The Rise of Governance Television, 1999-2019

Abstract

In this dissertation I identify a new fictional genre of entertainment TV: “governance television.” This genre presents the behind-the-scenes workings and operations of government and comprises scripted dramas and comedies of primetime television. I argue that governance television is a component of the American civic imaginary—the way in which the American public understands and imagines its government—in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Unlike other institutions of American life such as the legal system, the criminal justice system, and the medical system, government only became a fertile topic for primetime entertainment at the turn of the last century; between 1999-2019, more than 20 shows within this genre were produced. Within this project, I center the 15 shows firmly set within the American federal government and the ideological work they did. I pay special attention to seven programs featuring the presidency and executive branch: The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006), Commander in Chief (ABC, 2005-2006), Veep (HBO, 2012-2019), Scandal (ABC, 2012-2018), House of Cards (Netflix, 2013-2018), Madam Secretary (CBS, 2014-2019), and Designated Survivor (ABC, 2016-2019, Netflix, 2019).

These representations of the (dis)function of the federal government repeatedly told stories of crisis and resolution, fostering an ideological trust in the continuity and stability of the American federal government, and through it, American democracy. Twenty years of governance television limited the capacity of at least a portion of the center-left public to imagine a threat to the fundamental structures of the government. This limitation was made visible during the 2016 presidential campaign when candidate Donald Trump broke political and social norms and then continued to break them throughout his four-year term. By the 2019 and 2020 television seasons, governance television’s prominence had diminished as the genre contended with this new type of presidency and the subsequent political fatigue of the television audience. Drawing from scholarship at the intersection of television studies and political history, this dissertation highlights how entertainment television intersects with civic beliefs.

This project uses historiography, discourse analysis of critics’ reviews, visual analysis of title sequences, interviews with political consultants, and narrative analysis of more than 200 episodes to interrogate governance television. In the prelude, I provide a brief overview of how concurrent changing trends—intensified political partisanship, increased fiscal pressures on journalism professionals, expanded cable news and talk radio outlets, and shifted entertainment storytelling from episodic to serialized—together set the groundwork for the new genre. Then I track how between 1999 and 2019 critics constructed this genre through intertextual referencing and how the tonal register of the genre varies along the lines of an idealization versus cynicism in parallel to the four presidential administrations of the same years. Next, I analyze how ideas of authenticity and reality are negotiated and incorporated during the process of production. While ‘realistic’ is consistently a valued quality, I establish the existence of a spectrum of realism outside of which a show might be too realistic to be entertaining or so unrealistic as to be unbelievable. Finally, I analyze recurrent crisis-in-leadership narratives within the seven executive branch shows. These shows articulate heightened anxieties about the stability and legitimacy of American democracy and manage those anxieties with narrative resolutions of institutional continuity even in the face of flawed individuals gaining power.