Occupying Televisual Narratives: Metaphors and Models for Imagining Beyond the Cultural Machine

Televisual narratives frequently strive to enclose viewers within a culture industry that renders them passive and preoccupied. This dissertation considers the ways in which two modes of televisual meaning-making, namely crime dramas and reality television, can work against that closure by providing models of feminine possibility and occupation. Viewers can pursue the openness of imaginative occupying by reading with the grain of the narratives, which teach viewers first how to understand the stories on the screen and then to understand the possibilities for navigating and ultimately challenging the power structures that marginalize and disadvantage certain bodies. Detailed readings of Murder, She Wrote (CBS, 1984-1996); Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-2016); The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (Bravo, 2010- ); Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976-1981); The Real World (MTV, 1992- ); Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC, 1999- ); Perry Mason (CBS, 1957-1966); and How to Get Away With Murder (ABC, 2014- ) track the connections that these narratives make across a history of television and with other technological and social developments. Stereotypically feminine modes of understanding and community-building like multitasking, talking or visiting, reflecting, and empathizing or imagining depth become the operative actions by which viewers might imagine the possibilities available to them and ultimately look beyond the constraints of a cultural machine that traditionally disempowers them. By employing the sorts of simultaneous and imaginative thinking that helps the characters we see on the screen become successful, we can also imagine the spaces of the television industry and of a cultural machine as places that we can connect to and through. The modes of making meaning that stories and characters model for the viewer become a methodology for creating, understanding, and representing significant depth in television programming