling shows, in particular, depict this in terms of people鈥檚 stories about their race and ethnicity and how it can be a personal selling point. It鈥檚 a commodification of how we think about sexuality, ethnicity, race, and personal biographies. If we watch a show like that critically, it can help us see how this is happening in almost every field of work and how it鈥檚 really changed the way that people think about themselves as workers and as citizens. This is another example of how TV matters; even seemingly silly shows like ANTM actively train us in new ways of working and living.
Joe Linstroth is director of media relations at Macalester.
