Spring Quarter's Film & Digital Media Colloquium Series continues with Professor Victoria Johnson (UC Irvine).
This talk examines television's continuing role in delineating the relationship between regional identity and national "values." It examines the geographically-inflected industrial promotional and popular critical discourses surrounding Friday Night Lights (NBC and DirecTV, 2006-present), to argue that NBC's apparent inability to market the show in its first season, and critics' general confusion at the series' "quality" during this same season, were rooted in the series' counterintuitive reworking of "official" cultural myths regarding "quality TV" and capital relations presumed to be at home in the "flyover" U.S. heartland. The talk encourages us to consider and to question the resiliency of regional mythology as a national, cultural "common sense" that has been significantly re-energized in the transition from a "network era" to a "post-network era."
Victoria Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of Film & Media Studies at UCI. She is the author of several articles regarding the politics of place, race, and popular music in anthologies and journals including The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, Film Quarterly, The Velvet Light Trap, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, and online at Media Res. She is also the author of Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity, which examines the imagination of the American midwest as symbolic heartland in critical moments in prime-time television and U.S. social history.
This talk is sponsored by Film and Digital Media and the Arts Research Institute. Free and open to the public.