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A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 302
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Feminist Media Histories
Publication Date:
04 January 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520300798
Format: Paperback
"Berke’s imagination — bolstered by insight, expertise, and scholarship — reveals stunning depths. Authors’ intent may be unknowable, but critical interpretations are their own kind of creative work. Berke’s interpretations are generative and convincing accounts of the way that art and artists can come to reflect each other."
"Their Own Best Creations seamlessly bridges the fields of media studies and feminist studies via a rich and lively exploration of the women who scripted the first Golden Age of television."
"Drawing on writers who worked in both film and radio, Berke’s book will pique the interest of radio and television scholars, but her conceptual frameworks and innovative use of texts alongside industrial history make it essential reading for students and scholars of media industries and labor."
"The book is energetic and animated, drawing on rich source materials that come to life. . . . an impressive accomplishment and valuable contribution."
"While media histories will always contain gaps that existing archives may not be able to fill, Berke excels at investigating these spaces to rethink the women who created so many of early television’s genres. Their Own Best Creations is a fascinating, timely, and heartening contribution to media history and industry studies."
"Berke’s Their Own Best Creations offers a fascinating insight into the professional careers of a number of successful and innovative women television writers who played memorable roles in the creation of popular postwar US television genres."
"Their Own Best Creations enriches the field of television studies, which has too often reproduced the industry’s masculine bias in its choice of objects."
Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Camera Obscura, Public Books, Feminist Media Histories, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Craftsmen and Work Wives
The Gendering of Television Writing
2. “A Sea of Male Interests”
Your Show of Shows and the Comedy of Female Mischief
3. Gertrude Berg, Peg Lynch, and the “Small Situation”
of the Stay-at-Home Showrunner
4. “What Girl Shouldn’t?”
The Many Children of Irna Phillips
5. “Knowing All the Plots”
Presenting the Woman Story Editor
6. “A Girl’s Gotta Live”
The Literate Heroines of the Suspense Anthology Drama
Conclusion
Better Than It Never Was
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Craftsmen and Work Wives
The Gendering of Television Writing
2. “A Sea of Male Interests”
Your Show of Shows and the Comedy of Female Mischief
3. Gertrude Berg, Peg Lynch, and the “Small Situation”
of the Stay-at-Home Showrunner
4. “What Girl Shouldn’t?”
The Many Children of Irna Phillips
5. “Knowing All the Plots”
Presenting the Woman Story Editor
6. “A Girl’s Gotta Live”
The Literate Heroines of the Suspense Anthology Drama
Conclusion
Better Than It Never Was
Notes
Bibliography
Index