64 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
MIXED MEDIAVirgin,” Nussbaum tells me. She likes the show so much that
she’s watched the series through twice—once in real time,
and again with her children, in preparation for the show’s
fifth and final season. Her essay on Jane bristles with outrage
that the world has taken “all this perfection for granted.”
Nussbaum writes that the show is a “joyful manifesto” against
the very idea of a “guilty pleasure,” a “bright-pink filibuster
exposing the layers in what the world regards as shallow.”
But Jane was doomed to a niche audience, having been
derived from art forms traditionally coded “female”—not
just the telenovela but the soap opera, the rom-com, reality
television, and the romance novel. The title is a woman’s
name, followed by the word “virgin.” Jane the Virgin never
stood a chance of being anything but a “guilty pleasure.”
So much of the history of the medium is contained within
the self-repudiation of that phrase, “guilty pleasure.” The
serial broadcast was historically girlie stuff, first on the radio
and later on TV. Advertisers recognized that women were the
main buyers of household consumer
goods, and serial storytelling kept
those women tuning in day after day. A
great deal of regular programming was
thus geared to the tastes and habits of
housewives. As the sociologist David
Morley has pointed out, this created
a split in cultural attitudes about tele-
vision consumption that reflected the
split in the middle-class American
home, which was and remains a sphere
of leisure for men and a sphere of work
for women. For the men, TV could be
an uncomplicated pleasure, to be en-
joyed freely after the workday; for the
women, it was a pleasure to be sneaked
throughout the day, distractedly, while doing household
work—or even, yes, guiltily, while the housework went un-
attended. And when the family came together, guess whose
tastes ruled the remote. Here’s how one woman explained
it in Morley’s 1986 book, Family Television:
“I feel guilty if I push for what I want to see, because he
and the boys want to see the same thing, rather than what a
mere woman would want to watch...If there was a love film
on, I’d be happy to see it and they wouldn’t. It’s like when
you go to pick up a video. Instead of getting a nice sloppy
love story, I think I can’t get that because of the others. I’d
feel guilty watching it, because I’d think, I’m getting my
pleasure whilst the others aren’t getting any pleasure, be-
cause they are not interested.”
Out of these domestic fault lines emerged the television
“guilty pleasure.”
Popular criticism has only reinforced the gender dynamic.
Anything pitched too frankly at women, and certainly any
bit of daytime programming, was held to be lesser, frivolous.
No form of TV has gone in for as much abuse of this kind
as the soap opera, which was produced once upon a time
to literally sell soap to housewives. But Nussbaum sees the
soap as a sort of unappreciated mother of modern prestigeTV. “Soap operas ran during the day, they were their own
strata of TV,” Nussbaum says. “But the stories changed from
episode to episode, the stories went on, and the characters
changed over time and over years. That’s the model for a lot
of modern ambitious television, and I often think that it’s
kind of cut out of the story, and I think part of the reason
is because it is marked as a shameful, feminine medium.”
A lot of Nussbaum’s criticism revolves around the ways
that smart shows that take interesting risks are devalued,
if not dismissed out of hand, if they have a female protago-
nist. She writes about falling in love with Buffy the Vampire
Slayer in the late ’90s, a heady, joyful affair that set her on
the path of television criticism. Buffy was an important show
for reasons beyond its demon-hunting teenage-girl lead. It
challenged the norms of what television could do. There
was the silent episode; the musical episode; the decision to
kill off the main character and then resurrect her; the entire
sixth season, during which the Big Bad is a group of teenage
boys propelled by a feedback loop of misogyny; the upset-
ting, complicated portrayal of a sexual assault attempt by a
main character. The series is not without its flaws, but the
mere fact that it was taking such big swings while building
a mythology that still holds up in 2019 suggests there should
be no guilt in enjoying its pleasures.
Except, as Nussbaum points out, “there’s this complicated
thing about audiences and the perceived audience for a
show. Even if a show is watched widely, sometimes there’s
a sort of primal audience member—for a show like Buffy,
it’s a teenage girl, and for a show like The Sopranos, it’s a
middle-aged man.” And there is no group that mainstream
culture takes less seriously than teenage girls.
Over the span of Nussbaum’s essays, an alternative canon
begins to take shape. The shows that she celebrates tend to
have overcome the burdens of genre conventions, say, or the
critical condescension deployed along hidden contours of
gender. Buffy, like Jane, like Sex and the City, is Nussbaum’s
kind of TV. Circumscribed by genre, boxed in by the as-
sumptions surrounding their audiences, these shows never-
theless used those limitations to do something brilliant and
culturally significant. Think of The Good Wife and its deeply
satisfying spinoff, The Good Fight; think of the Johnsons
in black-ish; think of anything by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
You can start to make out, in Nussbaum’s reconfiguring of
the canon, a struggle for a different sort of liberation from a
different sort of convention. Squint a little and the book starts
to look like an allegory for women’s rights in the 20th cen-
tury. She writes: “But when, as the years passed, TV began to
warp—as comedies got sadder and dramas funnier; as prime-
time stories absorbed the serialized daytime model, allow-
ing characters to change and stories to take bigger leaps; as
dramas began to wrestle with worldly subject matter—TV
didn’t abandon those tight, seemingly repressive genres. In-
stead, it worked off their restraints. It both resisted them and
exploited them.” Like the women to whom it pandered and
peddled soap and entertained all the while, popular television
itself is the story of limits imposed and—on glorious occa-
sion—limits transcended. —Becca AndrewsHere were the
shows doing
the invisible
labor of the TV
revolution.