Are Mad Men like shows only successful with male leads?

Mad Men is one of my favorite shows and I know how widely popular it is, however before reading this article I had never noticed the story line trend that it was following and how it can be found in many other popular tv shows. I think it is interesting that the public wants to see men fall from their supposed "high horses" in order to confront the realities of the world and come to terms with their lives. Towards the end of the article the author alludes to the idea that women can only be successful leading roles if they are comedies, she points to the success of shows such as 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation and The Sarah Silverman Show. Although I do agree that sometimes female leads are more successful in comedies, I do believe there are still successful shows out there that have strong leading female roles. 

For some reason I keep thinking of the crime/cop/murder dramas that have a strong woman as the leading character and the first one that comes to mind are the shows Body of Proof . (Here is a link to watch the show if anyone is interested in checking it out body of proof .) I think this show is a good demonstration of a powerful leading female characters. I would argue that in Body of Proof they are following the similar trend with the main character fighting to come to terms with the harsh realities of their lives in order to find happiness. The main character in this show has lost her job as a neuro surgeon and is divorced with a strained relationship with her daughter. She has now become a head medical examiner and is repairing her relationship with her daughter. I think this type of story line is just as successful when there is a female lead character. However, I don't know what this means for women and men for that matter. Are shows only truly successful when they are constantly challenging the main characters as a means to make them struggle? 

Toxic Masculinity in Mad Men and Friday Night Lights

         Marcotte’s article focused on television shows, such as Mad Men and Friday Night Lights, that appeared to celebrate masculinity and patriarchal power, but instead the plots encompassed toxic masculinity and the down fall of patriarchal power.  Although I have not seen much of Mad Men or Friday Night Lights, Marcotte’s article highlighted the story of men enjoying and celebrating their power and roles in life, until their realities shift and they find themselves in unfamiliar territory.  For Mad Men’s Don Draper, he finds himself without his family and job, while Eric Taylor of Friday Night Lights struggles with a new coaching job and his wife and daughter demanding more respect.  Why do these types of plots attract such a large audience and fan base?

            Personally, I would find myself drawn a show in which a character experiences a hard downfall, but then tries to undo his/her mistakes and grows to me an honorable and likeable character.  After reading Marcotte’s article, I believe I would find myself rooting for Don Draper and Eric Taylor because they are learning from the wrong doings and attempting to make changes no just for their benefits.  I think many viewers would have the same feelings towards the lead characters of these male dominant television shows.  There also appears to a large female fan base as well.  One commonality in these plots appears to be that a strong supporting female character comes to the rescue of the drowning lead male character.  Therefore, the presence of strong women in a male dominant television show may be the cause of a large female fan base.

            However, the most interesting part of the article was that dramas similar to that of Mad Men and Friday Night Light but instead with female leads have yet to achieve a large fan base and the popularity as dramas with male leads.  Instead, women are starting to dominate the comedic genre.  Marcotte suggests that society is not ready to deal with the questioning of gender roles and women being placed in dramatic and complex plots.  I hope that women find themselves in dramatic and complex roles in dramas sometime in the future, and are not limited to comedies.          

           

   

Mad Men vs. Lipstick Jungle and Funny Ladies

Reading Marcotte's article, "How to Make a Critically Acclaimed TV Show About Masculinity", made me realize something that I haven't really noticed before--I couldn't think of any TV shows that revolve solely around a woman or a group of women and their struggles.  I am sure there must be some show out there, but when I think of TV shows I mainly think of either a show revolving around a group of both men and women or shows that have men as their main characters.  This made me think of the show Lipstick Jungle, which ended after its second season in 2009 and was about a group of three powerful women in the workforce in New York City.  The show was about their struggles involving work life, their families, romance and other daily dilemmas.  Lipstick Jungle feels like a modern day version of Mad Men, in which women have full representation in the work place and they hold very high positions, along with the men.  Mad Men to me is a very interesting example of masculinity in the media and the male's struggle to deal with "the fantasy of patriarchal power" versus newly evolving male and female societal roles.

The article also made me think about the fact that many times, popular media that revolves around women is comedic.  Marcotte's point that "Perhaps the absurdities of being female in this modern era don't lend themselves well to drama, but have to be approached sideways, through comedy" was really interesting to me, because it seems like comedy is a way in which women have broken through and been able to be represented in the media, but that is just one way.  Thinking back on the "Funny Ladies" presentation, I was reminded of Bridesmaids and how it is completely about women and their lives, but it is presented to us through comedy and makes us laugh at some of the gender ideas in the movie, such as the scene we watched in class when they are all in the bridal shop.

None of These Women are Me

Content analysis in the media may not be the perfect method for evaluating media based on feminist standards; however, dissecting each medium and quantifying its representation can still send flares up for an anti-feminist/anti-woman situation, even if the methodology does not involve the qualification of such media. The example that is always debated is “Mad Men;” is this show inherently anti-feminist because it portrays the very honest reality of women in the 60s? Or is it a form of feminist critique, because we can watch the show now and start a dialogue on how unfair the system was and remember why we reformed in the first place? This is where numbers (aka content analysis) leave us desiring more. Gill brings up this satisfaction amongst critics that are looking for a more context-sensitive approach where the meanings of representations of women can be questioned instead of only analyzing the manifestation of these representations.

Van Zoonen reminds us that this method is really the only viable way of producing concrete, reproducible, and uniform data for research. This type of study can also create a timeline of sorts to frame the transformations of female representations in the media. For instance, if we time travel to “I Love Lucy,” Lucy is a heroine for many, but represents an overtly feminine, ideal housewife who always ends up getting herself into trouble (maybe not the best role model, but who is to say). This female protagonist was essential for the time, but now our image of women is either like the powerful (yet still phallocentric) ladies of “Sex and the City” or the ditzy, laughable divas of “The Real Housewives” (again, maybe not the best role models). Content analysis would certainly show this shift, but what does the shift say about our state of society? If a person from the future read a content analysis report of our generation, there may be more women represented and even more types of women; but without context and subjectivity, what would they think about all of our make-up ads, skeletore models and promiscuous leading ladies?

My aunt does not allow her 4-year-old son to watch live television, but only rented DVDS (like Curious George), because she is so tormented by the ads that run on television, even during children’s programs! Van Zoonen says “a culture communicates with itself by a means of its total mass media output with television being the prime mass medium,” but what are we really communicating: vanity and destructive sexuality or progressiveness (73)?