Book Reviews

Teen Television: Essays onProgramming and Fandom

Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein, eds.McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson,North Carolina, 2008 $35.00 (soft), pp. 259.

The editors of the edited volume Teen Televi-sion: Essays on Programming and Fandom(McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008), SharonMarie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein, producedan anthology that is timely and offersmultipleperspectives on the quickly evolving worldof teen television. In the introduction,they define teen television as a fluid genredesignated by ‘‘content, audience address,programming context, or demographics ofreception (or any combination of these ele-ments)’’ (p. 4) and also argue that these pro-grams are both ‘‘culturally transgressive yetcommercial’’ (p. 7) in ways that inform thecontent of the programs and the variousresponses of fans. Over the years, televisionhas encountered resistance from the academywhen scholars have tried to examine it criti-cally. Even though some key scholarly workshave been produced considering the mediumin the past 25 years, there is still muchwork tobe done. Ross and Stein have not only decidedto put effort into a medium that has beenundervalued over the years, but they havegone further into television to consider anarea that has been marginalized within televi-sion studies by considering teen television.

There are 12 chapters in the volume dividedinto three topic areas: Part I—the IndustrialContext of Teen Television, Part II—TeensonTelevision, andPart III—Cultures ofRecep-tion. The general approach of examining tele-vision texts in the larger contexts of modes ofproduction, textual analysis linked to theoret-ical frameworks, and reception is both appro-priate and useful, and a number of the articlesdelve into several of these areas to develop thecomplex relationships among programs, fan-

dom, and various cultural constructs.

In Part I, Valerie Wee (‘‘Teen Televisionand the WB Television Network’’), SharonMarie Ross (‘‘Defining Teen Culture: The N

Network’’), and Ben Aslinger (‘‘RockingPrime Time: Gender, the WB, and Teen Cul-

ture’’) contribute chapters that discuss theemergence of The WB as the first ‘‘teen’’ net-

work, the development of The N as a narrow-casting network, and the role of music as

a component of teen television. Each of thesearticles offers a compelling look at the inter-

play between industry and audience anddraws on larger themes that help designateand reinforce the genre, fluid though it may

be. The section begins with an article by JeffMartin on the show TV Teen Club, which

aired from 1949 to 1954. Although ‘‘TV TeenClub: Teen TV as Safe Harbor’’ is an interest-

ing read and offers some limited context forthe later series, especially in terms of the use of

music, the temporal gap between this showand the other programs addressed in the vol-

ume (which premiere in the 1990s and 2000s)makes it an uneven fit for the book.

Probably because of the theoretical frame-works informing the analysis, the chapters inPart II of the anthology are the most cohesivegroup in the collection and offer analytical

tools and critical insights that the reader usesin thinking more broadly about other tele-

vision programs and genres. FrancescaGamber’s article ‘‘Riding the Third Wave:

The Multiple Feminisms of Gilmore Girls’’ isa particularly nuanced look at complex and

competing discourses of Second Wave andThird Wave feminisms and should have

broad applications beyond Gilmore Girls asa way of interrogating various media texts.

At first I was confused about the inclusionof Six Feet Under in a volume on teen televi-

sion, but Barbara Brickman’s article ‘‘thePortrait of an Artist as a Young Fan: Con-

sumption and Queer Inspiration in Six FeetUnder’’ is provocative and adds an interesting

Communication, Culture & Critique 1 (2008) 447–449 ª 2008 International Communication Association 447

take on how a program that is not activelymarketed to teens can still include the signi-fiers of teen television in ways that are centralto the series. The other three chapters in thissection are Caralyn Bolte’s ‘‘‘Normal is theWatchword’: Exiling Cultural Anxieties andRedefiningDesire from theMargins,’’ AndreaBraithwaite’s ‘‘‘That Girl of Yours—She’sPretty Hardboiled, Huh?’: Detecting Femi-nism in Veronica Mars,’’ and Sue Turnbull’s‘‘‘They Stole Me’: The O.C., Masculinity, andthe Strategies of Teen TV.’’

Part III of the volume is the most prob-lematic and, in some ways, the most interest-ing section in the volume. Problematicbecause of the methodological challengesof conducting research using online fansites but interesting because of the insightsthese authors bring to their subjects andbecause of the expansive nature of theanalysis. The final chapter in the book,Louisa Ellen Stein’s ‘‘Pushing at theMargins:Teenage Angst in Teen TV and AudienceResponse’’ is more general in scope, but theother two articles look at specific series andfan responses. In ‘‘Fashion Sleuths and AerieGirls: Veronica Mars’ Fan Forums and Net-work Strategies of Fan Address,’’ JenniferGillan provides a multilayered look at theway fans engage the series, interact in onlinecommunities, and express their fandom inthe larger consumer culture inspired by theshow. Although this type of research is nec-essarily ‘‘messy,’’ it offers a necessary exam-ination of the interplay among the text andvarious related texts and contexts to give thereader a sense of the dynamic and inter-textual way fans experience Veronica Mars.Melanie E.S. Kohnen introduces a reconcep-tualization of televisual spectatorship in‘‘The Adventures of a Repressed Farm Boyand the Billionaire Who Loves Him: QueerSpectatorship in Smallville Fandom.’’ Herpoint is not simply that straight people ‘‘canand do see queerly’’ but that in certaincontexts they ‘‘understand it as a pleasurable,active, and communalway of seeing’’ (p. 209).By examining the interplay between the series

and the fan site discussions, Kohnen makesa compelling case for expanding the range ofspectatorial positions available to the viewersbeyond the ‘‘straight’’ and ‘‘gay’’ binaries thathave marked previous conceptions (popularand scholarly) of television.

Teen Television: Essays on Programmingand Fandom is an excellent resource formediastudies scholars and might make a good sup-plementary text in graduate seminars, partic-ularly those that include a component onreception studies. Although the focus of theanthology is specific and limited to a particu-lar genre, there will be applications in thesechapters for researchers working in all areas oftelevision studies. Furthermore, these articlesbring the previously underexplored areaof teen television from margin to center.Although other books have looked at teenculture more broadly and some more specif-ically at some of the individual series consid-ered in these articles, this volume fills animportant gap in the literature and shouldbe included in libraries supporting mediastudies programs.

Mary Dalton

Wake Forest University

Book Reviews Book Reviews

448 Communication, Culture & Critique 1 (2008) 447–449 ª 2008 International Communication Association