Making Feminism Popular: Audience Interpellation in Late Post-Network Era Television (a Case Study of TNT’s THE CLOSER)

Abstract

This dissertation explores the serial design model of The Closer. It answers the following question: How does The Closer offer multiple entry points along a spectrum of views on gender and feminism, appeal to a range of viewers, and thus secure popularity? To generate metadata of how The Closer is designed for popularity by offering what film scholar Christine Gledhill calls “a range of positions of identification” with the text, using a Fiskean method of textual analysis, I examine the television codes of the transgender figure and the gaze in Chapters Three and Four (Gledhill 1988, 73). Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of a single episode of The Closer and theorizes how television codes of one episode are designed to take advantage of the coexistence of many possible interpretations of the theme under review. As counterpoint to my readings, in Chapter Two I analyze a focus group study conducted with forty-two sample viewers in Tucson, Arizona in 2013. Combining textual, industrial, and ethnographic audience analyses, I find that The Closer’s historic popularity is due to the ways its television codes broaden hegemonic discourses, break gender binaries, and relieve the dominant male gaze—that is, temporarily, subtly, and anachronistically. This smart serial design offers characterizations and content that chip away at hegemonic ideologies of gender over the series run. Viewers along a spectrum of feminism, gender, or sexuality are interpellated into the text through differing characters and points of view taken up in individual episodes, as well as those across the series. This model of serial design offers more pluralistic gender frameworks while not sacrificing popularity. This model qualifies The Closer as a sea-changing text, and it is why this series has influenced myriad, similarly designed female protagonist dramedies since 2005.