Before Olivia Pope, there was Christie Love...

Get Christie Love!, which only ran for one season from 1974-1975 on ABC, was a flop. Get Christie Love! featured Teresa Graves as a black undercover cop, and was the most similar in format to Police Woman as a police procedural. Get Christie Love! is an oft cited example of the failure of black television, especially shows anchored by black women. In a 1974 Washington Post article, Teresa Graves “emphasized the show will not make a big thing out of her being black” and said she thought the character was “too tough. She was too tough for me. We want her to be believable. She’s more Columbo than Mannix. She won’t do her her karate on 9-foot guys” (Base). Angie Dickinson said something similar of Pepper Anderson: “I’m kind of frail...It wouldn’t be believable, my being physical” (Kitman). But even a restrained Christie Love proved to be too much for network television of the time. Critics were also harsh concerning the low production values, cartoonish violence, and unpolished scripts. Police Woman, with its origins in the “realist” series Police Story, once again had a claim to quality.

Currently, Scandal (ABC, 2012-present) is the only show starring a black woman as the lead character on network television (and Deception, the NBC soap and crime drama slated to air January 2013). Scandal follows Olivia Pope’s (Kerry Washington) unofficial crisis management team as they ward off political disasters, in a formula inspired by the experience of White House press aide Judy Smith. In a review of Scandal, Get Christie Love! was explicitly referred to as a failure in representation: “Portrayals of black women have come a long way from the blaxploitation-inspired characters like Teresa Graves, the last black actress to play a lead on network television, in Get Christie Love!” (Springer). Get Christie Love! deserves its own thorough examination, but the comparison between its reception and Police Woman is a marker of what boundaries could be successfully and profitably crossed in 1970s representations of women. Get Christie Love! was troubled and confused about its own representation of race and gender. Police Woman was glaringly white (and blonde) and always a little softer and maternally mature, made familiar and less threatening through the well-known figure of Angie Dickinson. Get Christie Love! was a groundbreaking attempt at what remains a difficult task, even today. Scandal’s success is highly contingent on creator/writer/producer Shonda Rhimes’ proven profitability with hospital melodrama Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005-present).

Golden Girls

What a great show! I should start watching more, it was so freakin' funny and ahead of its time.

Grad School breakdown

First semester is over and done! It was pretty hard, harder than I expected. There was a ton of readings- maybe 300 plus pages a week, plus writing, all with my 40 hours a week job. The classes were pretty quality, I think. Even though the same people talked every sessions (and yes, I was one of those talkers) each class seemed fairly lively and interesting.

Any problems I had seem to be with the pacing- sometimes I felt like we were going too fast, or too slow, over the material. Or I felt like what I wanted to talk about did not get addressed, or not in a helpful way to me. But this was the minority of the experience.

Writing my papers was also an interesting experience. One was fun, and flowed basically without much prompting- the challenge was editing for coherence. The other was very dry to me, but probably more logical and cohesive. I remembered how much I like to write. 

Downton Abbey meet & greet!

I had the great opportunity to go to the screening of the new season of Downton Abbey, a new Masterpiece show on PBS (and Thirteen :). Downton Abbey is sort of a brushed up and sexified version of Upstairs Downstairs, of the Jane Austen oeuvre. There's unrequited love, and awkward situations, and talk of women getting the vote!

The event was quite fun, as you got to see the cast in modern day attire. I got a few autographs and was pleasantly surprised by how nice (and good looking!) the cast was. Although they did seem smaller in person, which is always kind of funny. I can't wait to watch the next season, and enjoy the escapism.

Judith Butler at OWS

If you already have an established acronym, you are in good shape as a social movement! Last week I went to see Judith Butler down at Washington Square Park for an Occupy event. She spoke for about five minutes using the human mike, which gratefully limited the use of overly complex language. She made some good points about the "body" politic and asking for the impossible. I'm very interested in this academic trend where OWS uses theorists as their celebrity representation. It says a lot about ideas of "quality" and authenticity that Kanye just can't give to them.

Next week: Angela Davis!

3 classes in

So here's my preliminary evaluation of grad school so far

• The classes seem to be just as hard, but not harder than, Swarthmore. Basically, a lot of Swattie profs treated undergrads like grads, which is awesome. 
• there is a lot of reading, but I would not have any trouble with it if I was working 20 hours a week instead of 40, and trying to have a social life too
• NYU, just like Swarthmore, has those annoying people who have to overshare and connect everything to their lives. I've already learned about one student's love life and another cried when an article connected with their personal life. And all of this was in class. 
• grad school is awesome because you get lots of free booze and most of the socializing is in bars 
• my fellow grad students seem really smart, easy to talk to to, and very interesting.
• profs are good, seem passionate about what they are teaching
• I'm back to making bullet points!

My classes this semester

MCC-GE 2001 Media, Culture, and Communication Core Seminar
Monday 7:15 - 9:25 pm (section 1)
Rodney Benson
Class number: 3235 (4 credits)
Examines theoretical approaches that are central to the study of media, culture and communication. Provides students with a historical and critical framework for understanding the literature and research traditions within the field of media studies with an emphasis on media and communication as institutional actors, technological artifacts, systems of representation and meaningful cultural objects

MCC-GE 2182 Communication Processes: Gender, Race and Cultural Identity
Deborah Borisoff
Wednesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Class number: 3243 (4 credits)
Students examine the processes and approaches to the study of communication theories, language and aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication with a particular focus on gender, race, and cultural identity. These processes are examined in both personal and professional contexts, across relationships (e.g. friendships, romantic, marital, and work settings) and are connected to current local and global media representations.
S. Douglas & M. Michaels (2004), The Mommy Myth; S. Keen (1991) Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man; L. Arliss & D. Borisoff (2001), Women & Men Communicating: Challenges & Changes; S. Hewlett (2002), Creating a Life; A. Hochschild (1997) The Time Bind. Course readings include also works by Julia Wood, Cheris Kramarae, Marsha Houston, Ronald Jackson, Frank Wu, Judith Butler, Fern Johnson, Pepper Schwartz and others who have written widely on the topic.
[MA Areas of Study: Interaction and Social Processes & Global and Transcultural Communication]

Game of Thrones- the female reader pov

I just read Game of Thrones, all 807 pages of it, on a plane trip to Denver from NYC. Game of Thrones is a medieval fantasy book now in its first season as a HBO show. From Wikipedia:

Set in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, where "summers span decades and winters can last a lifetime," Game of Thrones chronicles the violent dynastic struggles among the kingdom's noble families for control of the Iron Throne; as the series opens, additional threats from the snow and ice covered region north of Westeros and from the eastern continent across a narrow sea are simultaneously beginning to rise.[2]

 

The first thing I heard about GOT was a NYT article declaring it "for boys only." Here's the actual quote:

"The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.  "

And I can understand where that thinking comes from. The HBO show is very obviously seeking out the coveted youngish male viewer. There are random sex scenes not present in the book that add a little pizazz to show for both genders.  The book is often times very dry and political. There are pages and pages describing battle tactics, actual battles, and then some more political intrigue. I'm not very interested in that. In fact, I admit to skimming the battle pages with no regret. 

But I think it's inaccurate to say that GOT is only accessible or appealing to men. I would say it's mostly appealing to men but there is something there for female readers. There is something in the text that points to a consciousness in the author to include strong women and many female story lines. We have the three Stark women, diverse within themselves (the matriarch, the princess, the tomboy); Cersai, the evil temptress & schemer who really holds the plot together with all her villainy; Dany, the lost girl who becomes a dragoness; and Osha, the peasant from the true North where the "others" live. Bellafante's point becomes clear when you see the character that HBO has inserted into the show- Rose, the rosy prostitute, there for the (male) viewer's pleasure.