Quality Television to female niche audiences: Taking Sex and the City and Why women kill as examples

1.???The definition of quality television

?Even though many studies have applied and investigated the notion of “quality television”, the definition has never been generally accepted. The idea of “quality” cannot be provided with specific evaluation criteria in the area of media since it is an intangible product. (Moriones, Etayo and Tabernero, 2018) The issue of whether the television is quality or not doesn’t equal with the issue of whether it’s good or not as well. While quality TV often means good TV that follows the HBO (Home Box Office Incorporated) recipe in the US， “good” and “quality” tend to separate in (Western) Europe. “Quality” has been historically reserved for television with an educational purpose and linked with public service broadcasting.?(Imre, 2009) The definition of “Quality television” vary with the context of situation.

According to A Dictionary of Media and Communication（Chandler and Munday, 2020, p626）,the concept of “quality television” is translated in three senses, “1. For television academics in the UK, a notion associated with the Reithian values of public service broadcasting delivering impartial news reporting and educational documentaries or traditional high-cultural forms like theatre, art, and literature targeting middle-class audiences 2. Negatively, an oxymoron, particularly in comparison to popular commercial television. R. J. Thompson claims that quality TV is best defined by what it is not: it is not standard television content. 3. For cultural critics, an evaluative judgement focusing on textual features and relating a program’s perceived pedigree, prestige, and cultural influence to other high culture forms. Such judgements vary over time and across cultures.” As mentioned above, the most proper way to define the meaning of quality TV is finding out what is not. When the concept of quality television has firstly been proposed, it was used to distinguish a specific kind of televisions from the regular others. Therefore, I will trace the origin of this concept to explain it.

?As a media industry, the development of television has not only processed in terms of contexts but also the technologies. At the first of beginning, the audiences were fixed to the planned programming that offered by television networks. However, with?development?of the?high?technology，this traditional model of scheduled viewing has been broken by the rise of cable and satellite TV, as well as home recording. Audiences could watch programs in a more flexible way of repeating or though domestic recordings. This means that the existing television networks was threatened and needed to think of new methods to attract and maintain viewers, which is precisely where ideas of quality television turn up.

?Like Jancovich and Lyons (2003) demonstrates, television has conventionally been recognized in respect of habitual viewing and televisual ‘flow’ whereas ‘must see TV’ emerged in the contemporary television. This phrase was initially applied by the American NBC to promote its brand of quality TV. In a broad sense, it can be used to describe those programs that have become ‘essential viewing’ like ‘date’ or ‘appointment’ television, in compare with the compulsive viewing practice. In addition, as network audiences decreased as a result of the proliferation of cable and satellite channels in the 1980s, the networks target less on mass audiences than the ‘most valuable audiences’ that is affluent viewers that appealed to advertisers. In the meantime, these wealthy and high educated viewers value the content qualities of these programs. “Must see TV” designed to “the most valuable audiences”. Quality television is essentially a market-oriented production emerged from fierce competition.

?In a sense, quality is not broadcast. (Miller, 2017) Similar to the NBC’s slogan of “must see TV”, the tagline “It's not TV. It's HBO,” is also used by the HBO network to differ itself from the other television field, often by relating its definition of quality original programming to the sole visions of established cinema auteurs.??(Nygaard, 2013) During the late 1990s and 2000s, HBO was the preeminent destination for producing quality original programming. And “television in the United States developed on commercial ground from the beginning, its value was assessed primarily by its popularity as measured by ratings, which are conducive to the production of least objectionable programming.” (Nelson, 2007, p38) In another word, the American network audience is only one of the markets for ‘must see’ programming. These shows are produced increasingly with a focus on international rather than national audiences. Jancovich and Lyons (2003) reckons that American shows operate in complicated ways as vital parts of the programming schedules of broadcasters in other national circumstances and are frequently transnational productions that gather economy, personnel and positions from across the whole world. That’s the reason why ‘quality’ American shows such as Hill Street Blues, Friends and The Sopranos played a crucial role in establishing an audience for the British Channel 4 network in the 1990s.

During the past fifty years, as Boyle (2020, p848-849) suggests, “television has evolved from a broadcast-network, mass-audience situation to a multichannel, multiplatform, niche-audience situation.” This evolution has resulted in a drift away from an advertiser-supported market landscape to a consumer-supported market landscape. The content is directly sold to audiences, which means the content should be involved with current trends and viewer interest. Here come the problems, who the highly desirable viewers are and what they are actually interest in.

?Women who aged from 18 to 49 have been one of the most lucrative television audiences in long history. They are usually middle-class and highly-educated with above-average income who can afford the pay for content or commodities (Boyle, 2020). And as the mainstream media has permitted more immediate modes of feminist engagement, communications, discourses, and the organizations of transnational feminist communities around particular problems (Chamberlain 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018), the audience is also politically aware. In the evolving television place, it has become good business to make women-centric, more explicitly feminist content. (D’Acci, 1994)

In this paper, I will demonstrate the idea of “quality television” in terms of how it functions as a market strategy to cater niche audiences by presenting two female-oriented American series, Sex and the City?(1998-2004) and Why Women Kill（2019– .The will show feminist definition of “quality” in different eras. The first one is the definitive show of HBO and gained Emmy award. The second is more recently program that has been aired on CBS (Columbia Broadcast System) and commonly accepted as a typical feminist television show with mass popularity among female audiences. Both of them are fair examples that exhibit the alignment of industry interests and feminist interests. Chronologically，the trend from Sex and the City to Why Women Kill evidences a shift from what television scholar Juile D’Acci has called “ambiguous or tacit feminism”(1994, p147), which represents sexual inequality as an isolated issue, towards “explicit general feminism”(1994, p161),which represents sexual inequality as a formal issue. The commercial and political changes of these two series will be focused in the following analysis.

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2.Sex and the City and its feminist discourse

?“Over the past decade, HBO has turned towards domestic melodramas like?Olive Kitteridge?,?Sharp Objects?, and?Big Little Lies?to cultivate its aesthetic brand of ‘quality television’ for women. These series frequently position their themes in dialogue with popular feminisms through melodrama’s documented capacity to seize upon the social problems that mark everyday public life.” (Reinhard, 2019, p1046)?As a matter of fact, this theme could be seen in the hit show Sex and the City that initially aired on HBO from the end of the 20th century. It has six seasons, ninety-four episodes in total.

As Nash and Grant (2015) suggests, it is not out of expectation that such a blockbuster was aired on HBO, a network that was transforming the way that consumers were watching television in the 1990s. HBO was not only get rid of the dependence of commercial advertising a subscription-only channel but also was capacity of launching original programs and make huge investments on marketing.?SATC?has significant meaning for HBO to establish its identity as a channel that is now broadly acknowledged for enabling producers to creative liberty, catering to niche audiences, and for challenging with difficult adult content (sex in especial).

?The television series was adapted from Candace Bushnell’s book Sex and the City. Located in New York city, the show is about four white privileged women that aged from thirties to forties, offering a genre painting of the complex social and sexual relationships though the experience of the heroines. Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist who plays the role of narrator and often makes auctorial comments of her thoughts and mental activities via the voiceover as an observer. She writes a weekly column that is called “Sex and the City” for the New York Star（a fiction newspaper）.In each episode, Carrie brings up a diverse relationship topic related to her love life, like “Is it still possible to believe in love at first sight?”, “What are the breakup rules?”, “Can you change a man?”, “Can you be friends with an ex?” She explores those dilemmas through her actual romantic life as well as sharing with her three close friends. These questions, which were thought to be noticeably challenging for mainstream television in the show’s heyday, do not seem to have lost vigor a decade after its final episode was aired, and only a handful of shows have reached SATC’s quality of boldness and popularity. On the contrary, SATC remains undisputed unmatched to date in the successful combination of both. (Beatriz Oria,2014)

?Apart from the main storyline of Carrie and Mr. Big ’s on-again-off-again relationship throughout the whole seasons, the stories and characteristics of the other three woman Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, and Miranda Hobbs are also concerned. The series provides a variety of female classifications with audiences to facilitate identification.

Samantha is a public relations executive and she is known for her numerous sex mates. She disdains to keep a conventional long-term relationship，men are just sexual objects in her eyes. As a defender of feminism, she is always confident about sexuality and adopts a progressive perspective in sex issue. At the final season, she breaks her rules by developing a committed relationship with a younger man.

The opposite attitude towards sex is adopted by Charlotte, she is a traditional woman who fancy a fairytale romantic relationship. She ends her career as an art distributor to dedicate to her marriage life and children. She struggled with keeping her faith in love in face of her divorce and remarries over the seasons.

Miranda is a career-oriented woman who graduated from Harvard and became a partner at her law firm. She treats the sexual subject with a considerably justice view of balancing the perspectives of male and female. Her cynic altitude towards relationship led her to raise a child alone as a single mother.

These four female figures act as diverse representatives of women in real society. The severe collision of their consciousness, value conception and manner behavior creates a dynamic landscape of feminist identities in turn-of-the-century. Their polyphonic opinions could reach an equilibrant to address each topic fairly. There are lots of sharp-pointed content being included in SATC, like homosexual love, open sexual relationship, bachelor mother，celibacy, cradle-snatcher love, children adoption etc. It portrays basically all kinds of liberal relationship situations.

Sex and the City's main narrative is about women's aim that is to gain equal power to white, heterosexual, middle-class men within the existing patriarchy social structure. It offers an excellent instance of how hegemonic feminism looks, how it thinks, and what it does. As Rebecca indicates (2006, p132), "White, middle-class women unwilling to be treated like second-class citizens in the boardroom, in education, or in bed". The television series focus on their perspective by forming the subjectivity of centered issues and simultaneously exploiting marginalized groups. In another word, SATC promotes a hegemonic feminist discourse.

Second-wave white feminist works hard to earn equality with white men were accused of both tacit and explicit racism, class exploitation, and homophobia. （Rebecca, 2006）However， there are still some ideological stereotypes remaining in the story. For example, Miranda’s success in the career result in problems to her relationship with a man who has lower income than her. Based on the conventional condition that man usually earn more than woman, Miranda has to reduce the living standard to protect the pride of her date partner. The woman’s achievement of high-earning seems to be a shame when it comes to the gender issue. And taking Charlotte as another example, she efforts to fit in the group of lesbians due to being attracted by their independence and career success. But she is still rejected by lesbians because she is not an actual homosexual. The resistant to other people is a marginalized description of homosexual. As mentioned above, hegemonic feminist practices remain an area of contention today. Although the progress can be found in the recently show Why Women Kill that I am going to talk about.

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3.???Why women kill as a new feminism practice

Why Women kill is a “darkly comedic drama” (Goldberg, 2018) that premiered on CBS streaming platform on August 15, 2019.There are ten episodes in the first season and the second season is promised to be released on 2021. The television series was created by Marc Cherry who is famous for producing the popular shows Desperate Housewives. When CBS All Access offered a straight-to-series order to Cherry, he said like this, “As much as we like to think that institution of marriage has evolved over the past few decades, infidelity still has the ability rock to our core. Why Women Kill will explore what happens when women’s primal instincts are unleashed with unexpected and twisted consequences.” (Meredith, 2019).

The series interweaves three marital lives of three different women. It is set over three different decades spanning 50 years, in the same Pasadena house. They are all in face of infidelity in their marriages. As the hostesses change, the similar way that they deal with cheating seems to be put on the stage.

In the 60s’, housewife Beth Ann lives by serving her husband Rob without any complaint. When her husband wants some coffee, all he has to do is to knock on the rim of the cup with his finger and Beth will take over the cup graciously to fill it with coffee. Her neighbor cannot stand the sight of it and accused Rob “That’s how you treat a maid, not your wife.” (Why Women Kill, Episode 1，2019) But Beth just defend for him and said “Rob is such a wonderful provider. I consider it an honor to take care of him.” (Why Women Kill, Episode 1，2019)However, she was satisfied with her marriage until she found Rob’s cheating on her with a young, beautiful restaurant waitress. Since then, she starts to pick up her interest of playing piano to reclaim self-respect and retrieve her husband’s heart by changing her look.

In the 80s’, socialite Simone is an arrogant women and shows off her perfect life every moment. However, the life has changed since she received an anonymous letter of a photo that shows her gentle husband is kissing a young boy. The discovery that the gay identity and the betrayal of her husband gives a huge strike on her even though she pretends to be not mind. She makes every effort to hide this scandal from the neighborhood. At the same time，her best friend’s son confessed his love to Simone and she gets obsessed with the youth.

The third subplot is set in the present. The bisexual lawyer Taylor has an open marriage with her husband Eli who is a writer. The open marriage means that they can both flirt with others but not be able to bring the third party back home. The harmony was broken by the arrival of Jade, Taylor’s playmate. For some reasons Jade lives together with the couple and Eli falls in love with Jade gradually. While Taylor works hard to support her family and her laid-back husband, she finds that she is the one who becomes the “other woman” in her house.

The three tales are performed in a parallel way. Though the montage and smooth editing of transitions, the audiences can enjoy the continuity of the narrative as well as associate and contrast the diverse features of the three storylines. The three protagonists represent three kinds of female identities, the domestic virtuous wife, the social butterfly, the career-oriented woman. And their relationships with husbands fall in to obedience, accompany and openness respectively. However, they all coincidently defend female rights and deal with the infidelity in an extreme way that is murdering.

Based on fact, all models of murder by women are considerably uncommon, but when women do kill, the victims are most likely to be their own children or a male partner (Ballinger, 2000; Frigon, 2006). And like Seal (2010) illustrates, woman homicides go against norms of femininity, like nurturance, gentleness and social conformity. It violates traditional concepts of how women should behave as well as of what a woman is. Women who kill catch great attention of both masculinity and feminine gender by disturbing its boundaries. Moreover, as feminist research shows, women who kill abusive male partners relates to wider issues on women’s treatment of domestic violence and to historical basis of female’s subordinate position in society. Therefore, gender formation of women who kill is a vital area for feminist analysis.

As mentioned above, feminism has entered the mainstream. As a figure of the resistance against the patriarchal ideology, Why Women Kill is a lucrative market-oriented product, whether looking from the side of its niche-audience content or the side of well-crafted images. Like executive Vice President of Original Content at CBS All Access Julie McNamara explains the decision about ordering this series, "Having worked with Marc 15 years ago on?Desperate Housewives, it is clear he has captured lightning in a bottle again with the depiction of three women who are so richly drawn that they defy expectations at every turn. Why Women Kill?poses powerful cultural questions with Marc's inimitable, biting wit, and we look forward to taking viewers on this wild ride." (Meredith, 2019) As expected, the show is resounding and resonating among audiences.

?“In the media-saturated world we live in, film and TV play a key role in the creation and circulation of public discourses. Our views of what is permissible and/or desirable in sexual terms is largely influenced by the general beliefs and assumptions disseminated by the media, which have traditionally functioned as a public forum of debate for different social issues, including sex and sexuality. Thanks to its ‘democratic spirit’, its easy accessibility, and its private character— unlike cinema, TV can be enjoyed in the privacy of the home— television has proved to be a particularly useful arena for the discussion of issues such as sexual morality in the public and private spheres.” (Oria, 2014) From these two examples, it is obvious that the contemporary television embrace gender politics and feminist thoughts more and more avowedly. Those mainstream manifestations are “marketplace feminism” which have been coopted-repurposed and repackaged for sale. (Zeisler, 2016, xii-xiv)

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4. The Aesthetic of quality television as a commercial and artistic form

?When there is a long-standing convention of work on the economics and politics of television, studies in television aesthetics arose generally in 1980s and 90s, the period in which terrestrial television was confronted with a crisis due to the popularization of cable and satellite. (Jancovich and Lyons，2003) The cultural significance of television upgrades while the industry marked the transformation to oriented, demographic television shows as one toward “quality television” which aim for a sophisticated audience by promoting the aesthetics of television. (Lentz 2000, p46) The “quality” demographics that the quality television targets for, like Feuer (1984, p3) indicates, are those young, professional, women aged from 18 to 49 and they are prime consumers of the kind of merchandise advertised on television. In this sense, television plays a loyal role as a commercial medium to cater consumerist femininity.

One of this market strategy to enhance the television’s quality aesthetic is the uses of fashion. Besides the content of feminist ideas, these quality televisions also appeal to urban women viewers by gorgeous costuming. As far as Sex and the City is concerned, women audiences are not only in favor of the taboo-breaking discussions and feminist political awareness behind in the series but also the glamorous lives of the figures. The look of these characters lead the fashion trend in the reality. The impressive scene that occur many times is Carrie’s wardrobe which is stuffed with extravagance. The classic fashion statement of Carrie “It’s not a bag. It’s a Birkin.” (Sex and the City) spreads widely and makes the Hermes Birkin become the coveted bag of fashion girls.

The still of Sex and the City

The baguette bag that the protagonist frequently wears becomes a stylish item and until today it is still on the list of girl’s must-have. The influence of the fashion trend of this show evidences its profitable commercial value.

CBS also fights for being recognized quality in lens of fashion. Even though used unofficially for long time, “quality TV” came out as an industrial catchphrase with a CBS shows that highlighted female, gender matter, and woman interests (noticeably fashion), that is The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77; Lentz 2000, p82). Simultaneously, CBS started reconstructing its schedule and popular TV programming with rural themes substituted by more sophisticated and city-oriented products. This “rural purge” appeared as a consequence of the demographics in its assessment of market value being tied to the rating system. (Lentz, 2000)

As D’Acci (1994) described her work on an former CBS show, Cagney and Lacey (1982-88). To make the figure of Christine Cagney more feminize, producers reselect the actor and upgraded her clothing budget to wear. Luxurious clothes made her upward movement more visible. Meanwhile, it gave a benefit to the decision of the show’s and the advertising market’s to target upper-class working woman. Equally，in Why Women Kill the great living environment of the character’s mansion and the fabulous garments they dress up all evidences the high aesthetic quality of this TV series. Especially Simone’s extravagant suit and jewelry that evidences her identity as a social lady and shows her vanity. These trendy, magnificent setting and costuming are not only the meaningless decorations, they also function as an approach to build the different characteristic and contributes to develop the plot.

Another important approach to represent television’s aesthetic qualification is the cinematic audiovisual language. The invisible transformation is the notable feature of editing strategies in Why Women Kill. To narrate a complicated story of three subplots in different timelines is quite a large challenge because audiences are prone to be confused with such huge information and multiple structures. However, the cinematographic strategies of making a scene cut to another with no editing effect is used in the series to ensure the continuity of space and time. For example, in the 1960s’ Beth is so angry about finding her husband cheating on her that she breaks a glass flower vase when she is doing the housework. The shot of the falling vase is closely followed by a close-up of a broken vase that dropped by accident in Simone’s party in the 1980s’. Thus, the scene changed to Simone’s part smoothly. The skillful transfer pushes the plot forward at a rapid pace and make the narration more concise and attractive. Furthermore, the rapid rhythm works in concert with the theme of the courageous personnel of these women figures.

The most impressive clip in the series which has been widely accepted is the last 7-minute footage in the last episode. It’s the climax of the whole season which portrays how these three women finally kill. Beth Ann kills her husband by other’s hand though her scheme in the 1960s’ while Simone danced with her dying husband who is about to be euthanized in the 1980s’ and Talyor murders Jade to save her husband in the 2019. The three incidents happened simultaneously in the same house in one scene, the three storylines finally interweave and overlap. In the background music of “Devil of Disguise”, the song that Simone and her husband dance the tango with, the protagonists of the three plots are busy with their own murder separately. There is no dialogue in the last 7 minutes and that makes the scene like a dramatic stage play. The mise-en-scene and editing strategies shows a high quality of contemporary television as an art form.

To sum up, both Sex and the City and Why Women Kill have gender politic representations and aesthetic qualifications which combine advertising and advertisers’ interests to achieve their commercial goals. In addition, they all adopts long-format to complete narrative and character complexity. The last episode of Why Women Kill left a clue for the plot of the next season to pave the way for remaining the audiences. In Martin’s words, this is a narrative architecture that you could describes like a colonnade. Each episode makes a brick with its own pleasing shape, but also makes itself a fragments of a season long architecture, in turn， would stay linked to other season, to form a coherent, free-standing product of art. Although the model of quality television would evolve over the time and across the culture, the format it has established is a mature, niche audience-oriented work that takes the demographic of consumers, the need of the contemporary industry and the aesthetic study of television into consideration. Based on the pursue of being both a good commodity and an art form, quality television will move forward.

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