The 1980s saw the rise of Ronald Reagan and the New Right in American politics, the popularity of programs such as thirtysomething and Dynasty on network television, and the increasingly widespread use of VCRs, cable TV, and remote control in American living rooms. In Seeing Through the Eighties , Jane Feuer critically examines this most aesthetically complex and politically significant period in the history of American television in the context of the prevailing conservative ideological climate. With wit, humor, and an undisguised appreciation of TV, she demonstrates the richness of this often-slighted medium as a source of significance for cultural criticism and delivers a compelling decade-defining analysis of our most recent past. With a cast of characters including Michael, Hope, Elliot, Nancy, Melissa, and Gary; Alexis, Krystle, Blake, and all the other Carringtons; not to mention Maddie and David; even Crockett and Tubbs, Feuer smoothly blends close readings of well-known programs and analysis of television’s commercial apparatus with a thorough-going theoretical perspective engaged with the work of Baudrillard, Fiske, and others. Her comparative look at Yuppie TV, Prime Time Soaps, and made-for-TV-movie Trauma Dramas reveals the contradictions and tensions at work in much prime-time programming and in the frustrations of the American popular consciousness. Seeing Through the Eighties also addresses the increased commodification of both the producers and consumers of television as a result of technological innovations and the introduction of new marketing techniques. Claiming a close relationship between television and the cultures that create and view it, Jane Feuer sees the eighties through televison while seeing through television in every sense of the word. " Seeing Through the Eighties is a book by one of the best TV critics in the business. A work of real TV scholarship, it is also a treasure trove of information about programming in the eighties—a kind of critical companion to TV Guide for the decade."—Jane Gaines, editor of Classical Hollywood Narrative ""Seeing Through the Eighties "is a book by one of the best TV critics in the business. A work of real TV scholarship, it is also a treasure trove of information about programming in the eighties--a kind of critical companion to "TV Guide" for the decade."--Jane Gaines, editor of "Classical Hollywood Narrative" Jane Feuer teaches film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of The Hollywood Musical and coeditor of MTM: "Quality Televison . " Seeing Through the Eighties Television and Reaganism By Jane Feuer Duke University Press Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-1687-9 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction: The Relationship between Politics and Television in the Reagan Era, 1 The Made-for-TV "Trauma Drama": Neoconservative Nightmare or Radical Critique?, 2 The Yuppie Spectator, 3 Yuppie Envy and Yuppie Guilt: L.A. Law and thirtysomething, 4 Art Discourse in 1980s Television: Modernism as Postmodernism, 5 Serial Form, Melodrama, and Reaganite Ideology in Eighties TV, 6 The Reception of Dynasty, Afterword: Overturning the Reagan Era, Appendix A: Trauma Dramas, Appendix B: Yuppie Programs, References, CHAPTER 1 The Made-for-TV "Trauma Drama": Neoconservative Nightmare or Radical Critique? An Iowa farm wife takes on the U.S. Army after her son is killed by "friendly fire" in Vietnam; a mother battles the legislature to change the drunk driving laws after her daughter is killed; a father gets Congress to tighten the FBI'S authority to investigate the murders of children after his son is abducted in a shopping mall; a battered wife, cast aside by numerous human welfare bureaucracies, sets fire to her husband's bed; distraught parents battle the medical establishment to stop treatment of their severely impaired child in a neonatal intensive care unit; parents unable to control their wayward drug-addicted son lock him out of the house. This massive loss of faith by individuals in institutions occurred not only in the courts and homes and hospitals of America during the 1980s, but also on its TV screens. Beginning in 1979, a wave of made-for-TV movies known in the trade as "trauma dramas" appeared on the U.S. airwaves, on all three networks and with a variety of creative personnel (see appendix A). The eighties version of the "sociological film" or "public service drama" resolved the traumas of the American family in a rejuvenation of public institutions by the people, the same promise that got Reagan elected. Although there existed a long tradition of socially realistic literature and film that mirrored social problems in the dilemmas of families, this group of films seemed peculiarly symptomatic of the popular frustrations that brought Reagan to office and fueled the New Right engine of the 1980s. These films invoked a long tradit