thirtysomething Season 1 (1987-1988) ABC Crea.docx

thirtysomething
Season 1 (1987-1988)
ABC: Created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick
Brief Summary:
The ABC series thirtysomething focused on a group of young
adults living in Philadelphia. The
central characters are Hope and Michael, a married couple with
an infant daughter, and all the
other characters exist in relation to them. Michael owns a small
advertising firm with Elliott,
who is married to Nancy. He is also close to his cousin Melissa
(a single photographer) and best-
friend Gary (a pre-tenure college professor). Hope’s best friend
Ellyn (a civil servant in the
Philadelphia government) is also a frequent presence on the
show. Basically, thirtysomething
was a character-based drama where the people on the screen

spend a lot of time discussing their
feelings, especially the anxiety of new parents and young adults
of the 1980s who are not always
enthusiastic about the consumerist mentality of the 1980s. They
are also not entirely comfortable
with the countercultural values of the early 1970s that they
grew up with. They are, in a word,
conflicted.
(From left to right: Gary, Melissa, Michael, Hope, Ellyn,
Nancy, Elliot, with kids Janey, Ethan,
and Britty)
Evaluation
Watching thirtysomething literally thirty years after it first
aired is an interesting experience.
Without a doubt, it feels dated. The fashions (the shoulder pads
that some of the women wear are truly
amazing) and technology can be hard to take, but more
importantly it simply feels old. The pacing is

much slower than a contemporary show and the first season,
especially at the beginning of the run, is
plagued by awkward fantasy sequences and flashbacks that
inevitably seem to result in the actors wearing
wigs and other signals of “the 60s.” The characters do seem to
spend an awful lot of time worried about
what today we might call “first world problems.” One of the
complaints about the show when it first aired
was that the characters – especially Michael, who seems to be
wholly unable to make a decision without
agonizing over its socio-economic and philosophical
implications – are whiny.
Binge-watching the show today really emphasizes this and has a
tendency to make the characters
insufferable at times. In one episode, Hope and Michael want to
have a party, but the renovation of their
kitchen isn’t finished. Eventually, after much hemming-and-
hawing, they decide to hire a carpenter to
complete the work. But Michael soon comes to the conclusion
that what they want is going to be too
expensive, so they direct the carpenter – who, of course, is also
flirting with Hope – to scale back the
plans. They’re not really sure this is the right thing, in part
because they want to impress the people who

they’ve invited to the party. By the end of the episode, Hope
and Michael have decided on a third option:
leave the work undone and lean into it, having the party anyway
and emphasizing the potential of the
room. 1 This is portrayed as the Right Decision – something
that happens a lot in the show. Michael or
one of the other characters freaks out over a particular issue or
problem; he or she agonizes over it by
talking about it with the other characters; eventually the
character Does The Right Thing – mostly. This is
annoying, watching the show today, but that might be because
of the binge-watching effect. It didn’t
strike me as a problem watching it in 1988, perhaps because this
is how television worked back then.
It’s important, then, to think about why people liked
thirtysomething in its original context. Of
course, it wasn’t a universally liked show, although it did
attract a very desirable demographic, according
1 If I recall correctly, the work on the kitchen is never
completed. This becomes a running motif on the show.
to the interviews with creators Zwick and Herskovitz on the

DVD extras. The people who watched the
show bought into the world of the characters, and I think the
reason for this is the intimacy of the
characters. In the 1980s, there wasn’t anything else on TV
where characters were talking about mundane,
real world problems. By doing this, thirtysomething was able to
get at some very real – very typical –
fears experienced by lots and lots of average Americans. Some
of these problems had relatively low
stakes – finding a babysitter, for example – but they were real.
And as the series got into deeper issues,
the intimacy of the show because truly powerful, to the point
where it became almost hard to watch, as if
we as the viewers were eavesdropping on the neighbors and
seeing into a world that we really shouldn’t
be.
One of the most powerful sequence of episodes involved the
death of Michael’s father. He shows
up in the episode “Business as Usual,” pretending that
everything is great, but Michael notices that he
seems weak. There’s a powerful shot here where Michael, from
a distance, sees his father struggling to
get out of a chair, and we can see the pain, the concern, and
almost a sense of betrayal on actor Ken

Olin’s face. Later, after his father passes away, Michael has to
confront his brother about the fact that the
family business is failing. The writing and acting really gives us
a sense of the relationship between
siblings, where love and resentment can be mixed up in a
powerful way that’s hard to put into words. Olin
in particular is great at showing emotional escalation, going
from calm to seething anger to furious
shouting in moments. We see this here and also later in the
season when Michael and Elliot’s company
seems to be on the verge of collapse. It feels awkward watching
the two business partners and friends
nearly coming to blows, but it makes for powerful television.
This awkward feeling is magnified in the most powerful
episode of the season. Entitled
“Therapy,” it focuses on Elliott and Nancy’s rocky marriage.
Elliott seems to want to leave his wife
(played by Patricia Wettig, who ironically was and still is
married to Ken Olin), but they decide to give
couple’s therapy a chance to save their relationship. The
episode is essentially an airing of each other’s
dirty laundry, and for the audience it is incredibly powerful,
but, again, hard to watch, kind of like

overhearing a couple fighting at a restaurant. The acting by
Wettig and Timothy Busfield as Elliott is top-
notch, and the writing is subtle, getting at the small nuances in
their relationship that are acting as a
wedge between the two of them. But it’s not sensationalized in
any way. There’s a brief nod to the idea
that Elliott wants Nancy to watch pornography with him, but
where another show might have used this to
establish that he’s a pervert, thirtysomething just mentions it
and moves on, suggesting that it’s part of the
character’s complexity.
Along with the intimacy that we as the audience experience
watching thirtysomething, it’s this
complexity of the characters that made people turn on the show
week after week. I think people connected
to this – to the fact that Michael was sometimes a jerk, but
sometimes a great husband, that Melissa was
sometimes scared and insecure but also sometimes brave, and so
on for almost all the characters. The fact
that they were complicated and conflicted, and that they
agonized over their decisions, invited a kind of

interactivity that made the audience feel like they were part of
the club. When I watched the show in the
80s, I remember watching it with my mom, and discussing the
choices the characters made after the show
was over. Ultimately, that’s why thirtysomething worked: its
intimacy brought us into the conversations
of the characters, inspiring us to get involved in conversations
of our own.
Gender
As a show that is primarily about relationships among young-
ish people, it’s not
surprising that’s thirtysomething would frequently bring up
issues of gender, and given that it
premiered in 1987, it’s not surprising that the some of those
issues would seem very particular to
that moment. And as a show that seemed to be speaking for – or
at least describing – a very
specific demographic (white, upwardly-mobile people born in
the 1950s), it’s also not surprising
that thirtysomething was seen by the media as establishing a

particular definition (or stereotype)
of their lives were supposed to be all about. In other words, the
characters in thirtysomething –
and perhaps especially the female characters – were seen as
representatives of their “types.”
Hope was the Happy Housewife; Nancy was the Unhappy
Housewife; Ellyn was the Single
Professional Woman; Melissa was the Single Bohemian Woman.
Imagining the characters as
types is part of the reason why the show received a substantial
amount of criticism for how its
female characters were portrayed.
A strong example of this criticism appeared in Susan Faludi’s
book Backlash: The
Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Faludi’s
basic argument is that the
conservative swing of the 1980s brought with it a response to
the gains of feminism that occurred
in the 1970s. Feminism became a dirty word, as conservative
Republicans and the mainstream
media began to blame the women’s movement and its
accomplishments of the 1970s for a wide
variety of socio-cultural problems of the 1980s. According to
backlash writers, feminism was

bad for women who really wanted to live according to
traditional gender roles and the norms of
the nuclear family. Women who worked outside the home
weren’t as happy as their stay-at-home
counterparts; single women really wanted children, but they
were being forced into lives of
empty relationships because of the demands of feminism.
Faludi’s book is tremendously
persuasive, as she demonstrates in great detail how various
writers, institutions, and
organizations advocated for these ideas that seemed to want to
push the country back to the way
it was back in the 1950s.
One of her targets is thirtysomething. Her criticism is two-fold.
First, she argues that the
main female characters in the show – the aforementioned Hope,
Nancy, Ellyn, and Melissa – are
all backlash-inspired stereotypes. She argues that the single
women on the show are portrayed as
unhappy because they lack men and don’t have babies. She
describes Melissa as “the tear-stained

version of the 80s spinster” (164) while Ellyn (“the hard-as-
nails single career woman” (165))
gets no sympathy on the show, as she sees it. Faludi suggests
that Hope is totally submissive to
her husband Michael, inevitably giving in to what he wants.
Meanwhile, she notes that while
Nancy does develop a professional, creative, and even sexual
life once she’s separated from
Elliott, she points out that in the third season of the show that
Nancy is essentially punished for
her liberation by having to cope with a cancer diagnosis. (167)
On one level, Faludi is accurate about her assessments, but her
judgements seem to be
based on selective viewing of a handful of episodes. She doesn’t
get the full picture of these
characters. She is probably most accurate in her evaluation of
Hope, especially in the first
season, but there is more nuance to Melissa and Ellyn than
Faludi suggests. For example,
Melissa might want kids – she breaks up with a doctor simply
because he claims to be unwilling
to become a father for a second time – but there’s a lot more to
the character than that. She’s a

photographer who lives independently, working on her art
without having to compromise her
values (usually) by doing work simply to make money. Of all
the characters on the show, she’s
probably the most caring and supportive. In this way, her desire
to have a child is actually
consistent with her other personality traits. She’s not quite the
gender stereotype that Faludi
makes her out to be. More importantly, Faludi tends to ignore
the ways in which these characters
do offer positive images for women. The friendship between the
women is powerful, and none of
them are really defined by their status with men. Even Hope,
who tends to fit the stereotyped
image of the stay-at-home mom, is very self-conscious about it
and the show establishes that this
is ultimately her choice (and a temporary one at that). She
realizes that ideology, media, and
tradition have made her want to stay home with Janey, her
daughter. When she makes this choice
to stay home, she does it in a way that suggests that it’s not
meant to be a policy that she’s

advocating for all women. It’s just what’s best for her, at that
moment in time.
In some ways, Faludi’s second criticism of the show is more
damning, suggesting more
strongly that thirtysomething is an example of the backlash. She
reports that the men who created
the show, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, wanted its
female characters to be more
traditional, more domestic – and more domesticated – than what
viewers saw on the screen. “The
show’s female actors and viewers weren’t clamoring for full-
time nesters,” she writes, “but the
show’s male creators were.” (167) The quotes that she provides
back up this assertion, as both
Zwick and Herskovitz come off as being not much better than
the conservative Republicans who
spread the backlash ideology. The saving grace of the show,
argues Faludi, is the group of
women behind the sexist characters they are playing. Melanie
Mayron, who portrays Melissa, is
described as having developed her character’s photography
career, while Polly Draper (Ellyn)
challenged the show’s creators and pushed for her character to
be independent, confident, and

not totally jealous of Hope. (165)
Reading between the lines, there is a strong sense of betrayal in
Faludi’s analysis of
thirtysomething. She seems angry that this show, beloved (I’m
guessing) by some of her peers
because of its substantial roles for women, doesn’t live up to its
potential as a progressive vision
of how gender roles could – and should – be in the late 1980s.
From the perspective of 2019,
though, the show gives us powerful insights into how traditional
gender roles were still being
portrayed on TV into the 1980s.
Structure
Like most television series before 2000, thirtysomething does
not have – especially in its
first season – a strong, overarching narrative structure. But

while the series is not a serial, despite
sometimes being compared to soap operas when it originally
aired (for example, look at Jane
Feuer’s Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism
(1995) for how the series was
sometimes framed as a soap opera (112)), it is also not strictly
episodic. This means that
although individual episodes are not inaccessible to new
viewers, there are at least two weak
narrative threads that connect the first season of the show. In
this way, thirtysomething is
actually structurally similar to The Sopranos (which premiered
in 1999, nearly a decade after
thirtysomething was cancelled) with its mixture of episodic and
serial storytelling. In his essay
about The Sopranos, Ohio State University professor Sean
O’Sullivan argues that the series is
more like a short story collection than a novel with continuing
themes that link the episodes of
the series rather than a single overarching plot. (71)
thirtysomething works a similar way.
The first season of the series has three main narrative threads
that last more or less from
the first episode to the last. The threads do not appear in each

episode, and some episodes don’t
include any of them. At the same time, viewers are quickly
reminded of these basic plots in
subsequent episodes and certainly are able remember from week
to week what is happening with
their favorite characters. The first narrative thread focuses on
Michael and Elliot’s advertising
business and how it’s not exactly as successful as the partners
want it to be. 2 Michael in
particular is nervous about the company’s bottom line, while
Elliot has more faith in the notion
that everything will work out in the end somehow. These
different approaches to the business
develop into a tension between the partners that flares up at
various points. The second narrative
2 In fact, the Michael and Elliot Company goes out of business
about a third of the way through the second season,
and in many ways the series becomes better because of it.
thread involves the dissolution of Elliot and Nancy’s marriage.
This has significant ramifications

for the show, as both characters are integral parts of the circle
of friends at center of the show.
The third narrative thread involves Hope’s conflicted feelings
about going back to work. This is
primarily a concern of Hope and Michael, but it does
occasionally impact other characters,
especially Ellyn and Melissa.
The episodes of the series breakdown this way:
Episode Title The Business The Marriage Going Back to Work
Other Main Plot
Pilot Yes Hinted at Yes
The Parents Are
Coming
No No Yes Relationship with
parents
Housewarming Yes No Somewhat
Couples No Yes No
But Not for Me Yes No Yes Gary and Melissa
We Gather
Together

Yes Yes Yes
Nice Work If
You Can Get It
Yes No No Ellyn at work
Weaning Yes No Yes
I’ll Be Home for
Christmas
No Yes Yes What to do about
the holidays?
South by SE No No No Gary is
threatened
Therapy Yes Yes No
Competition Yes Yes No Learning about
computers
Separation Yes Yes No
I’m In Love . . . No Yes Yes Melissa and
Ellyn
Business as

Usual
Yes No No Michael’s father
Accounts
Receivable
Yes No No Michael’s father
Whose Forest Yes Yes No
Nancy’s First
Date
Yes Yes No Melissa wants
kids
Undone Yes Yes No
Tenure No No No Gary
Born to be Mild Yes No Yes
What we see here is that, with the exception of a few episodes
– primarily ones about
Gary – every episode features at least one of the major narrative

threads, and many episodes
feature multiple threads. In some of these, the thread is the
major plot. For example, most of
“Therapy” takes place in the office of Nancy and Elliot’s
marriage counselor. In other episodes,
the narrative threads are minor or are simply alluded to. In the
two episodes about the death of
Michael’s father, the business theme is alluded to through
references to his father’s business. As
it turns out, his company is failing, which clearly makes
Michael think about the financial status
of his own business venture. Moreover, the fact that Michael is
named executor of his father’s
will, despite his brother’s involvement in the company, reminds
viewers (and most likely
Michael and other characters) about his over-active sense of
responsibility. Even the marriage
narrative thread connects back to the business, as both Michael
and Nancy feud with Elliot over
his mishandling of funds that are supposed to belong to both
partners. In the second season, this
is emphasized even more when Michael and Elliot “divorce;”
Michael is even able to connect
with Nancy better because they both feel like they’ve been

betrayed by Elliot.
Regular viewers of thirtysomething certainly benefitted from
watching every episode, but
missing select installments of the show would not have taken a
tremendous amount away from
the overall impact of the first season of the series. In fact, some
episodes – the ones focusing on
the death of Michael’s father and the episode where Hope and
Michael have to decide how to
celebrate the holidays as a mixed-faith family – stand up just
fine on their own. The series – and
certainly TV in general – seemed to be moving in the direct of
more serial formats, though. As
thirtysomething moved into its third and fourth seasons, the
narrative threads became stronger, in
much the same way that TV series would become more serial
oriented in the 1990s and 2000s.
TV History
thirtysomething has an important place in the history of
American television as an
innovative example of the family drama genre. This style of

series virtually didn’t exist prior to
the premiere of thirtysomething. Family sitcoms, of course, had
been and continued to be staples
of broadcast television, but depicting family interaction in a
more serious way was, surprisingly,
not very common during the first four decades of TV. Dramas
tended to focus on other, more
“high concept” genres that featured suspense and tension simply
as part of their foundational
ideas. Cop shows, Westerns, legal dramas, and even medical
dramas had conflicts virtually
“built into” them, and in that way they were able to avoid
having to deal with real-world issues
and real-life concerns. Perhaps that’s why the family drama was
not a big part of the networks’
schedules.
There were a few family dramas that preceded thirtysomething,
though. Two of them had
historical settings: The Waltons (1971-1981), set in the 1930s,
and Little House on the Prairie
(1974-1983), set at the end of the 19th century. This high-
concept element makes these shows
significantly different from thirtysomething. Eight is Enough
(1977-1981) was a high-concept

show by virtue of the size of the family: 3 sons and 5 daughters.
The producers of the show kept
it relatively light, although not to the point of it being a sitcom.
For these reasons, it is not really
a direct predecessor to thirtysomething. The series Family
(1976-1980) does have some
connections, though, including the fact that Edward Zwick, one
of the creators of
thirtysomething, was also a producer on that earlier show. More
importantly, it didn’t have a
high-concept – it was just about a family and their middle-class
lifestyle. There were no
gimmicks, except perhaps for the presence of teen idol Kristy
McNichol. Family was just about
life: jobs, divorce, relationships, aging parents, and other
everyday realities. An important
difference between the two shows was the focus on young adults
on thirtysomething, as opposed
to older parents on Family.
Viewers during the 1980s could find “family drama” in soap
operas, and while some

critics at the time suggested that thirtysomething was similar to
them, they were clearly different.
Soap operas tended to be melodramatic, telling sensationalistic
stories about scandal, cheating,
and sudden turn-abouts in very dramatic ways. While
thirtysomething did have some episodes
about these kinds of things, the way that the show depicted
them was very different from soap
operas, even prime-time soaps like Dallas. While soap operas
tended to be over the top, with
characters confronting each other in tension-filled scenes,
thirtysomething was much more
introspective, with characters agonizing over choices for entire
episodes. And when the
characters in thirtysomething did finally get to the point of
confronting someone, the sides of the
argument were much more complicated than what one would
find in a soap opera. While soaps
tended to have heroes and villains, no one on thirtysomething
was purely good or bad.
Relationships and people were complicated on thirtysomething,
while on soap operas the plots
tended to be more complicated.

Because of its position as an innovative family drama,
thirtysomething has gone on to
influence later shows. The creators of thirtysomething went on
to create two thematically and
tonally similar family dramas. My So-Called Life (1994) and
Once and Again (1999-2002) were
both shot in a style that is similar to that of thirtysomething and
all three focus more on smaller,
real world events as opposed to hugely dramatic life-changing
transformations. The writing of all
three is similar, with a lot of introspection, and they even seem
to take place in the same
universe. In fact, the character Miles Dentrell, introduced in the
second season of
thirtysomething, also appears in Once and Again.
Perhaps more importantly, thirtysomething influenced sensitive
family dramas from a
variety of creators. While some of the intimate discussions
between Philip and Elizabeth in The
Americans are similar to that of thirtysomething, the series that
truly seems to be a spiritual and

even visual descendent of the show is This is Us. While more
melodramatic, this contemporary
series really gives viewers a strong thirtysomething vibe, even
down to the acoustic guitar music
that is frequently heard on the show. The characters are earnest,
just as in their predecessor, and
they seem to be walking a political line between politically
correct progressive and self-centered
elitism. Perhaps the biggest similarity between the two shows in
the tendency of characters to
agonize over choices, leading to a sense in both shows that the
characters are excessively whiny.
In addition, a number of episodes of This is Us have been
directed by thirtysomething alum Ken
Olin, the actor who played Michael Steadman, giving us a direct
line from the older show to its
contemporary counterpart.
Cultural Significance
I first became aware of thirtysomething when a college
professor of mine mentioned the

show in a US History class in what must have been 1987 or
1988. He mentioned the show as a
way to talk about how the countercultural baby boomers of the
late 1960s and early 1970s were
having to come to terms with adulthood in the 1980s. Because
of his mention of the series, I was
ready to think about its cultural significance even before
watching my first episode. For many
other people, too, thirtysomething was more of a cultural
touchstone than it was a collection of
stories about how a group of people relate to each other and the
world as adults with real
responsibilities for the first time. As a result, thirtysomething
was probably talked about more in
the 1980s than it was actually watched, and when people talked
about it, they often talked about
it as a show about yuppies.
Although it’s not clear who coined the term, by the late 1980s
“yuppie” was a common
buzzword used in all manner of media reports. A play on terms
from the 1960s like “hippie” and
“yippie,” “yuppie” referred to people who were seen as “young
urban professionals,” or

sometimes “young upwardly-mobile professionals.” As a result,
yuppies were frequently
attacked as the personification of the consumerist mentality of
Ronald Reagan’s America. This is
especially true since the yuppies, at least originally, were
thought to be the children of the 1960s
who, all grown up, have abandoned the countercultural values
of their youth for greed and
consumerism. This construction of the yuppie undoubtedly
comes from the film The Big Chill
(1983), a movie about former 60s radicals who join together to
mourn the suicide of one of their
friends. Nearly everyone in the group has sold out: a woman has
become a corporate lawyer after
getting tired of defending “scum” while working in a public
defender’s office, a man creates a
running shoe company and becomes incredibly wealthy, another
man abandons his dream of
becoming a novelist to write for People magazine.
As Jane Feuer points out her book Seeing through the Eighties
(1995), the characters in

thirtysomething really are too young to qualify as this kind of
yuppie. (70) If they had been born
in the mid-1950s, then they would have been too young to have
been involved in any of the
meaningful protests of the counterculture. Still, the show
suggests in its first season that Michael
and Gary, in particular, were involved in various protests
against their university administration.
This aspect gets downplayed later on in the series, but there is
always a notion that Michael kind
of feels like he should be living according to the values of the
counterculture. At the same time,
though, he’s also drawn to the concept of supporting his family,
being successful, and living a
“good life” according to the standards of mainstream America.
If Michael and his friends are
yuppies, they are a different kind of yuppie than the characters
of The Big Chill. They are the
younger siblings of the kids who protested at Kent State and had
to worry about being sent to
Vietnam, but this doesn’t really prevent them from being
thought of as yuppies.
Especially later in the 1980s, the yuppie type was less
connected to the 1960s and more

connected to the consumerism of the 1980s, and especially the
dominance of the financial
industry. The image of this yuppie is more consistent with the
character of Bud (Charlie Sheen)
from the movie Wall Street (1987). This yuppie is all about
making money and looking the right
way in the process: slick, slim, and well-dressed. Any pretense
to morality is gone; the corporate
lawyer in The Big Chill feels bad about it, but Bud doesn’t
regret making a lot of money, until
he’s caught cheating. The characters in thirtysomething aren’t
like this. They feel bad about
being successful in a strictly monetary way. In fact, they’re not
really that successful or that
wealthy. Feuer quotes show creator Marshall Herskovitz as
saying that, yes, Hope and Michael
have a big house, but it’s a house that’s in terrible shape and
still needs a lot of work. (112) Gary
and Melissa aren’t really interested in making money – they’re
focused on art and culture, not
acquisitions. The only character who seems to be a
“professional” in the first season is Ellyn, and

she works for the city government, not exactly a direct path to
wealth.
Herskovitz might have thought that the characters in
thirtysomething were not really
yuppies, but that isn’t exactly true either. (Feuer 113) They are
somewhere in between the two
extremes of the yuppie stereotype, baby boomers with a dim
memory of the counterculture who
nonetheless feel some pressure to live according to the values of
their older siblings. In this way,
thirtysomething might have been the most important yuppie text
because it provided a more
realistic portrayal of the yuppie stereotype than was available in
any other media of the 1980s.
Works Cited
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American
Women. Anchor Books, 1991.
Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and
Reaganism. Duke University Press,

1995.
Sean O’Sullivan, “The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling.” How
to Watch Television, edited by
Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, New York University Press,
2013, pp. 65-73.
TV in American Life
February 8, 2019
Viewing Project
Details:
Due Date: Our Exam Session during Final Exam Week
Length: Five sections of 2-3 pages each, double-spaced, with
standard margins and point sizes
Value: 200 points + 50 points for a brief presentation on one
section of your project
Description:
For the Viewing Project assignment, you will be examining a
single season of a specific television series.

(One exception: for a season that only has a few episodes,
especially half-hour sitcoms, you should
watch two seasons so that you have enough material to write
about.) After watching the entire season,
you will analyze the series from five different perspectives,
writing a 2-3 page essay for each one. The
possible perspectives are:
• Evaluation/Aesthetics: Why does the show work? Why do
people like it? Is it good? Why or
why not?
o This section is mandatory; you will then choose your other
four sections from the list
below
• Audience: Who is watching the show, and why? Does it appeal
to a specific demographic? How
does the show define its audience? To what extent does the
series have a fan following? If this is
an important aspect of the series and its audience, what are the
fans like and how to they
demonstrate their fandom?
• Genre: How does the series fit into a category of similar
stories, with specific conventions to

define its scope and themes? To what extent does the series
bend or break the genre rules?
Does it cross genre boundaries? If so, how and to what end?
• Cultural significance: How does the series connect to its
original context? How does it
reflect historical, economic, and social trends of its time? To
what extent did the show reflect
or even shape cultural changes or controversies?
• TV history: Where does the show fit into the larger narrative
of television history? What
shows influenced your series? What shows were influenced by
your series? How was your
series innovative? Look at The Platinum Age of Television for
models of how particular series fit
into their genres’ history.
• Structure: How does the narrative work structurally? Is it
serial, episodic, or something
different? Do the storylines continue over the course of the
season? Do they continue into
other seasons? How is an individual episode structured? Are
there multiple storylines, or just
one linear plot in a single episode?

• Ideology: To what extent does the series have a political
position or “ax to grind”? To what
extent does the show unintentionally reinforce traditional
notions of American “ways of
thinking”: the American dream, nationalism, capitalism, “truth,
justice, and the American way”?
Does it challenge or reinforce those ideas? Is the show liberal or
conservative? Why?
• Gender: How does the show portray traditional gender roles
and norms? How does it address
issues of sexuality and sexual identity? Are men and women
portrayed equally, or does the show
privilege the experiences of one gender over the other? Is the
show feminist? Why or why not?
Is one gender objectified? If so, how?
• Race: How does the show portray racial difference? What
kinds of roles are non-white people
allowed to fill on the series? To what extent does the show
define what it means to African-
American, Asian American, Latinx, or white? Does it rely upon
stereotypes, or are racially
defined characters thoroughly developed?

The questions here are just some ideas to get you started
thinking about each one of these topics.
Don’t think that you have to answer all of these questions – you
don’t need to and, in fact, you
shouldn’t try to answer all of the questions in a single section.
You want to make sure that each one of
your five essays is focused, well-developed, and thorough.
Obviously, not every series to going to
prompt ideas and interpretations for all of the possible
approaches; just use the ones that seem most
relevant to your project/series.
A few other limitations or notes:
• You should write about an American TV series or a TV series
that is widely available in the
United States (like Downton Abbey). You also want to make
sure that you’re writing about a
television series and not movies. Avoid series that were
originally created as movies and then
cut up into a series format.
• Reality TV is fine to write about, as is narrative TV (i.e.
fictional series). A news or sports
program isn’t really going to work for this project,

unfortunately, as it is not practical to write
about a whole “season.”
• Animated series like The Simpsons or Bob’s Burgers are fine
to use.
• You might prefer to use something that’s roughly
contemporary, but historical series can also be
interesting to research and write about.
• In your five essays, you must use at least 2 different quality
sources: books, academic journal
articles, or more journalistic articles from quality, respected
outlets, including magazines and
websites. Check with me if you’re not sure if what you’re using
is “quality.” Obviously, this
means that you’ll need to include a Works Cited page with your
essays. References need to be
cited within the text itself also.
• At the beginning of your set of documents, you should give
some basic information about your
series and the specific season you’re writing about. In other
words, you should tell us when it
was shown, who the important characters were, who created it,
and what network/streaming
service it was originally on. Also, provide a brief summary or

description of the series.
• I will be posting a sample Viewing Project on our Blackboard
page. You can take a look at that
to get a sense of how something like this should look.
• At the end of the semester, when you turn in your project, you
will also be giving a brief
presentation based on a single section of your work. I’ll provide
more directions about the
presentation later on in the course.
Evaluation:
A high quality project will have the following ingredients:
• Clearly focused, unified arguments in each section
• Thorough analysis and well-developed answers to important
questions
• Specific references to the show; use of at least 2 quality
secondary sources
• Insights into your show and how TV in general works;
evidence that you’ve really thought about
your series and how it functions as an extended narrative
• Engaging writing that is free of mistakes. Proof-read; I don’t
want to see mistakes that could be
easily caught if you had just read the paper over once. (Like, for
example, homonyms: words

that sound the same but are spelled differently.) Organize each
section into paragraphs, and
avoid run-ons and fragments.

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