This article uses the “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” segment on late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! as a case study in how television can remediate social media to maintain its dominant position in entertainment. The incorporation of tweets into television appears to demonstrate the power social media has over broadcast media, but a careful study reveals that television and film celebrities use television appearances to denounce “mean tweets” as an example of frenzied and cacophonous social media. Drawing on the history of the televised celebrity roast, I argue that contemporary roasts resemble Internet trolling while segments like “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” embody the spirit of historical roasts by granting celebrities the opportunity to laugh at jokes about themselves. Thus, the segment reiterates the hierarchical position of “old media”: television as a source of comfort and clarity, and the Hollywood celebrity as the epicenter of culture.

Fan-written stories that involve three-way relationships among the characters Tom Paris, Harry Kim, and B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager capitalize on the homosocial bond between Paris and Kim and the canonical relationship between Paris and Torres to create a queer triangular relationship in which characterization, sexuality, and desire are all reoriented from the canon. Some of these stories relegate the nontraditional relationship to something approximating heteronormativity; in these instances, the story mirrors the canon in its often undesirable depiction of domesticity. In other stories, the triad moves away from dominant cultural expectations like marriage and children; in these stories, the triad seems to endure happily. The key to the stability of the erotic triangle therefore shifts the relationship or relationships away from the burden of hegemonic values, both in canon and in fan fiction.

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