This article explores the representations and tonal qualities of British “structured reality” programming. Focusing on The Only Way Is Essex and Made in Chelsea, it investigates their glocalizing of the model established by MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills. It argues that while they blur boundaries between docusoap, drama, and soap opera, the British programs also recognize and foreground issues of construction for their reality TV-literate youth audience. It suggests the programs play a key role in their respective channel identities and the ideologies of British youth television, connecting to larger issues of class, gender, and taste. This is articulated through their regional and classed femininities, with the article exploring how the programs draw on classed ideologies surrounding “natural” and “excessive” femininities and of the role of this in their engagement with construction and camp play. This play contributes to the tonal shift offered by the British programs, mixing the melodrama of the MTV programs with a knowing, at times comic edge that can tip into mockery. In doing so, the programs offer their audience a combination of performative self-awareness and emotional realism that situates them clearly within British youth television.

The 2010s saw a boom in television comedies, created by, written, and starring women, that explored the bawdy and chaotic lives of protagonists who were experiencing some form of arrested development. These comedies sought to build intimate connections with their imagined audiences by crossing boundaries—social, bodily, and physical—to produce comedies of discomfort. Drawing in part on Rebecca Wanzo’s consideration of “precarious-girl comedy” (2016) I examine how two British television comedies intensified these intimate connections through the use of direct address, binding the audience tightly to the sexual and social misadventures of their twenty-something female protagonists. Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum (E4, 2015–2017) follows naïve and desperately horny black working-class Londoner Tracey in her quest for sexual experience, and Phoebe-Waller Bridges’ Fleabag (BBC Three, 2016–) documents an unnamed upper-middle-class white woman’s sharply misanthropic journey through grief. In both programmes direct address serves to intensify the embrace of bodily affect and intimate access to interiority found in the “precarious-girl comedy” (Wanzo, 2016), producing moments of comic and emotional repulsion. Each program uses direct address’s blend of directness and distance to different ends, but both draw audiences at times uncomfortably close to the singular perspective of their protagonists, creating an intensely affective comic intimacy.

By examining the discourse around Lena Dunham's HBO comedy Girls (2012–present), this article argues that the programme served as a space to think through female authorship, televisual representations and cultural tensions surrounding young womanhood. Central to this discourse was the narrative asserting Girls' and Dunham's ‘authenticity’, originality and universality, which sought to legitimate her gendered authorship and interest in the comedy of female intimacy within HBO's masculine prestige channel identity. Charting three cycles of discourse surrounding the programme's debut, this article explores the paratextual framing by promotional concerns, television critics and women's websites. It highlights how journalists and critics furthered HBO's paratextual framing of Dunham, which was later countered by the networked spaces of niche online media, which used the programme as a space to productively work through industrial and cultural tensions; particularly those surrounding female comic authorship, autobiography and intersectionality.

No abstract

No abstract