Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal

Notes

Notes 1. Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005); Derek Kompare, “‘Greyish Rectangles’: Creating the Television Heritage,” Media History 9.2 (August 2003): 153–169; Vera Dika, Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). There is some fan fiction devoted to Ally, although such work is not the focus of this book. See the Ally McBeal Literature Society at http://allymcbeallitsociety.hypermart.net. 3. “Bonnie Dow’s publication advice,” which circulated on the NCAcritcult mailing list, among other places. 4. John Caughie argues that “the absence of an archive which would have allowed an examination of various transformations of television as a discourse, coupled with television’s own insistence on being immediate and up-tothe -minute, has tended to place television and television criticism in a perpetual present” (“Television Criticism: ‘A Discourse in Search of an Object,’” Screen 25.4–5 [1984]: 116). 5. Caughie notes that “academic television criticism and theory moved almost invariably to the social, whether it was talking about audiences, institutions, or generic forms” (115). The classic statements on television as cultural indicator are John Fiske and John Hartley, “Bardic Television,” in Reading Television (London: Routledge, 1978), 85–100; and Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 455–470. 6. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Methuen, 1984); Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985; Jeremy Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994); E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987). 7. In part this academic emphasis has introduction to do with the fact that television (for economic, institutional, and technological reasons) operated in a pared-down version of the invisible Hollywood style for most of its history. This medium did not seem to call for much close aesthetic attention, and the most salient differences between television and film form could be adequately described in general terms: the interruptibility of story by commercials, the importance of editing in music videos, the construction of soap opera narrative. If one examined a particular soap or music video, it was to use it as an exemplar for the basic workings of the genre, not to highlight deft strategies for handling particular narrative quandries. 8. The controversy sprang from Flockhart’s appearance at the Emmy Awards in 1998. For examples of the press coverage about Flockhart’s body, see Lynn Snowden, “Calista Bites Back,” George 4.5 (May 1999): 68–75; Barry Koltnow, “Now for the Skinny on Ally McBeal,” Orange County Register (26 April 1999); Mark Reynolds, “Pride of Our Ally but Is That New Figure Really Her?” Daily Mail (London) (7 February 2002); Karen S. Schneider, “Arguing Her Case,” People (9 November 1998): 92–98. Courtney Thorne-Smith, who plays Georgia, entered into this controversy when she wrote an article about body image after leaving the show (“I Was Beating up My Own Body” Self [October 2000]: 240). 9. David Cogan, “Downey Visited Reputed Drug Dealer,” New York Daily News (26 April 2001). 10. Some of this work has already been done. See Tracey Owens Patton, “Ally McBeal and Her Homies: The Reification of White Stereotypes of the Other,” Journal of Black Studies 32.2 (November 2001): 229–260; Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read, “Having It Ally: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism,” Feminist Media Studies 2.2 (2002): 231–249; Rachel Dubrofsky, “Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and Fetishizing of the Independent Working Woman,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 265–284; Susan E. McKenna, “The Queer Insistence of Ally McBeal: Lesbian Chic, Postfeminism, and Lesbian Reception,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 285–314; Laurie Ouellette, “Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 315–337; Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Putting Ally on Trial: Contesting Postfeminism in Popular Culture,” Women’s Studies in Communication 23.3 (Fall 2000): 413–428; L. S. Kim, “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television,” Television and New Media 2.4 (November 2001): 319–334; Kristyn Gorton, “(Un)Fashionable Feminists: The Media and Ally McBeal,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (New York: Pantheon, 2004...