Television Commons^™

Amc’S Infamous Criminal Partnerships: Suppressing The Female Antihero, Melissa Vosen Callens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper explores the limited number of female antiheroes in AMC’s critically acclaimed drama series. Using a feminist lens, the author argues that audiences have failed to embrace female characters on AMC as antiheroes, particularly when they are in romantic relationships with male antiheroes, for three primary reasons. First, female characters often challenge binary thinking, and thus, gender role stereotypes. Rather than exhibiting passive, yet nurturing characteristics, characteristics often associated with femininity and motherhood, female characters within the dataset frequently challenge their partners and exert their dominance. Second, writers often fail to fully develop female characters. The absence of their …

Bad Girls: Agency, Revenge, And Redemption In Contemporary Drama, Courtney Watson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Cultural movements including #TimesUp and #MeToo have contributed momentum to the demand for and development of smart, justified female criminal characters in contemporary television drama. These women are representations of shifting power dynamics, and they possess agency as they channel their desires and fury into success, redemption, and revenge. Building on works including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, dramas produced since 2016—including The Handmaid’s Tale, Ozark, and Killing Eve—have featured the rise of women who use rule-breaking, rebellion, and crime to enact positive change.

Nature Vs. Nurture In Albuquerque: What Breaking Bad And Better Call Saul Teach Us About How We Talk About Criminals, Max Romanowski

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul focus on the criminal transformation of their two main characters, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). While quite similar on the surface, Walter and Jimmy’s narratives represent two different criminal transitions, evoking the classic nature vs nurture conversation. Both of these shows bring the conversation to the idea of inevitability. The nature vs. nurture argument is a popular one because it acts as a teaching tool for how we think and talk about criminal behavior. At first, it follows that since criminality was in Walter White’s nature the whole time, his …

If Androids Dream, Are They More Than Sheep?: Westworld, Robots And Legal Rights, Amanda J. Dipaolo

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The robot protagonists in HBO’s Westworld open the door to several philosophical and ethical questions, perhaps the most complex being: should androids be granted similar legal protections as people? Westworld offers its own exploration of what it means to be a person and places emphasis on one’s ability to feel and understand pain. With scientists and corporations actively working toward a future that includes robots that can display emotion in a way that can convincingly pass as that of a person’s, what happens when androids pass the Turing test, feel empathy, gain consciousness, are sentient, or develop free will? The …

Making The Case For Teaching Character Change In Complex Tv: The Closer And Major Crimes, Emily C. Hoffman

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Jason Mittel’s 2015 book Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling offers enough material to sustain a semester-long undergraduate course. Because of its approachability and students’ interest in discussing characters, his chapter devoted to viewers’ parasocial relationships and characters’ potential for change is among the most teachable. However, teaching complex television that relies on intensely serialized story elements can make choosing televisual texts for study and discussion challenging. Therefore, series that skew episodic yet still incorporate serial elements, like police procedurals, can prove to be a practical alternative for classroom study. This article describes how using the interrelated …

A Gendered Perspective On Policing Violence In Happy Valley And Fargo, T. Allen Culpepper

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Portrayal of a police officer determined to fight crime and execute justice in a harsh, isolated environment has become a television and film subgenre, often featuring women facing gender-related challenges. The issues raised in Sally Wainwright’s British television series Happy Valley, can be made more accessible, particularly to American undergraduate students, via its commonalities with the Coen brothers film Fargo. In both, a tough but compassionate policewoman pursues the more sociopathic of a pair of criminals involved in a botched kidnapping attempt instigated by an inept businessman, taking on the case for personal and professional honor, and as …

We All Have Jobs Here: Teaching And Learning With Multiple Intelligences In The Walking Dead, Lizabeth Gartley

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

With the rise of cultural studies, positivism and formalism fell out of favor. But in recent years, altered versions of these methodologies have been suggested as solutions to the deficiencies of the ideological approach dominating the field. Where the ideological approach looks at the content of texts to determine their meaning, the aesthetic approach adopted by media scholars in recent years returns to the close textual readings of formalism (while abandoning its assertion that meaning resides in the text alone). Similarly, where the ideological approach tends to use textual analysis devoid of sociological empiricism, the use of “big data” in …

Deconstructing "Proper Condom Use" As An Introduction To Literary Analysis, Julie Stewart, Thomas D. Clark, Marilyn Clark

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Popular culture figures in television, movies, comics, and video games have captured the imaginations of young people. The themes and characters of shows students watch regularly help shape their views on contemporary issues, especially as they compare their personal experiences with those portrayed on their favorite shows. This paper examines how "Proper Condom Use," an episode of South Park, one of the most popular shows among young viewers, can be used as a springboard for in-class discussion of tools for literary analysis through an exposition of this episode’s visual and aural humor, themes, characters, audience, and genre.

Our experience …

Social Justice From The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling As Human Rights Activist, Hugh A. D. Spencer

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Rod Serling achieved critical acclaim in the First Golden Age of Television writing realist teleplays that express a strong moral sense and social consciousness. With the decline of anthology drama at the close of the 1950s, Serling created The Twilight Zone, which would become a forum for telling relevant stories while circumventing commercial and bureaucratic interference. As a means of exploring Serling’s use of drama as a tool for social justice, this paper compares themes from The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery with charter and constitutional statements of human rights. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is …

Applications In The Classroom: Teaching Disney/Pixar’S Inside Out Within The Tradition Of Allegorical Personification, Jason John Gulya

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Several years ago, I noticed that the widespread distinction between high and low culture was wreaking havoc on my classroom. My students would read and analyze texts like Robinson Crusoe and Pride and Prejudice with little to no prompting because (in their minds) these texts were already part of the recognized canon and it was therefore permissible to pick them apart and analyze them closely. But I would get strange looks when I asked undergraduates to think critically about how the mock-news programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report worked or when I asked them to discuss how the …

More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, And True Detective’S Terrestrial Horror, Jonathan Elmore

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” …

Destructive Plasticity, “Surplus Of Consciousness,” And The “Monster” In True Detective, Courtney Patrick-Weber

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The first season of HBO's cult hit True Detective introduced viewers to a southern gothic murder mystery that many will not easily forget. Since many of us focused primarily on the whodunit narrative, we may have missed the narrative of trauma simmering under the surface of the story. This narrative of trauma reveals a deeper layer to the story between Detective Rust Cohle and serial killer Errol Childress, one that also reveals our own fears regarding trauma in our lives. By applying first the nihilist philosophies of Peter Zapffe with Cohle and Catherine Malabou's concept on destructive plasticity in Childress, …

“If You Want To Be The Man, You’Ve Got To Beat The Man”: Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990s, Marc A. Ouellette

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE's on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

Applications In The Classroom: Pop Culture And Ed Psychology: What I Learned From Larry David, Rick Grimes, And Hank Hill, Melissa Vosen Callens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In teacher education courses, it is common to teach educational psychology concepts using case studies. Many publishers provide these case studies in textbooks and/or in ancillary materials, and there are many advantages to using them. For example, an instructor does not have to spend extra time finding or writing the case studies, both of which can be very time consuming. In addition, if students have the textbook, they have immediate access. One major disadvantage, however, is that students may find themselves uninterested and disengaged with the cases, depending on the students’ interests and the cases. This paper argues that studying …

(Re)Learning About Learning: Using Cases From Popular Media To Extend And Complicate Our Understandings Of What It Means To Learn And Teach, Kelli Bippert, Dennis Davis, Margaret Rose Hilburn, Jennifer D. Hooper, Deepti Kharod, Cinthia Rodriguez, Rebecca Stortz

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article utilizes sociocultural and socio-constructivist learning theories to analyze incidents of learning, and by extension teaching, in six different popular media selections. The authors describe their shared theoretical framework and the nature of the original analyses, which were completed as part of a doctoral course assignment. Each of the six excerpts is then described and discussed employing unique theoretical perspectives. The use of popular culture as the context for examining learning and teaching provides a space untethered from traditional notions of schooling through which typically accepted assumptions about pedagogy are revealed, re-examined, and reframed.

Book Review Of Lazzaro: A Man And His Machines. By Ron Moshier. Newburyport, Ma: Coastal 101, 2023. 180 Pages., Elton G. Mcgoun

Journal of Motorsport Culture & History

No abstract provided.

Traversing Realities: Genres, Histories, And Politics In Popular Culture [Dialogue, Volume 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2015)], Lynnea Chapman King, Anna Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial

Examining Perspectives and Applications, Lynnea Chapman King and A.S. CohenMiller

Articles

A Field Guide to Teaching Agency and Ethics: The West Wing and American Foreign Policy, Kayce Mobley and Sarah Fisher

Survivor Skills: Why I Want to Teach Reality TV, May Friedman

Girls, Guns, and Zombies: Five Dimensions of Teaching and Learning in The Walking Dead, Anthony Neely

“Can you imagine, a real, live Indian right here in Walnut Grove?”: American Indians in Television Adaptations of Little House on the Prairie, Amy S. Fatzinger

The Gentle Tongue: How Language Affected the World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, …

Book Review: M. J. Trow, A Brief History Of Vampires, Myha Do

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of M. J. Trow's A Brief History of Vampires. Philadelphia: Running Press Book Publishers, 2010. xv, 368 pages, paperback, ISBN 978-0-7624-3988-1.

Applications In The Classroom: Hardly Elementary—Frontiers For Freshman Composition With Conan Doyle’S A Study In Scarlet, Kate M. Donley

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Three recent television and !lm adaptations testify to the continuing popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. The fast-paced novella that introduces detective duo Holmes and Watson, A Study in Scarlet involves some astonishing elements, and not just in the plot. With just a little probing, collegiate readers may wonder whether Conan Doyle plagiarized his most famous character, invented forensic science, despised Mormons, and accidentally wrote a Western.

The novel was adapted as A Study in Pink, the !rst episode of the BBC’s series Sherlock created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Their vision of Holmes set …

The Gentle Tongue: How Language Affected The World Of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Louisa Danielson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Although new episodes of the program ceased to be recorded in 2004, the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood show is still recalled by many today as an iconic childhood staple—the right show to watch if you are a young child or a parent looking for something wholesome to view on television. This is as Fred Rogers, the creator of the program, wished, but what exactly were the goals behind the Mister Rogers’ program? What were the shaping forces that inspired Rogers’ theory for children’s educational television? These are questions explored in “The Gentle Tongue: How Language Affected the World of Mister Rogers’ …