TV Scholar #3: Dr. Brandy Monk-Payton
"We've always had these moments where Blackness has tested the limits of televisual mediation."
The TV Scholar interview series brings real-life television scholars to my newsletter to discuss their journey to television studies, share nuggets of wisdom from their research, and obviously, to talk about television itself. Previously, I’ve spoken to Dr. Hunter Hargraves about Uncomfortable Television and Maddie Ullrich about her dissertation on feminism and contemporary television.
This time, I chat with Dr. Brandy Monk-Payton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Fordham University, about the book she’s writing, Channeling Reparations: Television and Black Lives Matter, her affinity for broadcast television’s soothing flow, and why the second season of Yellowjackets almost made her abandon the series altogether.
Before we get into it: what are you watching and enjoying lately?
I have, in some ways, retrenched myself into broadcast and cable television as the sort of streaming world gets more immense. I've kept hold of this linear TV model. So I've been watching programs on broadcast TV: the last season of The Good Doctor, I’m still watching Grey's Anatomy, Elsbeth, 9-1-1, the new season of Interview with the Vampire on AMC. And I've also been increasingly going back to programs that were a part of my formative years during the 90s. I'm always rewatching Felicity, it seems. I feel very much invested in keeping linear television afloat, in my own personal way.
Do you find there’s something comforting about linear television?
I'm a sucker for TV flow. I really enjoy having the television on and being able to watch segmentation within flow, watch commercials, and then be able to watch these procedurals and medical dramas that are in a lot of ways comforting because they have retained a particular kind of structure and affect for the viewer that is incredibly stable in a lot of ways. And I’m getting very exhausted by trying to find things on different streaming platforms.
When did you realize that researching television could become a legitimate thing that you could do in this life?
I went to Swarthmore College and I was one of two special majors in film and media studies. I switched to film and media primarily because I loved watching movies, I was very into cinema-going and trying to analyze film. So I initially thought I was going to be a film scholar. I took an independent study in television when I was an undergrad with Patricia White. That class definitely pushed me more into the realm of television studies. I love the dynamism of television, that the medium just has a different feel from film. It’s always changing and adapting, and I liked that fast-paced quality of television, what we might call its immediacy, or its presence.
Initially, in undergrad, I thought I was going to go into TV production. I ultimately ended up applying to a Master's program in media culture and communication from NYU, which was a theory program and got sucked into thinking about television more conceptually, theoretically, and historically.
How would you describe your current research and scholarly approach?
I am currently writing a manuscript called Channeling Reparations: Television and Black Lives Matter. It’s really looking at the limitations and possibilities of TV in addressing and redressing, potentially, racism and anti-Black violence. I’m interested in what happens when TV deploys a reparative impulse towards thinking about racial injury in its industrial strategies, its textual forms and content, as well as its modes of address.
The way to frame this project is to think about what I'm calling BLM TV, Black Lives Matter TV, which is a cycle of programming that roughly exists between 2013, with the emergence of Black Lives Matter, and 2023. Not only because a decade is a nice round number, but I think a lot of things started to happen and shift in the years following summer 2020 that allow for me to make the claim that the cycle has ended or waned.
In terms of that kind of industry perspective, I feel like we've seen a lot of DEI executives get laid off at streamers and network. So are you sort of writing about what has happened between 2020 and now in that respect?
Absolutely. I make the claim that after this racial reckoning of summer 2020, you had all of these boilerplate statements. And then you have this kind of attentiveness to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but now we see, as you said, those DEI positions leaving not only the TV industry, but also corporate university systems. Also the backlash against defunding the police as an activist rallying cry, the increasing criticism of whatever we want to call “wokeness” happening post-2020. Also the decline in Black Lives Matter as a movement itself. Pew Research Center just did a study last year, and also said that Black Lives Matter as a movement, the opinions around and support for it, have also waned.
So all of this is happening and you also get the strikes, creating a contraction in production and development. A lot of these programs created in the midst of the industry trying to sort of pivot have now been cancelled. I'm thinking of Issa Rae's Rap Sh!t, among others. There are many others; creatives of colour are having their shows being canceled. Basically, I’m making the claim that we're kind of done with this cycle—although there are still programs, obviously, that I put in the category of being more attentive to Black experience in a more complex way in the current moment.
Based on that research, what do you think the next five years will look like in the TV industry from that perspective?
It’s a good question. I think you will see these overall deals are still being made, for particular creators of colour that have gained a certain kind of stature within the industry like Issa Rae, Quinta Brunson, Lena Waithe, Donald Glover, all incidentally millennials of colour. Issa Rae has something coming up with Tubi—I see that being an outlet for more work to be done. But I think we’re just in this moment where there is so much backlash, but at the same time, so much desire, for shows that are geared towards issues around identity and that are more localized, about specific spaces and places, different geographies. I think that will continue because they are so lucrative and resonant.
In the book manuscript I talk about six different modes of repair that are operating within television during this decade-long period that are continuing to operate. One of them is reparation via speculative storytelling, storytelling within the sci-fi, horror and fantasy genres. I forgot to mention I did just watch the second season of Them…
I tried watching the first season and I was like, absolutely not.
[Laughs]. The first is terrible. I have so much hatred for the first season, precisely because I'm writing this book and I'm thinking about representations of violence. The gratuitousness of that first season I see as a failure of televisual reparations. The second season is far more interesting and restrained. It follows a story in the early 90s amidst the the Rodney King beating and has a lot to say about trauma, but also the milieu of Los Angeles during this time period with law enforcement and police brutality. It’s saying a lot more in a more nuanced way. These are the kinds of programs that we might see more of moving forward.
What are your foundational TV shows and your earliest TV memories?
I'm very much a fan of melodrama and soapy material. That really comes from watching soap operas with my mom pretty much every day. She would record them on VHS while she went off to work and I was at school, and then we'd watch them during the night: Young and the Restless, All my Children, One Life to Live. I always had a real attentiveness to serialized storytelling and ensemble casts, that really appealed to me, and the various interpersonal machinations that can happen on these kinds of programs, and their permutational quality.
Then I moved into primetime soaps, but geared towards teens: Beverly Hills, 90210, the OG Party of Five, and Dawson's Creek, which is a pivotal moment in my being a high schooler and watching that program. I wasn’t part of Television Without Pity then but it was certainly a program that begs for the introduction of the TV recap and all of these different ways to engage TV in a more extensive way online. I was writing fanfiction, I was on message boards, I was a shipper—that's when I got into fan culture through intense adoration of particular couplings. I was a Dawson/Joey fan, sorry Pacey/Joey people!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my all-time favourite programs. I could say so much about Buffy. But that got me into more cult programming. Lost became a really formative program for me in terms audience interaction and really got me thinking about puzzle box programs. I’m anticipating the new season of From. I adore From. My friends all laugh at me because it's basically taken up the Lost-shaped part of my heart.
I'm also a huge fan of The Walking Dead. Cable television is kind of like the walking dead—not only because that show had such a huge following and ratings success in its early years, but you can map the decline of The Walking Dead onto the decline of cable television. It still exists in its zombie form.
What’s your Walking Dead ranking?
I would say that the OG is still the top, followed by the Richonne show, The Ones Who Live, followed by Fear the Walking Dead.
Have you found any challenges with teaching TV as a medium?
It's always a struggle for a variety of reasons, both logistical and more philosophically. Logistically, it's the realization that they don't have access to as much television as I might assume. This past semester, my students were talking about how they were booted off of their parents’ Netflix account, after the password crackdown that ended up happening. So part of is lack of access to some programming content.
I think on the other hand, they're just not watching many things, and there's a lot going on in the world. To the degree to which they find programs compelling, I get a lot of students really enjoying watching all of Grey's Anatomy or Criminal Minds. They have this misplaced nostalgia for these procedurals and broadcast/cable TV programs. Other shows that I think that they're committed to like Euphoria, from my experience, they aren't. I will never forget last fall when I asked them about Euphoria, they told me they felt peer pressured into watching. So that's been interesting.
I teach a global television course and the extent to which they are watching international programming has, I think, increased. I'm very happily surprised that the algorithm is at least trying to give them programming like Baby Reindeer and others that would appeal to a younger audience. It's hard to teach TV now, because of the different streaming services, not necessarily knowing who has access to different content, and the lack of DVDs—I’m of the DVD boxset generation, so not being able to have physical access to programs sometimes hinders what I teach.
What’s a show you recently abandoned?
Okay first I'll start with a show that I thought I was going to abandon and then didn't, which is the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. I had so many reservations going into it. I also do a lot of work on celebrity culture and I'm really interested in the way in which celebrity functions across television and digital media, and I also teach a class on reality television. I was intrigued by this program and the way in which he was understanding the real and the function of the camera.
It seemed as though he comes across as this extreme narcissist and has these really uncomfortable moments with his parents as he’s navigating how to be queer in front of them. I was so close to completely taking that program off my radar, but I kept watching because I was intrigued amidst all of the spectacle. I think there are real kernels there that are instructive in terms of ultimately the way that he wants to reconcile with his mother. I think it's a really interesting program in terms of thinking about Blackness, queerness, and childhood trauma. So I came out on the other side being…a fan is not the right word, but as appreciative that it exists for him as a form of therapy, I suppose.
I was also very close to stopping Yellowjackets, actually, during the second season. It’s not just Yellowjackets, but endemic to this moment, where we only have seasons that are 10 episodes long, where the way that narration is functioning in these programs oftentimes leaves me kind of bewildered in terms of the way that story arcs and character motivations are being dealt with. I ended up hate-watching the second season precisely because of what seemed to me like a lack of attentiveness to the way that it was managing its different storylines and temporal logics that I think something like Lost handled really well by virtue of being on broadcast network television and having a format and a structure for each episode that audiences found comfort in, even as it seems perhaps alienating to generalized audiences.
I guess this points to the fact that I am a completist.
What’s one thing you’ve written about television that you’d want tvscholar readers to check out?
The seeds of my book project come from my article in Film Quarterly called “Blackness and Televisual Reparations” and it's where I really start to discuss what reparative logic might be on television. The way in which television as a medium, its unique properties around flow and liveness, the spectral quality of television, lends itself to thinking about the afterlife of slavery and the different ways in which Blackness has come to be constitutive to the medium if we're looking back at the way that television news understood broadcasting in part through the Civil Rights Movement.
We've always had these moments where Blackness has tested the limits of televisual mediation. That's where I start to think through those issues. I can see a lot of programming that aligns itself with how I'm talking about this reparative function and the way that Blackness is called into being through television. From shows like Kindred to Them and others.
Great interview!
Glad to see some love for From! I feel like that show is not talked about enough.