Their Own Best Creations by Annie Berke - Hardcover

About the Book

A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.

About the Author

Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Camera Obscura, Public Books, Feminist Media Histories, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Craftsmen and Work Wives
The Gendering of Television Writing

2. “A Sea of Male Interests”
Your Show of Shows and the Comedy of Female Mischief

3. Gertrude Berg, Peg Lynch, and the “Small Situation”
of the Stay-at-Home Showrunner

4. “What Girl Shouldn’t?”
The Many Children of Irna Phillips

5. “Knowing All the Plots”
Presenting the Woman Story Editor

6. “A Girl’s Gotta Live”
The Literate Heroines of the Suspense Anthology Drama

Conclusion
Better Than It Never Was

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Berke’s imagination — bolstered by insight, expertise, and scholarship — reveals stunning depths. Authors’ intent may be unknowable, but critical interpretations are their own kind of creative work. Berke’s interpretations are generative and convincing accounts of the way that art and artists can come to reflect each other."

— Los Angeles Review of Books

"Their Own Best Creations seamlessly bridges the fields of media studies and feminist studies via a rich and lively exploration of the women who scripted the first Golden Age of television."
— Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

"Drawing on writers who worked in both film and radio, Berke’s book will pique the interest of radio and television scholars, but her conceptual frameworks and innovative use of texts alongside industrial history make it essential reading for students and scholars of media industries and labor."
— Media Industries Journal

"The book is energetic and animated, drawing on rich source materials that come to life. . . . an impressive accomplishment and valuable contribution."
— H-Soz-Kult

"While media histories will always contain gaps that existing archives may not be able to fill, Berke excels at investigating these spaces to rethink the women who created so many of early television’s genres. Their Own Best Creations is a fascinating, timely, and heartening contribution to media history and industry studies."
— New Review of Film and Television Studies

"Berke’s Their Own Best Creations offers a fascinating insight into the professional careers of a number of successful and innovative women television writers who played memorable roles in the creation of popular postwar US television genres."
— Critical Studies in Television

"An inventive exploration of women writers in the early years of American television, Their Own Best Creations is an exciting illumination of the intertwined histories of gender, the TV business, and creative labor. Annie Berke brings to life the struggles and triumphs of these writers and their ground-breaking work."—Elana Levine, author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History

"What Annie Berke does in this book is as impressive as it is entertaining and informative. In spinning her historical overview of women TV writers and story editors, she pulls from memoirs, interviews, and countless examples of specific television shows. Expected series and creators are all here, but so are many delightful surprises."—David Bianculli, author of The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific

"With engaging detail, Berke shows how women writing in early American television challenged audiences—and their coworkers—to examine the changing roles of femininity, domesticity, and gender identity. Tying behind-the-scenes work experiences together with press interviews, memoir, scripts, series, and media studies research, Berke helps us better understand the long history of how the personal is professional for those often left out of the history of TV."—Miranda Banks, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

"A revelation! From soap operas to sitcoms and suspense dramas, from story editors to staff writers and showrunners, Berke's lively study reveals the absolute centrality of women's creative labor to television's growth as an art form and an industry in the 1950s. Their Own Best Creations is required reading for anyone interested in the impact of female media professionals on post-war US culture, or histories of women's labor more generally."—Jennifer M. Bean, coeditor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema