Shonda Rhimes is one of the most powerful players in contemporary American network television. Adventures in Shondaland critically explores Shonda Rhimes's meteoric rise to stardom, her reign (or cultural appointment) as television's diversity queen, and Shondaland's almost-universally lauded melodramatic narratives.

Innovator Award for Edited Collection from the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Shonda Rhimes is one of the most powerful players in contemporary American network television. Beginning with her break-out hit series Grey’s Anatomy, she has successfully debuted Private Practice, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, The Catch, For The People, and Station 19. Rhimes’s work is attentive to identity politics, “post-” identity politics, power, and representation, addressing innumerable societal issues. Rhimes intentionally addresses these issues with diverse characters and story lines that center, for example, on interracial friendships and relationships, LGBTIQ relationships and parenting, the impact of disability on familial and work dynamics, and complex representations of womanhood. This volume serves as a means to theorize Rhimes’s contributions and influence by inspiring provocative conversations about television as a deeply politicized institution and exploring how Rhimes fits into the implications of twenty-first century television.

The Works of Shonda Rhimes, the first book in Bloomsbury's Screen Storytellers series, brings together a collection of essays that look critically at the works of this award-winning writer, producer, and CEO of the global media company, Shondaland. Shonda Rhimes's television series, and those created and produced through Shondaland, have left an important imprint on television history. Beginning with her groundbreaking series Grey's Anatomy, the series created under the umbrella of Rhimes's brand, including Private Practice, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, For the People, Station 19, Bridgerton, Inventing Anna, and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, have delighted global audiences with their innovative storytelling, dynamic characters, and the inclusion of contemporary social issues woven throughout the storylines. In this collection of essays, screenwriting and television studies scholars explore the ways in which Rhimes's series have been at the forefront of change in the television landscape in the past two decades, including discussions of the representation of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ characters; inclusivity in casting; innovations in pilot and series development; variations on genre; and disruptive business and marketing practices. This collection of essays offers emerging screenwriters and informed consumers of television insights into the cultural impact of Rhimes's work as well as how one of the most powerful television creators and showrunners in the history of the medium has crafted and shaped screen stories that speak to viewers spanning all demographics across the globe.

This volume of essays provides a critical foray into the methods used to construct narratives which foreground antiheroines, a trope which has become increasingly popular within literary media, film, and television. Antiheroine characters engage constructions of motherhood, womanhood, femininity, and selfhood as mediated by the structures that socially prescribe boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality. Within this collection, scholars of literary, cultural, media, and gender studies address the complications of representing agency, autonomy, and self-determination within narrative texts complicated by age, class, race, sexuality, and a spectrum of privilege that reflects the complexities of scripting women on and off screen, within and beyond the page. This collection offers perspectives on the alternate narratives engendered through the motivations, actions, and agendas of the antiheroine, while engaging with the discourses of how such narratives are employed both as potentially feminist interventions and critiques of access, hierarchy, and power.

This book discusses the use of authorship discourses and author figures in the promotion and marketing of media content, dealing with the U.S. mainstream media, including franchise film, network television, and triple-A video games. The research takes a unique approach studying ideas of authorship in promotion, diverging from extant approaches looking at the text, production, or reception. Conceptualizing authorship within the logic of media branding, the book studies the construction of ideas around creativity and the creative person in marketing and publicity content where media industries communicate with audiences. A cross-media approach allows the book to take a broad look and make comparisons across the increasingly integrated media industries. The book will be of great relevance to academics in the fields of film, television, and media studies, including postgraduate students, conducting teaching and research around authorship, media industries, and media promotion.

This title provides a broad overview of how women are portrayed and treated in America's news and entertainment industries, including film, television, radio, the internet, and social media. This book provides a one-stop resource for understanding the participation and representation of women in the U.S. media in such areas as narrative film, scripted television programming, advertising, video games, news, and sports. Coverage is wide-ranging and comprehensive, covering historical developments and trends as well as such relevant issues as gender disparities in pay and advancement opportunities, stereotypical gender portrayals in popular entertainment, sexual harassment in America's media and entertainment industries, and the dearth of positive media representations of women of color. Engaging with this history and reading about current issues related to this topic will be useful to those interested in understanding more about why women's engagement in media—in such roles as performer, journalist, producer, and writer—is important. It will also help readers better understand how and why problematic media representations of women hinder efforts to achieve full gender equality in American society.

Winner of the 2023 SCMS Media Industries Scholarly Interest Group Outstanding Book Award sponsored by the Center for Entertainment & Media Industries On March 15, 2011, Donald Trump changed television forever. The Comedy Central Roast of Trump was the first major live broadcast to place a hashtag in the corner of the screen to encourage real-time reactions on Twitter, generating more than 25,000 tweets and making the broadcast the most-watched Roast in Comedy Central history. The #trumproast initiative personified the media and tech industries’ utopian vision for a multi-screen and communal live TV experience. In Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture, author Cory Barker reveals how the US television industry promised—but failed to deliver—a social media revolution in the 2010s to combat the imminent threat of on-demand streaming video. Barker examines the rise and fall of Social TV across press coverage, corporate documents, and an array of digital ephemera. He demonstrates that, despite the talk of disruption, the movement merely aimed to exploit social media to reinforce the value of live TV in the modern attention economy. Case studies from broadcast networks to tech start-ups uncover a persistent focus on community that aimed to monetize consumer behavior in a transitionary industry period. To trace these unfulfilled promises and flopped ideas, Barker draws upon a unique mix of personal Social TV experiences and curated archives of material that were intentionally marginalized amid pivots to the next big thing. Yet in placing this now-forgotten material in recent historical context, Social TV shows how the era altered how the industry pursues audiences. Multi-screen campaigns have shifted away from a focus on live TV and toward all-day “content” streams. The legacy of Social TV, then, is the further embedding of media and promotional material onto every screen and into every moment of life.

Intersectional Humanism and Star Trek: Discovery focuses on the shift from the liberal humanism of the Star Trek franchise to the intersectional humanism of Star Trek: Discovery. Featuring a great deal of diversity both in front of and behind the camera, Discovery affirms the guiding principle of the franchise: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Arguing that the focus of Discovery is a connection between a variety of beings and ways of being in the world, the author analyzes the relationships among humanoids and machines, animals, and between each other as well as the representation of trauma in the series. The author finds that, while there are reversions to some of the more problematic elements of liberal humanism over the course of the series, ultimately it forms connections that will progress humanity and deepen our relationship to each other and the world around us.

Difficult Women on Television Drama analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or address: equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and the need for intersectional approaches. Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change. This book is a must-read for scholars of media and communication studies; television and film studies; cultural studies; American studies; sociology of gender and sexualities; women and gender studies; and international film, media and cinema studies.

2020 Second Place, Best Nonfiction Multi Author, International Latino Book Awards Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity. Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region (“Tejana style,” “L.A. style”), age group (“homie,” “chola”), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, “walking altars” on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.