TV Scholar #2: Dr. Hunter Hargraves
Uncomfortable Television
“By focusing on the changes that made postmillennial television a comparatively more exciting medium than what came before it, audiences learned how to transform feelings of discomfort into feelings of a pleasure, a skill necessary to adjust fully into the systems of economic precarity and cultural instability brought on by the instantiation of neoliberalism into daily life.” — “Introduction: Television Scripts,” Uncomfortable Television
Hunter Hargraves is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. We spoke on Zoom earlier this month about his book Uncomfortable Television, a theoretically sophisticated monograph published earlier this year by Duke University Press. Hunter received his PhD at Brown University where he worked closely with Lynne Joyrich, an iconic researcher at the intersection of television, gender, and sexuality.
After interviewing another TV scholar last year, I hope to continue this series where I get to check in with scholars researching and publishing juicy work within television studies who are willing to graciously offer me some of their time for a chit chat. I’m still making my way through Uncomfortable Television and highly recommend picking up a copy for anyone interested in an incisive look at how discomfort has been used to legitimize television as an art form.
You’re a graduate of the Modern Culture and Media PhD program at Brown University. What was that experience like?
What I really like about it is that you are trained first to think about media and all of its dynamism. You do think about it on the level of medium specificity, even in our age in which we flitter around from film to TV to digital in very promiscuous ways. But what I really liked about the program is its dedication to striking that balance between promiscuity and that kind of like…No, you do need to actually think rigorously about a certain kind of historical and formal grounding in the medium.
That was really helpful to me as someone who was coming in being all like, I love TV and I’m a big faggot who wants to teach questions of gender and sexuality and race and all of that. TV is a really great place to do that work. Not just on the level of a fan, but with my students, I have more of an opportunity to shape how they view those topics through the lens of The Real Housewives or Fargo rather than…Shakespeare. No offense to Shakespeare.
When did you realize that researching television could become a legitimate thing that you could do in this life?
I did my undergrad in the early 2000s, so as the first wave of a lot of interdisciplinary ethnic studies, gender studies, feminist inquiry—at that moment of institutionalization within the academy. When I graduated, I was like, Oh, I want to do a PhD program in queer shit. Then I was watching DVD boxsets of Law & Order: SVU in 2007, I had a friend working with Linda Williams on pornography, and he was like, maybe you should be thinking about this in terms of discipline. What do you think about this as your sandbox?
That was in the mid 2000s when shows like SVU were really borrowing from the headlines in terms of their sensationalism. I remember there was this really crazy episode about “super HIV,” and the plot twist at the end was this HIV activist who was going on a vigilante killing spree where he was finding circuit queens who were not disclosing their status. He would do these crazy stylized revenge setups. The episode that premiered the week after that was about a white couple that adopted a Black child and then hired a white supremacist group to assassinate that Black child for the life insurance money. Like, truly crazy shit. That’s when I was just sort of like, how are we getting away with this? That was some of the initial germination into the project that I ended up working on and set me off on that path.
That seed you planted seems to have blossomed in your book, Uncomfortable Television. What was it like working on that culmination of all your research?
You know this really well—television is a medium of the present, even though we’re in this “we don’t really know what television is” moment. There is that urgency to respond to what you're watching, right? That's why the Emmys felt so disoriented last week, we’re still in this weird temporal shift—which I also think is an extension of pandemic times to a certain extent—where everything just feels like in these rhythms of deferral and delay. When you write about the present it presents its own challenges when it comes to the research process.
I applied to grad school in like 2008, kind of obsessed with why SVU was doing its thing. I did kind of have the argument of how throughout the early 21st century, something was going on with discomfort, but I didn't have the vocabulary to really lay out that argument. By the time I had finished my dissertation and graduated in 2015, we're already in this new post-Golden Age, beginning of peak TV formation. So as I'm thinking of how I turn this dissertation—which is written for a handful of people to demonstrate my competency as a scholar—into a book, to have an impact.
Writing about television is tricky. The ways in which most academic research progresses—years for anything to happen—feels so different from the ways in which we talk about television, and the ways in which we also want to function as hybrid scholar-critics.
Periodizing television is just so challenging, as I say in the book. When Grey's Anatomy is still on 20 years later and the Emmys are doing this retrospective, it's hard for us to think about how a show fits in with all of the other structures and feelings that are going on. Which is why at the end of the day, I say Uncomfortable Television is a historical book.
What were some of your formative TV shows?
The only television I was really allowed to watch as a child were these feminist coded sitcoms of the late 80s and early 90s. So Roseanne, Designing Women, Murphy Brown, those were shows that my mom really enjoyed. Those were all very formative series in terms of how I think about the world, in part because they opened my mind into that bridge between second wave and third wave feminism and gave me memories of watching that as a way to make sense of those concepts later on.
One of the things I really like about television studies is that it's always been a discipline that has said we're a feminist discipline. Most of the founding texts and legends in the field are women. I'm able to at least think about my own pedagogy and how I'm representing the field to students knowing that it's already coming from a place that privileges feminist inquiry from the very beginning.
Do you find you have to keep up with what your students are watching to teach TV?
Yes and no. In our post-digital age, history is hard for students to understand because when they Google something, they're getting everything from the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s all in front of them at once. So I find myself turning to history more and more to be able to be like, you need to understand what 80s TV was like. You can't just flatten it out and put it all on this plane. It it also hard for me to get excited about Marvel or Star Wars shows. So there are some gaps between what my students are always talking about at the beginning of class and what I'm interested in. I'm also teaching in Southern California, at a campus that's 15 minutes from Disneyland.
Have you found any other challenges with teaching TV as a medium?
There’s still too much of it. [Laughs]. This isn't a dig on my students, I don't fault them, but they don't always have a clear distinction between cinema and television at this point. Now we have a thing of like, why isn't Killers of the Flower Moon just a limited series? If you're going to watch The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon at home, pausing it when you're done and saying you'll pick this up later, at what point do these categories that we have held on to—because they helped us organize our understanding of popular culture—become muddy? Like, narrative closure now means the scene after the credits, where you get to see what happens in the next film. It’s a challenge just to get students to think about the actual affective environmental factors that went into pre-binging, pre-SVOD television.
Ugh with Marvel shows especially, the TV to film to TV again. Or something like Small Axe, where cinephiles will argue it’s a series of films and telephiles will argue it’s a TV show. This never-ending battle.
How cool is it that we now have telephiles as a category to compete and push back against this initial hegemonic vision of what is what? One of the arguments I make in the book is that TV has to be thought of in this promiscuous space. Not just because the medium is changing so much but because it was a domestic medium rich with distraction in which you are not immersed into the diegetic setting, you are multitasking from the very beginning. So there has to be a spectatorial promiscuity that you have to extend to the audience, whether that's TV of the 1960s or TV of today. That's a strength of television.
What are shows lately that you’ve been inspired by/pulled to lately?
A lot of my research is in reality television. I have been inspired lately by the number of Bravo series that have really been leaning into nonlinear forms of storytelling, like with The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or Vanderpump Rules, in which as the season is somewhere in-between production and post-production, new scandals are happening, forcing the editors to respond in real time. It shapes and changes the overall narrative arc of the season. Those are capable of producing really entertaining moments of television that sometimes fly under the radar, because they're written off as like, you know, Bravo shows.
I’m a recent Real Housewives viewer and I'm fascinated.
We’re now two decades deeply saturated into the logics of reality television, which we've also seen, over the last eight years, extend into our understanding of government and public life in really intense ways. Their (the housewives) disagreements are also about disagreements as co-workers. And that then ties into some of these larger discourses around the labor conditions of reality television that were unfolding against the backdrop of the strike.
I know that Salt Lake has gotten a lot of buzz lately, but it also does encapsulate a real perfect storm of all of these different conversations that we're having about reality television and its relationship to scam culture, girlboss culture, social media use, intertextuality, breaking the fourth wall…things we weren't necessarily ready to put all together in the constellation a few years ago.
Further Reading
Feud: Capote vs the Swans premiered this week on FX. Naomi Watts, it’s your time (to finally get an Emmy nomination)! I wrote a who’s who guide for The Cut which included some fun research into Truman Capote’s Real Housewives-esque dysfunctional friend group.
Last year, I wrote a guide to the shows I was looking forward to in 2023 for this newsletter. This year, I was asked by Harper’s Bazaar to round-up a list for 2024. I capped it at 35, but I probably could have gone to 50—that’s how much TV is on the way. Some shows that were delayed by the strike actually appear on both lists.
Expats premiered on Prime Video last week. It’s a 3-star show for me, and I’ll explain in my mini newsletter review on the 15th—but Sarayu Blue is a huge stand-out. Luckily, I got to chat with her for The Cut.
ICYMI, I also interviewed Josie Totah who plays Mabel on The Buccaneers back in late December. Yes, a bird actually pooped on her as soon as we started our interview.
Very interested in reading this book now!