Breaking The Glass Screen: Representational Defiance and the Comedic Female Televisual Auteur

Abstract

Although both academic and popular commentary has recently emphasized the importance of the showrunner in supplying a coherent vision to a television series, it has focused disproportionately on male showrunners and on ‘quality television,’ especially premium cable networks (Newman and Levine 38-42). This thesis, however, aims to examine the rise and significance of the female auteur in the contemporary half-hour comedy, both in cable and free-to-air television and in particular to explore whether auteur theory can be applied to both industrial formations. It analyses the work of female creators Lena Dunham (Girls), Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl) and Whitney Cummings (2 Broke Girls, Whitney) and how this work has been received. Dunham has been widely acknowledged as an auteur due to the perception that she exercises authorial control over daringly frank and explicit autobiographical HBO series Girls. However, despite free to air network self-censorship and the pressure to adhere to the formal rules of the sitcom, the three other free-to-air shows with female creators or co-creators possess a similarly provocative vision to Dunham’s. Whilst Dunham, Meriwether and Cummings do not explicitly address feminist issues or viewpoints, they confront and challenge the cultural imagery that sustains prevailing cultural and mediated fantasies of female bodies and sexuality, and, significantly, of masculinity. Although they employ a number of writers both male and female, Meriwether and Cummings consistently defy gendered conventions of representation and concealment. They thematise the materiality and functionality of the female body in order to undercut idealised abstractions of the female form. Furthermore, they undermine commercialised and mediated fantasies of female sexuality through the representation of female sexual displeasure, whether in the dark and disturbing scenes of sexual oppression in Girls or comic sexual mishaps in the less naturalistic sitcoms Whitney and New Girl. Finally, all four shows explore threatened and/or failed masculinity. The work of this group of contemporary female showrunners suggests that both the ontology and industrial conditions required to produce a (female) televisual auteur need to be reconsidered.