Broadcasting Quality

Abstract

This special issue is devoted to The Good Wife (TGW) and unpacking the discursive divide between “quality” niche programming and mass entertainment broadcast programming. These essays question the conversations about quality swirling around a show that carries all the markers of prestige, but that also features the female protagonist, broadcast home, procedural roots, and soapiness often denigrated or overlooked by critics and academics alike. In response to the inherently gendered notions of quality, these essays re-center feminine subjects and interrogate masculinizing discourses through an array of approaches to a single series, analyzing TGW via the lenses of habitual mobile technologies, fashion, fantasy, and the labor of wifedom and motherhood. Analyzing this particular series through discourses of quality is not only a way to acknowledge a broadcast series within pre-existing standards of excellence but also a way to begin to reclaim television studies’ feminist roots from often hyper-masculine discussions of twenty-first-century quality TV.