Hiv On Tv: Popular Culture’s Epidemic by Malynnda Johnson (review)

Malynnda Johnson’s HIV on TV: Popular Culture’s Epidemic (2018) is a welcome new addition to a body of HIV/AIDS-focused communication and media studies scholarship that largely ceased after the introduction of life-saving anti-retroviral medications in the mid-1990s. This older body of literature is dated in its analysis of mass communication strategies relaying information about and representations of the epidemic. Thankfully, Johnson’s research provides a much-needed update to this literature and dwells thoughtfully on the role that syndicated popular culture continues to play in how we represent the realities of HIV in the twenty-first century.

In part 1, HIV on TV begins with the premise that television has a pedagogical function and is worth paying attention to as a medium that teaches as well as entertains. In the US context in which Johnson writes, she astutely notes that television may very well be the only sex education that generations of young Americans have received (135). Johnson’s task at hand is to better understand where stigma and fears about HIV/AIDS might stem from and how these may contribute to a lack of behavioural changes to prevent viral transmission of HIV.

In part 2, Johnson breaks down the ways HIV/AIDS have been presented on American television by genre—news, medical dramas, crime dramas, teen dramas, daytime television, primetime, animated comedies, stand-up comedy— by using a structural analysis that attends not only to plot but to character, tone, and medical accuracy as well. Doing so, she examines patterns of how HIV/AIDS has been used to introduce conflict in order to move storylines and deliver punchlines across series and genres. This is followed by a short analysis about how the use of HIV narratives deployed for reaction, ratings, and/or dramatic effect impact viewers’ perceptions of the disease and their own risk. Johnson’s research is methodologically rigorous, and she spends a significant amount of time detailing the inclusion/exclusion criteria for the types of syndicated programming she analyzes.

The third part of the book examines whether or not the characters in television shows are varied and believable enough to prompt viewer identification and parasocial relationships with them. She does this by diving deeper into an examination of the types of characters presented on shows and evaluating the perception of risk amongst both young television viewers and the actors who portray HIV-positive characters. In all instances, Johnson imagines an audience of HIV-negative viewers and foregrounds the potential of television to illicit behaviour modification that decreases the viewers’ chances of seroconverting. HIV-positive viewers, and their need to see themselves reflected accurately and compassionately on screen, are absent from her analysis.

In the fourth and final part of the book, Johnson reflects and restates her argument while making a direct appeal for readers to recognize that HIV isn’t simply a historic problem or a concern abroad in so-called developing countries but no longer domestically. She notes the issue today simply isn’t a question of people knowing less about HIV—of course there is plenty of factual information online—but a problem of engaging people who have been told over and over through a mediated discourse on HIV/AIDS that they don’t need to or wouldn’t want to know about HIV as it’s either not relevant to their lives or is a punishment for their actions.

There are a number of common factual inaccuracies about HIV/AIDS repeated throughout the text for which the author fails to reference any supporting documents. Since the medical accuracy of each episode was evaluated as part of Johnson’s structural analysis, the following three instances are worth briefly noting and discussing as such inaccuracies undermine one’s faith in Johnson’s overall argument. These factual inaccuracies occur in chapters devoted to the formal analysis of genre and/or characters in relation to HIV.

While discussing “The Political ’90s” in chapter 3, Johnson makes the claim...