Full Description
This volume explores how television has been a significant conduit for the changing ideas about children and childhood in the United States. Each chapter connects relevant events, attitudes, or anxieties in American culture to an analysis of children or childhood in select American television programs. The essays in this collection explore historical intersections of the family with expectations of childhood, particularly innocence, economic and material conditions, and emerging political and social realities that, at times, present unique challenges to America's children and the collective expectation of what childhood should be.
Contents
Introduction, Adrian Schober and Debbie Olson
1. Recognizing the children in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Ken Mogg)
2. Rod Serling's Damaged Children: The Twilight Zone (Adrian Schober)
3. The Trouble with Teenagers and the Case of Gidget: ABC and the Youth Market (Caryn Murphy)
4. "And Then There Were Three": Bewitched, Family Audiences and 1960s America (Fran Pheasant-Kelly)
5. Like It Or Not: How Sesame Street Influenced European Children's Television (Helle Strandgaard Jensen)
6. Krofft Kids: Saturday Morning Innocence and Counterculture TV (Debbie Olson)
7. "Dance Your Cares Away": Fraggle Ethics - or Jim Henson's response to Reaganism (Yannick Bellenger-Morvan)
8. The End of Racism and the Last Family: The Cosby Show's Fukuyaman Neo-Liberal Children (Robert Geal)
9. Performing Adulthood: the Adult-Child and the Child-Adult in Modern Family and Roseanne (Mark Mac Leod)
10. Are You Afraid of the Dark? Children's Horror Anthology Series in the 1990s (Jessica Balanzategui)
11. On the Cusp: Exploring the Underbelly of High School in Freaks and Geeks (Katie Barnett)
12. "Be Careful!!": Child Safety and Empowerment in The Legend of Korra (Bonnee Crawford and Shih-Wen Sue Chen)
13. Bob's Burgers: Rewriting the Rules for Girlhood in American Television (Emily Chandler)
