TV Scholar #1: Maddie Ullrich
TV Scholar #1: Maddie Ullrich
"We delude ourselves into thinking consuming certain shows makes us politically engaged."
I first got to know Maddie Ullrich when she agreed to join a TV discussion group I was organizing. “I’m a PhD student studying TV and have felt so stir crazy this year without other grad students/people to talk TV,” she had said in January 2021 in response to my call for participants. “Definitely interested :).” That year feels like an absolute blur to me, I can’t even recall what that month consisted of, except probably doomscrolling social media and reading about how many were dying from a raging pandemic.
What I do remember are these Zoom meetings, a space to share honest opinions about what we were watching, dissect characters, and inspire each other to watch niche TV. We still have the group running to this day, albeit much less frequently since everyone’s lives returned to full steam. Maddie is incisively well-spoken about television without losing you in dense theory, and as a queer person, highly attuned to what’s going on in the landscape of lesbian television. Over an hour-long Zoom hang out, I picked her brain about her experience as a PhD candidate nearing the end of her dissertation writing, and what it’s like working within the field of television studies as a budding academic in 2023.
Let’s jump right into the deep end: What’s your dissertation about?
I study contemporary television objects and I’m interested in tracing how feminism has been historically represented in older eras of television like 1960s and 70s, when glimpses of feminism were coming out on television — Mary Tyler Moore, for example. I argue that television now represents feminism through negative and antagonistic feelings, a huge departure from the feminist icon/positive representation model, which is how liberal feminism marketed itself on television for most of the 20th century.
That shift can really be attributed to the shift from broadcast television to cable to streaming. I resist the feminist anti-hero model because it makes a claim that this is somehow a new character we’ve never seen before when it’s much more subtle than that. I write about it through feeling — like disappointment, for example. How does disappointment get represented on television as being a feminist feeling? You can look at the disappointing daughter character on Sharp Objects or resentment in the workplace as a popular way to represent feminism on contemporary television. I’m interested in these feelings themselves and that’s how TV tries to address women, rather than the girlboss character.
There are so many shows from the 80s and 90s that use that model, like Murphy Brown; the individual character who is supposed to be representative of feminism. We’ve moved away from that model on contemporary TV, and that encapsulates a lot of discourses about prestige TV, post-network television, streaming. I'm interested in both feminist theory and rhetoric, and how feminism historically has used popular media to market itself by looking at the TV industry specifically.
Slay. What are your case studies?
The first chapter is on disappointment and the disappointing daughter by looking at Sharp Objects and Gilmore Girls. The second chapter is on resentment and the workplace through the contrast between P-Valley and The Morning Show. The third chapter is on defiance, and that’s on Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale — the idea of consuming narratives of violence on prestige television as being an act of feminist defiance. Kind of how we delude ourselves into thinking consuming certain shows makes us political relevant or politically engaged. I don’t believe in that at all. The fourth chapter is on guilt and reboots, on The L Word and The L Word: Generation Q. Basically how reboots use history to mediate feminism’s guilt and address past grievances. With Gen Q, it’s trying to cover over The L Word’s problematic history of dealing with trans representation and race.
Taking it back to your earlier academic career — when did you realize that researching television could become a legitimate thing that you could do in this life? For me, I came into academia studying fashion, not even realizing that television studies was a fully-formed field.
My background is in art history and I was doing a master's degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in the art history program there, and I wanted to work more with film and media studies…I didn't have this background, television wasn’t even on my radar. My advisor had gone to the visual and cultural studies program at University of Rochester where I am now, and she was like, I think this program that would be perfect for you because it’s housed in the art history department so having an art history degree where you can do visual analysis is encouraged, but you can work on film, video games, television…it’s a very interdisciplinary program. So I came kind of not knowing what I wanted to study but knowing that I wanted to do something with moving images.
For a while I thought I was going to do film, specifically queer cinema. Pre-covid days, I was always watching television in my free time…I wouldn't necessarily recommend capitalizing on your leisure activities! But I just suddenly felt I wanted to write about TV. Like this is what I enjoy watching. Film…I felt like I sometimes had to drag myself to the theatre to watch something, or only watch something because film bros were like, I can’t believe you’ve never seen XYZ film! With TV, I felt more confident, like I was always on the pulse of what was coming out at that time, what I thought was aesthetically and narratively interesting. It felt natural to me. I started writing about TV in the second or third year of my PhD, so I’ve been studying it intensely for four years now.
What were you looking at in terms of television in your qualifying exam?
My sample chapter, which of course is now my dissertation chapter I’m struggling the hardest with, I was looking at quality television and conspicuous consumption of sexual violence on television in The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies. So basically, how these shows were co-opting feminism and specifically narratives about sexual violence in this quality TV landscape — which is relatively new. Sexual violence used to be reserved for the made-for-TV movie, soap operas, this “low form” of television. I was interested in how that was being brought into these big streamers like HBO and Hulu, who were now using rape narratives as glossy, quality TV.
Why has it been challenging to come back to it in your dissertation?
Part of it is I get distracted by the new television that’s coming out. Handmaid’s feels so outdated to me now. Even Big Little Lies feels outdated. There’s part of me that feels like…I don’t know if I care about those objects anymore? And this is why I like to write for publications outside of academia, because it allows me to talk about TV that’s current. Whereas in academia, it’s such a slow-moving process. By the time you get something published it’s not at the forefront of peoples’ minds anymore, necessarily, like this article I’m writing on I May Destroy You. That show will be three years old this year. It’s a glacial process, but media is so fast-moving now it’s hard for the academic publication cycle to keep up with that.
What are the formative shows for you that opened your eyes to the possibilities of the medium?
I was obsessed with Gilmore Girls in middle school. I had it on DVD, my best friend and I rewatched it over and over again for years. Really intense. It’s funny because I’m writing about it in my dissertation now and my relationship to it has totally changed. I find it hard to watch, now, it feels really out of touch with reality. Like, fantasy. As a 13-year-old that makes a lot of sense…I didn’t have exposure necessarily to what it’s like to be a single mother trying to raise a daughter. You see their relationship as so idealized. Now I look back and I think…god that would be impossible in the real world.
I also watched a ton of Nick at Nite, where they would show re-runs of sitcoms from the 80s like The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Cheers, The Golden Girls. I really liked older television. I didn’t necessarily have a contemporary, flashy exposure to TV — I was watching things that were outdated, even at the time. Not to be corny but I think it’s really inspired the way I look at TV now, I’m a very historical scholar where I’m interested in taking a show that seems really novel, like Yellowjackets, and I’d be interested in how did this genre form? What is the lineage that Yellowjackets fits into? Going back in time and tracing that — looking at Lost, shows with female ensemble casts, there are so many directions. I was always wanting to know where things came from.
How do you balance watching a sufficient quantity of television with your writing/research/teaching? And do you feel everything you watch has to go back to your research?
I go through phases. Right now, I’m teaching a survey-level class on television and gender, and so we started in the 1950s to present, which is a huge amount of ground to cover. So I’ve been spending my time watching shows for that class. We watch two to three shows per week. There’s the TV I watch for fun, the TV I watch for research, and the TV I watch to teach. The last few months my watching has been dominated by my teaching and researching. I’m rewatching the original The L Word because I’m working on that chapter of my dissertation right now, and then I sprinkle in a watercooler show like Succession, Yellowjackets, The Last of Us. I keep up with the big names. But there are so many shows that fall through the cracks…like the more niche shows that I would probably find relevant to my research interests and personal taste. When the hell am I going to find the time to watch Rain Dogs?
Ugh yes, Rain Dogs. I think it’s like…the polar opposite of Somebody Somewhere, about this straight woman and her gay best friend in the most toxic dynamic I’ve seen in a show. We don’t get this specific kind of toxicity from gay men on TV…
Right, like the toxicity helps bring nuance to a character. I feel like we’re still stuck in this era of positive representation. I’m like…I don’t want to see that, I want to see queer characters who are assholes, because that’s how life is. As a queer person I encounter a lot of assholes. It’d be nice to see the real world rather than this sanitized version.
We have yet to see a gay Fleabag!
I need it.
Anyway. Not to start a triggering conversion, but I was wondering how you cope with the anxieties around the precarity of academia in this pre-tenure track world and the current job market.
Every day looks different. A skill I’ve learned — and honestly I don’t know how helpful this is — but you kind of have to focus on one day at a time. The way my brain works now is: okay, what are my goals for myself this semester? Finish this publication, teach this class, make this connection with this person. When I focus on these small projects I end up feeling more confident going into the job market, rather than sitting around worrying about what will happen in the fall when I apply for jobs.
I think that’s very realistic. I used to get stuck in that mode a lot in grad school, and it’s the number one question you get asked from those around you: “what are you doing after/where is this going for you/etc.”
Yeah, it’s hard. Even if it’s really hard to do your own research and to be teaching undergraduates at the same time, I find that to at least make me feel more connected with people. Research can be really isolating and that can create a lot of anxiety because you don’t see how your work is connected to the real world. When you’re teaching, you get to connect your research to what undergraduates are interested in. I’ve learned a lot from my students and it helps me feel more secure. You’d be surprised by how much TV those in the 18 to 22 demographic are watching.
What is a limited series, drama, and comedy that you would recommend?
Limited series, that’s easy: Sharp Objects. Of course, it has its problems, like any shows does, but as an example of the limited series mode, Sharp Objects still holds up. The performances, the writing, the visual aesthetics of the show are all beautifully done. The way that series uses sound too was really revolutionary, the atmospheric sound in particular. I grew up in the south so I’m very familiar with the buzzing sound that you hear at all times in the summer. The bugs, the moisture…the show captures that atmosphere through sound. The music was incredible, too. Patricia Clarkson!!!!
Drama: Severance has really stuck with me since I saw it. I remember thinking the penultimate episode was the finale and being so captured and disturbed by it. I had not felt those feelings in such a long time, the stakes felt so high. It’s a cerebral show but the kind of puzzle that anyone would enjoy, even those who aren’t looking at it as a capitalist critique or interested in it on that meta level. I think about it all the time. It’s a show that after the pandemic feels even more pressing as a series, our relationship to labour was really called into question during Covid-19, that show is both relevant in a “post-pandemic world” but also a reminder of before, when it felt like the separation between one’s personal life and one’s work felt a lot more invisible.
Comedy: Work in Progress season one! I love the queer characters and the way the show thinks about gender, it feels really rare to see a show where the protagonist is questioning their relationship to gender and dating someone who’s gender nonconforming — these questions that I feel don’t get that much exposure on television, and doing it in a funny, comedically interesting way that doesn’t feel like it’s poking fun to those issues but is bringing light to them.
Rest in peace Work in Progress!
