As these series have come to anchor middle-class taste formations and cultural literacies, certain presumptions about art and about gender have been attached to them, including the one that particularly concerns usβthe until recently relatively uncontroversial assumption that male perspectival centrality is one of the hallmarks of so-called QTV.
Only approaching the second decade of the twenty-first century have we seen the large-scale emergence of a set of critically acclaimed series whose emphatic female centrality rebuts the still often taken-for-granted white masculinity of so-called QTV.
These series in some ways conform to accepted definitions of QTV, but feature female leads and boast large female audiences; they also enjoy a cultural prominence and critical regard which stands in marked contrast to female-centered television of earlier eras. Newman and Elana Levine outline as a gradual process of legitimation whereby serial drama in particular has metamorphosed from earlier, despised feminized forms such as daytime soaps to the prestige event television now broadly understood as QTV ; see also Berlatsky Viewing that process from a feminist standpoint, it is apparent that QTV series first earned their prestige laurels on the backs of male leads and showrunners, and only then broadened to include women-centered shows such as those mentioned above.
Without getting embroiled in debates about the nature of televisual quality, we undertake to examine the distinctiveness of the series denominated here and to argue that a post cultural context unifies them thematically and ideologically.
The critical mass of female-centered TV notably forms around , in the years immediately following the global financial crisis, the effects of which have been well-documented within media studies Negra and Tasker ; Bramall ; Leyda and In an effort to more clearly articulate the conditions of possibility for this new development, we argue that the interdependent affective ecologies of austerity, precarity, and financialization now distinctly inflect Anglo-American female-centered television.
