Watching Teen TV Contributors' Community

some notes on notes

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:04:25 GMT

Hey folks--here is some info since a few of you asked about how to do notes in your eventual essays:

Note numbers should be indicated in the text by arabic numerals, superscripted above the line, and outside the punctuation. No letter-number combinations (such as 6a or 13b) are to be used with note numbers. The notes should follow directly the text of their chapter (do not place the notes on a separate page--they should follow immediately after the last line of text of the chapter).

If a book has no bibliography or if an item cited is not included in the bibliography, the item should be cited in full the first time it is referred to in the notes for each chapter. Because alphabetical considerations do not apply, authors' names should be in normal order, not inverted (e.g., Henry Adams, not Adams, Henry).

So this is really an endnote style text--where the citations occur in the endnotes rather than the text proper.

Sharon

VM and CW sources

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 06:24:38 GMT

For those of you working on Veronica Mars, or for those of you who are just fans, or for anyone interested in the increasingly important intersection between blogging, online fan communities, and the shows that they discuss, this VM online press conference transcript might be of interest: http://tubetalk.blogspot.com/2006/04/veronica-mars-online-press-conference.html

It's quite long, I'll warn you, but there are some interesting tidbits in there about fan interactions and the looming changes brought on by the advent of CW.

I also found an article on the ending of the WB and UPN, and the end of niche marketing via network. Here's the address: http://newyorkmetro.com/arts/tv/features/15710/

Just thought I'd pass these on--
Carrie

drafts and such

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:58:19 GMT

Hey all..I had such fun reading through all these! I've offered a few comments via replies, aiming to speak to issues you raised. Hope they are helpful...Sharon

Very late entry...

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 08:20:05 GMT

Hi everyone,

I'm probably the last person left to upload my info. Apologies. I'm in the final weeks of the semester and have been dealing with essays, exam issues and other deadlines. Being a LiveJournal virgin didn't help as I ended up floundering around trying to figure out how to work it *grin*.

Anyway, I'm Valerie Wee and I've been at the National University of Singapore since graduating from UT-Austin a couple of years ago. I've been working on teen culture since my dissertation and my recent research has been focused on teen slasher films as well as teen TV. I'm primarily interested in tracing the ways in which industrial developments (in terms of both structure and practices) shape textual elements.

Here's my abstract (which will need some slight revision when I'm finally done with the paper):

Teen Television and the WB Television Network

In the 1999-2000 fall television season, when the WB television network marked its 5th anniversary on the air, it did so as the acknowledged teen-oriented network. In its first five years, the network had evolved from what critics called “a struggling, almost pathetic sixth-placer in the prime-time wars” (Bierbaum, 1998, 30), into a media site actively engaged in creating, mediating and (re-)shaping teen entertainment culture. The network’s success at attracting and servicing the entertainment demands of the teen demographic made it popular with advertisers and consumer corporations who were actively targeting that demographic.

This paper examines Time-Warner’s decision to enter the broadcast network arena within a context of continuing multimedia conglomeration and considers the WB network’s evolution from its launch in 1995 to 2002, tracing the various strategies it utilized in marshaling the increasingly vital teen market for the network’s survival and success. The decision to target the teen demographic resulted in the creation of programs and a format that collectively constituted the WB as a teen-oriented cultural artifact in itself. The characteristics and qualities that marked the WB’s teen shows and the ways in which these texts were shaped by the specific industrial, economic and creative contexts of the period are the key questions considered here.

This paper is divided into three parts. Part I examines the motivations behind Time-Warner’s decision to launch a new television network in what was dubbed the post-network, post-broadcast era. Part II interrogates the WB’s commitment to niche marketing and narrowcasting and traces the strategies the WB adopted to consolidate its distinct teen brand – especially its teen-oriented programming, marketing and branding activities. This section will also analyze a range of WB teen shows (including Buffy, Dawson's Creek, Roswell and Young Americans) and argue that the WB tried to construct a teen identity that was distinct from the more established MTV teen identity. Part III considers the benefits and risks that accompanied the WB’s dedication to the teen audience.

extended deadline

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:18:31 GMT

Hello all! I am currently raising my head above water as it's spring break and I have some "spare" time! Louisa and I have decided to extend the deadline for your articles to April 10th for two reasons: 1) we realized there needed to be more time between the mini-online conference and the turn-ins and 2) we had to extend our own deadlines for the intro because of (good) projects that have just popped up on the horizon for both of us this month.

For those of you who haven't told Louisa yet when you are free for the online Live Journal "conferencing" between March 27th and 28th, drop her a line. Hope all is well! Sharon

Anyone working on Veronica Mars...

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:24:44 GMT

I love this show.

Sorry to be a total fan rather than an academic right now, but I'm immersed in Season one DVDs, finding evidence for my argument, and am in love with the writing. I love any show that actually has dialogue that features a sarcastic leader of a motorcycle gang saying “You’re concerned? I’m the one that’s got to go up into the hills, all by myself. What if I run into a pack of you white boys, huh? On some clean, well-lit street? I could be bored to death.”

Okay. Valentine to Veronica Mars over now. Hope all is well with all of you!
Carrie

Hello. Apologies for the tardiness.

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 21:38:59 GMT

Hello everybody. I apologize for being so late doing this. I'm a a dissertator at UW-Madison in Comm Arts, media and cultural studies division. My dissertation deals with the rise of music licensing in the 1990s and the ways the compiled popular music soundtrack changes television and video game narration and allows new ways of exploring the ways electronic media represent gender and sexuality (for instance, waht happens when riot grrrl rockers and in-your-face queer musicians such as Le Tigre get picked up and put in One Tree Hill). For this paper, I look at how the WB negotiated music licensing with record labels and worked to promote new and emerging artists for reductions in licensing rates. I look at how this incorporation might open ways of thinking about the visual representations of gender and sexuality in the WB teen dramas. A version of this paper will be presented at SCMS.
Here's my abstract:
The increased presence of popular music soundtracks in 1990s teen television programs was more than a symptom of conglomeration and new network branding. This paper argues that popular music soundtracks in WB shows provide new ways of imagining and critiquing representations of gender and sexuality in teen culture. While work on MTV aesthetics and early 1980s programs such as Miami Vice pointed to the ways in which music video’s visual strategies changed the pace and look of much mainstream American television, little has been said on the role of the music and lyrics in programming transformations. Following Carol Vernallis’ (2004) admonition to put the “music” back into music video, this paper takes music’s role in television aesthetics seriously. I chronicle how the WB used popular music soundtracks as a way to enhance viewer identifications, to promote ancillary commercial products, and how music worked to address current trends in teen culture in the 1990s. I analyze how popular music genres, songs, and artists were used to showcase WB “hipness.” Focusing on Felicity, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel, I chart how the increase of popular music in these soundtracks and a decrease of classical scoring in these programs changes the way these television texts tell narratives. Operating between sound studies and visual culture studies, I plot a middle point, where popular music soundtracks re-frame audience interpretations of on-screen events, where music potentially works against straightforward readings of television’s visual elements, and where music moves between engendering “assimilating” (fewer) and “affiliating” (more) identifications with the media text (Kassabian, 2000). I argue that the WB’s use of “alternative” music, particularly the music of Sarah MacLachlan (organizer of the Lilith Fair music tours) and other feminist musicians, results in a situation where musical discourses (star positioning, reviews, and lyrical content) push viewers toward more nuanced readings of on-screen gender performance. Analyses of the impact of music on television narration will provide new ways of talking about these texts’ representations of gender and sexuality and a useful historicization of the compiled popular music television soundtrack now found in shows such as Queer as Folk, The L Word, Nip/Tuck, Six Feet Under, and The O.C.
Cheers,
Ben Aslinger.

Paul Whiteman (?!)

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:03:32 GMT

Hi; thanks for the reminder to take care of this!

I'm Jeff Martin, and I'm a recent graduate of NYU's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program. My primary preservation interest is television, particularly early (pre-1960s) TV--so I've watched a LOT of television. I spent a summer working at the Peabody Awards archives at the University of Georgia (an invaluable, if underused, resource), and systmatically watched every program they had on teenagers up to 1970. A fascinating exercise, and one that introduced me to the rather odd "Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club," which I'll be writing on. A summary of the paper is below--could there be any programming further away from "Buffy," et. al.? Will be interesting to see people's reactions to the paper. In general, there's probably less in the program itself to analyze, but quite a bit more in terms of its creation and context. We'll see.

Jeff

Paul Whiteman and "TV Teen Club": Teenage Television's Creation Myth

He seems to be unlikely father for teenage television: a portly, genial, mustachioed big-band leader. But Paul Whiteman's "TV Teen Club," which aired between 1949 and 1954 (initially on WFIL-TV in Philadelphia, and later on ABC), did become the first nationally broadcast program aimed at teenagers—at least, that was how the show presented itself. However, a reading of both the shows themselves and their reception at the time reveals more complex aims. In this paper I will explore the ways in which "TV Teen Club" was only nominally a show for teenagers. Instead, it primarily functioned as a reassuring show about teenagers—good teenagers, that is.

The show had its roots in the early postwar panic over juvenile delinquency. Whiteman, one of the most prominent citizens of suburban Hunterdon County, New Jersey, helped set up a series of Saturday-night dances as a way to combat purported weekend idleness and criminal behavior on the part of local teens—an outgrowth of the "teen canteens" that became popular during World War Two. In 1949, Whiteman took the idea to WFIL, hoping that weekly broadcasts aimed at teenagers could eventually become a de facto series of delinquency-reducing dances across the nation, keeping teens safely at home to watch a program just for them.

The show was a variation on the long standing "amateur night" genre that had its roots in radio. This format played off Whiteman's status as a discoverer of new talent—Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, and Bix Biederbecke were among those Whiteman claimed to have discovered. Each week "TV Teen Club" presented teenagers who were exceptional as much because of their "goodness" (a factor continually pointed out by Whiteman) as their talent. In presenting these "safe" teenagers, Whiteman was repeating a function he'd performed in the early days of jazz music—the sanitizing of a supposedly "dangerous" culture to mainstream audiences. In the 1920s, Whiteman's symphonic treatments of jazz music had the stated goal of "making a lady of jazz," thereby making African-American music palatable to white audiences. With "TV Teen Club," Whiteman was able to show how teenage America, a subculture supposedly wracked by delinquency and trouble, was in fact populated by "real good kids."

This paper will trace the show's history, placing it in relation to contemporary moving image texts about juveniles and delinquency, as well as relating it to future "mediators" of youth culture such as Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark (who, in fact, did the live commercials on "TV Teen Club.") Close readings of surviving episodes of the program will explore how the program delineated the boundaries of "good" teenage activity, and how it celebrated the idea of the "anonymously exceptional" young person.

CW

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:18:29 GMT

I'm guessing everyone has heard about the merger they announced at NATPE last week of UPN and WB? Just throwing it out there as it might be relevant to all the work we're doing here...

Hello from Sharon

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:55:50 GMT

Hi all- a welcome from me as well! Most of you know "about" us so I won't bore you with my bio. I am looking forward to working with you all in this joint endeavor. I'll be at NATPE next week so will be out of the loop for 5 or 6 days, but I'm sure I'll pop bak soon after to see what you all are sharing (and perhaps to spout off about relevant shows such as Small ville and Veronica Mars, ha ha). Til then...