Supplemental Post #3-Tiana Williams

(Disclaimer: Below is a ramble about topics that have been on my mind all week, in which this week’s readings helped bring out; also a possible direction I might go for my final paper)

    I found this week’s exploration of TV and genre quite fascinating as it brought together many thoughts I have been having all week about genre as a vehicle to represent and relay the Black experience. What brought these specific thoughts up (for context) was the recent Twitter critiques of the upcoming Amazon series Them produced by Lena Waithe and written by Little Marvin. The series’ trailer shows a Black family moving into an all-white neighborhood in the 1950s as they begin to experience “malevolent” and supernatural forces, along with intense racism. When I first watched the trailer, I personally thought that the show seemed interesting and I was excited to watch another series that might fit into the genre that Jordan Peele coined as a social thriller, but a lot of folks on Twitter felt otherwise. Twitter users called the show a “LoveCraft Country rip-off” and criticized Lena Waithe for “copying” Jordan Peele’s film Us. 

    These misunderstandings, or rather disagreements, about this type of content within the horror/thriller genre are always interesting to me—especially the assertion that any replications of similar storylines within this mode equates “rip-off.” Similar to McPherson’s discussion of 24 as a “re-masculinisation of serialised melodramas'' that have been historically feminized and associated with the soap opera, I feel that in the same token, it is also difficult for folks to characterize/categorize innovative shows such as LoveCraft Country (and even Them) due to the series’ reimagination of terror, horror and racism within the Black experience, and ultimately, a sort of experimentation with a genre that is dominated by whiteness (and quite often, very similar, recycled storylines). These works have clearly given Black creators a space to utilize conventions of the overarching horror genre to move us into abstract terrain relating to racism, an endeavor that for some reason, draws in much criticism as well as a defensive affect from certain audiences. As noted in Jason Mittell’s article, “one of the great lessons of poststructuralism is to question the categories that seem to be natural and assumed,” (1) and Jordan Peele was able to do just that by experimenting and sort of breaking the mold with works Get Out, Us, (and in some ways the Twilight Zone?). It’s just interesting to see how Jordan Peele is credited as the innovator of this social thriller category, yet works that follow in this novel genre walk a fine line of receiving heavy criticism for thievery of content and actually being praised.  

    Jason Mittell’s article that problematizes categorizing genre through “aesthetic paradigms and definitional approaches” versus “examining how texts function within larger cultural contexts,” sparked more thoughts for me relating to this sticky place of genre exploration. The reception and categorization of a show like LoveCraft Country, two very different points of examination as Mittell points out, is a topic that I think I may want to explore for my final paper. Mostly because I am constantly trying to figure out why my Mom (one of THE biggest horror/thriller/Sci-fi movie goers I think I’ve ever met) doesn’t enjoy LoveCraft Country in the least, and also doesn’t identify it as Sci-fi or horror, but instead as simply “weird,” and a show with “too much going on.” But anyway, with that said, I very much appreciated Mittell’s breakdown of each mode of genre analysis as well as their limitations, and in thinking about how I might aim to tackle the subject I laid out earlier relating to genre and LoveCraft Country, Mittell’s analysis proved to not only be crucial for my own understanding of genre in TV studies and the tensions that often arise within television genre exploration, but it also brought to mind many cultural texts that I tend to bring into this reading of LoveCraft Country and how it is received. Mittell’s assertion that we should “look at the meanings people make in interactions with media genres to understand the genre’s meanings” (5) partly illuminates why there is much confusion for folks in categorizing LoveCraft Country, and I’m excited to learn more about this and to investigate why claims of thievery arise with certain works, but not with others as well as the hesitant nature of folks to categorize LoveCraft. Anyway, I feel myself continuing to ramble on, so I will end here in just emphasizing that I felt this week’s round of readings were all quite illuminating and insightful and that the Mittell reading’s focus on the “cultural operation of genres” was extremely fascinating and an interesting lens in which I may seek to situate LoveCraft Country and my discussion of genre for my (potential) final paper topic.