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The Cupcake Revelation Reading American sitcoms and their representation of the social world Master Thesis presented by: Milana Kogan 10849041 Supervisor: Joke Hermes 2. Reader: Jaap Kooijman Media Studies: Television and Cross-Media Culture (M.A.) Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam Academic year 2014/2015 Index I Introduction i. Sitcom as genre ii. Genre as contract iii. Role of television in society iv. Political economic context v. TV as cultural phenomenon II Sitcom and the understanding of the social world i. Realism in sitcom ii. Method iii. Methodology III Sitcom and the financial crisis of the 2010s, the case of 2 Broke Girls and Sex and the City i. 2 Broke Girls and poverty ii. Cupcake, the connection between two eras iii. Impact of the financial crisis as shown on 2 Broke Girls iv. Sex and the City and financial issues that never become a real problem v. Sitcom’s representation of finances as dependent on the historical era in which the sitcom is made: Before and after the financial crisis vi. “Emotional realism” in sitcom and in the representation of society IV Sitcom and US politics in the 90s and early 2000s, social political values on screen. The case of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Dharma & Greg i. Reagan, Bush, their values and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air ii. A new president, changing values and Dharma and Gregg iii. Political values in sitcom: it is not just economical upheaval, it is also political change that can be taken up in sitcom V Conclusion VI Appendix VII Notes VIII Bibliography List of Readings List of Literature List of Internet References IX Declaration !2 I Introduction The relation between television and society has been a matter of debate since the emergence of television in the 1950s. Its impact on social change, social behavior, attitudes and values and the learning from the images it conveys has always proposed questions. Television is considered to be the leading medium of society (Koch 2010: 17). The TV screen is seen as a window to the world. It opens peoples’ minds to things that might have remained unseen. It challenges the audience’s view of the world by showing them otherwise concealed societies and norms. Thus, TV is able to gather and organize world knowledge and make it consumable (Schmitz 2012: 134). It presents a world and understanding of society that might differ from what is considered realistic but it can also represent the zeitgeist, showing society as it is perceived by the majority of the audience. In this way, television sends out social-cultural messages and gives meaning to the social world. These messages and the underlying meaning-creation vary in and among the variety of genres that television offers. According to Connolly, “television does not represent the manifest actuality of our society but rather reflects symbolically the structure of values and relationships beneath the surface” (Connolly 2014: 24). This implies that even unrealistic, distorted representation of social facts represent the social values and esteem in which these values are regarded. In fact this shows a verisimilitude, a representation of something on TV that is likely to happen in the same way in real life in society. David Marc explains the effects of television on social orders and states that social norms, orders and values, such as topics revolving around career, relationships, and independence, can be re-configured through TV. In this case, the term ‘yuppie’ (young urban professional) and how it is understood had been predicted and partially created in television of the 70s that thematized new ideas and norms, such as career-driven and independent women in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its offsets (David Marc 1999: 143f.). These shows, commonly belonging to the genre sitcom, as will be explained in a further paragraph, shifted the depiction of a domestic environment to a more open, public environment and changed its general topics and settings. Turner suggests that television constructs a culture that could be consumed and read by its viewers, who will differ from nation to nation. British and American TV each create a culture that they understand as the norm. It depends on the culture of the audience whether the produced norm is scrutinized (Turner, 2005: 416). In the case of sitcom, especially the sitcoms from the 80s were aiming to give the audience advice and ideas about social issues that Berman describes as an advice on “how to run our lives” (Berman, 1987: 5) and “an attitude towards things and towards ourselves” (ibid.). The genre that I will further analyze is the sitcom, short for situation comedy that has developed as a from of comedy. According to the theory by Henri Bergson, “comedy is human, one laughs about traces of humanism” (Bergson, 1956: 62) and Sypher adds that “the ambivalence of comedy reappears in its social meanings, for comedy is both hatred and reveal, rebellion and defense, attack and escape. It is revolutionary and conservative. Socially, it is both sympathy and persecution.” (Sypher in Bergson, 1956: 242) But mostly, as defined by Neale and Krutnik, comedy can represent everyday life with a happy ending and filled with laughter (Neale and Krutnik 1999: !3 1). In relation to Sypher, it is notable that comedy is celebrating truth, which Sypher marks as “philosophical and psychologic compensation” (Sypher in Bergson, 1956: 246). Only if society is capable of laughing at the imperfections of the world, it can set itself free from the limitations of things. Therefore the comedic narrative has to represent the social world. When a work has verisimilitude, that is, it is represented close to the relations of the social world, or to what the viewer believes to be true, respectively the public opinion, it “has implications for conventional notions of realism” (Chandler 1997a: 47) and in turn can be truly understood and compensated. Krijnen et al. however argue that it is the realism that keeps viewer on a distant level of a narrative while fiction establishes as sense of shared experience (Krijnen et al. 2005: 357). Sitcom can be then seen as a representation of the general situation of the world and the society, and it can address current social events and problems that arise from social change. By its representation, sitcom helps understand the social world and social changes. Three top economists agree1 that the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 has been the biggest crisis since the Great Depression in 1929. It caused the increasing widening between the rich and the poor and therefor unemployment, evictions and foreclosures among the populations. Large financial institutions collapsed, stock markets dropped and thus the economic activity decreased, leading to a global recession between 2008 and 2012. During this time, particularly in 2011, the American TV comedy series 2 Broke Girls was first broadcasted on national American television, showing the life of two waitresses in their mid- twenties, who can barely afford to live. They discuss their poverty openly. One of the 2 Broke Girls is Max Black who is used to saving the little money she has and living in poor conditions. She lives and works in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York that is known for low rents that attract artists and young people who dream of starting their own businesses, for an ethnic melting pot, where different cultures and ethnicities come together, but also for a broad hipster culture that fosters a rapid gentrification.2 The other Broke Girl is Caroline Channing, a socialite and former rich girl from Manhattan whose father lost all their money in a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent investment operation in which the operator doesn't pay back investors with earned profit, but uses new investments instead and thus generates high profit for himself. Her father is arrested for the fraud and thrown in jail, so Caroline has to start over as she is left without one cent. She begins working at the diner in which Max works, and becomes Max's co-worker, roommate and eventually best friend. She also comes up with the idea of starting a cupcake business with Max, when she finds out that the latter is a good baker. The sitcom thematizes poverty and the obtaining of money at first and wealth in general, and how two different characters, on the one hand a person that has always been poor and on the other hand a girl that is adjusted to wealth, deal with the effects of constant or sudden poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor is represented on the one side between the two different characters who show a different approach in dealing with poverty, wealth and the stigma that comes with each of the problems. On the other side the show represents the issues for both characters that are concomitant with the financial crisis, such as the problem of being in debt and paying it back. !4 In the thesis, I argue that sitcoms, in particularly the sitcom 2 Broke Girls, are not just shows for entertainment purposes but can be used to understand the social world, in this case the financial crisis and its effects on both rich and poor and how people deal with poverty. My research question will answer, how the sitcom 2 Broke Girls deals with the financial crisis, in order to show that earlier sitcoms also made contemporary social events a subject of discussion. The following questions are center of my analysis. • Is it specific for the TV series 2 Broke Girls to deal with a contemporary social event or crisis like the financial crisis or does the genre of sitcom to which the series belongs do this more often? • Can more contemporary themes be found in other series of the same genre? • Is the interrelation between the social event of the financial crisis and the television show 2 Broke Girls a fluke or can an interrelation be detected between social events and problems in earlier decades? In order to answer these questions I will analyze the narrative, dialogues of specific episodes and the setting of 2 Broke Girls and relate it to the financial crisis.