Women And POP Culture Essays Examples

Nighttime dramas have become popular television shows with media consumers, particularly women, because of the heterogeneous nature of their content. It is these dramas that contain themes of romance, abuse, family, and corruption. Primetime shows like Law and Order, Scandal, and Grey’s Anatomy may combine elements like law and politics or medicine and business, for example. These often appeal to women who get emotionally involved with the characters, thus being able to construct their own meanings from such media texts. When episodes of these normal one-hour dramas end, they often leave the viewer on a cliffhanger, wanting more. But as Fiske noted, the lack of closure allows for audience members to “negotiate their own meanings, resolutions and anticipations.”
Empire, a new FOX music drama, has encountered viewer rating success since it first aired in January 2015. The primetime music industry drama highlights the joys and sorrows of a well-to-do African American family that built a record label powerhouse in which most of the family members sing or rap while the others handle the business side of the family enterprise. This drama is polysemic in many ways in that the characters depict various real world lifestyles such as interracial marriage, same-sex relationships, infidelity, organized crime, and incarceration, to name a few. Therefore, different types of viewers can relate to this show in some way, forming their own interpretations of the attitudes and behaviors expressed in Empire.
Finally, it is interesting that Finke endorsed the view that the masses are not passive consumers who naively accept what they are fed in TV dramas. Instead they actively choose to consume the media content that best reflects their individual tastes and preferences and with which they can identify. Therefore, media consumers have their boundaries that classify what they will or will not support. In summary, as our diverse society becomes more sophisticated in its program selection, so will the television industry’s strategy become necessary for catering to a viewership that demands polysemous, multifaceted media texts.