Action TV Reboots and Visibility Politics

Mareike Jenner is a researcher at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research focusses on Streaming, American Television, and Middlebrow Television. Her edited collection Binge-Watching and Contemporary Television Studies was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. Her previous work includes the monographs Netflix and the Re-Invention of Television and American TV Detective Dramas.

This is an important intervention in our understanding of TV drama of the 2000s. By looking at the ‘middle-brow’ action reboots of the 2000s, Mareike Jenner shows us that these dramas provide middle America with a sense of progress while also continuing to serve up quite regressive politics: women remain sexualised, homosocial bonds between (mostly) white men are undermined by casting a more gender-diverse team in which heterosexual romantic liaisons can be more explicitly developed. By analysing these programmes in detail, Jenner shows that the concessions of ‘visibility politics’ – of providing visual diversity – are actually undermining the progressive politics behind the demands for greater equality.

• Acknowledgements 1. Introduction2. The Cultural Politics of Middlebrow TV3. Rebooting the Middlebrow: The Action TV Reboot and Nostalgia4. Updating the Text: The Politics of Visibility and Middlebrow Culture5. Swapping Things Around: The Gender Swap, Middlebrow Culture and Visibility Politics6. ConclusionBibliographyIndex