Branded Women in U.S. Television: When People Become Corporations (Critical Studies in Television)
Peter Bjelskou
Language: English
Pages: 142
ISBN: 0739187937
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Branded Women in U.S. Television examines how The Real Housewives of New York City, Martha Stewart, and other female entrepreneurs create branded televised versions of the iconic U.S. housewife. Using their television presence to establish and promote their own product lines, including jewelry, cookware, clothing, and skincare, they become the primary physical representations of these brands. While their businesses are serious and seriously lucrative, especially reality television enables a certain representational flexibility that allows participants to create campy and sometimes tongue-in-cheek personas. Peter Bjelskou explores their innovative branding strategies, specifically the complex relationships between their entrepreneurial endeavors and their physical bodies, attires, tastes, and personal histories. Generally these branded women speak volumes about their contemporaneous political environments, and this book illustrates how they, and many other women in U.S. television history, are indicative of larger societal trends and structures.
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helped bring them all together. The perceived realness of these characters made the illusion believable. This strategic use of real people as powerful normative agents was also prevalent on game shows such as The Big Pay-Off, It Could Be You, Strike It Rich, and Queen for a Day, where contestants could win prizes if they provided correct answers or explained why they deserved, or needed, to win. These shows are often referred to as “misery shows,” because they required contestants to convey
describes this as a desire “to build a long-term relationship with a brand by expanding [the] consumer’s emotional, social, and intellectual investments, with the goal of shaping consumption patterns.” 71 Along the same lines, journalist Naomi Klein explains that corporations are not satisfied with convincing customers to purchase their products; their primary objective From Midcentury Housewives to Martha Stewart 41 is to become integrated parts of the lives and consciousness of consumers.
personal taste. This tension even extends to Jill’s own difficulties creating a believable persona as a Manhattan socialite, as I will illustrate. However, despite such setbacks, Jill utilizes the artificiality of the reality genre to promote her real product, that is, her branded self, based on her ability to maneuver and diversify in the urban economy. Jill allows the audience to witness her perpetual construction of self, including her liquid facelift, social mobility, and socialite
Bird, Elmo, and the Cookie Monster from PBS’s Sesame Street are under attack by presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, I am resigned to accept that commercial television, like sex (according to the Marx Brothers), is here to stay. 7 Certainly, sometimes James Bond’s car seems more important than the movie’s storyline, and, for example, when Heineken Beer paid big sums to be included in the James Bond franchise, that switch received a lot of attention. 8 Product placement does blur the line between
the 112 Chapter 7 characters (like the inclusion of manly working-class beer affects the recent James Bond) but instead become the center of the narrative and the core of the personas. The latest incarnation of the Project Runway concept, NBC’s Fashion Star, also infuses product placement creatively. Here, three major clothing brands, H&M, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Macy’s, are at the center of the narrative flow, deciding how many of the contestants’ designs to purchase. This suggests a certain