“Heeere’s Johnny!”…Again…and Again…: Pluto TV and the Continued Presence of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show
(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/PlutoTV/videos/johnny-carson-tv/1012800892491661/) In August 2020, Pluto TV, a free streaming service from ViacomCBS, launched a new channel called “Johnny Carson TV.” Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the channel streams hour-long edited episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (NBC, 1962-1992).[i] This article will explore how Pluto TV’s programming strategy of continuously streaming content removes The Tonight Show’s hallmarks of timeliness and late-night positionality, yet still works to incorporate the program into the modern media landscape. When Pluto created the Johnny Carson TV channel, it joined the ranks of the platform’s other “Classic TV” offerings, which includes channels dedicated to The Rifleman, The Addams Family, Mission: Impossible, Happy Days, The Love Boat, and other American television programs from the 1950s-1980s.[ii] What separates Johnny Carson TV from the other channels in the Classic TV category, however, is timeliness and topicality. While these narrativized programs in Pluto’s […]
Continue Reading‘Brings Back Some Memories’: Textual and metatextual experiences of nostalgia in Twin Peaks: The Return
“When you see me again, it won’t be me,” the entity called The Arm warns in the second season finale of Twin Peaks, the cult 1990s TV series co-created by screenwriter Mark Frost and filmmaker David Lynch. This cryptic statement was borne out by the long-awaited revival of the series Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), which adopted a darker tone, more opaque storytelling techniques, and a sterner aesthetic than the original series. This, coupled with the narrative withholding of iconic elements from the series, qualified the return promised by the season’s title. Consequently, Twin Peaks’ third season has been framed as a critique or a “refutation” [i] of nostalgia. However, it can be argued that The Return uses audience expectations and memories to trigger nostalgia in its viewers and exploit this feeling as a springboard to engage in a critical reexamination of their perception of the original series. The […]
Continue Reading“Be Curious, Not Judgemental.” Influences of Positivity and Kindness in Ted Lasso
In the summer of 2020, Ted Lasso, a sitcom centred around a former NBC soccer promoter, was released to both critical and commercial success and appeared to channel a specifically upbeat register quite unlike its peers. Built on the tried-and-tested ‘fish out of water’ comedy trope, Ted Lasso centres on the eponymous American Football coach who is employed as a Soccer coach for fictional premier league team, AFC Richmond. The show’s branding and promotional campaign suggested that the aforementioned rehashed trope, namely goofy protagonist clumsily happening upon hijinks and confusing situations, would be its operative tone. Instead, the show took audiences by surprise with its wholesome messages of goodwill and nuanced character studies, joining a rich history of American sitcoms that are not simply comic in tone but also layered with messages of humanity, goodwill, and positive representations. Initially due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, Ted Lasso became a […]
Continue ReadingQuantum Leap: Jukebox Nostalgia and the Flattening of History
In the opening scene of the Quantum Leap episode “Animal Frat” (2×12), Dr. Sam Beckett ‘leaps’ into the body of Knut “Wild Thing” Wileton, arriving in his body on top of a pool table as two ‘Tau Kappa Beta’ fraternity brothers pour beer from the keg into Sam’s startled face. A raucous house party rages in the background as The Kingsmen’s seminal 1963 rendition of Louie Louie booms from unseen speakers. By this point in the show’s run, the audience is aware that this conspicuous use of popular music in the soundtrack is more than mere background noise, it is important mise-en-scène. The viewer is instantly transported, with Sam, into all of the countercultural insinuations of rock and roll and youthful rebellion inherent in that simple I-IV-V chord progression. It is the mid-‘60s and the nascent teenage youth culture of the ‘50s has grown and matured into a social and […]
Continue ReadingMirroring the Medium: Depictions of Female Domesticity in ‘WandaVision’
WandaVision (2021) is, at its core, a story of grief and nostalgia. In its genre-bending magnificence, WandaVision narrates the evolution of American sit-coms, hurtling us forward through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as the black-and-white pastiches of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched transform into the familiar worlds of Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family. However, in mirroring the medium of American sit-coms, the series also masterfully chronicles the changing role of women in American society through its portrayal of the picturesque nuclear family life – and the fantasies which uphold its illusory existence. As we are transported into the world of Westview, New Jersey, we find Wanda Maximoff and Vision settling into a life of domestic newlywed bliss in the confines of 1950s sit-com America, complete with its monochrome filter. The series follows the events of Avengers Infinity War (2018) and […]
Continue Reading“The Only Way Forward Is Back” – Nostalgia, Grief and Television in WandaVision
WandaVision, one of the newest installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), abandoned the cinema altogether to bring two of the Avengers, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) to the small screen in a 7-episode miniseries airing weekly between January and March 2021 on streaming platform Disney+. The series is set after Vision died at the hands of ubervillain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), a fact viewers could not be sure of until several episodes into the series. It opens in medias res, dropping us directly into a world that feels both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time – recognizable to those who are well-versed in American sitcoms, but jarring to those expecting the MCU’s signature superhero fare. Episode one is shot in black and white, on a 4:3 frame ratio, and in front of a live studio audience, casting Wanda in the role of a […]
Continue ReadingEliminating “Blood and Thunder” from Containment Culture: Audience Efforts to Censor Postwar Radio Programming in the Run-Up to Television
The decade after WWII (1945-1955) was distinct and pivotal in the formation of American media policy, and in establishing postwar social norms.[1] The major broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had profited from wartime spending and garnered some regulatory goodwill through their work with the Office of War Information. Still, they struggled as they transitioned programming from radio to television – while fending off regulation efforts from Congress and an activist FCC. At the same time, a range of progressive and conservative groups debated how to define “the American Way.” Ultimately, Wendy Wall (2008) argues, the postwar emphasis on “getting along” silenced progressive voices, including minorities and women who objected to the postwar reassertion of patriarchal gender norms.[2] Instead of giving everyone a voice, postwar consensus or containment culture privileged and sought to universalize beliefs and arguments made by conservative social groups seeking to define the United States as emphatically […]
Continue ReadingWhen Mariah met Lutie – Luke Cage, The Street and the cultural capital of TV comic adaptation
Content Warning: Graphic Images (violence, severed heads) Netflix released the first series of Luke Cage in September 2016 to immediate acclaim. Cheo Hodari Coker, the producer of the Marvel comic adaptation, uses the richness of African American culture to create a hyper-real Harlem as the backdrop for his eponymous hero. Along with one of the best soundtracks of any of the Marvel shows, Luke Cage is replete with visual references to twentieth century Black America, blurring the distinction between the fictional setting of the characters and the actual world of the audience. Luke is more than just a muscle man, and at various points we see him with books; these are usually incidental to the plot but are deliberate additions to the depth of the scenario that presents the viewer with a literary geography of Harlem. Across the two seasons Luke is discovered reading Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016) and […]
Continue ReadingWatchmen and Hunters: Reading Nostalgia, Repair, and Heroism in American Historical Fiction
Watchmen (2019 and Hunters (2020) are both TV shows that engage with a deep sense of nostalgia and reparation: whether it is their counterfactual worldmaking with an ‘American god’ or a group of Jews who are on the ‘hunt’ to kill Nazis in post-war America, they both demonstrate how a longing for a different personal or historical past is inextricable from a desire to ‘repair’ the linear course of time. The insistent attempt to re-create personal and collective histories against the pervasive and overwhelming myth of American exceptionalism is symptomatic of a particular kind of cultural longing. Svetlana Boym’s useful categorisation of nostalgia into two kinds, restorative and reflective, along with her understanding of nostalgia as a longing for a home that ‘may or may not have existed,’ is central to the re-construction of a lost past both TV shows attempt (in their counterfactual worldmaking).[i] They speak back […]
Continue ReadingU.S. Television, Nostalgia and Identity – Editorial
The ubiquity of television has been written about extensively in both scholarship and popular writing; ever since the first commercial sets began replacing the hearth as the centrepiece of any American living area, television has dominated how we write and think about the United States. In 2020, a time unlike any other in recent memory, more people than ever stayed indoors with the television on, streaming platforms open, and consumed entertainment insatiably. Was it comfort and nostalgia for a pre-pandemic time that saw record viewing figures? A distraction from the uncertainty of the present? Or, simply, that more entertainment is being produced than ever and to stay afloat and abreast of popular culture one has to consume quicker than ever before? This USSO Special Series brings together 10 scholars and their respective research into the televisual landscape of America both past and present, examining how nostalgia, revisionism, and other ideological […]
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