2
The Programs and The Characters
"People on TV have to show me something"

I concentrate primarily on the characters that the girls identify within primetime network and syndicated cable drama series. The girls also identify characters in several network sitcom productions and a few television movies. They watch a few daytime soaps and a great deal of daytime talk shows. Because these programs are daily or weekly, they allow the girls as viewers to witness the characters on a repeated or continuous basis. They allow the girls to 'get to know' the characters. The characters of drama series, sitcoms and soaps all provide this repeated access to the characters, but there are additional elements of the drama series which make it most suitable to the occurrence of the virtual family.

Within the drama series there is more often an emphasis on self-contained situations or stories. Some of the situations play out by the end of the program and others continue over several episodes. Soaps are most readily characterized by interweaving little subplots that continue endlessly, providing an open narrative with which the girls can come and go without missing much.1 Sitcoms, while also revolving around a story that concludes by program's end, are highly interjected with punchlines and comedy. 2 The sitcoms leave the girls with more of an impression of the jokes and the humor expressed in the particular episode than a personal remembrance of the situation and the personalities of the characters. Issues and situations which are most similar to the girls' own are represented and resolved through the drama series. Along with repeated character exposure, it is this distinction of the drama series as genre that readily facilitates the virtual family.

Certain drama series such as Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, My So-Called Life and the newer Party of Five and Malibu Shores attract high numbers of female viewers. The characters represented on these shows are mostly young, affluent and conservative in attitude. They live in spacious, high-income surroundings. The interpersonal relationships represented on these programs include some 'traditional' family situations, but the majority of relations represent different types of family between friends, enemies, lovers, business associates. These programs are watched by the girls mostly to criticize and compare the lifestyles of the usually homogenous white casts to the girls own more diverse situations. The girls enjoy seeking out the differences in environment and dress code in these programs, but find similarities in the social dilemmas the characters face.

In the well-known soap opera manner, information on these programs is exchanged in various ways according to which characters are sharing it. Much of the intrigue with watching and following these programs is in noticing how each character acts, reacts and thinks. Stereotypical models are presented through the characters and attempts are made to transcend the usual social roles. There is much for the girls as audience to choose from in terms of attitude, personality and behavior of the characters. As viewers, the girls are able to involve themselves in the reading of the televisual text by interacting mentally with the characters. 3

The girls describe the characters of programs they watch:

Renalda: Beverly Hills - I have watched it for a long time and it is really bogus! Those people are rich! I mean they really have money. And they have that rich California life, too. Goin' to the beach and all that - the parties.
LJ: Yeah, that West Coast jive, and their clothes!
Sister G: Oh yeah, their clothes and just their look! They are so really false.
Elva: The guys, too. They are total white bread. Out-of-it! None of those boys is sexy, none of them.
Renalda: Not even that one with the motorcycle.
Keisha: Dylan (Beverly Hills). No, he is not much. And he had Brenda as his girlfriend, like he was tryin' to fit in with the highs somehow.
Sister G: In a way, Dylan was cool, 'cause he was not so hung up with fashion and that is kind of sexy.
Renalda: And Melrose Place. I watch it , but I don't so much understand it, you know, 'cause it's pretty false. But there are fights between the people -
LJ: They all live together in a little private complex - like how could that be happenin'?
Sister G: Yeah, like that ever happens -
Keisha: Maybe in California.
Renalda: So they have these fights and I like to watch that happen.
Elva: Party of Five. They live all in a house and they don't have no parents.
Sister G: They died in a airplane crash.
LJ: Yeah, that's sad. But now all those kids live together in a house by themselves and how do they have the money? Plus they are pretty conserve', they don't really party or nothin'.
Renalda: Julia had that weird boyfriend for awhile, though.
LJ: O-k, but Bailey's out, he's like a jock or somethin'.
Keisha: And his girlfriend is out, too!
Elva: Now she's in a band.
Keisha: Oh yeah, and there is My So-Called Life. I like it, but it goes too slow. They are always so emotional and whined out.
Sister G: It's kind of all about the gay guy.
Renalda: Yeah, but Angela is o-k. I can see where she is comin' from - except for her life with her parents at her house, but she is really separate from that, you know, like she wants to be somewhere else. I can understand that.
LJ: I think Angela is a little too young. The people on TV got to show me somethin' for me to watch them.
Sister G: I guess that show is kind of realistic. There's the alcoho' girl
Renalda: Rae ann.
Sister G: Yeah, and even the situation with the gay guy, Ricky - I guess that is kind of true. I know some people like that. They all (characters on My So- Called Life) are still a little naive or somethin' - they are not quite the same as the people in school that I know - but the things they do is kind of the same.

The girls have different practices and responses when watching certain ethnic sitcoms like Martin, Fresh Prince of Beverly Hills, Living Single and Moesha. The dialog on these programs includes more slang that the girls themselves use and the situations in which the characters find themselves are more like the ones the girls encounter.

LJ: At least on Martin, they talk the talk somethin' like it's right. They are still off a little, though, some words they use are old, you know, and the way they say it - it's not the way, but it's TV, so they get it late.
Sister G: It's the way they make them be for TV. It's like they can't be too true or somethin'.
Keisha: Martin's allright, but I don't like Gina. She is like my sister, tryin' to be all society-like and then havin' her own life different from all that.
LJ: Moesha is funny, but all I can think about is that she is Brandy. What's she doin' havin' that show?!
Sister G: Fresh Prince is happenin' sometimes'. The boy is funny, but I can't always take him 'cause he is so Hollywood white.
Renalda: I like watchin' Moesha now because it's not long like the other shows and it's funny. Plus, there are always guests and they are not the ones you see on the other shows. They have basketball players and rappers come on like they are her (Moesha's) friends.
Elva: I think she knows them for real 'cause they talk together like they know each other before.
LJ: Yeah, Moesha is allright. Her show is more of a sister show that the other ones.
Sister G: It's true that there is more accurate attitude in these shows than in the other ones with mostly white people. I think the directors have somethin' to do with it - like they know how the real stuff is and they make it more that way.
Renalda: You can't hear them talkin' like they do in the funny shows on the other ones like Beverly Hills - they just don't come from the same place.
Keisha: I like to see how they are talkin' on Living Single, Martin and those 'cause its not like that on the other shows I watch.

Talk shows such as Rikki Lake, Montel Williams, Gordon Elliot and Richard Bey provide material through the topics and guests that the girls take particular pleasure in berating. A high degree of identification and interaction with the guests occurs with these programs, but recollection of particular guests is not as distinct as with reoccurring characters on the serial programs.

Renalda: Rikki is the best 'cause people are always losin' it on her show. They really go off, it's the only show that they really go so much off like that.
Sister G: Montel, he is too soft, he always tries to get people to do good or somethin'.
LJ: They all do that!
Renalda: I like watchin' Rikki Lake 'cause the people she has on there - they are always showin' what's goin' on with people that I know - maybe in a more out-of-control way - but it's the same stuff that you can hear happenin' all over the neighborhood and with your family and people you know.
LJ: The talk shows make you get involved with them - like they get so opinionated! They make you take sides with some of the people and yell at the other ones.
Sister G: They bring on some people that you can't believe they think the ways they do! There are some crazy people doin' crazy things on those shows.
Elva: I watch the talk shows and I hear about a lot of stuff that I know people who are doin' the same thing and I also see stuff that I couldn't imagine and it makes you think that your life is better than that.

Although they know the topics of the talk shows well, the girls don't remember individual guests as characters:

LJ: I can remember certain people by what they were sayin', what their scene was all about. I remember a girl with two boyfriends and she didn't know which one of them was the father of her baby and they both wanted to marry her even that they also didn't know. But I don't know what her name is.
Sister G: Yeah, you can't remember their names, and there's lots of them that have that same ordeal. That's how you remember them - by what their problem is or what they are cryin' about and stuff like that.

Notes


1 A difference between open and closed narrative is examined as part of the consideration of the attributes of soap opera by Allen, 107. He states: "Closed narratives resolve all the major narrative questions raised in the plot by its end. The pleasure derived from reading or watching closed narratives is closely connected to that ultimate closure when secrets are revealed, riddles solved, obstacles overcome and desires fulfilled. An episode of American primetime serial usually contains at least one plot line that is closed off by the end of the episode, along with a few others that may be stretched over several episodes or an entire season." Open narratives, by contrast "do not tie up all their narrative loose ends. Questions, problems, mysteries might remain unsettled or their resolutions might provoke still further questions, problems and complications. American daytime serials.....assume they will never end and they very seldom produce narrative closure within a single episode. Every plot line continues across a number of episodes." BACK TO TEXT

2 Jane Feuer describes the sitcom "by nature a conservative and static form." Feuer, "Genre Study and Television," Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen, (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1992) : 148. Feuer says that: "The situation is the funny thing that will happen this week. Next week there will be a new situation entirely independent of what happened this week. The situation develops through complication and confusion usually involving human error. There is no plot development and no exploration of ideas or conflict.....As the audience we are reassured, not challenged by choice or ambiguity.....nor are we forced to reexamine our values."
BACK TO TEXT

3 The phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, "Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology," Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia U Press, 1986) : 94, asserts that "reading is the playful metamorphosis of the ego." Hermeneutic philosopher H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979) : 94, defines the relationship between reader and text as an "ease of play, a to-and- fro movement in which the (viewer) moves back and forth over the text in a holistic construction of its meaning." BACK TO TEXT

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