COLT TV
Undergraduate Presenters

Alex Beeler

Title: "American Savagery, Forgiveness and The Sopranos"

Mentor: Lisa Freinkel

Death was the overwhelming verdict for Tony Soprano in the weeks before the series finale of The Sopranos. A wide audience believed Tony had to die; death was the only justice for his crimes. But the screen went black; our eyes into New Jersey blind and the music gone. Eruptive speculation followed and everyone had something to say. Washing away everything else though was the black screen; soon the widely believed conclusion argued that the cut to black was a fatal bullet in Tony’s head.

Throughout the narrative of the series, The Sopranos captures the growing savagery of American culture in the chasm cleaved by mafia racketeering. Building throughout this barbarism is a question of forgiveness and how forgiveness frees one from harming others and destroying lives. Tony is the series’ prime example for the destructive force of one’s incapacity to pardon, and that same incapacity breeds savagery in him, leading him to harm others and commit terrible acts.

As the screen cuts in the final seconds of the series finale of The Sopranos, the silent black is the choice to spare Tony’s life. Bandaging the savage American culture which the series bleeds to narrate, the audience fights an incapacity to not hurt anyone, even Tony Soprano.

Scott Dinsfriend

Title: "Examining How TBN’s Chameleonic Identity Ensures its Mission’s Success"
Mentor: Amanda Cornwall

By following the trends of secular entertainment and borrowing from their specific forms of communication, the Trinity Broadcasting Network rises above all other Christian networks and succeeds in transforming an electric box into a welcoming, always available home for millions of viewers throughout the world. TBN makes this home comfortable for every type of viewer, whether it is a pierced and tattooed teenager head-banging to heavy metal music videos, or an elderly grandmother singing hymns in homophony with the televised congregation. While TBN masterfully emulates secular television programs by modeling genres birthed from the womb of nonreligious society, it simultaneously and carefully extracts the nonreligious content and smoothly implants the message of Christianity. In allowing itself to take its cues from the secular media, TBN creates what seems to be an incongruity, a reversal of expectations, similar to wearing a white suit to a funeral. This thesis will examine the brilliant and necessary tactics that TBN uses to resolve the apparent contradiction between the conservative Christian message and the secular styles of entertainment that it has appropriated. TBN and its particular message can safely thrive in each part of the jungle of society, successfully capturing such a broad audience because, as the chameleon of television, it skillfully camouflages itself through each form of entertainment. In order to resolve this paradoxical juxtaposition of secular forms with Christian content, TBN provides an intensely personalized message of salvation for every viewer, effectively ignoring and thus overcoming the gulf between the television and its audience.

Alex Frane

Title: "It's All Very Violent:" Violence and the Clash of Values in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Mentor: Jeong Chang

My essay focuses on the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The paper pays close attention to the violence exhibited on the show, namely the numerous fight scenes that appear in all 144 episodes. The paper will address the morality of the violence, examined both textually and extra-textually.

It's possible to criticize a show with the amount of violence that Buffy has on it, claiming that it promotes violence as a valid answer to problems, as the vast majority of problems on the show are solved that way. However, I am arguing that the show uses violence in a symbolic manner, representing individual and communal struggles with issues such as adolescence, first love, addiction, family, as well as feminist issues of victimization and patriarchal institutions.

I'll explain how the violence is symbolic by doing a close reading on particular episodes, examining what the violence represents and also examine how the show cues the viewers to the violence's symbolic nature by foregrounding its fantastic setting, subverting genre expectations and the show's own narrative, and its use of humor.

I will also discuss how the show inspires fans to act against violence through such events as the Dark Horse Comic writing contest, "How Buffy Changed my Life", and the Portland Buffy Festival/Fundraiser, which raises money for an organization that protects victims of domestic violence.

Amanda Golbek

Title: "Romantic Love and the Late Capitalist Moral Occult in Grey's Anatomy"
Mentors: Kom Kunyosying and Jeong Chang

The television drama Grey’s Anatomy produced by Shonda Rhimes premiered as a midseason replacement in 2005 on ABC. The show’s titular character, Dr. Meredith Grey, leads an ensemble cast that depicts the personal and professional lives of five surgical interns and their supervisors. The show is framed by Meredith Grey’s voice-over narration at the beginning and end of most of the episodes that introduces themes and provides narrative and emotional closure. Due to its success among viewers it was moved after its second season to Thursday night, a spot traditionally reserved for the most popular and competitive shows. Its success has continued and it is now in its fifth season.

My paper will look at the expression of the melodramatic mode in Grey’s Anatomy and how through it a “moral occult,” as defined by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination, presents an underlying domain of spiritual values located beneath the surface reality and drama of the show. This paper will analyze through the form of the show, as well as characters’ relationships, how such a “moral occult” operates within late capitalist ideology, illustrating how this operation serves to internalize in its audience the instability on which late capitalism rests in the globalized world.

Philip Lilly

Title:

Mentor: Jenny Odintz

A significant amount of Japanese animation is viewed by American audiences, and one of the most popular genres within anime is the cyberpunk genre. This genre in particular deals with a futuristic urban setting that is heavily reliant on the cyber world, an idea that is not limited to Japan. The U.S. and Japan, both highly developed societies, have a continuous focus on technology and modernization, which allows both audiences to identify with the technological aspect of cyberpunk anime. Furthermore the ubiquity of technology creates a common language between the two cultures, which allows cyberpunk anime to easily transcend these borders. A close analysis of Ghost in the Shell, a futuristic television show in which the line between human and cyborg becomes blurred, will serve as an example of how the cyberpunk genre of anime has become globalized.

Sarah McNaughton

Title: "Network Newscasts and the Pleasure of Fear"

Mentor: Virginia Piper

The news media is often what sociologist David L. Altheide calls a “problem-generating machine,” playing a prominent role in the constant deterioration of the public’s overall sense of security (647). My paper examines the role of television news in influencing and manipulating viewers’ feelings of comfort, pleasure and fear during times of crisis as particularly evidenced by coverage of the Beltway Sniper attacks on October 4, 2002. In Washington D.C, where the attacks occurred, Nielsen numbers showed that “the number of homes using television rose about 20% on average during the crisis” (Washington TV 7). Turning to their televisions, Americans expected comforting information that would help them comprehend the random attacks of the Sniper. Examination of the coverage on NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN reveals the ways in which network newscasts systematically and simultaneously produced feelings of comfort and fear. While viewers often did attain increased feelings of comfort as a result of the information provided, the stories and facts themselves were formatted in methodical ways to spark additional fear. Based on the “problem frame,” a common structure for important news stories, I analyze the ways in which each newscast manipulated viewers into fright, methods including the ceaseless repetition of frightening images as well as the use of phrases designed specifically to cultivate fear. In addition to the emphasis on fright, however, this paper also identifies ways in which the viewer gains pleasure from watching tragic news stories like that of the Beltway Sniper. With reference to several key psychological and sociological studies, I analyze how viewers’ fear is easily transformed into feelings of pleasure, thus encouraging viewers to continue watching such coverage. Revealed to be cyclical in nature, I discuss the reasoning behind the “problem-generating machine” and the emotional loop it produces for viewers nationwide.

Benjamin Taylor

Title: "The Production Behind Production: Developing Trends in the Global Television Set Market"

Mentor: Leah Middlebrook

The capital attained by transnational corporations involved in the manufacturing and distribution of television sets increases with each passing year. This is due to the central role television plays in the lives of so many. This medium, in which culture, society, and politics blend and through which one can receive information ranging from the latest news broadcast to the latest Survivor elimination, has gone through an interesting transformation in the past twenty or so years in terms of its physical production. This change reflects a global trend towards the practice of economically absorbing “developing” nations into the currently “developed” world. To demonstrate this practice, this paper will focus on the sectors of physical television set production that have become centered in developed nations, on the outsourcing of the most labor-intensive stage of television set production to developing nations, on the retention of more technical stages of television set production within developed nations, and briefly on new marketing strategies geared towards consumers of developing nations. These three points will emphasize the fact that the economic workings behind the production of television sets, which inherently allow for the production of culture in the form of television programs, are becoming more and more complex as transnational corporations involved in television set production strive towards further participation in and expansion of the global economy.