First-Year Seminar: Cult TV: Critical Approaches to Fans and Fictions

3 units

What do such disparate television series as Dr. Who, Star Trek, The Avengers, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Sealab 2021 have in common? They all attract loyal audiences, stimulate subcultural sensibilities, lend themselves to textual poaching, and thus qualify as examples of Cult TV, a term that has become increasingly salient within critical studies of the medium. In this course we will explore the subject of cult television from a variety of social, cultural, and thematic perspectives, so that by the end of the semester students will have gained a deeper understanding of its historical importance as a barometer of both popular and oppositional tastes. We will examine how these and other examples of genre-based network and cable programming complicate distinctions between lowbrow and highbrow tastes while sustaining worldwide interpretative communities years after their original airdates. Students will also examine the importance of syndication, home video technologies, ancillary markets, publishing, and the Internet in the construction of fan cultures. Required Screening.