Frank's Place, Gender, and New Orleans: Using Folklore to Create Televisual Place

the critically acclaimed and award-winning television show Frank's Place aired only twenty-two episodes in 1987–88, but despite its brief run, the series has had a strong impact on critics and the genre. The series' title character moves from the Northeast to New Orleans, a city that he struggles to understand and appreciate. As an outsider, the series' main character Frank Parrish enacts a paradigm of cultural education. Born in New Orleans, he moved from the city at the age of two and has become a northerner, a professor specializing in Italian Renaissance art history at a university in Boston. Returning to the city of his birth, to claim the restaurant and property inherited from a father he never knew, Frank has to confront a city without his Volvo and his Yankee middle-class assumptions. Befriended by the restaurant staff and neighborhood patrons, especially its female ones, Frank learns to respect and understand the rhythms and beliefs of a working-class black culture. Implicitly and explicitly, the city of New Orleans challenges Frank's beliefs based on his life in Boston. Frank is continually schooled in the practices of New Orleans, a culture that embodies what Sharon Zukin describes as "the voice of the authentic city—a voice that spoke of origins rather than of new beginnings" (15). Though this tale is set decades before Hurricane Katrina, the series' affection for New Orleans presciently evokes the music and attitudes expressed in the aftermath of the diaspora, even including as the theme song Louis Armstrong's "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?," which also became an anthem for the city post-Katrina.

The specific episodes discussed here represent the ways that Frank's Place draws on concrete New Orleans cultural practices, from voodoo to funeral customs, to create a sense of place. Alternative New Orleans cultural practices reveal and reinforce the city's femininity and the importance of Frank's discovery, appreciation, and eventual acceptance of these unique cultural practices. Through fact-based plots and settings, the series not only provides a vivid and compelling depiction of New Orleans; it also suggests its underlying and pervasive femininity. As one of the first television shows to take African American culture as its focus and create well-written and compelling narratives, the series well deserves its critical acclaim.

Perhaps most significant is the way that gender informs and defines the representation of New Orleans. Not only is the city itself depicted as feminine, but also strong female characters inform and shape the depicted cultural practices. Although decades have passed since it aired, Frank's Place deserves analysis not only for its groundbreaking focus on a working-class black community and its innovative "dramedy" (combination of drama and comedy) format, but also because the issues it raises remain relevant for televisual representation today. Challenging the traditional tourist narrative of New Orleans as seen on Cops (1989–), The Real World: New Orleans (2000; 2010), or American Horror Story: Coven (2013–14), Frank's Place allows the viewer to follow the main character's discovery of a city that represents an alternative to mainstream corporate America. As the series uses folklore and gender to create a believable and compelling sense of place, it models a way of representing place that identifies a complex intersection of gender and race. The series demonstrates that a city and a place belong not just to the rich and famous inhabitants (The Housewives of . . .) but to the historical and everyday lives of all residents. Frank's Place positions New Orleans front and center as Other for the protagonist. It is primarily by understanding its culture, codes, and folklore that Frank becomes a part of the city. Helen Parmett quotes Herman Gray's approving description of the city's visual representation of place, as it puts "the viewer aurally and visually into the experience of black New Orleans . . . Frank's Place is not just Anywhere, USA, populated by anonymous folk, but black New Orleans, with its own particular history and story" (Gray, qtd. in Parmett 196...