Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros22.2RecensionsHunter Hargraves, Uncomfortable T...

Recensions

Hunter Hargraves, Uncomfortable Television

Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2023, 264 p. ISBN: 9781478019572. $26.95
Sophie CHADELLE
Référence(s) :

Hunter Hargraves, Uncomfortable Television. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2023, 264 p. ISBN: 9781478019572. $26.95

Texte intégral

1In his book Uncomfortable Television, Hunter Hargraves tackles millennial and postmillennial television by analysing the link between Affect Theories, Television Studies and neoliberalism. His aim is to analyse how contradictory feelings such as pleasure, discomfort, violence, or concepts such as repulsion and profanity, can influence our individual perception of television so that it corresponds to a specific neoliberal culture. These sensations belong to what he calls “a script” (3) which is given to audiences in order to “reconceptualize [their] boundaries of pleasure and discomfort” (4) and reorganize their perception of what is considered as “quality television” (8). According to him, a shift has taken place in what is considered as televisual pleasure and as “quality television”. “New cultural forms and practices” in television have been articulated in order to embrace “the affective flexibility demanded by neoliberalism,” which is “characterized by the prevalence of the superego to enjoy” (8). From a medium that used to be a family-centred activity, television has become a medium “emphasizing the individual as a unique, mobile, and diversified consumer” (9).

2In his introduction, Hargraves defines neoliberalism and describes how it has indeed changed this medium drastically. Basing his demonstration on Cultural Studies theories (quoting Stuart Hall) and on works by specialists in economics (such as Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello and Elizabeth Povinelli), the author defines neoliberalism as “an economic relationship between free markets, the state and civil society” (12). The emphasis is put on “individual rights, the privatisation and deregulation of state assets, and new global scales of production supervised by corporate conglomerates” (12). According to him, this transition has also left its mark on the US television industry. This can be seen through the change in televisual practices, as the American televisual landscape has moved from broadcasting strategies to narrowcasting strategies, with the targeting of niche audiences, the development of numerous television programmes, the multiplication of cable channels and new technologies (DVD and SVOD platforms) which finally marked “the divorce” (12) between the viewers and the live broadcasting schedule. This resulted in the emphasis on individual choices and tastes and on the notion of authorship (to which the concept of “quality TV” is linked). Thus, according to Hargraves, television has found new ways to appeal to the viewers/subjects (he refers to Foucault’s concept of the “interpellation” of the viewers as subjects). To prove his point, he analyses programmes as varied as Girls, The Wire, Intervention and Jem and the Holograms in five different parts, each focused on different types of spectators (“the irritated spectator”, “the addicted spectator”, “the aborted spectator”, “the spectator plagued with guilt”, and “the woke spectator”) experiencing five different affects of discomfort (irritation, addiction, perversion, guilt and discomfort). Throughout these five chapters Hargraves daringly argues that television in the 21st century uses strategies to “educate” (175) audiences in order to make them co-exist and even accept their economic and social precarity as well as to alienate them by defining them as isolated individuals.

3In the first chapter, entitled “The irritated spectator: affective representation in postmillennial comedy”, Hargraves studies how some television programmes, such as Girls (HBO, 2012-2017), have played on the identification process with flawed, irritating characters, thus “troubling the viewer’s ability to forge empathetic attachments with the characters” (56). He demonstrates how the show plays on a “complex negotiation between audience identification and disidentification” (56). To do so, Hargraves draws on Affect Theories (in particular on Raymond Williams’ works, among others) by proposing precise definitions of what an “affect” is and how it is different from a “feeling.” By doing so, he demonstrates to what extent feeling irritated, which is a feeling that manifests itself both emotionally and physically, “emerges as a minor but no less important form of discomfort, well suited to late capitalism’s appropriation of identity politics” (31). “Irritation serves as a useful affective barometer for postmillennial television” (31). The originality of his approach to Television Studies, proposing a “hermeneutic approach” to Girls (36), helps him demonstrate how the programme draws on a postfeminist approach, playing with cringe aesthetics and cringe narrative style in order to prove that the characters are aware of their entitlement, making the series appear as a form of what he calls a “hate watch” (49) or at least an uncomfortable viewing experience. Hargraves links this approach to HBO’s branding strategy (which we find with HBO series focused on White male characters), which is perfectly fitted to what he calls the new “forms of neoliberal citizenship” (52).

4In the second chapter (“The addicted spectator: TV junkies in need of an Intervention”), Hargraves tackles the difficult subject of reality TV and more precisely what he calls “recovery television”. In this chapter he tackles the topic of televisual discomfort through the lens of addiction, both addiction represented on screen (with characters depicted as addicts) and addiction behind the screen (with addicted spectators). According to him, recovery programmes, such as the one he studies thoroughly here, Intervention (A&E, 2005-), provide the perfect illustration of the neoliberal discourse of American society that places the spectator in an ambiguous position. On the one hand the spectators are placed in a morally superior position, as they “ironical[ly] watch” (72) addicts trying to recover on screen, while at the same time being aware that what he watches is supposedly “bad art” (16). On the other hand, these programmes place the spectators in the position of addicts, forced to binge watch, and consume television programmes mindlessly. Viewers take pleasure in feeling superior by watching characters who have lost their free will and struggle to “get better,” to “self-improve” and to “individually thrive” in order to fit into the neoliberal moral system (87). “Recovery television invites us to own our addictions and to come to terms with them through the narrative on-screen, so that we can better understand our own relationship to television itself. Addiction may signal the crisis of free will caused by the overexposure to economic and consumer freedom, the free market taken to a habitual extreme” (88). These recovery programs are a reflection of our own behaviour as addicts, to television as well as to other aspects of our society. They are merely a reflection of the way we are constantly invited to consume and choose from an incredible number of products, ideas, programs, etc., thus limiting, paradoxically, our free will.

5Through the study of the children’s programme Jem and the Holograms (Hasbro, 1985-1988), and its YouTube remix Jiz and the Mammograms (YouTube, 2009-), Chapter 3 (“The Aborted Spectator: Affective Economies of Perversion in Television Remixes”) analyses how television remixes can operate a uncomfortable queer transformation not only of the identities displayed on screen but also of the act of transformation itself by playing on the feeling of discomfort you encounter when you pervert childhood memories. The original children's program, which is grounded in a nostalgic childhood network of affects and which intertwines television creation and the advertising of derived products, has turned young girls into “prodigious consumers” (110). However, the webseries Jiz has then transformed the original programme in order to take a political stance on matters such as abortion, sexual predation and other complex political topics. According to Hargraves, these television remixes are a mutation of the original audience as well as a mutation of the medium itself and of the affective response usually expected. It is the queer nature of these remixes which aims to “put out of order or to disconcert, perturb, unsettle” (91). These queer remixes attempt to “scramble existing categories of sexuality and narrative in order to subvert, pervert, and revolt against normative codes” (91). According to Hargraves, this queering process is one of the characteristics of postmillennial television since it relies on convergent culture, “convergent television,” “an expanded configuration of the medium that includes short-form web series as well as paratextual media such as fan reaction videos, video recaps and remixes” (91). In this chapter, the author claims that “the technological changes to television spectatorship that have occurred in the neoliberal convergent era” have reshaped the concept of spectatorship entirely and have clearly influenced participatory culture. There is, in this queering process of televisual texts, a real “affective economy of perversion” (103) which has led to the gradual disappearance of the barriers between media consumers and producers. This “affective economics rewards the affective investment that these loyals/fans have in a series often by acknowledging the presence of fan communities through narrative and aesthetics” (104).

6In chapters 4 (“The Spectator plagued by white guilt: on the appropriative intermediality of quality TV”) and 5 (“The Woke Spectator: misrecognizing discomfort in the era of peak TV”), Hargraves analyses the concept of “quality TV” and the “cultural value of postmillennial drama, which television critics primarily refer to as a “third golden age” (122). In these chapters, the author attempts to rethink “contemporary quality television in terms of its intermediality” potential which functions as a marker of cultural value (123). The term “intermediality” is used by Hargraves to refer to the transference of cultural value from one medium to another (this often refers to the bridges existing between television, cinema and literature). In chapter 4, Hargraves analyses this “cultural value,” based on intermediality, through the study of the series The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008), which perfectly illustrates the shift in affect made by American television at the end of the 20th century. Twentieth-century television was thought to be a means to comfort and instruct postwar American audiences while twenty-first century television dramatically shifted that affective address toward more negative affects which are triggered by shows representing flawed and disturbing characters. The Wire was created in order to go beyond the simple spectatorial pleasure of “normal television” (124): “despite being a series that regularly portrays poverty, homicide, and drug use problems as endemic to urban life, the Wire relies on racialized empathetic identifications to its characters to establish itself as a quality text that defies televisuality” (124). The unlikable character becomes an essential element for artistic legitimation since it illustrates a form of risk-taking just as the television series’ intermediality (a series having a cinematic or literary style) also illustrates this search for cultural value and recognition. “The Wire must be perceived as literature in order to better extract its commentary on the effects of neoliberalism on social institutions [...]; then these epistemic efforts foreground how intermediality itself is trenchantly a strategy of neoliberal ideology” (139). According to Hargraves, The Wire, by escaping the traditional formal restraints of television and by basing its narrative and aesthetic characteristics on other intermedial works, manages to acquire a certain “flexibility” (often defined as “quality”) that perfectly reflects the neoliberal economic demands of its time (149). In the final chapter, the author goes even further by stating that TV was forced to take into account the major social and economic crisis of its time and represent these issues clearly and explicitly in television programmes. However, the way these issues are represented does not illustrate a form of political stance but rather a cultural form of seduction and an economic strategy (what Hargraves qualifies as “woke”), in order to continue to reach its audience and this leads to the creation of a “woke spectator.” In this final chapter, the author assesses “the capacity of Peak TV [which Hargraves defines as following the Third Golden Age] to satisfy audiences by analyzing its invocation of food and consumption metaphors, and interrogating its capacity to represent cultural minorities through a sustained examination of wokeness as a viewing position” (167). According to Hargraves, after Trump’s election in 2016, “woke television” (25) both minimized and emphasised discomfort of political expression and protest. To illustrate this, he analyses shows such as Queer Eye (Netflix, 2018-) and The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu, 2017-) and manages to demonstrate what is uncomfortable about televisual wokeness and “how this discomfort is shaped by further aesthetics, technological and generic changes to the medium” (167).

7Hargraves’ book undeniably offers a very original study of postmillennial television and its social and political implications in today’s society. He thoroughly analyses these elements through the lens of Affect Theories, thus offering an approach to televisual pleasure (and discomfort), which in many ways, helps us understand our own position as viewers in a neoliberal system. The author gives a very thorough description of how our own affects manipulate our viewing and our understanding of cultural value, and how television knowingly manipulates us by playing on these particular affects. Also, the fact that Hargraves clearly states his own political views is, in my opinion, one of the most important and attractive aspects of this work and offers us a very original insight into today’s televisual landscape. However, “neoliberalism”, “late capitalism” and other key concepts are not defined well enough and sometimes not explicitly linked to the topics of each chapter. Also, some chapters (in particular the last two) are not clearly linked to the main topic of the book, although Hargraves’s analysis of the different television programs does illustrate his main argument and contribute to the originality of this work.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Sophie CHADELLE, « Hunter Hargraves, Uncomfortable Television »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/19871 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144qt

Haut de page

Auteur

Sophie CHADELLE

Université Toulouse- Jean Jaurès

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search