Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2022

The cultural politics of The Girlfriend Experience (2016–present) and Girlboss (2017) are symptomatic of intersecting discourses surrounding millennial femininity and neo-liberal enterprise culture. Featuring aggressively individualistic, White, twenty-something female protagonists, both shows interrogate the slender ideological crevice that separates economic libertarianism from social pathology. Girlboss and The Girlfriend Experience critically explore the ontological dissonance experienced by a millennial cohort schooled exclusively in the mythologies of a stubbornly resilient neo-liberal culture. As such, these young women are best understood as ideological avatars that expose the entropic conjunction of gendered individualism and entrepreneurial selfhood in a ‘post’-recessionary United States.

This article argues that the philosophical and psychological concepts of resentment and ressentiment serve as compelling motivational forces in the lives and actions of the central characters that comprise the American TV series Better Call Saul (2015–22). For Nietzsche and Scheler, ressentiment involves the internalization of hostile affects that tend to reinforce a sense of powerlessness and feelings of inferiority. Unlike ressentiment, which can linger for a long time, resentment is an active and immediate mode of resistance that supports its stance against the conformist tendencies of passive or reactive forces. Resentment, if properly directed externally, can serve as an empowering and a creative, active force in a character’s life. For Jimmy McGill, resentment functions as a primary catalyst for his eventual transformation into the unethical, yet prosperous, criminal attorney Saul Goodman. Resentment, if directed inwards, can produce debilitating effects such as Jimmy’s older brother Chuck’s incapability to move past his hatred and envy over his younger brother’s past actions and successes as a lawyer. This article illuminates the role and character of resentment and ressentiment as affective forces for characters in television melodramas.

With 60 per cent of American households reporting watching at least one Christmas movie between Halloween and New Year’s Day, the Hallmark Movie Channel has enjoyed a remarkable amount of success. In 2021, the Hallmark channel produced 41 new Christmas movies that drew a remarkable 85 million viewers. The purpose of this study was to identify the different perceptions, attitudes and beliefs of Hallmark Christmas movie fans, by using Q methodology, to determine why people love these movies so much. Our sample was selected from the attendees at the first-ever Christmas Con in 2019, sponsored, in part, by Hallmark. Participants in the study self-identified as true Hallmark Christmas movie fans who were then asked to sort through a group of statements based on the question: ‘Why I love Hallmark Christmas movies?’ The results revealed three factors or groups of like-minded thinkers, the Season’s Greeters, who are the Christmas enthusiasts who watch the movies as a way to celebrate the season; the Rudolphs, who watch to escape the troubles of the world and their busy lives and the Carolers, who watch simply for a wholesome story with happy endings.

This article intends to explore the formlessness of the Woodsmen as unsettling characters in Twin Peaks:The Return (2017). Their lack of, or blurred, humanity and our misunderstanding of their origins, intentions and boundaries is disruptive enough to our senses that there exists a desire to abject them. It is through this abjection that we, as viewers of Twin Peaks (1990–91), experience a loss of self that permeates through the entirety of The Return. Yet, we return to watch the show, as we, as spectators, are drawn to that which confuses and repulses us. The Woodsmen serve as a metaphor for Season 3 in that they aid in our inability to interpret the show in the traditional sense of what a narrative is, could be or should be. Watching Twin Peaks: The Return is an unsettling experience, and the findings and connections drawn through this research serve as one – among many possible – explanations for this uncanniness, of our misunderstanding of a show that exists outside of traditional boundaries. Links will be drawn through this work of David Lynch and Mark Frost along with the theories and philosophies of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, among others, with the intention of responding to the overarching question of why The Return was so difficult and unsettling to watch as viewers.

Review of: On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth (2021)

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 192 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47801-475-1, p/bk, $24.95