Back to Work/Back to Blog
I’ve been working on the introduction to the book so I can put together a pitch for the publisher before the end of summer, and it’s going well, if a bit slower than I would like. I got into the habit of thinking through some of the issues in my true crime chapter and that is part of the hang up because I have to get back into this headspace. But I’m reinvigorated about the project on the whole, and part of that has to do with what I’ve been up to the past few weeks professionally.
Two weeks ago, I was invited to do an online event with the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAARS) about my recent article “‘Fully authenticated by respected scientists’: fact, fiction, and the roots of paranormal reality shows in American television history,” which was in New Review of Film and Television Studies last fall. Because my work frequently touches on the paranormal, scientific inquiry, and religious belief systems, I agreed even though I felt a bit outside my wheelhouse. Still, I had a fun conversation about the concept of authenticity in media studies and in television history, especially as it pertains to reality television, and I got to hang out with a few friends who showed up and made some new friends and colleagues along the way, which is sort of the whole point of scholarship and our endeavors as scholars.
And this past week I presented a paper on the TV series Chucky, that I hope can turn into an essay in a special issue of a journal that my co-presenters, Amanda Ann Klein and Suzanne Scott, and I could potentially co-edit. Parts of that paper, which was about the industrial contexts of its release, will show up in the book as well, so it was productive to think through some of it to generate a little bit about what the book even actually is, which will now show up in the introduction as well as the third case study of teen-oriented horror/thrillers.
I also feel especially indebted to my friend and colleague Nora Patterson - whose excellent book, Bootlegging the Airwaves, just won prizes from the Broadcast Education Association and the International Association for Media and History - and a conversation that has really gotten my brain rollicking the past few days. We were out having a late dinner during the conference eating dumplings and a vegetable curry from different stalls in Atlanta’s Krog Street Market. I brought up how stale some of the writing around television history is, with many of the same conventional interpretations repeated over and over ad nauseum by a particular subset of very prolific authors (whose work is generally very good and very helpful, but it they can get a bit repetitive) in the field. She threw this nugget out at me: “I’ve been wanting to write about the networks in the Twenty-first century,” she said. “I think understanding anything digital as a ‘disruption’ is historically inaccurate.”
I have held that nugget in my head for the past few days and it has really clarified a key throughline of the argument I want to make, which is that we often write history as if it’s filled with disruptive moments, but what they really are are moments of adjustment. And my work is to explain how popular formulas — with examples of paranormal reality, true crime, and teen horror/thrillers — work as part of these moments of adjustment over the past twenty-five years. So, I guess I’ll see how the book starts going from this point on.
