Core response #5 by Marina Massidda

 It’s fascinating that the move to “sophisticated nighttime dramas about the lives, trials, and excesses of upper-middle-class professionals and the wealthy”(60) has been ongoing since the 1980s, since the genre prevails today and has permeated all mainstream media from streamable TV to “prestige” festival films (like the abhorrent Triangle of Sadness). Most of the time I seriously resent this genre for its paltry ideology, wealth porn masquerading as the most base level satire without any true subversion. Gray writes, “These and similar shows articulated the angst, frustrations, and dilemmas of a generation of affluent (predominantly white) and aging baby boomers who were reconciling their 1960s political and cultural ideals with the realities of social responsibility and generational accountability”(60). This statement confirms my feeling that the palatable wealth satire genre is actually meant to assuage the average consumer or target audience, as well as absolve the upper middle class white audience of their social responsibility, often by allowing easy disidentification with the most grotesque caricatures of privilege. In this sense it’s a salient example of the permissible resistance we have discussed earlier this semester, by which dissent is written into the capitalist product to create the impression of elasticity while preserving the status quo. I hate it so much! Gray goes on to describe how a drop off in affluent white viewers opened a market for television shows targeting Black audiences: “an undeserved and reliable pool of viewers was there waiting to be served (or, at the very least, acknowledged)”(67). What will it take for TV and film audiences alike to demand a new angle to the critique of concentrated wealth, wealth disparity, race inequality, aka Western capitalism, other than spectacularizing the fabulated screwed up lives of the ultra rich? I’m still not convinced audience participation has that much power. I don’t want working class struggle to be coopted by major networks to serve as conservative morality or bootstraps propaganda packaged as progressive ideology either. Gray is optimistic that “Television representations of blackness organize and articulate different audiences, desires, identifications, and meanings within the media space of commercial culture”(69). I agree, marginal desires and meaning creation cannot be completely absorbed by the culture industry, but I am resistant to the optimism that networks’ profit follows consistently behind dominant social moods.