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 other - one that is beholden to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, sleeped in intertextual references, and framed as a ‘kinder, gentler kind of cult television series’ in this lightly 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; and 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.