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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.

While the first season of Girls generated a great deal of controversy and mixed reactions from viewers and critics alike, this paper explores the logic behind the rather surprising choice to put th...

On September 22, 2010 Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University who identified as gay, updated his Facebook status for the last time, stating simply that he was ‘jumping off the GW Bridge, sorry’. His body was found in the Hudson River the following week, confirming that Clementi had jumped to his death. Adding to a horrific list of other high-profile lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer suicides in recent months, Clementi’s suicide was quickly labelled a tragic product of homophobic cyber-bullying. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, was accused of repeatedly rigging his computer to spy on, broadcast and gossip about Clementi’s intimate interactions with an older gay man that took place in their dorm room. With evidence pulled from text messages, Twitter feeds and instant messages among other digital traces of his actions left behind, Ravi was charged and convicted of 15 criminal counts, including invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, tampering with witnesses and evidence tampering. He was not charged in relation to Clementi’s suicide, although the death loomed heavily over his trial and he faced between five to ten years in prison and possible deportation because he was not born in the United States. On May 22, 2012 Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 300 hours of community service, three years’ probation and $10,000 to be paid to a fund that helps victims of bias crimes.