Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s JapanDuke University Press, 5 août 2010 - 278 pages In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession. |
Table des matières
1992 | |
1996 | |
Television Dramas and the Tarento in Postwar Japan | |
Agency and Fetishism in Trendy Drama Production and Reception | |
Capital and Authorship in Drama Production | |
Love Dramas and Branded Selves | |
Employment as Lifestyle in Workplace Dramas of the 1990s | |
Bootleggers Fansubbers and the Transnational Circulation of Jdorama | |
Image Commodity Value Affect | |
Notes | |
References | |
Expressions et termes fréquents
advertising agency analyzed argue Asian audience segments become branding broadcasting capital career career-track celebrities chapter characters Chinatsu consumer culture consumption context corporate discourses drama production drama serials eBay economic employees entertainment episode Esumi Makiko fans fansubbers film freeters gender genre global heroine image commodity important increasingly individual interviews Iwabuchi J-dorama Japan Japanese dramas Japanese television dramas Japanese television industry Kimura Kimura Takuya Kitagawa Kyōko labor lifestyle love dramas mass media murder Nakazono Nariai neoliberal office ladies Ōta percent personas played popular primetime production and reception program production program slots relationship role salaryman script scriptwriters Shomuni shows Single Lives social story line strategy tarento tarento system target tele television dramas television networks television producers television professionals television programs televisual culture theme tion Tōden Tokyo Tokyo Love Story trendy dramas University Press viewing rates watching workplace dramas writers young female young women