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Longlisted for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, Moving Image Category

Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By addressing ordinary actors as a labor force, Kate Fortmueller proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood.

Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood.

Examining Netflix’s global influence through its complex global-local dynamics in Korean media.

Korea is a global entertainment powerhouse, thanks in no small part to Netflix. Analyzing the artistry and industry behind Netflix-produced Korean hits like Squid Game, The Glory, and Narco-Saints, Benjamin Han argues that Korea is ground zero for an emerging “Netflix Paradigm.” The US-based streaming platform generates massive profits by erasing boundaries of foreign and domestic production, even as it underscores the resilience of the national media within global popular culture.

Beyond Squid Game breaks down the intricate and often ambivalent relationship between Netflix and the Korean media business, drawing on interviews with creative workers navigating the streaming giant’s ever-increasing economic and cultural power. Challenging narratives that present Netflix as a revolutionary disruptor, Han shows how the company has replicated abroad the precarious labor conditions and tensions over intellectual property from which US studios have long benefited. At the same time, Beyond Squid Game underscores the complex dynamics of a globalized media industry in which cultural imperialism thrives on localization and perceived authenticity.

Black and Blue TV explores the ways television productions have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. Television programs’ engagement with BLM was common before George Floyd’s murder sparked international protests in the summer of 2020, at which point it became nearly unavoidable for many series. Images of police using violence against Black Americans fueled criticisms of the role of television—especially cop shows—in perpetuating “copaganda,” highlighting the fact that television’s cops are nearly always the good guys, even when they break the law and use excessive force. Black and Blue TV identifies trends and anomalies in television’s engagement with BLM but also investigates the people who influence what those representations look like. Pairing textual criticism with interviews with television creatives, executives, and media activists, author Laurena Bernabo traces shifts in how these individuals understand their role in televisual culture and the cultural forum of narratives that are produced and distributed as a result.