Bryn Mawr College

The Mellon Tri-College Faculty Group in Film and Media Studies presents a talk by television studies scholar Victoria Johnson on Wednesday, April 22, at 5pm in the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema at Swarthmore College.

The “Red State” v. “Blue State” Myth and Popular Television: Friday Night Lights’ Challenge to the Logics of “Quality TV”

This talk examines broadcast television’s role in delineating the relationship between regional identity and national values. Specifically, it unpacks the geographically-inflected promotional and critical discourses surrounding Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006-present) to argue that NBC’s apparent inability to market the show in its first season, and critics’ general befuddlement at the series’ “quality” during this same season, were rooted in the series’ counterintuitive reworking of “official” cultural mythologies regarding “quality TV” and capital relations presumed to be at home in the U.S. “Heartland.”

The talk interrogates how regional mythology becomes a powerful cultural “common sense” that encourages each of us to invest in institutionally and popularly sanctioned rhetoric of division, rather than to query the broader market and political functions such simplifications encourage and support. These questions apply to and inform broader classifications of “cult” vs. “mass” TV, and notions of “quality” in popular media.

Victoria E. Johnson is Wolf Visiting Professor of Television Studies in the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity (NYU Press, 2008) examines the imagination of the U.S. Midwest as symbolic “Heartland” in critical moments in television and U.S. social history and is the recipient of the 2009 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.