Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity

by Victoria E. Johnson

Overview

Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award
The Midwest of popular imagination is a "Heartland" characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively —; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American—or negatively—as backward, narrow–minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch—the myth of the Heartland endures.
Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to television's promotion and development, programming and marketing appeals, and public debates over the medium's and its audience's cultural worth. Victoria E. Johnson investigates how the "square" image of the heartland has been ritually recuperated on prime time television, from The Lawrence Welk Show in the 1950s, to documentary specials in the 1960s, to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, to Ellen in the 1990s. She also examines news specials on the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal how that city has been inscribed as the epitome of a timeless, pastoral heartland, and concludes with an analysis of network branding practices and appeals to an imagined "red state" audience.
Johnson argues that non-white, queer, and urban culture is consistently erased from depictions of the Midwest in order to reinforce its "reassuring" image as white and straight. Through analyses of policy, industry discourse, and case studies of specific shows, Heartland TV exposes the cultural function of the Midwest as a site of national transference and disavowal with regard to race, sexuality, and citizenship ideals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814742938
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Victoria E. Johnson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and she is also the President-Elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2021-2023). She is the author of Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity (2008) and Sports Television (2021).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: TV, the Heartland Myth, and the Value of Cultural Populism
1 “Essential, Desirable, and Possible Markets”: Broadcasting Midwestern Tastes and Values
2 Square Dancing and Champagne Music: Regional Aesthetics and Middle America
3 “Strictly Conventional and Moral”: CBS Reports in Webster Groves
4 “You’re Gonna Make It After All!”: The Urbane Midwest in MTM Productions’ “Quality” Comedies
5 “There Is No ‘Dayton Chic’”: Queering the
Midwest in Roseanne, Ellen, and The Ellen Show
6 Fertility Among the Ruins: Reconstituting the Traumatized Heartland
Epilogue: Red State, Blue State, Purple Heartland
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A groundbreaking book, highly original in concept and persuasive in its execution. Johnson elegantly rewrites the history of American television with an eye to its geographical imaginary.”
-Anna McCarthy,New York University

&%8220;Network chieftains, advertising executives, and primetime performers generally fly over the heartland with barely a glance, but it's never far from their thoughts, or ours. In this remarkable analysis of American television, Victoria Johnson cogently explains why Middle America matters: on the screen, in the home, and in public life.”
-Michael Curtin,author of Playing to the World's Biggest Audience

"Johnson shows how the opposition of "heartland" and various urbane, coastal foils went through a series of permutations, alternately deprecating and valorizing middle America through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s."

-Choice

Editorial Reviews

"&%8220;Network chieftains, advertising executives, and primetime performers generally fly over the heartland with barely a glance, but it's never far from their thoughts, or ours. In this remarkable analysis of American television, Victoria Johnson cogently explains why Middle America matters: on the screen, in the home, and in public life."

Michael Curtin

"Johnson shows how the opposition of “heartland” and various urbane, coastal foils went through a series of permutations, alternately deprecating and valorizing middle America through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s."

Choice

”Johnson shows how the opposition of “heartland” and various urbane, coastal foils went through a series of permutations, alternately deprecating and valorizing middle America through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s.”

-Choice

&%8220;Network chieftains, advertising executives, and primetime performers generally fly over the heartland with barely a glance, but it's never far from their thoughts, or ours. In this remarkable analysis of American television, Victoria Johnson cogently explains why Middle America matters: on the screen, in the home, and in public life.”
-Michael Curtin,author of Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience

From the Publisher