Evil Twins of American Television
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€44.99
1960s television
A01=Kristi Rowan Humphreys
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alter Egos
Author_Kristi Rowan Humphreys
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Betty Friedan
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APT
Category=ATJ
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSF1
Category=JFCA
Category=JFSJ1
COP=United States
Cultural Studies
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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Evil Twin
Evil Twin Trope
Female television writers
Feminism and television
Gender Media Studies
Gender Studies
Language_English
PA=Available
Popular Culture Studies
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Sydney Sheldon
Television Shows
Television Studies
Television tropes
Twinning and Television
Twins
Women and Gender
Product details
- ISBN 9781498583312
- Weight: 231g
- Dimensions: 154 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 09 Mar 2022
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The Evil Twins of American Television examines evil-twin depictions in over fifty years of television, comparing male twins to female twins and male-writer depictions to female-writer depictions. Kristi Rowan Humphreys evaluates The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, among other television programs that use the twinning trope to explore themes of feminism and identity. Employing traits identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique as belonging to the “evil” side of her “schizophrenic split” theory, Humphreys analyzes the ways in which these alter ego characters embody the desire for a separate self and independence through loose inhibitions, career interests, political interests, intellectual prowess, and assertiveness. This book then compares female-written twin episodes to male-written twin episodes, finding that when “evil twin” episodes are written by women writers, the twins are presented less as oppositional binaries and more as compatible, often symbiotic binaries. Thus, the women writers of these shows offer a compelling response to Friedan’s text, one that acknowledges and underscores the many complexities of women—the image of which cannot in reality be so easily split into two oppositional binaries. Humphreys then connects 1960s depictions to more current evil-twin examples, including those in Friends, Knight Rider, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Kristi Rowan Humphreys is lecturer in the Department of English at Baylor University.
