| The 1960s are an understudied area of television history and I undertake here one of the first comprehensive studies of the fictional narratives produced and consumed during this period. In this study I look at the ways movements for social change impacted representations of race, gender, class, and generation during this period. I focus on four major television genres: the adult Western, the spy series, the situation comedy, and relevance—an amalgam of genres from the sitcom to the police procedural. I argue for a politics of postmodern coalitions in which to study these representations, looking at the intersections within identity discourses as well as between them. Such a method enables the formation of coalitions among various social groups while avoiding the essentializing and balkanizing characteristic of identity politics so as to promote a project of radical democracy. I argue that of the three crucial axes in which media representations have been studied, class has been the most marginalized and has typically referred to working class individuals rather than the professional middle class (PMC) which is a major focus of televisual narratives during this period. I study the ways in which the occlusion of class both by the PMC and in the culture at large also blocked attempts to democratize social relations in gender and race relations, and in the corporate state.; Most television historians have downplayed the significance of the 1960s, essentializing it as a continuation of the 1950s as a time when television was uniformly homogeneous, escapist, and formulaic, and characterized the seventies as the period when social relevance flourished. Challenging this binary schema, I outline three overlapping phases that form the trajectory of sixties representations: the first period, which runs from the mid-fifties to the early sixties, is one in which what historians call the liberal consensus held sway, as exemplified by the adult Western. At the same time, I argue, the Western was also the site for the emergence of important challenges to this consensus and the patriarchal Cold War definitions it enabled. The next period is one in which the Kennedy New Frontier ethos, along with the emergence of camp, acted both to challenge and modernize representations of race, class, and gender, but also was not able to totally break from consensual definitions. The third phase takes place from the late sixties to the mid-seventies, and marks the full emergence of relevance in television, most successfully in the genre of situation comedy. This phase saw the rise of independent producers like Normal Lear, Larry Gelbart, and Mary Tyler Moore Productions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
