Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television

by Annie Berke

Overview

A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520300798
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Series:	Feminist Media Histories , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Camera Obscura, Public Books, Feminist Media Histories, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Craftsmen and Work Wives The Gendering of Television Writing 19

2 "A Sea of Male Interests" Your Show of Shows and the Comedy of Female Mischief 49

3 Gertrude Berg, Peg Lynch, and the "Small Situation" of the Stay-at-Home Showrunner 80

4 "What Girl Shouldn't?" The Many Children of Irna Phillips 112

5 "Knowing All the Plots" Presenting the Woman Story Editor 148

6 "A Girl's Gotta Live" The Literate Heroines of the Suspense Anthology Drama 170

Conclusion Better Than It Never Was 203

Notes 225

Bibliography 263

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

"Berke’s imagination — bolstered by insight, expertise, and scholarship — reveals stunning depths. Authors’ intent may be unknowable, but critical interpretations are their own kind of creative work. Berke’s interpretations are generative and convincing accounts of the way that art and artists can come to reflect each other."
 

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Their Own Best Creations enriches the field of television studies, which has too often reproduced the industry’s masculine bias in its choice of objects."

ASAP/Review

"Drawing on writers who worked in both film and radio, Berke’s book will pique the interest of radio and television scholars, but her conceptual frameworks and innovative use of texts alongside industrial history make it essential reading for students and scholars of media industries and labor."

Media Industries Journal

"The book is energetic and animated, drawing on rich source materials that come to life. . . . an impressive accomplishment and valuable contribution."

H-Soz-Kult

"Their Own Best Creations seamlessly bridges the fields of media studies and feminist studies via a rich and lively exploration of the women who scripted the first Golden Age of television."

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

"While media histories will always contain gaps that existing archives may not be able to fill, Berke excels at investigating these spaces to rethink the women who created so many of early television’s genres. Their Own Best Creations is a fascinating, timely, and heartening contribution to media history and industry studies." 

New Review of Film and Television Studies

"Berke’s Their Own Best Creations offers a fascinating insight into the professional careers of a number of successful and innovative women television writers who played memorable roles in the creation of popular postwar US television genres."

Critical Studies in Television