Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls

Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000-2007). Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated wordplay and compelling portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, this contemporary American TV program finally gets its due as a cultural production unlike any others” one that is beholden to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, steeped in intertextual references, and framed as a "kinder, gentler kind of cult television series" in this tightly focused yet wide-ranging collection. This volume makes a significant contribution to television studies, genre studies, and women’s studies, taking Gilmore Girls as its focus while adopting a panoramic critical approach sensitive to such topics as serialized fiction elite education addiction as a social construct food consumption and the disciplining of bodies post-feminism and female desire depictions of journalism in popular culture the changing face of masculinity in contemporary U.S. society liturgical and ritualistic structures in televisual narrative Orientalism and Asian representations on American TV Internet fan discourses new genre theories attuned to the landscape of twenty-first-century media convergence Screwball Television seeks to bring Gilmore Girls more fully into academic discourse not only as a topic worthy of critical scrutiny but also as an infinitely rewarding text capable of stimulating the imagination of students beyond the classroom.