Journal of Popular Television, The - Current Issue

Even where corporations actively engage in unquestionably immoral behaviour, the vast majority of their employees are often morally good people. When moral people produce significantly immoral results simply by doing their jobs, we call it ‘administrative evil’. Administrative evil is humorously, but revealingly presented in Better Off Ted (2009–10). Through Better Off Ted, we learn how administrative evil derives in large part from bureaucratic structures that facilitate moral employees into thinking of both their companies and their own identities in fashions that distance their labour from the products of their work. These bureaucratic systems encourage employees to view themselves as constructive and valuable workers, while seeing their companies as incompetent organizations that are merely performing immoral acts by mistake. Through realistic, fleshed-out examples, Better Off Ted enables us to understand how corporations use bureaucracy to constrain the moral senses of its employees, who follow seemingly dumb rules that just happen to lead to inherently immoral, but consistently profitable results.

iZombie (2015–19) is set in Seattle where part of its population is infected with a zombie virus created by a corporation. iZombie sustains the productive use of the zombie to explore consumption and late-stage capitalism, but unlike most other zombie fiction, situates this in a familiar, banal present where social and governmental institutions, laws and bureaucracies continue to operate. Central to these questions is the role and responsibility of corporations, situated within an eminently recognizable, but not particularly effective, law and order. iZombie accurately portrays the continued production of a dangerous product within a legal framework that protects corporations and investors, rather than customers. Given the dependence of zombies on access to brains, the series sheds light on the responsibility of consumers, legal authorities and broader society in perpetuating harms. In light of our increasing dependence upon corporations and the systemic harms that they cause, what kinds of justice are available? This article will consider how corporate wrongdoing, legal conceptions of corporate criminal responsibility and the im/possibility of justice are mis/represented in the first season of the series.

This article examines the way Timeless (2016–18), a series focused on time travel, interacts with history and historical revision as either prescient of or commenting on the current era, particularly in the way it questions, through the stories it tells, accepted history and the consequences of excluded stories, particularly those of women and people of colour. Further, pitting the series’ protagonists against the machinations of a powerful corporate cabal that extends back to the US colonial era, with the goal of controlling citizens through the erasure and revision of history, offers real-world analogues to the control of information that persists to the present day.

This article sheds light on the media representations of successful women using the theorization of affective economies. We focus on four female characters in three popular television series: Andy in Ode to Joy (2016–17), Su Mingyu in All Is Well (2019) and Luo Zijun and Tang Jing in The First Half of My Life (2017). First, we begin by using television content analysis to examine the ways women are subjected to the paradoxical cultural values that stigmatize unmarried women as shengnü (‘leftover women’) while promoting the neo-liberal ideal of duli nüxing (‘independent women’). Second, to explore the affective economies of successful women and how feelings and cultural values are circulated among the female audience, we conduct an in-depth analysis of interviews with 21 female viewers in China. Third, we employ feminist critical discourse analysis to examine how these popular television dramas reflect changing gender norms in China, where new types of relationships are now deemed acceptable. We argue that these series have represented changing gender norms that successful women can achieve happiness by securing a ‘carefree’ romantic relationship, replacing marriage as the new happy ending.