From Liars to Slayers: Seeking a Better Understanding of The
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FROM LIARS TO SLAYERS: SEEKING A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE TEEN DRAMA by Corine Elizabeth Mathis A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University August 2017 Doctoral Committee: Dr. Alicia Mischa Renfroe, Chair Dr. Allen Hibbard Dr. Jane Marcellus I dedicate this research to my mentor, Dr. David Lavery, who always believed in my ideas and ability to see them to fruition, and to my uncle, Dr. Donald Andrews, without whom I would never have done any of this in the first place. I miss you both greatly. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family for their love and support throughout this seemingly unending process—from Tennessee to Alabama, full-time work to fellowship, you have been very understanding of the idiosyncrasies necessary to bring this project to completion. And to the friends who have become family, thank you for all the times you have been my sounding boards and helped me work out my ideas; I appreciate our conversations more than you know. I would also like to thank Dr. Mischa Renfroe, Dr. Allen Hibbard, and Dr. Jane Marcellus for being so patient with me during a very difficult year and working hard to give helpful feedback to a long-distance student. iii ABSTRACT In television genre studies, scholars tend to neglect the teen drama or situate all series that concern teens under the same umbrella, often dismissing the genre for connections to the soap or for its appeal to a teenage, often primarily female, audience. This dissertation asserts that the term “teen drama” itself is misleading and suggests that the name is actually of more use industrially than theoretically or practically, as the label considers the target audience instead of how these series are aesthetically constructed or how the genre has evolved. In its analysis of the genre, this study also shows that the teen drama is not a monolith; to fill a gap in current television scholarship, this project identifies three important subgenres: the teen family drama, the teen soap, and the young adult fantasy drama. Each of these subgenres has distinct thematic concerns, iconographic elements, and cultural work. Though these subgenres certainly share some characteristics, it is important to understand their unique contributions to teen drama to advance scholarship in the field. After providing an overview of teen drama scholarship and a description of the thematic and generic elements of three of the more popular subgenres, this project considers how one series in each communicates cultural messages to their audience. An example of the family drama, Gilmore Girls is widely known as a series with a pro- feminist message—its central teen character even identifies as such early on—but the narrative’s clear preference of white liberal feminism makes Lorelai and Rory hard to identify with for many third- and fourth-wave viewers; when one adds the events of A Year in the Life into the diegesis, Lorelai and Rory’s viewpoints and choices become iv even harder to reconcile with feminist concerns. As a teen soap, Pretty Little Liars is often dismissed as escapist fare—and many critics’ negative reviews of the series are heavily gendered—but the series’ use of slasher tropes allows the narrative to deconstruct and subvert its subgenre’s traditional gender roles. In particular, it puts female friendships at the center of the Liars’ lives, rather than romantic attachments or social concerns—a significant change to the teen soap subgenre. A young adult fantasy drama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses its feminist heroine’s constant fight against patriarchal villains to endorse communal action rather than top-down order; in Sunnydale, only those who work together and utilize everyone’s strengths will win in the end. By identifying and describing three subgenres and examining the cultural work in three popular series in each, this study shows that the teen drama is much more multifaceted than scholars currently recognize—and it is ripe for further academic work. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 The History of Teen Dramas—and Teenagers……………………...…………………5 Unpacking “Teen Drama”……………………………………...……………………..13 Detractors of the Teen Drama…………………………………………...……………23 The Marketing of Teen Dramas………………………………………………….25 Generic Considerations…………………………………………………………..29 The Shape of This Project………………………………………...…………………..32 CHAPTER ONE: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE…………………………………..35 Film Studies…………………………………………………………………………...35 Television Studies……………………………………………………………………..41 Feminist Television Studies…………………………………………………………...43 Teen Television Studies……………………………………………………………….50 CHAPTER TWO: ICONOGRAPHY AS THE KEY TO SUBGENRE IDENTIFICATION AND UNDERSTANDING………………………………………...57 Foreword……………………………………………………………………………....57 The Family Drama…………………………………………………………………….62 Character: My So-Called Life.................................................................................63 Setting: Gilmore Girls…………………………………………………………...69 Clothing: Life Unexpected……………………………………………………….78 The Teen Soap………………………………………………………………………...82 Character: Beverly Hills, 90210………………………………………………….82 Setting: Riverdale………………………………………………………………...91 Clothing: Pretty Little Liars……………………………………………………...98 The Young Adult Fantasy Drama……………………………………………………105 Character: Star-Crossed………………………………………………………...105 vi Setting: The Shannara Chronicles……………………………………………..111 Clothing and Accessories: Buffy the Vampire Slayer………………………….115 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..119 CHAPTER THREE: “WHERE YOU LEAD, I WILL FOLLOW”: THE PROBLEMATIC WHITE LIBERAL FEMINISM OF GILMORE GIRLS……………122 The Positive Representation of Feminism on Gilmore Girls………………………..129 The Problematic Aspects of Gilmore Girls’ Feminist Message……………………..140 A Year in the Life……………………………………………………………………151 CHAPTER FOUR: FINAL GIRLS: PRETTY LITTLE LIARS AS SLASHER TEEN SOAP…………………………………………………………………………………...166 Pretty Little Liars as Teen Soap……………………………………………………..167 Deconstructing and Subverting Genre Expectations………………………………...176 Rosewood as Slasher Setting………………………………………………………...184 The Liars as Slasher Heroines……………………………………………………….197 So, Where Is the Slasher in This Slasher Teen Soap?.................................................204 CHAPTER FIVE: “YOU COULD NEVER HOPE TO GRASP THE SOURCE OF OUR POWER”: BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, COMMUNAL ACTION, AND DISRUPTING THE PATRIARCHY…………………………………………………..212 Buffy and Communal Action: The Scooby Gang…………………………………….216 Fight the Power: Sunnydale as Haven for the Patriarchy……………………………221 The Watchers’ Council…………………………………………………………222 The Master and Angelus………………………………………………………..228 Sunnydale Authority Figures…………………………………………………...236 The Initiative……………………………………………………………………243 The Patriarchy Is Insidious: Buffy’s Flirtation with Top-Down Hierarchy…………250 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………259 WORKS CITED..………………………………………………………………………277 APPENDICES………………………………………………………………………….307 APPENDIX A: SELECTED AMERICAN TEEN DRAMAS BY SUBGENRE…...308 vii 1 INTRODUCTION In our current television climate, where antiheroes abound and gritty realism is becoming the watchword, it can be difficult to convince many popular culture scholars of the value of teen television, a genre that seems to thrive on stereotypes and the unrealistic. An extension of this feeling has led to a critical inclination to lump every drama that features teenage characters as leads—or, sometimes, those that are featured on networks with a strong teen viewership—into the “teen drama” category, which is reductive and damaging to scholarship on these series. For example, Rachel Moseley defines the genre industrially in a larger entry for “The Teen Series” in Glen Creeber’s 2008 edition of The Television Genre Book. She uses series as varied as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003, the WB/UPN) and Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003, the WB)— one a young adult fantasy drama, the other a coming-of-age drama—and includes Charmed—a series I cannot include in my own teen drama library, namely because none of its protagonists are in their teens, nor do they have teen concerns—as well as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, a teen sitcom.1 Another common approach among television scholars is to focus on a single series, and in doing so, spend most of their time discussing specific tropes or themes rather than dissecting its place in the genre. For example, an entire subfield has arisen around Buffy the Vampire Slayer, enough to spawn international conferences and a 1 Some more examples include Maura Kelly’s “Virginity Loss Narratives +in ‘Teen Drama’ Television Programs” (2010), which conflates family dramas, multigenerational soaps, and young adult fantasy dramas; Rebecca Williams’s “Unlocking The Vampire Diaries: Genre, Authorship, and Quality in Teen TV Horror” (2013) names the series as both teen drama and TV horror, but somehow does not consider that there is a space between the two. It is clear that scholars have yet to truly come together to help define this genre. 2 journal, but little critical attention has been paid to the series’ place in the teen drama genre, a gap this project will address. As I will argue later in this project, as a young adult fantasy drama, Buffy is concerned with power relationships in a way that the Gilmore Girls, a family drama, is not. When Buffy’s associations with the genre are discussed, it is generally “transcending one’s origins” rhetoric—in other words, Buffy is so much better than most teen