Uncomfortable Television

by Hunter Hargraves

Overview

From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this television is also more perverse: it bombards audiences with misogynistic and racialized violence, graphic sex, substance abuse, unlikeable protagonists, and the extraordinary exploitation of ordinary people. In Uncomfortable Television, Hunter Hargraves examines how television makes its audiences find pleasure through feeling disturbed. He shows that this turn to discomfort realigns collective definitions of family and pleasure with the values of neoliberal culture. In viscerally violent dramas, cringeworthy ironic comedies, and trashy reality programs alike, televisual unease trains audiences to survive under late capitalism, which demands that individuals accept a certain amount of discomfort, dread, and irritation into their everyday lives. By highlighting how discomfort has been central to the reorganization and legitimization of television as an art form, Hargraves demonstrates television’s role in assimilating viewers into worlds marked by precarity, perversity, and crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024194
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/19/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Hunter Hargraves is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Television Scripts  1
1. The Irritated Spectator: Affective Representation in (Post)millennial Comedy  27
2. The Addicted Spectator: TV Junkies in Need of an Intervention  57
3. The Aborted Spectator: Affective Economies of Perversion in Televisual Remix  89
4. The Spectator Plagued by White Guilt: On the Appropriative Intermediality of Quality TV  121
5. The Woke Spectator: Misrecognizing Discomfort in the Era of “Peak TV”  162
Notes  197
Bibliography  219
Index  239

What People are Saying About This

Why Karen Carpenter Matters - Karen Tongson

“As the first book to focus on millennial/postmillennial television through the lens of affect, Uncomfortable Television is a notable contribution. Hunter Hargraves shows how televisual encounters with repulsion, profanity, and violence attenuate the late capitalist subject to feelings of discomfort, which emerges as a regulatory norm and a form of exposure therapy under neoliberalism. Readers interested in critical theoretical interventions in TV studies will be thrilled by this book, while those who are invested in the field’s more standard approaches will find a new account of current televisual cultural available to them.”

Laurie Ouellette

“Uncomfortable Television shifts our conceptual lens by tracking the pleasure and power of television that irritates, upsets, and disturbs. Bringing affect theory to bear on a changing mediascape, Hunter Hargraves brilliantly shows how the uncomfortable feelings of TV viewers can be channeled into neoliberal agendas.”

Editorial Reviews

"Uncomfortable Television is an interesting work that raises many compelling questions about the relationship between televisual content and our own processing of reality and invites further discussion on affect theory and how affect potentially shapes most of our behavior. It is an insightful read for academics, political theorists, and students of many strands of humanities . . . ."

-- Ana Yorke Popmatters

"Hargraves's book sits at the intersection of scholarship focusing on neoliberalism, affect, and popular culture and synthesizes these conversations in fruitful ways. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty."

-- S. Pepper Choice

“Uncomfortable Television provides television, performance, and American studies scholars and graduate students with an interesting and insightful look into how televisual affect is mobilized. … [A] compelling illustration of the complex constellation of components that provide a framework for the affective and ideological functions of television.”

-- Courtlyn Pippert European Journal for American Studies

"Hargraves’s timely evaluation of television’s metamorphosis in the early twenty-first century is a welcome addition to contemporary media scholarship. The imbrication of critical race studies, affect, and genre means readers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds will find something useful in Uncomfortable Television."

-- Alex Remington The Velvet Light Trap

"Uncomfortable Television is an excellent example of analysis capable of placing the reader in a critical—and ultimately metatextual—condition: uncomfortable is both the television the book discusses and the state in which the viewer-reader finds themselves, seeking a better position to sit in their chair while reading, as well as a new perspective for confronting and resisting the cultural and economic logics of neoliberalism."
-- Gabriele Prosperi International Journal of Communication

"Hargraves’s writing style is easy to read and his examples drawn from a vast corpus of TV series are quite convincing. . . . Uncomfortable Television shall undoubtedly prove to be a worthy addition to anyone launching into a close study of the relationship between television and current American culture and politics from the early 2000s to the late 2010s."
-- Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris Journal of Popular Film and Television

“Hargraves’s thoughtful and provocative theory . . . combined with a rejection of a binary critical approach, makes Uncomfortable Television a deeply original and valuable contribution to television studies.”

-- Grey Mangan Blackwell New Review of Film and Television Studies

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