The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV: Production Design and the Boomer Era

Description

The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV explores the aesthetic politics of nostalgia for 1950s and 60s America on contemporary television. Specifically, it looks at how nostalgic TV production design shapes and is shaped by larger historical discourses on gender and technological change, and America’s perceived decline as a global power. Alex Bevan argues that the aesthetics of nostalgic TV tell stories of their own about historical decline and progress, and the place of the baby boomer television suburb in American national memory. She contests theories on nostalgia that see it as stagnating, regressive, or a reversion to outdated gender and racial politics, and the technophobic longing for a bygone era; and, instead, argues nostalgia is an important form of historical memory and vehicle for negotiating periods of historical transition. The book addresses how and why the shows construct the boomer era as a placeholder for gender, racial, technological, and declensionist discourses of the present. The book uses Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015), Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–2010), Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–2012), and film remakes of 1950s and 60s family sitcoms as primary case studies. Cover Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Touring the Mad Men Set Interventions in production studies Revising authorship Deconstructing the “text” Methodological interventions Interventions in memory studies Quality television and identity politics Chapter breakdown Notes PART ONE Sets 1 TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set Introduction: The nostalgia of recycled sets The sitcom studio lot as living archive My Universal Studio tour and narrativizing fantastic space Conclusion: Industry nostalgia and the sitcom home Notes 2 Office Sets and Nostalgic Modernism in the TV Workplace Introduction: Differences at work What the modernist office set says about fantasies of self and home The politics of taste in television production design’s reinventions of modernism “Bad taste” and gender identity in the corporate modernist set The industry background of reinventing the boomer years Conclusion: Retro modernism as shorthand Notes PART TWO Props 3 Prop Talk: A Behind-the-Scenes Look Introduction: The importance of props Press about props The popular legitimation of the prop industry and digital tensions When props become the whole story: Historical time travel Conclusion: Digital era prop talk Notes 4 Prop Stories: Media Props in Narrative Context Introduction: Props tell stories The Polaroid camera as narrative device The home movie as historical conduit The nostalgic anticipation of digitality in Mad Men Old media props in other period dramas Conclusion: The privileges of time travel Notes PART THREE Costumes 5 Making, Renting, and Telling National Histories through Costume Introduction: Clothes tell stories Costume design as gender historian Telling history by disrobing From the maker’s perspective Other examples of television fashion doing gender history Conclusion: When words fail, costumes do not Notes 6 Costume Countermemory: Marginalized Television Voices and Chicana Retro Introduction: Questioning nostalgia’s whiteness The postwar “New Look” and nostalgia television Ugly Betty’s aesthetic, narrative, and industrial diaspora Clashing vintage patterns and “bad” taste The Western Costume Company and costume bricolage Bad taste in nostalgic costume design Conclusion: How far we’ve come? Notes 7 Conclusion: Nostalgic Failure When nostalgia goes bad: The Playboy Club, Aquarius, and Pan Am Draper fatigue Nostalgia in 3D Notes Bibliography Index