Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan by Gabriella Lukács (review)

Among the many interesting studies in English on the “trendy drama” phenomenon and other aspects of late-twentieth-century televisual culture in Japan, Gabriella Lukács’s volume Scripted Affects, Branded Selves stands out by offering readers the first sustained political-economic account of how trendy (and posttrendy) dramas operate under their affective surface simultaneously to attract viewers and to sustain commercial television stations’ profitability.¹ Her account is focused less on story details or other dramaturgical considerations of the dramas themselves—although these are included in her study—than on elucidating how and why these dramas became what they were and why they were, however ephemerally, so very popular.

Trendy dramas were a new direction for commercial networks, and why they took this direction deserves some clarification. Lukács’s introduction outlines the late 1980s and early 1990s socioeconomic context: the stagnant economy and the concomitant rise in unemployment, which affected young people disproportionately, and the shifts from a government-guided economic model to reliance on the self-regulating capacities of the free market.² In consequence, people—again, especially young people—found employment both hard to find and less secure than in the past. Lukács also traces the simultaneous alienation of Japanese young people from the older models of adulthood (the workaholic sarariiman, or “salaried office worker,” and his partner, the sengyō shufu, or “professional housewife”) and the general disintegration of the myth of the middle-class society.³ Young people were unemployed, then, in part because the stagnant economy had no secure place for them in the workplace and in part because they rejected their parents’ all-work-and-no-play version of adulthood. Together, these factors contributed to increased market segmentation in television and in other popular media, and they sent commercial television stations in search of programming that would attract the young viewers who were not watching their parents’ TV shows. They first fixed upon young women. Lukács elucidates the context in which the family-oriented hōmu dorama, or “home drama,” lost its appeal for such young women and the trendy drama, especially the love drama, took its place, through neatly complementing analyses that focus on one or another of the specificities (e.g., narratives, characters, settings, language) of these productions.

Chapter 1 traces the postwar history of Japanese television and the rise of the tarento (mass-media personalities) as image commodity. The spread of television ownership played a role in orienting viewers toward common social concerns and common resolutions of social dilemmas until the early 1980s. Until that point, the most common dramatic productions were historical dramas, mysteries, and the home drama. But the latter genre began to experience a serious problem of audience erosion—particularly the alienation of young female viewers—around the middle of the 1980s. Why should television producers be concerned about young female viewers? Lukács here outlines the role of the young woman in the popular imaginary, a woman with superior discretionary spending potential, given her extended dependency on parental support. Commercial stations viewed young Japanese women as desirable viewers, since such an audience would attract corporate advertising dollars. To attract that audience, two commercial stations made “experimental” dramas; audience ratings soared, and the new genre of the trendy drama was born.⁴ In contrast with the older home dramas, with their stories that reinforced dominant national values, in the trendy drama plots recede in importance in favor of the characters, who become plot functions.⁵ In Lukács’s analysis, trendy dramas represent a shift from signification to affect. Themes of friendship and love take precedence over stories, the plot is overwhelmed by the visual and aural “coolness” of the series, and tarento were cast in the major roles.⁶ The chapter ends with a long and persuasive discussion of how the intertextuality of tarento acting simultaneously in fictional dramas and in commercials, as...