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  5. Volume 11, Issue 1, 2023

Journal of Popular Television, The - Bridgerton, Apr 2023

Bridgerton

Bridgerton, Apr 2023

Language: English
  • Articles

      • From private pleasure to erotic spectacle: Adapting to female audience desires

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv_00090_1

        In this article, we look at how medium and genre shaped the Netflix adaptation of the first two novels and mediated the depictions of sex and desire to fit medium-specific expectations surrounding sexual content made for women. The showrunners for Netflix’s (2020–present) articulated a desire to depict sex from a female perspective, and with a ‘female gaze’, but the series is also instrumental in defining that perspective in ways that often differ from the approach of the novels’ female author. The contrast between the original and the adaptation reveals social norms and beliefs about content that excites women as well as stark differences in print and television norms. In attempting to use a female gaze, the adaptation also constructs the female gaze as distinctly separate from what is depicted in the novels and as limited to specific forms of ‘looking’. We first explore how this is implicated in choices that were made about the adaptation of violent or aggressive sex for the show. avoids depictions of aggression present in the novel and falls back on traditional depictions of appropriate feminine desire. Secondarily, we discuss depictions of sexual consent in the novel and the series with a particular emphasis on the implications colour-blind-casting has for the depiction of violations of consent.

    • Reading will not find you a husband: Eloise Bridgerton, accomplishment and the ‘thinking woman’ in the early nineteenth-century period drama

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv_00091_1

      From the very opening scenes of (2020–present), Eloise Bridgerton, the second-eldest daughter, takes centre stage as a character entrenched in a Regency London world, yet immediately identifiable to a modern audience. Her desire to learn and live beyond a conventional path sets her apart in a way that provides hope to a viewing audience that desires from her a myriad of things, including the intertwining of her reticence to marry, her close friendship with Penelope Featherington and intellectual aspirations with longed-for queer representation. This article will explore how the building of Eloise’s character allows for the exploration of the gendering of intellectual freedom on-screen at a place where fact, fiction and audience desires meet. In examining the translation of the complicated nature of the ‘thinking woman’ and ‘accomplishment’ onto screen through the lens of Eloise, and the references and language used, in particular those to Wollstonecraft, as well as audience responses to and desires for Eloise, this article will demonstrate how a conflation of historical reference and modern outlook both re-energizes and often polarizes feminist tropes of the scholarly woman.

  • Articles

      • Primetime pathology: and heteronormative ideals

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv_00095_1

        Despite its popularity with viewers, the television series , which aired between 2016 and 2022, has received relatively little scholarly attention. Yet there is an emerging critical consensus that viewers’ self-image and behaviour is informed by the lessons they learn from the series. This article explores the series’ representation of gender as ideological precept, analysing the ways characters modify their behaviour to conform to gendered expectations at the same time as those ideological behaviours lead to relationship conflict. I argue that sells viewers the fantasy of good intention and performative affection, whilst implicitly normalizing unhealthy behaviours: poor communication, impulsiveness and self-centred decision-making. That the characters in the show exhibit these traits – these pathologies – is justified in the logic of the show, which paints them as righteous protagonists. Reading the series against the grain reveals that these individual shortcomings can only be understood as pathologies, presented as they are in the series with no material base.

    • (1978–80) and the disappearing detective: 1970s British television, a genre literature and the end of an era

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv_00096_1

      This article considers links between 1970s British television and male-oriented detective fiction. It takes as its focus the eponymous protagonist of Thames Television’s (1978–80), whose first incarnation, in the ‘P. B. Yuill’ novel , dates back to 1974. During the 1970s the investigator figure was to British television what the espionage adventurer had been in the 1960s – all but ubiquitous. Contemporaneous genre literature, often influenced by the US ‘hard-boiled’ tradition, played a pivotal role in establishing such a presence. Yet its relationship with television remains obscure. Why should this be the case? And what might be gained from looking at the changing world of the 1970s through the eyes of an obsolete archetype? In response to these questions, the article retrieves one cultural history (literature) on the back of, and while augmenting, another (television). , with its distinct ‘meta’ quality and end-of-era proximity, proves useful to this exercise.

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