Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White ushered in the era of the television antihero, with compelling narratives and complex characters. While critics and academics celebrated these characters, the antiheroines who populated television screens in the twenty-first century were pushed to the margins and dismissed as "chick TV." In this volume, Yael Levy advances antiheroines to the forefront of television criticism, revealing the varied and subtle ways in which they perform feminist resistance. Offering a retooling of gendered media analyses, Levy finds antiheroism not only in the morally questionable cop and tormented lawyer, but also in the housewife and nurse who inhabit more stereotypical feminine roles. By analyzing Girls, Desperate Housewives, Nurse Jackie, Being Mary Jane, Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under, Sister Wives, and the Real Housewives franchise, Levy explores the narrative complexities of "chick TV" and the radical feminist potential of these shows.

From An Affair to Remember to Legally Blonde, "chick flicks" have long been both championed and vilified by women and men, scholars and popular audiences. Like other forms of "chick culture," which the editors define as a group of mostly American and British popular culture media forms focused primarily on twenty- to thirtysomething, middle-class—and frequently college-educated—women, chick flicks have been accused of reinscribing traditional attitudes and reactionary roles for women. On the other hand, they have been embraced as pleasurable and potentially liberating entertainments, assisting women in negotiating the challenges of contemporary life. A companion to the successful anthology Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, this edited volume consists of 11 original essays, prefaced by an introduction situating chick flicks within the larger context of chick culture as well as women’s cinema. The essays consider chick flicks from a variety of angles, touching on issues of film history, female sexuality (heterosexual and homosexual), femininity, female friendship, age, race, ethnicity, class, consumerism, spectatorship, pleasure and gender definition. An afterword by feminist film theorist Karen Hollinger considers the chick flick’s transformation from the woman’s films of the ’40s to the friendship films of the ’80s and those of the "return to the classics" trend of the ’90s, while highlighting the value of the volume’s contributions to contemporary debates and sketching possibilities for further study.

Introduction: independents change the channel -- Developing open tv: innovation for the open network, 1995-2005 -- Open tv production: revaluing creative labor -- Open tv representation: reforming cultural politics -- Open tv distribution: struggling for an independent market -- Scaling open tv: the challenges of big data television -- Epilogue: open tv and the future of the networked era

The first book length study of the genre of 'chick lit' informed by an advanced stylistic approach, covering tradition and cognitive angles.

The first book to point out all the valuable life lessons that can be found in even the cheesiest, weepiest, most over-the-top chick flicks features fun chapters with overarching life lessons, backed up by examples from favorite films.

All the good and bad girls who need to know forgiveness, have you made some shameful choices? See how this chick deals with her shame. And she is that little girl without a home or mother, lost in a system called family.

This collection of essays offers a sustained, theoretically rigorous rethinking of various issues at work in film and other media adaptations. The essays in the volume as a whole explore the reciprocal, intertextual quality of adaptations that borrow, rework, and adapt each other in complex ways; in addition, the authors explore the specific forces