Henry Jenkins's Blog

Hiring a "Virtual Boyfriend": Chinese Cosplayer Construct Authenticity and Romantic Fantasies in Cosplay Commission

At an event centered on Chinese otome games (dating games aimed at a female audience), I cosplayed as a male game character and was asked several times if I would accept cosplay commissions — getting paid to cosplay as someone’s favourite character and going on a date with them. Although I turned them down at the time, the practice of combining cosplay and otome games caught my attention. I asked one cosplayer friend for their advice; they told me “You should try cosplay commissions to understand it.” Thus, I began undertaking cosplay commissions, which meant I cosplayed as the client’s chosen character and walked around with them, on the street, on a date. To be honest, I must confess that even as an experienced cosplayer, I found it challenging to act nonchalant in public while wearing a full costume and a light-colored wig. This difficulty was compounded by the specific nature of this commission: I was tasked with roleplaying as a romantic partner and caring for my "girlfriend." Though the date was challenging, I was obsessed with the sense of accomplishment I felt when I took care of someone and acted as their beloved character.

Cosplayers Commissioned by the Otome Game "Love and Deep Space" at Bilibili World 2025

Cosplay commission is an emerging practice within Chinese fandom, where clients hire cosplayers to perform as characters in animation, manga, and games, simulating romantic or friendly relationships and dating them in real life. It usually happens in shopping malls, on the streets, in art galleries or in restaurants. Not only fans but game companies themselves hire cosplayers to interact with the audience at comic cons, what is called an “official commission” in the otome game fandom. These performances usually earn the longest lines in the venue.

This study examines the practice of cosplay commission. Despite variations in character portrayals and dating scenarios, commonalities exist in cosplayers’ motivations and authenticity strategies. Employing participant observation since June 2023 and semi-structured interviews with 16 female cosplayers, each with substantial commission experience, the research adopts a thematic analysis framework. In this post, I will explain authenticity in this context and the motivations for participation in cosplay commissions, in order to further provide a context for discussion on cosplay culture.

The posters of five most popular mobile otome games in China (Top Left: Love and Deep Space, Lower Left: Light and Night; Top Right: Tear of Themis; Middle Right: Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice; Lower Right: Far beyond the World)

Otome Games and Cosplay Commissions in China

In recent years, the growing female market has led to the emergence of female-oriented services, including otome games. A representative example is Mr Love: Queen's Choice, which centers on a female producer developing a television show while forming emotional bonds with male characters—each possessing unique supernatural traits and professional backgrounds such as CEOs, scientists, detectives, and idols—through interactive storytelling and decision-making. Chinese otome mobile games have gained significant market share since the success of Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice in mainland China in 2017. Game companies now see the female market’s potential, bringing more love stories rather than just the endless adventure tales that fulfill male players’ tastes. The genre gathered a distinct fandom in China, centering on the five most popular mobile otome games in the market: Love and Deep Space, Light and Night, Tears of Themis, Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice, and For All Time.

In otome games, the parasocial relationship between characters and players is noteworthy, pointing to a one-sided emotional bond where players feel intimately connected to the characters, who, as fictional beings, are unaware of the players' existence. Many mobile otome games enhance this dynamic through simulated communication systems that allow players to “chat” with characters. These features, combined with immersive romantic narratives, foster a sense of intimacy and create idealized virtual relationships that cater to the players’ emotional desires. These parasocial relationships not only exist but also extend into physical reality, giving rise to the cosplay commission. The practice is deeply rooted in cosplay culture, where fans embody fictional characters through alterations in physical appearance, costumes, and behavior (Bainbridge & Norris, 2013). Cosplay commissions represent two notable changes to that culture: the expansion of cosplay spaces beyond unique cultural venues like comic conventions and specialized stores (Lamerichs, 2010), indicating increased social acceptance; and the breakdown of participation boundaries between non-cosplayers and cosplayers (Reysen & Plante, 2020), allowing non-cosplayers to create their own narratives through interactions with cosplayers.

The virtual photos in the game V.S. The real interaction in the life

Cosplay commission clients are fans of specific games, anime and other cultural productions. Among them are "dream girls" (yume-joshi夢女子), people who envision romantic relationships with the characters and project themselves into the otome games (Giard, 2024). Others see characters as virtual friends who provide emotional support.

In cosplay commissions, authenticity serves as a crucial link between the virtual and the real; it distinguishes commissioned services from standardized game plots and attracts clients seeking a distinctive experience. Here, authenticity is not merely about visual or behavioral imitation, but encompasses a deeper, emotional and relational realism that allows clients to feel a genuine connection with the character. This performed authenticity involves a dual negotiation: “role-authenticity,” where the cosplayer embodies the fictional persona through meticulous attention to narrative and aesthetic details (Rahman, 2012), and “self-authenticity,” where the cosplayer injects their own emotional responsiveness and personal touch to create a believable and individualized interaction (Roberts, 2005). Such authenticity is co-constructed through ritualized practices—such as gift-giving, personalized communication, and physical boundary negotiations—which together transform the commercial transaction into an intimate, emotionally resonant experience. Consequently, authenticity in this context functions as both a commodity and a mechanism for emotional fulfillment, bridging fantasy and reality in ways that predefined game narratives cannot replicate.

Constructing Authenticity: Intimacy, Boundaries, and Emotional Conflict in the Practice

Bringing characters into reality, cosplay commissions transcend the boundaries of the virtual world and highlight the value of authenticity within intimate relationships. Although such relationships are parasocial in nature and the characters themselves are fictional, participants often develop genuine emotional attachment and romantic imagination toward the characters. Perceiving these feelings as real, many engage in cosplay commissions precisely to seek tangible, real-world feedback, which is a central motivation behind the practice. In cosplay commission, cosplayers need to disclose their own private lives to be close to their clients, sometimes using physical touch, but that does not mean they will do anything a client asks. Cosplayers develop strategies to avoid intimate behavior beyond their duties. When taking a commission, I will repeat what degree of physical contact I can accept and will ask my client what kind of physical touch she expects. Most physical interactions are limited to hugging, which is a boundary set through mutual agreement. During the commission, cosplayers will also devise a strategy for unexpected incidents, such as using humor to sidestep sensitive subjects. Many respondents stressed the importance of negotiation and agreeing to limits on physical contact:

“I will prepare a small questionnaire and ask for the specific information about their needs, such as whether they want me to set the couple's avatar on social media, and other behaviors that show intimacy. How far this intimacy goes depends on both of us, and this is necessary during the commissioning process”.

 

The questionnaire provided by Cosplayers to guests

 

The Cosplay Commission Picture in the Supermarket

Characters in otome games have distinct personalities—they show their love and hate for specific things. Cosplayers try to follow this script, but sometimes such characterization causes trouble since the character can be too masculine to fulfil what a woman needs romantically. Hence, only bringing the character into real life is far from enough; cosplayers need to combine personal emotion and experience into their interpretations of the characters, which helps cosplayers to judge the situation and perform in a proper way to satisfy their clients. Some respondents have their own stories to show how they balance emotion and perform when meeting a special situation:

“One client cried at the end of the day, and I comforted her as gently as I could for a long time. She said I was much gentler than the character. It is because I didn't want to follow the character's personality and tried to adjust my behavior relying on my own experience. If I followed the personality of the character strictly, I would ask her to die, but I said, ‘Don't get upset over this little thing, we will meet again in the future’.”

“When I cosplay as some ruthless characters, I don’t know how to deal with the character’s and my own personality ... As a commissioned cosplayer, I should take care of my partner’s emotions and may be out of character. It is sometimes very hard for me to imitate and balance character’s arrogance and humility. So I try to talk less and keep my emotions very stable, I won’t talk about anything involving values during the date because it sometimes may be offensive.”

When a cosplayer suppresses part of their personality to meet the emotional expectations of others, scholars like Hochschild (1983) may call it emotive dissonance. However, many cosplayers insist that, although they should adhere to certain character scripts, they are not passive; they are able to express their own emotions and adjust feelings during the commission. For example, many respondents mentioned their cosplay experience of Jesse in the game Light and Night, saying such an optimistic character mobilizes their positive side, allowing them to ignore some negative thoughts.

There is no doubt that the expression of personal emotions immerses commissioners in the commission, strengthening the authenticity of the performance. At Bilibili World (a comic con hosted by the video website Bilibili), the official cosplayer of Love and Deep Space sat on the ground to rest due to fatigue. The behavior sparked discussions among fans; many people believed that the action of a cosplayer taking a break brings the characters into reality. In their words: “No one is perfect. After encountering so many things, both the characters and the cosplayers have the right to show their vulnerability in front of us.” This incident illustrates how displays of personal emotion—such as fatigue or vulnerability—do not break the illusion but instead deepen the sense of authenticity. By revealing the person behind the costume, the cosplayer makes the character more relatable and human, thereby strengthening the emotional connection with the audience. This case underscores the vital role of cosplayers in mediating between the virtual and the real: their ability to convey truthfulness through humanizing details helps construct a believable and emotionally resonant experience, affirming that authenticity in cosplay is often forged through imperfect, relatable moments.

  

Official commissioned cosplayer of Love and Deep Space in Bilibili World

  Fulfilling Fantasies by Caring for Others: Emotional Compensation in Cosplay Commissions

Although they have the freedom to set a rate for their services, some cosplayers are willing to take commissions without fees, while others strive to strike a balance between expenses and income. In order to minimize costs, some cosplayers will provide an illustrated catalog of available character costumes for the client’s selection; since many costumes will be put aside after wearing them to cons or photo shoots a few times, this is a perfect way for cosplayers to reuse them. When cosplayers do not have the necessary wigs or costumes, it is expected that clients will cover those costs. Some interviewees admitted that they sometimes spend more than they get paid for cosplay commissions, which is also seen frequently in experiences shared on social media. For example, some will ask makeup artists for help to improve their appearance, and some others will choose to “go Dutch” with clients when getting involved in paid activities. This willingness to spend beyond what is earned signals a deeper motivation behind the practice. In some respondents’ views, cosplay commission is a practice that can fulfill a player’s dreams:

“Comfort from a virtual lover”

"I was an otome game player before I started to take commissions, but my interest differed from those who harbored romantic fantasies about the characters. I found myself drawn to the characters' thoughts within the narrative ... I did not take on cosplay commissions at the beginning, but as I got to know more otome game fans, I realized how important the characters were to them, and it is not too much of a stretch to say that some characters were their hope of survival. So I have been thinking about taking on cosplay commissions to bring happiness into their lives and also to fulfill my dreams. After all, I hope that there is such a person by my side."

The interaction between the cosplayer and the client reveals a new participatory practice in fandom. Clients fulfill their dreams through interaction with cosplayers, and cosplayers obtain emotional satisfaction from taking care of others. As otome gamers, they are aware of the importance of the characters in the game to other players, taking it as their mission to fulfill the emotional needs of others and, at the same time, gain psychological satisfaction by taking care of others:

"Cosplay commission is a form of emotional fulfillment for me, and I would feel good to see others happy because of me .... Once the clients say they are happy, my purpose is accomplished, and it is my duty to make others feel happy and satisfied under my care."

Cosplay commission by the seaside

In Reading the Romance, Radway (1984) uses emotional compensation to explain why women love to read romantic literature; she compares it to compensatory fiction that provides emotional support when they can’t get enough psychological support from family and society. In cosplay commissions, many cosplayers try to satisfy others by coordinating emotions and behaviors. They take the practice to fulfil deficiencies in companionship in real life, drawing motivation from the clients' responses during their dates. This sense of emotional fulfillment and relational value often transcends monetary incentives, thus leading some cosplayers to willingly engage in unpaid work and invest effort that surpasses the compensation for the commission.

Although the cosplay commission, as an emerging subculture practice, is still in the process of exploration and standardization, many cosplayers and gamers have realized their romantic imaginations through this practice and found another dimension to their love of otome games and cosplay. As a subcultural practice that challenges gender norms and commercially connects the virtual and the real, cosplay commissions have huge research potential. As a cosplayer, I look forward to more research and deeper development.

References

Bainbridge, JG. & Norris, C. 2013. “Posthuman Drag: Understanding Cosplay as Social Networking in a Material Culture.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 32. https://hdl.handle.net/102.100.100/579057

Giard, A. 2024. “Love for a handsome man requires a lot of friends: Sociability practices related to romance games (Otome Games) in Japan.” Diogenes 65(1): 1-17.

Hochschild, AR. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press. https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1592...

Lamerichs, N. 2010. "Stranger Than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay." Transformative Works and Cultures 7(1). February 1, 2016. https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/246

Radway, J. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. University of North Carolina Press.

Rahman, O., Wing-Sun, L, & Hei-man Cheung, B. 2012. "'Cosplay'—Imaginative Self and Performing Identity." Fashion Theory 16 (13): 317–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175174112X13340749707204. 

Reysen, S., & Plante, C. N. 2020. “Cosplayers’ and Non-Cosplayers’ Involvement in Fandom-Based Drama.” The Phoenix Papers 4(2): 29–36. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JZE2P

Roberts, LM. 2005. “Changing faces: Professional image construction in diverse organizational settings.” Academy of Management Review, 30(4): 685-711. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2005.1837...

Song W. & Fox, J. 2016. “Playing for Love in a Romantic Video Game: Avatar Identification, Parasocial Relationships, and Chinese Women's Romantic Beliefs.” Mass Communication and Society 19 (2): 197-215, DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2015.1077972

Biography

Lenore Wang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where her research focuses on the intersections of fandom, gender, and cultural dynamics. In her work, she analyzes how cosplay influences cultural economies, bridges the gap between virtual and physical realities, and serves as a medium for cultural expression. Her academic scope also includes video games, pop music, comic conventions, and science fiction.

Captain Nemo: A Swap Story, or Why We Can’t Barter Our Way to a Better World

Finding Nemo

Figure 1 – The League of Extraordinary Gentleman

I first met Captain Nemo as a child in Jules Verne’s novels and, like many, was instantly hooked by this enigmatic science-pirate – Prince Dakkar, insurgent commander of a leviathanic submarine. And when he died from exhaustion in The Mysterious Island (1874), entombed aboard his beloved Nautilus, it felt like a fitting end: an outlaw, a legend, a story, laid to rest, living on in my dreams. Or so I thought.

Picking up an issue of Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 1999, I discovered that Nemo’s story extended far beyond his lonely death in the confines of his famed submarine. Resurrected alongside other literary figures like Mina Murray, Allan Quartermain, and the infamous Mr. Hyde, Nemo became part of a Gothicised superhero team: a rattle-bag of oddballs, with a thick vein of monstrosity. In league to save humanity, but also, perhaps, with the devil? And so, in some ways, was I. Reading Moore’s work often leaves me caught between pleasure and unease, but that’s another story.

In this new saga, Nemo picks up right where he left off, at the helm of the Nautilus, revered captain of his brigand crew. Despite its problematic characterisations and storylines, I was hooked again – drawn in by the enduring allure of Nemo. And so it went until the third volume of the series, where, to my dismay, I saw Nemo die once more: a frail, ageing man fading away in his cabin. A death so unlike the traditional valiant deaths afforded heroes, if they die at all. My chagrin wasn’t, however, merely tied to the manner of his death, but to its necessity, because, in this story at least, Nemo didn’t have to die.

The League saga spans epochs, populated by more than a few immortal or long-lived characters, including the aforementioned Ms. Murray, Orlando, or Dorian Grey among them. So why not Nemo? Could he have taken a dip in the Pool of Fire, granting him long life and allowing him to fight through time like the story’s other undying characters?

Certainly.

But he didn’t.

And he didn’t take that fateful plunge, because Moore and O’Neill had other plans for him, encoded into his very name: Nemo, which means no one or nobody – a clever nod to Odysseus’ life-saving deception when he tricked the drunken Cyclops Polyphemus. Yet in being nobody, in being no one, Nemo unlocks another power: the ability, as we’ll discover, to be anybody and everyone.

The name “Nemo” then begins to serve, as is often the case within superhero and adventure genres, as a codename: an identity and a legacy passed from one person to the next, as with Ra’s al-Ghul from the Batman mythos or the masked avenger, Zorro. The “legacy character” trope is popular within pirate mythology too, notably with the Dread Pirate Roberts of The Princess Bride (1987). “Nemo” is thus an orientation towards the world – anonymous and bodiless – a catch-all term for a constellation of ideas and values, or a particular way of being.

Yet names, like words, carry layers of meaning. In Latin, Nemo translates as “not a man”; in Oromo, “the man.” Interpretations that open up a field of possibility in the not-so-small matter of Captain Nemo’s rebirth as a woman, of which more later. Suffice to say, that “Nemo” has plenty of wiggle room for exploring and subverting notions of identity. And it’s the quality and handling of this identity play that interests me, and its effect.

Stories Matter. So Does How We Tell Them.

Story is the beating heart of social action, helping us to envision a just and equitable world. Yet it’s not enough to simply observe how mainstream stories shape or constrain our imagination of what is possible; we need to dig deeper into how they work. Method doesn’t always marry up with message. As Kristen Warner’s idea of “plastic representation” points out, mainstream media often privileges surface over meaningful substance.

Speculative stories, for example, may appear promising, brimming with possibilities. But before calling “Progress!”, we must be sure they aren’t sheep in wolf suits. That’s to say: we need to test the charm of diverse media representation. We need to ask: How are storytellers – still mostly straight white men – depicting women and underrepresented groups, and with what consequences?

Genderswap storytelling is one such way. And, unlike a lot of modern descriptors, its meaning is fairly clear: swapping a character’s sex – usually from male-bodied to female-bodied – and their gender identity. Yet, as Ann McClellan notes, it’s more nuanced than that. Of course, swapping goes beyond sex and gender identity, frequently involving race and sexuality, and it can be multidimensional.

Used by fans, artists, activists, and media producers alike, swap storytelling has become a popular tool for diversifying narratives and challenging norms. In fan spaces, genderswap queers canon, makes space for trans and nonbinary identities, and imagines storyworlds through more inclusive lenses. In mainstream media, it’s often – controversially – used to revamp franchises or signal progressive values. Think of gender-flipped reboots like Ghostbusters or Doctor Who. Activists and educators also harness genderswap storytelling in workshops and performances to confront stereotypes and provoke dialogue around systemic bias. For example, the UK-based collective G(end)er Swap uses fashion-based storytelling to help trans and gender-nonconforming individuals explore identity through genderbending aesthetics, challenging binary norms in public and educational spaces.

But it’s not a uniformly liberatory practice. Some iterations feel more authentic and effective than others, depending on who’s telling the story, how it’s framed, and what power dynamics are at play. As we’ll see, for every thoughtful reimagining, there’s one that reinscribes the very norms it claims to subvert. Swap storytelling is an ambivalent practice, capable of expanding representation but also of flattening complexity or sparking controversy. Beyond representation, genderswap storytelling invites deeper inquiry into  power, identity, and visibility, challenging who is centred in our narratives and why.  

What do genderswap stories reveal about women’s empowerment – about how we envision women stepping into central roles in stories and in society? About how it even happens: How do women come to occupy powerful positions, get inside power? What kind of “new” world do swap stories gesture toward? What’s different, the same? In other words, how are they radical? Invoking Angela Davis, how do they grasp things at the root?

Beyond the worn-out debates on “forced diversity,” it’s worth asking: What does swap storytelling actually contribute? What myths does it reinforce or create? What are these “bold reimaginings” truly achieving, or neglecting? While economic factors like branding, franchise continuity, and familiarity clearly play a role, the question remains: why do creative industries gravitate toward genderswapping existing characters, rather than, say, crafting original female-led narratives, written by women and diverse creative teams?

Yet, this critique shouldn’t dismiss the potential of swap storytelling altogether. When done well, it unlocks rich narrative possibilities, offering profound insights into representation and the fluidity of identity. And we’ve seen this potential realised, sometimes evocatively, in recent retellings and reinterpretations that use genderswapping not as a gimmick, but as a tool for rupture and reawakening.

Switched at Myth: Retellings that Rupture

Recent retellings like Gender Swapped Fairy Tales and Gender Swapped Greek Myths offer bold reversals of traditional narratives, revealing just how deeply gendered our cultural storytelling has always been. Television has taken up the mantle too: in Van Helsing (2016–2021), the iconic vampire hunter becomes Vanessa Van Helsing, a female descendant who battles the undead in a post-apocalyptic world, where horror intertwines with maternal strength and survival. Meanwhile, Dracula (2020) introduces Sister Agatha Van Helsing, a witty, atheist nun whose philosophical duels with the Count recast the mythos through irreverence, intellect, and feminist edge. Both versions rework the Van Helsing archetype to explore gender, power, and heroism in radically different ways.

Figure 2: Maxine Peake as Hamlet

Elsewhere, reimagined stagings of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and The Tempest – with Sigourney Weaver as Prospero – disrupt familiar scripts of power and ambition, while fan versions of Hamilton centre women and nonbinary performers to recast the revolutionary myth. In comics, Jane Foster’s transformation into Thor redefines heroism through vulnerability and resilience, while Renee Montoya’s tenure as The Question brings queer identity and moral complexity to the heart of Gotham’s vigilante mythos.

Alongside these more visible reimaginings, grassroots practices like genderbending and genderfuck offer a rawer, often more subversive mode of storytelling – one that resists tidy binaries and embraces ambiguity. Genderbending typically reimagines a character as another gender, often flipping male to female or vice versa, and is frequently used in fanfiction and cosplay to explore alternative dynamics or expand representation. Think of fanart that redraws Harry Potter as a girl, or cosplay that recasts traditional male characters like Link from The Legend of Zelda, Geralt from The Witcher, or even Batman, softening hard-edged masculinity and crafting new visions of strength, identity, and agency.

Genderfuck, by contrast, scrambles gender altogether: mixing signals, parodying norms, and exposing the constructedness of identity itself. It surfaces in drag, transfic that plays with mutable bodies and pronouns, and zines like Mail Order Bride that deliberately blur gender presentation. As Fanlore notes, genderfuck stories resist the tidy “man = male = masculine / woman = female = feminine” equation, embracing contradiction and fluidity instead. Whether through transformative fanart, bodyswap fic, or queer-coded reinterpretations, these practices don’t just rewrite canon, they rupture it, making room for identities and desires that mainstream narratives often overlook.

Taken together, these examples show how swap storytelling can be both playful and political, reshaping who gets to lead, love, and survive. When thoughtfully executed, identity swaps move beyond surface-level diversity and resonate with meaningful, context-driven storytelling. The challenge lies in striking a balance: embracing reimaginings while also championing fresh, authentic stories that reflect a wider array of voices and experiences.

So, the concern isn’t that identity swapping is an option; rather, it’s that it is becoming the go-to way to quickly and conveniently diversify stories, overshadowing opportunities to create original, diverse narratives, and often sidestepping deeper considerations. And, as I get into later, maybe the clue is in the name.

Figure 3: Janni as Nemo

Un/Becoming Nemo [Content warning: This section contains material about rape and sexual violence.]

We meet Princess Janni Dakkar, Captain Nemo’s wilful adolescent daughter, in the opening chapter of the third volume. After a moonlit dip off Lincoln Island, she is summoned to her father’s sickbed, where a bitter argument unfolds – one that has played out many times before. It is a dispute over legacy, over a father’s dying wish to continue, to persist, in this world. Simply put: Nemo needs an heir. Not just any heir – several of his crew could succeed him – he wants a consanguine heir; specifically, a male blood relation successor. But he has only one child, and she wants no part of his world.

Seeking to escape both her father’s control and the weight of his dynastic demand, Janni flees to London and adopts the alias Jenny Diver. Taking refuge in a shabby dockside hotel, she tries to go unnoticed, not just to the brutish men in the bar but to her father as well. Her anonymity, however, is shattered when one of Nemo’s crew arrives bearing news of his death. Soon after, a gang of men attack her in the hotel yard, leaving her brutalised and broken. Fuelled by pain, loss, and a thirst for vengeance, Janni summons the Nautilus – its hull now painted black, her father’s skull nailed grimly to the forecastle – and calls its crew to her. She will become Captain Nemo.

Descending upon the waterfront, the riotous pirates unleash destruction, annihilating everything and everyone in their path. Amid the chaos, veteran pirate Broad Arrow Jack seizes a rare moment of calm to present Janni with her father’s greatcoat and sword. As the swashbuckling rescue reaches its orgiastic climax, Jack presents her with one more thing: her hangdog rapists, asking whether they should die slow or quick. Without hesitation, Janni replies, “Kill them slow.”

Her first command as Captain Nemo seals their fate – and her own. Seeking refuge in London, she had hoped to lose herself, to start over as a nobody. Yet this small death, this petite mort, twistedly grants her wish, erasing Janni and leaving only Nemo in her place. She disappears forever into the folds of her father’s great green mantle coat and into his name, bound by their reluctant blood covenant. Like Oedipus, Janni is condemned to a destiny she did not choose, her actions and identity shaped by forces beyond her control. She will live cursing a fate that compels her to embody the very role she had sought to escape: the fearsome pirate queen, Captain Nemo.

Before departing for Lincoln Island, Janni crosses paths with Mina Murray who is unaware of the piratical power shift. When Mina inquires her name, Janni delivers a sardonic, hollow reply, “Me? I’m no one.” And with that, the Nautilus dives to depth, carrying its ribald crew back to self-imposed seclusion. In retreating, it exits both the scene and the story, effectively segregating this chapter – and the new Captain Nemo – from the broader League narrative.

Figure 4: Spin-off trilogy front cover designs

The Jeopardy of Genderswap Storytelling

The late Captain’s conflicted, reactionary stance reflects real-world resistance to women and gender diverse people assuming positions of public power. As Janni rightly notes, her father needs – but does not want – to see a woman inherit his place in the world. Yet, this is the cost of immortality and relevance, ensuring his story continues. It’s difficult not to draw a parallel between this tension and the creative industries’ own conflicted approach to diversity and inclusivity in an increasingly polarised world, a world caught in the struggle between progress and tradition. As the supremacy of straight white men is contested, swap storytelling becomes not merely a means of reshaping stories but a lens through which existing power structures can be challenged, or perhaps left largely intact.  

Captain Nemo is undeniably now a woman, yet what truly changes?

Autocracy – or more specifically, piratocracy – remains the name of the game. Hierarchies persist: captain, mate, crew. Under Janni’s rule, Lincoln Island remains a patriarchal society – men “play,” while women are playthings. Old-guard values of vengeance violence, and competitiveness persist. Men continue as sole agents of change, still shaping the trajectories of women’s lives, still saving them from other men. The Nautilus’ crew too accepts Janni as their leader without hesitation. This ready acceptance, while affirming on the surface, ultimately underscores the persistence of the status quo rather than signalling any meaningful shift or challenge to established norms. After all, if any group were to rebel against unwelcome changes, wouldn’t it be pirates, the very embodiment of defiance and unruly independence?

And that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it?

Things have changed, but the deeper implications – the true transformation – remain elusive. For, if the essence of Nemo remains unchanged, then what does this identity swap actually do? Does it challenge entrenched power structures, reframe the character’s motivations, or explore how gender itself shapes the experience of leadership and rebellion? Or does it merely dress the story in a different form, leaving the core untouched?

Figure 5: Mobilis in Mobili

Alas, no. Janni does not redefine what it means to be Nemo. Instead, walking in his footsteps and dwelling in his shadow, she inherits her father’s legacy – occupying the space he once held in the world and in the imagological realm. Yet she seems to fall short of embodying his maxim, Mobilis in Mobili: “moving within motion” or “changing through change.”

Inscribed on a mirror in the captain’s quarters, this motto encapsulates the interplay of change and continuity, offering fertile ground for reimagining characters like Captain Nemo in different forms, such as a different gender. It invites a moment of reflection: when Janni gazes into the mirror, does she see herself, her father, or an intermingling of both? And how, in turn, do we perceive her? Is she a commanding pirate queen, steering her own course, or simply a reassuring echo of stability amid change?

The tension between the potential for radical reinvention and the preservation of legacy lies at the core of this character’s resurrection. When change is only superficial, the promise of transformation dissolves into continuity. And that perhaps is the contradiction at the heart of “Mobilis in Mobili” – movement that appears fluid, yet remains bound within its own constraints. Though Janni possesses qualities both inherited and uniquely her own, her story does not fully realise the potential of swap storytelling, which could explore identity through transformation while still preserving the essence of the original character. But here, as in most mainstream cases, it does not.

Figure 6: Janni Dakkar, Captain Nemo II overshadowed by her father

Illusions of Change and Failed Imaginaries

Moore and O’Neill may have had radical intentions when they set about genderswapping Captain Nemo, but their plan had a fatal flaw: it relied on reimagining, on building upon what came before: an approach that seldom sparks the radical imagination, whether for characters or the world. This flaw that becomes further compounded when we consider the essence of a swap: an exchange of like for like, where what is given or received carries similar or equal value, meaning, or significance. Again, the sense of continuity rather than disruption, succession rather than innovation – of radical change interrupted.

Considering the nature of swapping, it’s hardly surprising how little truly changes. And – without veering too far into cynicism – it’s easy to see why the creative industries so readily embrace these methods. After all, the “swap system” not only affirms binary frameworks but also accommodates the surface-level change that institutional power finds acceptable.

The architects of Nemo’s reimagining offer an illusion, a ripple on the surface, a promise of something different. Yet Moore’s and O’Neill’s decision to genderswap Captain Nemo surely speaks to a desire to imagine the world anew. Unpicking this tension reveals the trajectory of a conflicted creative impulse, moving from the imaginary realm to the page: a radical urge – the wish to craft a powerful female character – is stifled through its enactment – genderswap – only to flicker briefly in characterisation – Janni’s reluctance to become another Nemo – but, in the end, is derailed by the constraints of the storytelling mode and a vaulted imaginary – Janni takes her father’s place, and the status quo persists.A creative struggle that mirrors real-world tensions in the pursuit of radical alternatives, whether in storytelling or social action. At its core lies the ever-present dilemma: evolution or revolution?

Janni’s story, much like the portrayal of her ascent to power, is deeply conflicted, a journey ignited by violence and shaped not by her own will but by men’s desires and actions. What intrigues me most about her rise, however, is the reluctance that defines it, a hesitation that does not stem from rejecting power or fearing self-determination. After all, she actively forges a new life in London. Rather, her reluctance to become another Nemo reveals a deeper struggle: a resistance against the burdens of legacy, succession, and replication, which threaten to erase her individuality. Put otherwise, Janni yearns for a revolution of the self and fears the prospect of a simple swap, an evolution that threatens to snuff her out. Her fear, deeply rooted, proves justified; the inheritance of her father’s “burdensome legacy” and the seizure of power demand a terrible price – her very self.

Moore and O’Neill give us a truly bleak representation of a gendered power shift that utterly erodes the symbolic force of Janni’s transformation from disempowered girl to formidable pirate queen. A portrayal that does little to challenge existing stories of power and women’s emancipation, in which familiar, binary perceptions emerge: nothing truly changes when women hold powerful positions; empowering women is only doable within the constraints of the status quo. Women’s liberation remains tolerable precisely because it sidesteps, or postpones, profound societal transformation. For women, the cost of emancipation is the loss of self. As Mary Beard observes, “we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.”

Janni’s admission that her father’s coat weighs heavily upon her shoulders – that his legacy is suffocating – parallels, for example, the experiences of many women in prominent public roles: corseted into established norms of behaviour, burdened with the responsibility of upholding institutional legacies, compelled to defer to men’s authority, knowledge, and experience, and conditioned to self-police for fear of having their leadership be dismissed or condemned. Remembering the layered meanings of “Nemo” – as no one, as anyone, and as “the man” – it’s clear that anyone can, indeed, be Nemo, as long as they continue to enact male power.

Feminist social action is also marked by gradualism, succession, and continuation – what Virginia Woolf called “procession.” It’s the pursuit of change through patience, negotiation, legislation, and civility politics: methods that aim to assimilate rather than disrupt. Yet these step-by-step strategies rarely yield radical transformation. Progress remains fragile, vulnerable to backlash and reversal, as seen in the persistent fight for equal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, and the Taliban’s brutal dismantling of women’s freedoms in Afghanistan.

Such incrementalism demands time – too much time. It breeds frustration, echoing Fannie Lou Hamer’s cry of being “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” In storytelling, as in activism, I find it hard to champion approaches that gesture toward change without fully committing to it. Like real-world politics, they often seek to swap the status quo rather than snap it, offering symbolic shifts instead of structural ruptures.

Scratching the surface reveals the unmistakable scent of something rotten, an enduring moulder that mere rebranding cannot remedy: social hierarchy. To extend the metaphor further, we can also sniff out the ruinous idea, expressed by Murray Bookchin, that the “assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.” In both fiction and reality, swapping practices reveal the corrosive impact of failed imaginaries, undermining the potential for meaningful systemic transformation and leaving existing structures intact.

While appearing to wildly speculate on alternate realities – populated by immortals, monsters, time travellers, and a pirate queen – Moore and O’Neill ultimately failed to imagine meaningful alternatives. This failure of imagination reaches beyond official creators, touching media fans and activists alike. Encouraged by mainstream media propaganda and so forth, it’s easy to mistake surface-level change for genuine progress, drawn in by what Forough Farrokhzad called “pleasing promises.” Think “bait-and-switch” tactics, where corporate creators and producers offer the illusion of something desired, such as greater diversity, but fail to follow through. (Audiences, however, are increasingly aware of the need to examine not just the content of stories but also modes of storytelling. Who is doing the telling, the making, and the sharing?)

The diversification of mainstream media is undeniably exciting. But sometimes – okay, a lot of the time – I feel deeply conflicted about how my dream of an equal world appears on page, stage, and screen, particularly in swap stories.It’s not how I imagine it. This emotional dissonance isn’t mine alone; many feel unsettled by these stories, which blend progressive aspirations and reactionary undertones, leaving few satisfied. Confronting these feelings is essential, not merely to grasp why “plastic” stories disturb us but to recognise and resist the limiting effects of failed imaginaries on our potential to create radical, alternate worlds.

And I wonder how these veiled failed imaginaries – betraying, as James Baldwin argued, a “thinness of imagination” – reflect broader failures to radically imagine emancipation, justice, and equality. What do we lose when seemingly well-intentioned creators produce this becalmed kind of work, all roar and no bite, like a paper tiger? What purpose does it serve to create illusions of change, and what is the cost? If “radical” imagining does not open other ways of seeing and being in the world, then, I wonder: what is the point?

Though it may seem cynical to suggest a deliberate effort to limit public imagination regarding the nature of social change, history offers ample precedent. Propaganda has been with us for as long as people have been telling stories, lurking in every book and artwork, as George Orwell observed. What, then, are mainstream swap stories trying to tell us, to persuade us, about social change? What perceptions and sensibilities might they seek to cultivate within their audiences?

Confusion. Distraction. Indifference. Helplessness. A few effects that come quickly to mind. Acclimatisation is another: fostering the belief that gender equality will never alter anything substantively nor systemically, leaving the status quo intact. Inevitability too: the disheartening sense that the social world we inhabit cannot be escaped, and that imagining alternatives is futile because the outcome was always predetermined. It narrows the scope of debate around gender equality and encourages the harmful fallacy that creating original women characters is difficult, unrewarding, unprofitable, and ultimately not worth the effort.

Curbing meaningful progress is another consequence, which goes hand in hand with the tempering of public expectations. Closely tied to this is the notion that progress is best ensured through social evolution rather than revolution, invoking ideas of gradualism, gesture politics, symbolic transformation, and the persistent call for patience, to wait just a little longer for the “right” conditions. While the creative industries are a vital part of our storytelling apparatus, capable of bringing both sunshine and rain, they must be approached with care; we must, that is, remain vigilant about the processions we wish to join.

Yet people aren’t sitting around helplessly hoping for authentic, radical stories. They’re out there making them, for themselves and for each other. Stories to enlighten, empower, provoke, unite, and mobilise. Media fans, as we saw earlier, routinely create genderswap fanworks – though they more often call it “genderbending” or “genderfuck.” A linguistic choice both critiquing and resisting the limitations of its mainstream counterpart and a story for another time. Unlike, or perhaps in defiance of, the creative industries, media fans, DIY creators, and grassroots activists understand one crucial truth: that we cannot simply swap our way into a just and equal world.

Ultimately, building such a world demands bold, transformative action and authentic storytelling: narratives that confront entrenched systems rather than merely reconfigure them. Only then can we begin to newly imagine the future.

Biography

Ellen Kirkpatrick is a writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies and a passion for (counter)stories. Based in the north of Ireland, she writes mostly about pop culture, fan cultures, radical imaginaries, and the transformative power of story. Her book Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds was published by punctum books (2023). ellenkirkpatrick.co.uk

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — What We Do in the Shadows: Nothing Ever Changes, But Yet it Does

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Throughout the six seasons of FX’s vampire mockumentary sitcom What We Do in the Shadows (2019-2025), there is a recurring refrain: “nothing ever changes.” The show, created by Jemaine Clement and building on Clement and Taika Waititi’s New Zealand film What We Do in the Shadows (2014), is set in a rambling house in Staten Island and follows the daily lives of four vampire housemates: Persian warlord Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak); married couple Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), an English dandy, and Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetrious), a Greek Romani peasant; and American energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), who lives in the basement and feeds by irritating and boring other people. The immigrant vampires arrived in Staten Island by boat, tasked with taking over the new world by Baron Afanas (Doug Jones), but were too lazy and incompetent to advance beyond conquering their street (and half of Ashley Street); Colin just came with the house. Nandor’s long-suffering and hypercompetent familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) provides a link to the mortal world. His intimate relationship with Nandor and his desire to become a vampire himself offers the show emotional stakes and a narrative throughline.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

What We Do in the Shadows (fx, 2019-2025)

Like its precursor, Shadows riffs lovingly on the history of vampire media and the absurdities spawned by placing ridiculous characters with high opinions of themselves in banal settings. More interestingly, the formal demands of episodic, longform storytelling quicky butt up against vampiric torpor in curious ways, just as the mockumentary form creates unexpected opportunities to enrich the show’s themes. For the vampires, time is effectively infinite, so boredom and indifference easily set in. Similarly, the repetitive nature of the sitcom format demands episodes that move from order to disorder and back again but limits the amount of character and narrative development that can happen over seasons or shows. Guillermo complains about the vampires’ inability to change, the mess in the house, and the “Groundhog Day” like sense of inertia that comes when you’re surrounded by indifferent immortals.

Nonetheless, What We Do in the Shadows becomes a fascinating exercise in comic storytelling as it takes a well-worn “fish out of water” (or out of time) narrative common to comic vampire media (Bacon 2022) and finds ways to prompt (and sometimes comment on) character and narrative development in the face of formal and vampiric stagnation – something very visible now that the show has wrapped after six highly acclaimed seasons. Shadows is notable for many things: its rich world-building; its terrific production design; its enthusiastic and capacious attitudes towards diverse sexualities; its contributions to vampire lore; its genre hybridity; its international creative and production teams, which result in a unique combination of different national approaches to humour; its melding of the comic and the gothic; its combination of scripted and improvised material. But it is its awareness of its own form, and the strengths and limitations of that form, and formula, that particularly mark the show’s intelligence.

vampire residence in what we do in the shadows

The rubber band ping of a return from chaos to stasis becomes its own kind of comic engine. Each season the setting is the same, but the characters have individual arcs, goals, or preoccupations that drive the situations. Nandor wants a wife (and gets one and regrets it).  Nadja decides to open a night club (and does and ruins it). Laszlo wants to go full mad scientist and build a monster (and succeeds but then must look after it). The vampires ascend to the Vampire Council, with the support of The Guide (Kristin Schall), but renege on their duties. They travel overseas but return home again, or they grow bored with their new hobbies. They run up against old foes and nurture never-ending grudges. In the spirit of playful Gothic “bizzarchitecture,” the “vampire residence” seems to grow bigger and bigger on the inside as new rooms or spaces are discovered.

The show has also been prone to some odd resets, as entire storylines from earlier seasons are not quite retconned but certainly discarded. In season two, Colin, subject to his own peculiar and unknown biological life cycle, ails and dies. In season three he is reborn, and raised through adolescence by Laszlo, before arriving at adulthood with no memory of the transition. (This wryly points to the way sitcoms that are stuck in a rut might shake things up with the introduction of a baby.) The ideological impulse under the sitcom format structurally may be seen as conservative, falling back into the familiar and unable to get traction on meaningful change, leaving its subjects to make do and accept their lot (Mintz 1985). Here that rhythm, and those limitations, enrich an understanding of the vampires’ immortality (and their uselessness!) and form the series’ comic underpinnings.

This creates problems for Guillermo, who offers the audience an emotional anchor. Queer, misunderstood, shy, low status, and full of want, Guillermo starts the series desperate to become a vampire and to be recognised as an equal, if only oblivious Nandor will recognise his potential and grant his wish. It’s a “will they, won’t they” storyline, ripped straight from the romantic comedy playbook (Lord and Hogan 2024), but there is something a little tragic about Guillermo’s character development over the seasons. He learns that he comes from a long line of vampire hunters, which puts him at odds with his beloved master. He is “promoted” from familiar to bodyguard (with very few changes in duties) and eventually has his wish granted, but he struggles with his new vampire identity. He seems to have a closer connection to the film crew than the vampires, but his vulnerabilities are more on display. More than anyone, he finds himself back where he started. The vampires are happy in their elastic afterlife, but Guillermo chafes against various thwarted ambitions. His frustration that nothing ever changes becomes resignation, until he’s able to engage in some drastic soul-searching that honours his character’s vulnerabilities; physician, heal thyself. A dynamic that could be seen as repressive, or even a sideways act of queerbaiting, takes on a different and more complex cast.

These beats and returns manifest in other ways. One of Shadows’s most striking contributions has been its approach to mockumentary. The 2014 film framed itself as an expose of a secret society of the undead, in which the intrepid crew, sometimes protected by crucifixes, gained access to something secret and dangerous. The series, too, is framed as an ongoing documentary about vampires, although for whom (and why) is never really answered. For the most part, the series adopts the conventions of what Brett Mills (2004) has described as “cinema verité.” This refers to a style of situation comedy that embraces the language of observational, fly-on-the-wall documentaries for narrative, comic and aesthetic effect. This includes shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, or Abbott Elementary, which draw from the conventions of documentary form. These shows combine “candid” and hand-held footage and techniques (such as obvious, clumsy zooms) with cutaways and direct-to-camera interviews, even if they are also highly selective in the ways that they acknowledge the diegetic presence of the cameras or even the rationale for the crew’s presence. In What We Do in the Shadows, these features work to fabricate a sense of factuality that comes into comic friction with the show’s ridiculous conceit – namely, that we are following the filming of a “real” documentary (of sorts) about actual vampires who exist relatively normally in the “real world.” This is enriched by the series’ frequent use of other fabricated or altered media, such as paintings and photographs, to establish the vampires’ history and relationships.

As the series progresses, this form offers creative opportunities. Characters frequently engage with the diegetic camera (and the unseen crew), and therefore the audience, in a manner that heightens dramatic and situational irony, and occasionally drives the narrative.  It contributes to the vampires’ characterisation, notably that they are quite happy to be tailed by a crew because they are both naïve and narcissistic; why wouldn’t people want to see the minutiae of vampires’ everyday lives? Over time, the series incorporates other forms of (found) footage in novel ways, including material from surveillance and security cameras, local government meetings, video conferences, social media, behind-the-scenes material, news broadcasts, and – most impressively, in the season 4 episode “Go Flip Yourself” – reality television.

nandor in “P I Undercover: New York” of what we do in the shadows (season 6, episode 8)

In the final season, this becomes delightfully meta, as in a narrative arc which follows Guillermo into a job at a shady venture capital firm, where his terrible boss is convinced the camera crew is there for him – much to the amusement of the vampires. In the episode “P I Undercover: New York” (season 6, episode 8), the vampires discover that their street and the exterior of the “vampire residence” have been appropriated by a television film crew who are filming a crime police procedural. Nandor and Laszlo must balance their anger at the disruption (including a crew truck damaging their backyard) with Guillermo’s fandom of the show, but despite declaring war on the crew, they become increasingly invested in being involved behind the scenes. Beyond the overt visibility of the workings of a television show, there’s a deeper joke here too, about hyperreality and representation in film locations. The show within a show is using Staten Island to stand in for elsewhere in New York, even as establishing shots of the exterior of the vampire residence are Cranfield House in Riverdale in season 1, then of the Jared S Torrance House in South Pasadena, with other exteriors filmed on a set in Toronto, all of it “authentically” captured by the fictional crew.

This all pays off beautifully in the show’s well-pitched final episode, which finally addresses, head on, the show’s guiding conceit. It’s a finale about a finale, which also intertextually references another notable television finale about the nature of televisual reality. It finally interrogates the role that the presence of the documentary crew has had on the lives of the vampires, who are perhaps more media savvy than we have given them credit for, and on Guillermo in particular, given his various identity crises. It asks questions about how we fashion ourselves for the screen and how this impacts our sense of self. For the vampires, maybe this has just been another entertaining diversion; for Guillermo, maybe not. It’s an impressive and deeply satisfying play that ensures that Shadows ends meaningfully on its own terms, while honouring its sitcom and mockumentary forms – something that rarely happens in comparable shows.

This conclusion challenges other comparable shows to make more of the mockumentary format. Here, it is something that informs narrative, theme and character. I can drive action, rather than just respond to it – especially as this resolution asks challenging questions about what it is that Guillermo has wanted all along. In the world of story, perhaps nothing ever changes, but in terms of its wider cultural impact, What We Do in the Shadows has certainly changed a lot.

 

Works Cited

Bacon, Simon. “Introduction.” Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Bloodsucking Comedy, edited by Simon Bacon, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2022, pp. 12–35.

Lord, Kristin, and Kourtnea Hogan. “Gay Vampires: Metaphor, the Erotic and Homophobia in Film and Televison.” The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, edited by Simon Bacon, Springer International Publishing, 2024, pp. 1087–102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-362....

Mills, Brett. “Comedy Verite: Contemporary Sitcom Form.” Screen, vol. 45, no. 1, Mar. 2004, pp. 63–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/45.1.63.

Mintz, Lawrence E. “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 8, no. 2, 1985, pp. 42–51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23412949.

 

Biography

Erin Harrington is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in critical and cultural theory in the English department of the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she coordinates the Cultural Studies programme. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (Routledge 2018), and has published on topics including female-directed horror anthologies, New Zealand horror, horror comedy, horror and theatre, and connections between horror and contemporary art practice. She is currently completing a monograph on transnational comedy horror, mockumentary form, and the What We Do in the Shadows universe for Auteur (Liverpool University Press). She sits on the editorial boards of the peer-reviewed journal Horror Studies and Edinburgh University Press’s 21st Century Horror series. She also sits on the board of trustees of the books and ideas festival WORD Christchurch and appears regularly as an arts critic and commentator.

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — Adolescence: Think Pieces and Cultural Dialogue

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Adolescence is probably going to do very well at this year’s Emmys. It has been nominated for 13 awards including Outstanding Limited Series or Anthology and broke viewership records for Netflix with 66.3 million views in two weeks. The series was widely praised for performances from Stephan Graham, Erin Doherty, Ashley Walters, and Owen Cooper (all of whom are also nominated) as well as its ‘innovative’ use of long-takes and ‘real-time’ storytelling to explore deeply confronting subject matter.

It is hard to deny the cultural impact of Adolescence. In the weeks following its release came a surge of lengthy editorials, features, and think pieces from outlets such as The Guardian, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), The New York Times, and The Conversation. In their Emmy coverage this year, the The New York Times described Adolescence as a “hit Netflix series turned water-cooler talker” (2025). The show certainly raises important questions—sexism (violent or not) is a terrible cultural problem that can have a wide range of devastating effects. In this respect, the final scenes of the series are confronting: Eddie (Stephan Graham), sobbing in his son’s bed, wonders what we could have done differently. As an audience, we are also forced to consider this question without being told a clear answer.

eddie approaches his son’s room in episode 4 of adolescence

eddie in his son’s room in episode 4 of adolescence

If Adolescence is to win big, it’s almost guaranteed that acceptance speeches will stress the importance of the on-going dialogue and conversations that came from the show. It is precisely these public conversations—and television’s role in public discourse—that I am interested in. These conversations are what will likely endure in our collective memory, perhaps more so than the show itself.  However, I cannot help but feel that these conversations that were had around Adolescence were subsumed into a more simplistic rhetoric about social media restriction. 

The paratexts generated by a TV show are in some cases as important as the programme itself.  In his work on True Detective (2014), Michael Albrecht makes this very case. He analysed the lively public debates about whether the show was plainly misogynist or if it was, instead, a layered critique of misogyny. This played out in outlets like The Guardian, The New Yorker, and Jezabel. For Albrecht, this question is of secondary importance to the discussions the show prompted. He suggests that,

Conversations that at one point might have been confined to the academy or to leftist enclaves ascend to the mainstream through the convergence of multiple media and the confluence of a multiplicity of voices. True Detective thus became a discursive point of convergence for problematising masculinity and the ways in which prestige television intersects with discourses of toxic masculinity. (2020, p. 23)

Albrecht’s work echoes valuable insights about the often-underappreciated role that paratexts and news coverage play in television’s contribution to cultural discourses. In fact, this insight is even more pronounced in the programming logics of streaming platforms such as Netflix. There is an observable pattern of short-lived ‘buzzy’ programmes—typically limited series that are provocative and culturally resonant—that receive short but intense bursts of attention on social media and in the press. Take, for example, recent programmes such as Baby Reindeer (2024), Inventing Anna (2022) or Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024). It is possible that more people have read about Adolescence than have watched it the full way through.

In the case of Adolescence, these cultural discourses have extended to policy makers and world leaders. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer talked openly about the ‘difficulty’ he had watching the show (Youngs, 2025). Both he and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggested that it should be shown in secondary school as an educational tool against the ‘manosphere’. A statement from Starmer’s office states that the show will “help students better understand the impact of misogyny, dangers of online radicalisation and the importance of healthy relationships”.

These deep-seated cultural problems around violence, misogyny, and masculinity are not new, and they are certainly not easy to ‘fix’. Starmer said as much when he discussed the show—“[there is no] silver bullet response” or “policy lever that can be pulled.” Additionally, in various press engagements, co-showrunner Jack Thorne was careful to stress that there is no “one reason” Jamie Miller is the way that he is. Rather, it is constellation of complicated social, cultural, and personal factors.  However, the show comes at a critical time when governments across the world are seriously considering social media bans for young people. Something that is sold to voters as a kind of silver bullet.

In Australia, my writing context, young people (under 16 y/o) will soon be banned from using social media (with adults required to undertake age-verification). Similar social media restrictions are also being considered in countries such as the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Italy, and the United States. In fact, showrunner Jack Thorne is often cited as an advocate for these types of bans with headlines such as “Adolescence writer suggests social media ban for kids” (BBC), and “Adolescence Has People Talking. Its Writer Wants Lawmakers to Act” (NYT). It is in this global context that we might worry that Adolescence has been dangerously integrated into panics about violent youth, and discourses that oversimplify dangerous, everyday cultural misogyny as easily ‘fixable’ through social media restriction.

Indeed, writers often praised Adolescence for its layered exploration of youth crime, and illumination of danger that social media poses to teenagers. Articles from The Conversation (AU & UK), The Guardian, and The ABC commended the programme for identifying the true depths of toxic male communities and the way that they are influencing teenage boys. In an article for The Conversation (AU), Kate Cantrell and Susan Hopkins suggest that Adolescence exposes the “darkest corners” of “incel culture and male rage.” They suggest that,

At the centre of the show’s broken heart is a devastating truth: the most dangerous place in the world for a teenager is alone in their bedroom. Trapped in the dark mirror of social media, Jamie—like a growing number of teenage boys—turns to the digital ‘manosphere’ and the grim logic of online misogynists. (Cantrell & Hopkins 2025) 

Indeed, teenage boys were often described as especially susceptible to online radicalisation in coverage. In review of Adolescence published by The Guardian, Michael Hogan writes that,

Adolescence lays bare how an outwardly normal but inwardly self-loathing and susceptible youngster can be radicalised without anyone noticing. His parents recall Jamie coming home from school, heading straight upstairs, slamming his bedroom door and spending hours at his computer. They thought he was safe. They thought he was doing the right thing. It’s a scenario which will ring bells with many parents.

While much of this discussion does highlight the insecurities and vulnerabilities that come along with the normative, heterosexist embodiments of masculinity, there is also a sense of urgency. There is an understanding that problems identified in Adolescence have been building for years and have now reached a boiling point. We are invited to view violent misogyny as something intrinsically connected to social media and the internet. In this sense, there is an implication that it is solvable through restriction and regulation.

As such, I can’t help but feel as though there is something missing in the conversations that have surrounded Adolescence so far. Its forecasted Emmys successes signal something of a victory lap for not just the show, but for a kind-of nobility and honesty to incite such pressing cultural discourse: and therein lies a risk that turning to television to drive policy debate paints an incomplete picture. In the case of Adolescence, we risk sweeping up complicated and controversial social media bans into the show’s ongoing applause.   

Of course, social media can pose risks to young people. However, misogyny was not invented there, and the roots of Jamie’s are embedded into our society. It is important that we remember that gendered violence, above all else, is a cultural problem. An element of the Adolescence which I found particularly interesting was its focus on the mundane and ordinary aspects of the Miller’s life. Through spending time with them, we saw glimpses of just how pervasive and normalised sexism is in the everyday. By framing Adolescence through the urgent lens of social media bans, we lose an opportunity to consider something deeper. That is, a deeper reflection on the place of gender and masculinity in our society.

References

Albrecht, M 2020, ‘You ever wonder if you’re a bad man?: Toxic masculinity, paratexts and think pieces circulating around season one of HBO’s True Detective.’ Critical Studies in Television, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 7-24.

Cantrell, S, Hopkins K 2025, “Adolescence is a technical masterpiece that exposes the darkest corners of incel culture and male rage”, The Conversation, March 19. Available at https://theconversation.com/adolescence-is-a-technical-masterpiece-that-exposes-the-darkest-corners-of-incel-culture-and-male-rage-252390 

Hogan, M 2025, “Unnervingly on-the-nose: Why Adolescence is such powerful TV that it could save lives”, The Guardian, March 17. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...

Lemer, J, Ketibuah-Foley, J 2025 “Adolescence writer suggests social media ban for kids”, BBC, 21 March. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vwye69yxwo

Marshall, A 2025 “Adolescence has people talking. Its writer wants lawmakers to act”, The New York Times, March 24. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/ar...

Razik, N, Gallagher, A 2025, “Why Anthony Albanese wants all Australian kids to watch Adolescence”, SBS News, 28 April. Available at https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/pm-praises-adolescence-and-says-australias-gendered-violence-response-isnt-working/pu2w4js02

Taylor, D 2025, “Adolescence Earns 13 Emmy Nominations, Including Nod for Owen Cooper”, The New York Times, 15 July. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/arts/television/adolescence-netflix-emmy-nominations.html

Youngs, I 2025, ‘Adolescence hard to watch as a dad, Starmer tells creators’, BBC, 1 April. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28neprdppo

 

Biography

Alexander Beare (He/him) is a Lecturer in Media at the University of Adelaide. His research specialises in streaming television, audience cultures, and gender. He is the author of The New Audience for Old TV (Routledge 2024) and has published with Television and New Media, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Critical Studies in Television.

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — All Dr. Robby’s Children: The Spectre of Soap Opera on The Pitt

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Dr. Michael Robinavitch aka Dr. Robby (Image Credit: HBO Max)

On Thursday nights in the Spring of 2025, I immersed myself in the chaos of an under-resourced emergency room in my new city of residence. Like Dr. Mel King and Dr. Dennis Whitaker, two of the interns who start their first shift in the pilot, I entered Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center nervous but tentatively optimistic. You see, buzzy, new series on streaming platforms have let me down before. This many years into streaming originals being their own force in the television landscape, I have had my fill of television series that are really “eight-hour movies,” of scant episode orders, and of truly terrible pacing. The Pitt, however, was developed by alums of network television dramas ER (NBC, 1994-2009) and The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006). These people know TV. After mainlining the first few episodes so I could catch up to the weekly release schedule, my cautious optimism transformed into unfettered glee: We were so fucking back!

This essay, however, is not just about my love for a standout new series that will likely walk home with several gold statues come Emmys night. Rather, it’s about television form and narrative and how we collectively speak about one of the medium’s greatest forms of storytelling: the soap opera. Soap operas are characterized by multiple plot lines and a serial narrative that resists formal closure. While the setting of soap operas has changed over the years, they are frequently associated with the domestic sphere and above all with the feminine. As feminist media scholars have argued for decades, it is soap opera’s connection to the feminine that fuels the form’s cultural and critical disparagement and what makes the soap opera emblematic of television as a whole (Modleski 1982; Levine 2020). Television’s most recent cycle of legitimation, marked by cable critical darlings and punchy, single-camera comedies, were praised for being so unlike the medium they were ostensibly rising above (Newman and Levine, 2012). Praise for serialized cable and streaming dramas frequently requires the continual disavowal of the soap opera and its attendant feminized connotations. While watching The Pitt each week, I also regularly visited the series’ active Reddit community eager to engage in a virtual water cooler discussion. In post after post praising the series, viewers celebrated its distance from the soap. I had to ask myself: are we even watching the same show?

Like most medical dramas dating back to St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982-1988), The Pitt blends episodic and serialized narrative. While some cases resolve within the span of an episode, or even within a single beat, others stretch out or are left seemingly to dangle only to be returned to at exactly the right moment. The lives of the doctors and nurses that work in the overburdened ER—Dr. McKay’s struggles with her ankle monitor and her son’s infantile father or Dr. Javadi’s tense relationship with her mother—also provide serialized threads that texture the characters and invite audience investment. Moreover, in some places The Pitt resists narrative closure altogether. Some of the figures that come into the ER leave, their cases still in limbo. (Will we ever see the victim of trafficking again?!?!) While it blends both forms, narrative threads intertwine and build on each other in a way that privileges seriality.

The Pitt’s structure, some of its aesthetic choices, and its placement on HBO Max can obscure many of its connections to the soap opera. In a tactic borrowed from the primetime network drama 24 (FOX, 2001-2010), each episode of The Pitt corresponds with one hour in the hospital workers’ shift. The season length mapping onto a shift length adheres to entrenched ideas about realism, as does many of the series’ other aesthetic choices, particularly the goriness, lighting, and sound design. In her framing of 24 as a “techno-soap,” Tara McPherson (2007) argues that the series real-time conceit and technophilia are used to distance itself from the serial’s femininity (p. 174). Beyond the “real-time” framework, The Pitt aims for a realistic portrayal of an emergency room through blood and guts, stark, fluorescent lighting, and a distinct lack of music. Greg M. Smith (2017) contends that realism, rather than being a static set of aesthetic principles or a true depiction of reality, is “an effect that occurs when our assumptions about what is ‘realistic’ intersect with the techniques that media makers use to portray their world” (p. 166). Realism, too, distances serialized dramas from the soap opera’s oft-derided excesses. Finally, HBO or Home Box Office made its name by cordoning itself off from the medium it sought to rise above (Jaramillo 2002). Critics have likened The Pitt to its 90s network parents over its prestige HBO predecessors. However, in examining its style and streaming home, it can be easy to dismiss The Pitt’s connections to feminized serials.  

While I have seen and read far fewer instances of the creative team behind the show insisting that their series is above the soap or even television itself, this discourse is especially prevalent in discussions by fans in the series’ Reddit community. In a post expressing excitement after discovering the show and catching up, one Redditor stated that they thought to themselves “‘huh, solid medical drama with little no [sic] over the top soap opera bullshit?”. Further, in asking the community for other recommendations of medical shows without “soap opera bullshit” they warned commenters about daring to recommend Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005-). This is a persistent thread. In another post, in which someone inquired why viewers seemed so anti-romance, the most-upvoted comment responds: “Because nobody falls in love in 12 hours.  It would be melodramatic like bad level, like a soap opera.” Of course, this reply conveniently forgets that only a handful of interns are arriving for the first time alongside the viewer; most of these characters have known each other for years. Further, the show does include elements of romance (Dr. Robby and Dr. Collins are exes; Dr. Javadi tries to ask out the attractive nurse Mateo right in front of a patient who watches the scene unfold, riveted as if watching an episode of one of his series). Despite viewers expressing disdain for soap opera, The Pitt is one.

Dr. Robby and Dr. Abbott switch places as they are pushed to their breaking points at the start and close of the season. Male melodrama at its finest. (Image Credits: HBO Max)

The whole first season is a single shift; however, we do not start on just any day. In true soap opera fashion, Dr. Robby comes to work on the anniversary of his mentor’s death. Throughout the shift, Dr. Robby has several traumatic flashbacks, and his insistence on working through it leads to an emotional breakdown the writers diligently build towards. In another example, Dr. Collins is assigned to a teen girl who travelled across state lines to get the abortion pill in the same shift in which she has a miscarriage. The young girl and her aunt, who is pretending to be her mother, are attempting to terminate the pregnancy in secret. When the real mother comes to the hospital and discovers what is going on, her and her sister have a massive public fight. This is one of the many examples in which soap operatic domestic conflict anchors The Pitt despite its non-domestic setting. At the biggest scale, the season’s final episodes deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting at an outdoor concert at The University of Pittsburgh where Dr. Robby’s surrogate son Jake and his girlfriend are in attendance. Earlier beats build to these arcs, and the viewer watches as the events reverberate through the characters as they try to make it through the day. These emotional threads and heightened sense of drama are core to the series’ identity. In Reddit discussions about the identity of the shooter, viewers suggested that a range of options couldn't be possible because the show was not a soap opera. Indeed, many people said this about diametrically opposed outcomes. It seems then that soap opera came to mean anything a specific viewer thought they were above. Discussion surrounding The Pitt illustrates how “soap opera” functions as a pejorative.

Soap opera should not be an insult. In fact, I contend that The Pitt works so well because of its connection to soap opera. The television soap opera is a unique storytelling form in which narrative threads can build and build and where the viewer becomes invested in not just action but reaction, the way plot points reverberate out through the narrative and the characters and their relationships. The Pitt smartly takes that legacy and runs with it. While watching the first season, Thursday nights were once again imbued with meaning and created the space for a shared sense of community as television watchers, a feeling I had been missing since Shonda Rhimes ran Thursday nights on ABC in the 2010s. (Ironic considering how many strays her longest-running series caught when folks negatively compared it to The Pitt on social media). The Emmys invite the opportunity to grapple with the politics of taste and distinction. The soap opera is embedded throughout the contemporary television landscape. Even as many daytime serials face a grim future in networks’ scheduling, the narrative strategies and conventions of the soap opera are still on shift.

 

References

Jaramillo, D. (2002). The family racket: AOL, Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the construction of a quality brand. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 26(1), 59-75.

Levine, E. (2020). Her stories: Daytime soap opera and US television history. Duke University Press

McPherson, T. (2007). Techno-soap: 24, masculinity, and hybrid form. In S. Peacock (Ed.), Reading 24: TV against the clock (pp. 173-190). Palgrave Macmillan.

Modleski, T. (1982), Loving with a vengeance: Mass-produced fantasies for women. Routledge.

Newman, M. Z. & Levine, E. (2012) Legitimating television: Media convergence and cultural status. Routledge.

Smith, G. M. (2017). Realism. In L. Ouellette & J. Gray (Eds.), Keywords for media studies (pp. 166-168). New York University Press.

 

Biography 

Jacqueline Johnson is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Film & Media Studies Program and the Department of English at The University of Pittsburgh. Her work has been published in Communication, Culture, and Critique and The New Review of Film and Television Studies, and she is currently working on turning her dissertation on Black women and the contemporary romance genre into a monograph. When she is not teaching or writing, you can find her patiently explaining to anyone who will listen that Beyoncé is actually underrated.   

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — Laughing at Her/Laughing with Her: Dichotomies of the Aging Woman in Hacks

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

deborah vance in Hacks

Women often face a cruel dilemma: they’re considered too young to be taken seriously, and then they are suddenly too old to be relevant. This dichotomy is central to women’s experience in comedy performances regardless of medium. Hacks (HBO Max, 2021- present) places this tension at the center of its story through Deborah Vance, a legendary comedian whose decades-long career in Las Vegas has made her wealthy, yet increasingly invisible. What the show dramatizes so sharply is the difference between laughing at Deborah and laughing with her—a distinction that reflects the cultural struggle aging women regularly face.

 On the surface, Deborah’s aging can act as a punchline. Jokes about her age, her sequined costumes, and her dependence on outdated one-liners echo throughout the first season. In this manner, older women are presented as the joke rather than performers. Audiences are encouraged to laugh at her for being out of touch, and for not knowing when to hang up the hat and leave the stage. However, from its debut, Hacks has centered the tension between traditional expectations of an aging celebrity and Deborah’s refusal to fade into stereotype.

Early seasons crafted laughter through the dual lens of mocking Deborah’s age and outdated Vegas shtick and showcasing her determination to succeed as she reclaims her voice. Throughout the series, we laugh both at her and withher, often oscillating between the two in quick succession. In season four, the stakes are higher, the world is younger, and Deborah’s comedic agency is put to the test. Deborah is now in command of Late Night with Deborah Vance, a late-night show that positions her as the first woman to hold down the prestigious 11:30 p.m. slot. This accomplishment is more than symbolic—it invites a new kind of scrutiny. When viewers and focus groups signal that she’s “not relatable” to 25- to 45-year-olds, the laughter risks turning at her again, but Deborah’s response—absurd, yet bold and relentless—reminds audiences that she’s not merely the subject of their amusement; she owns it. When Deborah confronts a focus group’s critique, attempts a guest booking war with Jimmy Kimmel, or stages surreal revenge pranks (like righting the power dynamic through underwear placement), it’s comedic aggression that reasserts her authority. We laugh—not at her age, but with her as she attempts to bend the jokes to her will.

Once fighting together, now Deborah and Ava fight each other for relevancy and control

Notably, Hacks does not employ just a single leading character - rather it is a dual focus on Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels, a younger, more daring comic whose previous jokes pushed too far. Together, Deborah and Ava balance each other to successful means (though it is a constant struggle). More than mere commentary on age, Hacks works to show the importance of women working together across temporal divides. Rather than viewing one another as “too different”, it reveals how success is a balancing act that can often only been found through working with others.

Yet this reclamation comes at a cost: a volatile relationship with Ava arises, and the young writer, who once helped reinvent Deborah, turns to blackmail in order to achieve the title of head writer. An emotional and professional war breaks out between the two women as allies-turned-enemies struggle for power. Their feud—public, vicious, and intimate— is weaponized with humor, forcing us to reflect: are we laughing with Deborah through her mastery, or at the farce of a woman visibly struggling to maintain control as the industry continues to shift underfoot after seemingly finding her way in early seasons?

As this tension continues to weigh on her, Deborah encounters comedy legend Carol Burnett in a waiting room. Deborah, once the older character and mentor, becomes young again as she talks to Burnett, referencing the inspiration Burnett provided and continues to provide Deborah. Carol makes a joke regarding her own age, yet it is not self-deprecating, rather it is relational, giving Deborah space to reflect upon her own relationship with Ava. These moments of vulnerability help audiences recalibrate our laughter— not as derision, but compassion.

Carol Burnett makes a guest appearance on this season of Hacks, reminding Deborah aging in comedy is not a decline, but can serve as site of connection and resilience between women

The thematic arc culminates in the season finale (spoilers): Deborah refuses to fire Ava despite corporate pressure. She walks away and ultimately escapes her non-compete with a stand-up residency. When the press mistakenly publishes her obituary, it’s a darkly comedic moment about public perception, mortality, and the erasure of women in comedy. The laugh here is layered: part grief at the idea of her erasure, part relief that she’s continuing to adapt and strive in a difficult and unforgiving industry.

Throughout Deborah and Ava’s emotional evolutions, laughter remains central, and with this relationship that defies age-barriers, both women are made sharper, riskier, more vulnerable. Now, Deborah is no longer just performing on the stage; she’s defying it. And the audience follows as they laugh with her at her boldness and bruises, not at the warping of age or industry constraints. Hacks complicates the with/at dichotomy by showing Deborah balancing self-mockery with sharp, biting observation. She refuses to let her comedy become a form of erasure. Instead, she insists that her experience—particularly as an aging woman—is a legitimate source of authority, wit, and insight.

By depicting a mature character as dynamic, flawed, and capable of growth as Deborah Vance, Hacks disrupt stereotypes that reduce aging to decline or irrelevance. Deborah and Ava’s ever-evolving relationship also reveal the significance in intergenerational conversations, illustrating how different stages of life can and should intersect to inform one another. These narratives expand cultural imagination by showing that creativity, ambition, and humor do not diminish with age, but rather evolve in ways that are deeply resonant and socially necessary.

Biography

Ashton Leach is a PhD Candidate in the Communications Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2020, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English- Film and Media Studies and History at Hendrix college in Arkansas, and completed her master’s in Communication Arts- Film at UW in 2023. Her current research focuses on cultural conversations and representations of geriatric intimacy. Her other research interests include regional identity, true crime media, and genre films as political commentary.

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — When the Force is Not with Us: Considering Genre in Andor and the ‘Star Wars’ Franchise

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

I once became startled in my sleep after a dream about ‘Star Wars’. In the dream, the franchise had abandoned the fantasy genre and wholly succumbed to science fiction. Admittedly, this was more of a nightmare than a dream.

As I have aged—and my ‘Star Wars’ fandom has persisted—I have become more attuned to how important ideas of genre are to my connection with the franchise; specifically, I admit, I am drawn to the idea that ‘Star Wars’ is not science fiction. Of course, this is not a new idea and I am not the only person to think this way: fans, critics, and scholars have for years discussed the genre of ‘Star Wars,’ from fan forums to videos and online commentary, and scholarly articles (Gordon 1978; Wright 2018); this discourse realizes that historically ‘Star Wars’ is driven by mythic fantasy more than questions of plausible speculative science. As George Lucas has revealed, “I knew from the beginning that I was not doing science fiction. I was doing a space opera, a fantasy film, a mythological piece, a fairy tale” (1997, 5-6). The complexity of this statement lies in the fact that, while the ‘space opera’ expresses fantasy themes, it is typically understood to be a sub-genre of science fiction.

The space opera occupies a threshold between fantasy and science fiction: its semantic iconography might resemble science fiction (cosmic space, spaceships, technology, androids, aliens), but its syntactic and thematic structures are driven by fantasy (wizards, magic, heroism, mythmaking, imaginary worlds, epic scale, and hope). Gary Westfahl identifies a few key characteristics of the space opera: space travel (or at least the existence of spaceports); adventure or ‘escapist’ storytelling akin to a “yarn”; and serialized formula (2003, 197-198). Underpinning these conventions is also the association between the ‘space opera’ and the soap opera or melodrama, which incorporates romance, heightened or excessive emotion, and family dynamics. Space travel in the space opera is less about speculative science, but about adventure and the potential existence of uncharted realms (Westfahl 2003, 197). What stands out about this in relation to ‘Star Wars’ is that space travel is probably also the most ‘science fiction-esque’ aspect of the franchise, since hyperspace is scientifically plausible in a storyworld that is otherwise ‘bound’ by a magical Force (figure 1). Even so, the animated series Star Wars Rebels (Disney XD, 2014–2018) introduces Purrgil, which are giant space whales that can travel the galaxy through a magical version of hyperspace—so not that ‘science fiction-esque’ after all.

 

figure 1: going into hyperspace in a new hope

figure 2: iconic opening text in ‘star wars’

 

A further example of this genre betweenness at work in ‘Star Wars’ is the dual interpretability of the opening text, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….’ (figure 2). In a science fiction context, this positions the franchise in a spatiotemporal relationship with our own world—while not in the future, it sets a precedence for its historical and spatial plausibility; conversely, in a fantasy context, this opening emulates the “once upon a time” of fairytales. It is this latter reading that must have resonated with the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, who at the film’s commencement apparently let out a sigh of relief that he didn’t “have to worry” (presumably about any depiction of real-world conflict).

figure 3: andor has 14 emmy nominations, including outstanding drama series

With all this in mind, the series Andor: A Star Wars Story (Disney +, 2022–2025) reignites a discourse around genre in the ‘Star Wars’ franchise. Indeed, many critics and fans have identified something tonally, thematically and stylistically different about the two seasons that make up this series: as William Dare at KeenGamer identifies, “Andor feels like a Sci-Fi story, rather than the traditional Star Wars Space Fantasy”. The side of the ‘Star Wars’ storyworld depicted in Andor is dark, violent, mature, politically and intellectually complex, and hopeless. Andor thus reflects an explicit genre shift in the ‘Star Wars’ franchise: its narrational dynamics, thematic questions, and stylistic tendencies are shaped less by fantasy and more by science fiction and political drama. It is also significant that both seasons of Andor have been nominated for Outstanding Drama Series at the 76th and 77th Primetime Emmy Awards (2024 and 2025) (figure 3) —the idea of ‘Star Wars’ as a ‘drama’ nominated for a prestige award notably highlights its degree of difference and acceptance within a different cultural sphere to the rest of the franchise. Therefore, while for decades I have been attached to the idea that ‘Star Wars’ is not science fiction, I now concede that Andor certainly seems to be.

So, what does all this mean for my ‘Star Wars’ nightmare? Unsurprisingly, it took me a while to embrace Andor. From the earliest episodes of season one, I could vaguely recognize the idea of ‘Star Wars,’ but not entirely. As the episodes progressed, I became anxious that at any moment an extreme shot of an all-too-familiar planet might appear with a title card that reads ‘EARTH’ (yes, the planet Alderaan resembles Earth, and it was blown up one hour into the first installment). The prospect that Earth might canonically appear in this storyworld (other than in the Star Tours theme park attraction) is disturbing enough to startle me in my sleep. This sentiment is perhaps the inverse to Ginsberg’s relief at reading “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Admittedly, I am drawn to ‘Star Wars’ because it depicts a world that is not my own; this is what drives my own investment in the idea that ‘Star Wars’ is not science fiction.

Once I moved on from the concern that Earth might suddenly appear in Andor, I realized that this genre shift is entirely consistent with the narrative history of the ‘Star Wars’ storyworld. Andor is set during the Imperial Era, which is a time when the Empire dominants the galaxy and the Jedi have been eradicated (or are in hiding). Andor thus shows us the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy when the magic has been oppressed: the Force is not with us, and neither is the fantasy genre. In what follows, I share some ideas that come from my research on entertainment franchising and then further consider the function of genre in Andor. 

Genre and Franchising: Building the Architexture

Entertainment franchising is not a genre: it is a mode of production, which “is an altogether different category, cutting across careers, genres, and studios” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985, xvi). The franchise mode is shaped by an interplay of intellectual property (IP) conditions and multiplied creative development, such that creative and industrial practices must work in concert to produce expansive storyworlds (that can extend across multiple media platforms, but not necessarily). As such, the relationship between genre and the franchise mode is dynamic, contextual, and reflects how creativity and industrial conditions are always in dialogue in contemporary entertainment.

Even though franchising is not a genre, genre plays a critical role within the franchise mode, either as a foundational component of its narrative mythos, or as a device for engaging variation within familiar structures. The dynamic of repetition with variation characterizes both genre and the franchise mode—popular commentary likes to emphasize the repetition, but it is critical to also account for the degrees of variation and difference. As Carolyn Jess-Cooke notes, “in its repetitious re-organisation of familiar features, genre shares much in common with sequelisation” (2009, 52). Sequelization—or serial form more broadly—drives the multiplied creative development of narration in the franchise mode (in my more substantial research on this topic, I conceptualize this as transtextual narration to account for the ongoing multiplication of narrative form). Serial form and genre are both frameworks that shape connections between texts, where serial form relates to the stories told within discrete textual structures and genre classifies stories within bigger architextual narrative systems.

This principle of architextuality can make sense of how genre characterizes the foundational mythos of franchise storyworlds. While it is common to draw on intertextuality to understand connections between texts—both in genre and serial form—architextuality understands a text across its multiplicity and in relation to its function through genre discourses and structures. Drawing from Gérard Genette’s ideas on transtextuality, architextuality accounts for “that relationship of inclusion that links each text to the various types of discourse it belongs to” ([1979] 1992, 82). This relation differs from intertextuality in that, more than denoting a simple co-presence between texts, architextuality relates to connections that function within broader narrational systems, such as genre and serial form.

Applied to the franchise mode, architextuality is a framework that enables the driving force of each franchise supersystem to be assessed based on its own industrial and narrative conditions, forms, genres, and media; in this framework, the architexture of every franchise should be assessed based on its own discourses and systems, as well as within broader historical, creative and industrial contexts. This perhaps explains why it can be common to refer to a franchise as its own genre: it is not that franchising or an individual franchise is a genre, but that franchises develop their own dynamic and transformative architextual system akin to genre. It is this sense of architexture that seems to underpin screenwriter Lawrence Kasden’s reflections on genre in ‘Star Wars’: “Star Wars is its own genre. It’s not really science fiction. It’s really something on its own, fantasy and myth and science fiction and Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa all mixed up together. For that reason, like all genre it can hold a million different kinds of artists an [sic] stories”. I think what Kasden signals here is not necessary the idea that ‘Star Wars’ is its own genre in a literal sense, but that it is its own narrative system—that is, its own architextural system that can sustain multiple stories, genres, histories, media, and audiences.

An understanding of the architextual system of the ‘Star Wars’ franchise must account for the multiplicity of its narration but also its range of allusions to other genres, media, and forms: its genre influences from sword-and-sandal adventure, soap opera, science fiction, Westerns, and samurai; its intertextual references to Flash Gordon (1936), Kings Row (1942), The Dam Busters (1955), The Searchers (1956), The Hidden Fortress (1958), and Yojimbo (1961) (figure 4); and media influences, including film serials and afternoon matinees, pulp magazines, comic books, and literary epics. In 1977, Roger Copeland published an article in The New York Times titled, “When Films ‘Quote’ Films, They Create a New Mythology”. According to Copeland, Star Wars (1977) is shaped by references to such a wide range of other different movies, genres, and stories that it could have been called “Genre Wars”. Historically, genre variation in the ‘Star Wars’ franchise has not occurred discretely between installments—for example, the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ is of the superhero genre but also draws from different genres for variation between installment, such as political thriller, comedy, and the teen genre—but genre variation and multiplicity is integrated in the architextuality of the franchise. Perhaps the ‘war’ in the ‘Star Wars’ franchise has always been about negotiating this genre multiplicity at its core. 

figure 4: ‘star wars’ influences, L-R, Flash Gordon (1936), Kings Row (1942), The Dam Busters (1955), The Searchers (1956), The Hidden Fortress (1958), and Yojimbo (1961)

Andor: A Genre Wars Story

Following on from Copeland’s suggestion that Star Wars could have been called ‘Genre Wars,’ Andor depicts a retreat of fantasy’s power during this time in the galaxy’s history (BBY5–BBY1). A few elements stand out that signal this retreat of fantasy in Andor: depiction of the workings of the Empire’s intelligence organization, the Imperial Security Bureau (its magical Emperor is mentioned but never seen); the brutality of Imperial occupation and the suppression of planetary cultures to control mineral resources; the mounting threat of a weapon of mass destruction (we know this as the Death Star); views into private and domestic intimacy, conflict, and trauma between characters; false detainment in a labor prison factory with no release; and depictions of torture, assault, execution, and massacres. In this way, Andor is a science fiction political drama because of the oppression of the Force, and thus the fantasy genre. While Andor has been critically well-received—affirmed by its Emmy nominations—not all ‘Star Wars’ fans and pop culture commentators have embraced its genre shifts. A basic survey of online fan discourse reveals a strong resistance to the science fiction and drama leanings in Andor (figure 5).

 

figure 5: online fan responses to Andor

 

This discourse reinforces the important role that genre plays in audience engagement with media. While Andor might have found a place within more prestigious areas of screen culture and attracted nominations in more respected award categories (beyond the usual visual effects nomination), some subsets of its fan audience have struggled to accept this shift. I can relate. I usually watch new ‘Star Wars’ episodes instantly upon release, but when I read that the third episode of season two (called “Harvest”) involved a scene of attempted sexual violence, I hesitated (remember how I was anxious about Earth making an appearance?). Audiences connect with genres for various reasons, and ‘Star Wars’ has built an audience around a particular architextuality that is distanced from everyday reality. We might not always be cognizant of what draws us to franchise architexture until the space wizards, laser swords, and the Chosen One are replaced by a political dystopia of firing squad executions, sexual violence, and on-screen massacres. 

The audiovisual style of Andor also strongly embraces the qualities and techniques of realism, including a gritty aesthetic, longer takes (a notable example is in the season 2 opening episode, “One Year Later”), medium wide shots to position characters within (often cluttered and crammed) spaces, and a preference for mostly physical sets and locations (enhanced and extended using visual effects). In an interview with SlashFilm, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy describes the series as being “in the kitchen and not in the restaurant”. In its straightforward meaning, Gilroy perhaps notes how the series reveals the operational workings of the people behind the dominating empire and the burgeoning rebellion. Curiously, this word choice also highlights Andor’s association with stylistic histories of realism, such as kitchen sink realism and social realism, which depicted the everyday life of angry youth living in cramped domestic spaces and commented on social and political issues. And, while Gilroy certainly does not mean that the show is literally about kitchens, kitchens do play a big role in shaping the domestic materiality of everyday life in Andor, with compelling similarity to the aesthetic associated with the art of kitchen sink realism (figures 6.1-6.4).

figure 6.1: Andor (“that would be me”, Season 1)

figure 6.2: Andor (“that would be me”, Season 1)

figure 6.3: Kitchen (John Bratby, 1965) – key artist and work in the kitchen sink realism movement

figure 6.4: Kitchen II (John Bratby, 1966) – key artist and work in the kitchen sink realism movement

Despite this apparent shift in genre and style, Andor is consistence with the ‘Star Wars’ architexture. For decades, audiences have invested in a storyworld built around the defeat of an villainous Galactic Empire, and so it would seem misguided to now claim that any depiction of this storyworld under its control is somehow ‘not Star Wars’—that it to ask, what were we really expecting the Galaxy to be like during this time, if not a science fiction dystopia with political terror? Anything less would not justify the heroism celebrated at the end of Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983) (figure 7).

It is with this mention of the Empire’s defeat by the Rebel Alliance in Return of the Jedi—and later again the defeat of the First Order by the Resistance in The Rise of Skywalker (2019)—that leads to a critical dimension that recontextualizes this ‘genre war’ in Andor: we already know where this story leads, and it is hopeful. As a midquel story (set between two already existing works) that precedes Rogue One (2016) and Episode IV —A New Hope (1977), there is always consolation in the knowledge that the Force will return. Andor is filled with terror, tragedy, and the suppression of fantasy, but this is also undercut by the certainty of ‘a new hope’. In The Fantasy Film, Katherine A. Fowkes reminds us that hope is one of the central principles of the fantasy genre (2010, 6). In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien offers the term “eucatastrophe” as the hopeful opposite to the tragedy of drama, whereby “the eucatastrophe tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function” ([1947] 2014, 75). Even though Andor rarely depicts hopeful moments (if any) and is not a ‘eucatastrophe tale,’ it is always-already positioned within a storyworld history with hope at its centre. As the final episodes of season two lead closer to the events of Rogue One—and thus straight into the beginning of A New Hope—every moment of known tragedy and sacrifice is also tinged by the knowledge of the hope that is to come (figure 8).

While the genre war between fantasy and science fiction that unpins ‘Star Wars’ might too-easily come down to a battle between space magic and dystopian politics, the ‘Star Wars’ franchise (like rebellions) will always be built on hope, no matter what genre variations might come.

 

figure 7: celebrating the defeat of the empire in Return of the jedi (1983)

figure 8: promise of hope at the end of rogue one (2016)

  References

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. Routledge.

Fowkes, Katherine A. 2010. The Fantasy Film. Wiley-Blackwell.

Genette, Gérard. (1979) 1992. The Architext: An Introduction. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. University of California Press. Originally published as Introduction à l’architexte.  Éditions du Seuil.

Gordon, Andrew. 1978. “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time.” Literature/Film Quarterly 6(4).

Jess-Cooke, Carolyn. 2009. Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood. Edinburgh University Press.

Lucas, George. 1997. Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays—A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi. Ballantine Books.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1947) 2014. On Fairy-Stories. HarperCollinsPublishers.

Westfahl, Gary. 2003. “Space Opera.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge University Press.

Wright, Jonathan. 2018. “The Fantasy of Star Wars: Reconsidering Genre in Hollywood’s Biggest Space Movie.” Film Matters 9(1):125 – 131.

Online material referenced via in-text hyperlinks.

Biography

Tara Lomax is the Discipline Lead of Screen Studies in the Master of Arts Screen program at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). She has expertise in blockbuster franchising, multiplatform storytelling, and contemporary Hollywood entertainment and has a PhD in screen studies from The University of Melbourne. She has published on topics such as the superhero genre, franchising, licensing, transmedia storytelling, storyworld building, and digital effects. Her work can be found in publications that include JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the book collections The Screens of Virtual Production (2025), Starring Tom Cruise (2021), The Supervillain Reader (2020), The Superhero Symbol (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019), and Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2017). Her research portfolio is available at Assembled Illusions. She is a member of the executive committee of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) and she is also an associate editor of Pop Junctions.

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — Shrinking and Mental Healthcare ‘Comedy’

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein in Shrinking Season 2

Shrinking has grown from two Emmy nods for its first season to five for Season 2. While hardly a case of field domination, advancing to compete for Outstanding Comedy Series sees it filling a niche in the sweepstakes of prestige television comedy left open since Ted Lasso—the heart-warming dramedy that takes mental healthcare seriously.

That both series share creative personnel shouldn’t be a huge surprise (like producer Bill Lawrence and cast-member/writer/producer Brett Goldstein). And nor is it a coincidence that both shows have become leading figures of Apple TV+ as a streaming service in terms of homepage visibility, awards campaigning, and broader marketing materials for Apple.

My colleague Dr. Alexander H Beare and I have been developing a research project about Apple TV+ as a unique player in the current Subscription Video On-Demand (SVOD) marketplace, theorising how their original and curated content supports the imperatives of Apple as a parent company. Given Apple TV+ has been reported by Variety as a loss-making service that haemorrhages more than US$1 billion per year (Spangler 2025), these imperatives are clearly more ideological than economic.

With this piece, I look to reflect on where Shrinking has come from, and how the unsteady storytelling that comes with addressing mental health within formulas of television comedy is so characteristic of Apple TV+. Spoilers incoming, obviously.

iPhone graphic featuring Ted Lasso being streamed on Apple TV+. Source

From Ted to Jimmy

Ted Lasso was the first major hit and Emmys-sweeper for Apple TV+ as a SVOD—premiering during global lockdowns during the COVID19 pandemic, it was praised as quintessential comfort viewing. Tanya Horeck (2021) noted this period for its rise in “Kind TV”—whereas comedy narratives have often poised central, antisocial characters as cringey, cynical figures (think Veep or The Office UK), Kind TV repositions antisocial tendencies as foibles for characters who otherwise wholly mean good (think Parks and Recreation or The Office US). As a protagonist, Ted of Ted Lasso (played by Jason Sudeikis) unifies the players, administrative staff, and fans of an English Premier League (EPL) football team through visions of kindness and optimism.

The massive, rapid success of Ted Lasso positioned it as more than just a television comedy and instead something of an all-encompassing philosophy of kindness. In our published research, Beare and I (2024) note how the show was quickly integrated into the cultural zeitgeist: it drove a major push in advertising EPL football to North American audiences, it was intertextually referenced in The White Lotus Season 2, and its cast even met with US President Joe Biden to promote mental health awareness (White 2023).

We argued that Ted Lasso as a character was particularly primed to represent an entire ideological disposition of Apple as a parent company—the kind-of inspirational figure who would readily fit into one of Apple’s infamous Think Different advertisements despite being a fictional character (Beare & Boucaut 2024). Indeed, we quickly observed the show’s characters becoming central in Apple’s broader marketing materials of the time and saw how the show’s slogan of ‘Believe’ was utilised in ways that deliberately evoked Think Different associations.

Advertisements of tech products like iPhones and iPads (which feature prominently as product placement in the shows’ narratives, as this YouTube piece by The Wall Street Journal (2021) interrogates) would simultaneously promote their content imperatives by featuring their starring players, and series paratexts would foreground the shows’ creative uses of Apple tech(Blunden 2020). This strategy would extend to other original comedies such as Loot (starring Maya Rudolph), Mythic Quest (starring Rob McElhenney), Stick (starring Owen Wilson), and Shrinking (starring Jason Segel).

The protagonist of Shrinking is Jimmy—a therapist who, after experiencing the tragic loss of his wife, tries to work through his grief while rebuilding his relationship to therapy. He fits a Lasso-nian archetype in how the show reifies his capacity to think different. This storytelling formula that straddles dramatically heavy themes with light-hearted and affirmative comedy stylings (which also tracks across the spread of shows just listed) carries interesting implications for how challenge and progress are represented in its storyworld.

Is Shrinking a Workplace Comedy?

By taking on mental healthcare as its thematic drive with characters that are actually therapists, one can argue that Shrinking is something of a comedic enquiry into therapy practice on an institutional level. Naturally, it draws from vocationally-specific settings and aesthetics (therapy offices, patient consultations, wellness jargon) in the stories it tells. Yet, the narratives that take shape in Shrinking suggest it is more occupied with mental health as a big picture concept, rather than anything too specific or tethered.

Shrinking cast promotional photo, (from left) Luke Tennie, Ted McGinley, Lukita Maxwell, Michael Urie, Christa Miller, Jessica Williams, Jason Segel, and Harrison Ford

What Shrinking exemplifies best amongst the Apple TV+ suite of original comedies is that the workplace setting is to be approached only secondarily as an occupation: instead, the primary function of these workplaces is to construct a pseudo family.

In the cast photo shown above, only a handful of characters are professional therapists—yet the contrivances by which they keep returning to the central therapy office as a setting are profound. Take Brian (Michael Urie), Jimmy’s best friend, an estate lawyer. When the two begin reconnecting early in the series, Brian starts giving legal advice to Jimmy’s clients on criminal matters and repeatedly interrupts Jimmy’s sessions with patients. Then there’s Liz (Christa Miller), Jimmy’s neighbour—from the outset of the series, Liz steps in as a caregiver to Jimmy’s neglected daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), steadily becomes best friends with Jimmy’s coworker, Gaby (Jessica Williams), and starts a business with Jimmy’s patient, Sean (Luke Tennie). Sean, who suffers from PTSD and has anger management issues, is kicked out of his parents’ home, and so he moves in with Jimmy and Alice. Jimmy’s boss, Paul (Harrison Ford), has also been a confidant to Alice throughout Jimmy’s spiral (making Paul a rival figure to Liz)—Paul also suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and eventually starts a relationship with his neurologist, Dr. Julie (Wendie Malick, not pictured). Gaby is not only Jimmy’s coworker but his dead wife Tia’s (Lilan Bowden, not pictured) best friend—she and Jimmy start sleeping together. There’s even Louis, played by Ted Lasso alum and executive producer Brett Goldstein (not pictured)—Louis was the drunk driver responsible for the accident that killed Tia, and after unsuccessfully seeking forgiveness from Jimmy, Alice and Brian start befriending him out of sympathy.

It maybe reads like there’s a lot going on in that crude summary. However, the cumulative effect of these storylines across two seasons is a show that is ostensibly about the mental healthcare industry feeling remarkably insular and narrow in scope. Rather than being content with supporting characters circulating around Jimmy as a central protagonist, they must insistently relate to one another on very meaningful terms. There’s no understanding in Shrinking of peripheral figures or extended social circles: instead, everyone fits into a pseudo-family structure.

The effect of this is, out of necessity, somewhat degrading to therapy as a practice. What we see of Jimmy’s patients (outside of Sean) are therapy sessions characterised by infantile complaining or unthreateningly compulsive behaviours: because the purpose of the show is to affirm Jimmy’s think different approach to mental health, his patients present with issues that he can work through with plain speaking. Grace, your husband is an abusive asshole – just leave him already! Alan, stop trying to be such a player, and maybe women would see a real you who is attractive. Dan, not everybody is a jerk, actually, so small talk with a barista isn’t really that bad…

So, Shrinking certainly depicts a ‘workplace’—but despite its preoccupation with engaging big-picture mental health thematically, its actual priority of constructing interpersonal relationships of affirmative trust makes its workplace just a convenient backdrop. Therapy is a setting for the show’s central relationships, and its background cast of patients present with frustrating problems that can be solved through Jimmy’s no-bullshit approach. It might be a storytelling convenience to have a jovial interaction between Jimmy’s patient and his lawyer-best friend in the hallways of his therapy office but doing so problematises the show’s understandings of ethics and boundaries—in thinking different about therapy, Shrinking undermines therapy as an entire practice and occupation.

 As for the ‘comedy’…

Is Shrinking funny?

Well, my scholarly contention is not really, but…

Obviously, comedy is subjective, television generic formulas have long been porous and straddled—et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Individual mileage for this style of show will vary, and the most meaningful factor for this is probably how receptive one is for feel-good, affirmative messaging as a storytelling priority.

That’s not to say that Shrinking isn’t without its pleasures. Jason Segel occupies a Lasso-nian central figure with a more grounded presence than Jason Sudeikis did, which makes Jimmy much less cloying, and the pronounced struggles that he goes through more compelling and believable. The rest of the cast is strong—so while the situations of the show don’t readily support memorable jokes, the characters at least have an easy chemistry. It makes sense why Segel, Williams, Urie and Ford make up the totality of the show’s Emmy’s endorsements alongside its Outstanding Comedy Series nod.

But in picking up on the storytelling mission where Ted Lasso left off, Shrinking perhaps over-relies on its cast’s chemistry to carry its interest. By Season 3, Ted Lasso was barely recognisable as a TV comedy—its episodes were long, subdued and meandering, with so little apparent drive towards inducing laughter. For Kind TV, heartwarming affirmation remains the goal—but where this was once achieved through absurdist and heightened situations, texts like these have shifted towards such outcomes being achieved through dramatic, contained, articulated trauma for its characters to overcome.

I wonder whether localising trauma like this—in grieving a dead wife and mother, in an abusive partner or parent figure, in a degenerative disease, in a confidence-busting divorce—is just another neoliberal fantasy of self-fulfilment. These backstories are woven into these comedies to give characters complexity and to justify their antisocial tendencies. Trauma is apparently a formula of the Apple TV+ original comedy: naming, facing, and embracing trauma allows it to be neatly contained within a feel-good narrative, and then overcome with positively affirmative messaging—with the help of iPhones and Facetime, of course.

References

Beare, Alexander H & Robert Boucaut 2024, ‘Positive masculinity or toxic positivity? Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso as a capitalist utopia’, Critical Studies in Television, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/17496020241228162

Blunden, M 2020, ‘Mythic Quest cast use iPhones to shoot hit Apple TV+ show remotely’, The Standard, 22 May, available at https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/appletv-mythic-quest-filming-iphone-a4447431.html.

Horeck, T 2021, ‘‘Netflix and Heal’: The Shifting Meanings of Binge-Watching during the COVID-19 Crisis’, Film Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, pp.35-40. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.1.35

Spangler, T 2025, ‘Apple Is Losing Over $1 Billion per Year on Streaming Service, Has 45 Million Apple TV+ Subscribers (Report)’, Variety, 20 March, available at https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/apple-tv-plus-streaming-losses-1-billion-per-year-1236344052/.

The Wall Street Journal 2021, Hundreds of iPhones are in ‘Ted Lasso.’ They’re more strategic than you think. | WSJ, YouTube, 14 September, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xAvVfJ_xyI&ab_channel=WallStreetJournal.

White, A 2023, ‘Jason Sudeikis, ‘Ted Lasso’ Cast Promote Mental Health Awareness at White House With Surprise Appearance by Trent Crimm Actor’. The Hollywood Reporter, 20 March, available at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/ted-lasso-jason-sudeikis-white-house-trent-crimm-1235356995/

Biography

Robert Boucaut is a Lecturer in Media at The University of Adelaide—his research interests include prestige media texts and celebrities, streaming services and programming imperatives, and mediated gender. His book Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige (Routledge) builds new frameworks for analysing Hollywood media ecosystems and awards. He has published works in International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Television, and Media International Australia.

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — Severance: A Present Tense Dystopia

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

This video essay explores the place of Outstanding Drama Series nominee Severance (Apple TV+) in the genre of science fiction TV. Severance continues the recent trend of dystopian sci fi shows grounded in a near future, using a ‘mystery box’ narrative structure and demanding an intellectual, committed audience enabled by streaming platforms. This video analyses the visual ways the show builds its dystopian world: a world that feels intensely relatable and present, but simultaneously a horrific warning of technological potential.

The following video contains spoilers for Season 2.

Biography

Melanie Robson is a Lecturer in Screen Studies in the BA program at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has a PhD from UNSW Sydney. She has co-edited a collection on Alfred Hitchcock (One Shot Hitchcock, Oxford University Press) and published in Studies in European Cinema, Mise-en-Scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, Refractory and MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture.

EMMYS WATCH 2025 — The Studio: Television (About Movies), Now More Than Ever

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

In the new comedy series The Studio, we follow Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), the new in-over-his-head Head of Continental Studios, working alongside best friend and VP of Production Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), as well as creative executive and Matt’s former assistant Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders), ousted studio head Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara), and the studio’s foul-mouthed head of marketing Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn) in their quest to make original, artistic films at the studio level. The Studio is a successor to other showbiz satires such as Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen 1991), Bowfinger (Frank Oz 1999) and most notably, The Player (Robert Altman 1992) and provides a close, comedic look at the machinations of modern filmmaking.

Fig. 1: “I’m sort of single-handedly keeping film alive.” – Matt Remick in “The Missing Reel,” Episode 4

Matt Remick is an avowed cinephile, earnestly attempting to make great movies that connect with audiences while dodging Continental Studios CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, in an homage to Tim Robbins’ character of the same name in The Player), communicating with unruly filmmakers, actors, and writers, and eluding the encroaching threat of the studio’s sale to Amazon. As much as the series satirizes the players’ grasping for creative power in the film industry, The Studio is often quite sentimental regarding the filmmaking process and has a sincere affection for the people who make movie magic. As Patty reassures Matt, “The job is a meat grinder. It makes you stressed and panicked and miserable. One week you’re looking your idol in the eye and breaking his heart, and the next week you’re writing a blank check for some entitled nepo baby in a beanie. But when it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.”

Created by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez, The Studio is part of a surge in showbiz satire on streaming television this Emmys season, growing a self-reflexive subgenre in which the industry “constantly speaks to itself about itself” (Caldwell 2008, 35)  The series joins fellow Outstanding Comedy Series nominees Hacks, last year’s winner that follows the odd coupling of a young comedy writer and a legendary late-night comedienne, and the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, which sees the trio of New York City podcasters-turned-detectives solving a murder while their podcast is adapted to the big screen. The Studio earned 23 Emmy Nominations this year, tying fellow Apple TV+ comedy Ted Lasso for the most nominations for a comedy series in the history of the Television Academy’s awards. 

Over the course of its first season, The Studio takes us inside Hollywood studio filmmaking through the anxious antics of Matt and his ragtag Continental Studio colleagues. Each episode chronicles the minutiae of the pre-to-post production process, from Remick’s delivery of a studio note to director Ron Howard, a debate over the colorblind casting of the Kool-Aid Movie, to a thank you speech at the Golden Globe Awards. The pleasures of The Studio lie in the multitude of industry in-jokes and situational comedy, kicking off hilariously with an uncomfortable encounter between the studio executives and Martin Scorsese where Matt must kill the award-winning filmmaker’s proposed Jonestown/Kool-Aid project. Other memorable incidents include Olivia Wilde causing problems as she goes “full Fincher” mode on the set of her directorial effort, Matt’s insecurity over Ted Sarandos getting thanked over him at the Golden Globes, and the looming presence of Puck newsletter founder and The Ringer podcaster Matt Belloni. The Studio engages in what media industry studies scholar John Thornton Caldwell (2008, 2) calls industrial reflexivity, where deep texts (such as a television show about the behind-the-scenes of moviemaking) circulate information about production cultures and function as a “form of local cultural negotiation and expression.” Hollywood is a highly self-reflexive industry, constantly producing film and television about what it takes to make film and television, and often engaging in self-critique and reflection on the labor conditions within production cultures. The Studio playfully criticizes the commercial forces that intrude on studio workers, with Remick and his team standing in for a broader creative community dealing with corporate intrusions on media production in a tech-driven, conglomerate Hollywood.  

Fig. 2: (Left to Right) Sarah Polley, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) and Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) on set of “The Oner,” Episode 2

The series frequently employs the “oner,” a technique used famously in the first 8 minutes of The Player where we follow studio employees literally behind-the-scenes as they walk and talk their way through studio offices and film sets in a single, unbroken tracking shot. In the second episode, “The Oner,” Matt and Sal visit Oscar-winning filmmaker Sarah Polley on the set of her new film as she shoots a oner through the set of her new romantic drama (Fig. 2). Purposefully, the episode itself was shot in one continuous take by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra. Discussing the prep process for oners with Variety, Newport-Berra said, “we would go to these locations and walk through it with an iPhone, the script, and just see how it timed out” and “often we’d have to figure out how to blend two locations, or how we would get out of one scene and into another” (Tangcay 2025). Shooting oners was all about “capturing the energy” of Altman’s one-shot in The Player, but in their own way, according to Newport-Berra (Tangcay 2025). While Altman’s formal choices make us feel as if we are spying on the seedy, greedy underbelly of Hollywood in its oner, The Studio operates in a lighter comedy verité style, where frantic, handheld cameras and a mockumentary aesthetic construct the show’s situational humor, as opposed to the canned jokes found in traditional network sitcoms (Mills 2004; Thompson 2007). Importantly, comedy verité is not a genre but a mode utilized to account for ballooning studio budgets and to make a distinction between the classical sitcom aesthetic and the visual and narrative complexity of the post-network era. The Studio’s “television show about movies” premise, cinematic flourishes, and a subplot about the studio’s sale to a streaming tech company all offer sly metacommentary on contemporary “prestige” television production and the film-ification of the medium of television.

After the series’ launch on Apple TV+ in March, a couple of projects were announced in the trade press that prove we really are living in the world of The Studio. The first is Hershey, a biopic-drama starring Alexandra Daddario and Finn Wittrock about the Pennsylvania chocolate company (Shanfeld 2025). The second project, announced with cosmic timing just a month after the premiere episode of The Studio, is a Jonestown television series co-written by and likely starring Bill Hader as Jim Jones (and not Steve Buscemi as pitched by Matt to Martin Scorsese) (Otterson 2025). If you visit a trade press website, in all likelihood you are bound to find that your favorite childhood toy or character is getting the silver-screen treatment. However, despite every new studio film sounding like it’s based on IP, a true story, and driven by algorithms and viral marketing, The Studio ultimately shows us that the frenzied and earnest team efforts in working to make something great under such conditions may, in fact, keep film alive.

References

Caldwell, John Thornton. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Duke University Press.

Mills, Brett. 2004. “Comedy Verité: Contemporary Sitcom Form.” Screen 45 (1): 63-78. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/45.1.63

Otterson, Joe. 2025. “Bill Hader to Co-Write, Potentially Star in Jonestown Series in Development at HBO (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, April 23. https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/bill-hader-jonestown-series-hbo-daniel-zelman-1236376109/

Shanfeld, Ethan. 2023. “Hershey Chocolate Movie Set with ‘Mean Girls’ Director, Finn Wittrock and Alexandra Daddario to Star (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, April 25. https://variety.com/2025/film/news/hershey-chocolate-movie-alexandra-daddario-finn-wittrock-1236362628/

Tangcay, Jazz. 2025. “How ‘The Studio’ Pulled Off Its One-Take Episode: Weeks of Planning, Dozens of Takes and Lots of Flubbed Lines.” Variety, March 27. https://variety.com/2025/artisans/news/the-studio-one-take-episode-1236347408/

Thompson, Ethan. 2007. "Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom." The Velvet Light Trap 60: 63-72. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vlt.2007.0027.

Biography

Madison Barnes-Nelson is a PhD candidate in Communication Arts (Media and Cultural Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on a dissertation about how audiences make meaning out of comedy television, film, and digital media.