Small tomes dissect popular TV shows

By Kevin Hagopian

When you’re a true fan of a television series, what you do — endlessly viewing and reviewing every episode, tracking down every reference and allusion the show makes, and finally, trying to explain coherently why it all means so much more than mere entertainment — sounds suspiciously like what scholars do.

And so it is. Wayne State University Press’s “TV Milestones” series aims to bring the serious study of television to a wider range of scholars, some of whom are masquerading as “mere fans.” A new generation of little books like Deborah Jermyn’s “Sex and the City” and David Diffrient’s “M*A*S*H” speak clearly, personally and passionately about television and its audiences.

These concise books (each is in a small format and around 115 pages) aren’t dummies guides. Instead, they reward the educated reader by seeing series television as something genuinely meaningful in the lives of its viewers.

Deborah Jermyn tells us that she became devoted to “Sex and the City” during its 1998- 2004 run because it presented female friendship as an authentic experience, and “its protagonists formed a circle who dared to declare themselves each others’ ‘significant others.’ ”

Of course, it’s just as possible to come at “Sex and the City” from another direction and slam the show for the way it canonized consumer spending as a religion. Or to complain that, like most contemporary romantic comedies, it straightjacketed female characters by making their desperate search for heterosexual love the outer limit of their ambitions.

Jermyn certainly gets this; for her, the show was successful because it leveraged the sacred (female friendship) against the profane (gross consumerism and the romantic-comedy squirrel’s wheel of endless female-male pursuit) and trusted its audience to sort things out. Ingeniously, she shows how this was (and is still being) done through an analysis of the show’s considerable and varied fan cultures.

“M*A*S*H” was a very different series. Initially sexist and antic, eventually preachy, it was a singular moment in the history of three-network television, a souvenir of an epoch in American popular culture when the question “what did you watch last night?” could only be answered three ways.

Every film or television show is a symptom of its age, and in the years 1972-1983, “M*A*S*H” documented the morphing of American culture from one of imagined social consensus to a mosaic of many identities. Paralleling this change, the show made itself over from a gag-based sitcom to a social-issues dramedy.

David Diffrient shows how “M*A*S*H” surprised even itself by becoming a platform for a variety of humane causes, transforming the sitcom into a pulpit for sermons on race, gender, anti-Communism and the militarization of American life.

“M*A*S*H” translated opposition to the Vietnam War into middle-class terms. Individual episodes, like the remarkable “The Interview” from Feb. 24, 1976, used the medium of television brilliantly to get its audience to ask questions of media representation.

David Diffrient’s take on “M*A*S*H” is more than just a testimony to the power of film and television to shape political attitudes; it is a gesture of respect to the mass media audiences whom many scholars still think of as a blank slate on which diabolical producers write their own fantasies of domination. Well, maybe, but more often, those audiences understand the difference between the commercials and the story.

Wayne State University Press has targeted these books for both fans and scholars. But that might be an artificial distinction. Indeed, it may just be that being a true fan is a prerequisite to being a true scholar of popular culture. Perhaps you can truly know only what you love.

Kevin Hagopian teaches film studies and cultural studies at Penn State.