Core Post #2 - Ensembles

I appreciated this week both Han and Esposito’s close readings of racialization as it operates within different representational frames, but want to focus here in particular on Gray’s questioning of the interrelationships between industry, perceived audiences, and the economic viability and circulation of models of blackness on television. While it was not mentioned explicitly in his article, I wonder what the role of something like MTV played within these shifts in the 1980s in terms of conglomerated ownership structures or media “symbiosis” that Gray traces. What might the rise of the music video as popular form tell us about the circulation of blackness on TV and networks’ senses of the profitability of black audiences given their historical share of the music market?

These questions aside, I am most interested in probing Gray’s claim, made via the logic of Gitlin and Taylor, that commercial representations respond to a certain societal “common sense,” always “[framing] its representations in appropriate and accessible social terms that express the shared assumptions, knowledge, and experiences of viewers who are situated along different alliances of race, class, and gender (and, increasingly, sexuality)” (p. 58). While the political economy of audience share and the forecasted predictability of blackness within a neoliberal frame are well traced in Gray’s article, I wonder what might be said for the somewhat intersectional “alliances” gestured at in his quote above. Like Jackie mentioned in her post, there has been an ongoing push in network series to feature diverse ensemble casts (at least in terms of race, gender, and sexuality – less so class). What kind of “common sense” or “social terms” do they offer for us in terms of perceived audience, especially along divides urban and rural? To whom are these ensemble casts speaking or being marketed towards in terms of narrowcasting models?

These questions seem particularly pertinent in light of the release of The L Word: Generation Q, the reboot of the mid-00s series of the same name. The original being a perennial “problematic fav,” the recent series clearly seeks to do right on many of the critiques leveled at the first. These include the overwhelming whiteness and class privilege of its lesbian ensemble, its misadventures in racialized casting, the normativity and femme-focus of its aesthetics and beauty standards, and its mishandling (to put it mildly) of trans storylines. In its place in this year’s series is a multiracial and gender fluid ensemble, firmly planted in LA’s east side rather than the comfort of WeHo. However watching the show, both for myself and many of my friends, these choices felt somewhat calculated and even deliberate, creating a kind of “one of everyone” model of tokenization – one trans character, one black character, one latinx, etc – that felt reductive in its scope. I suppose my question here is: when is representation not enough? It also was unclear to me who the shows’ target audience was, beyond some catch-all notion of the “lesbian” market share. Surely there a production and storytelling models that might help us remedy these concerns, but Gen Q seemed a particularly obvious and recent example. I’d be curious to hear others’ impressions.