Time Loops and Fragmented Women in the Contemporary Complex Half-Hour US TV Drama

This thesis explores affective dissonances tied to tensions between neoliberal feminist feeling rules and cultural anxieties in the contemporary complex women-centric US half-hour TV drama. Through excessive generic experimentation, fragmented selves, and time loops, the case studies in this thesis exemplify a curious condensation of television’s temporal affordances within shorter seasons and episodes that mirrors the felt urgency of our contemporary cultural crises. Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019-2022) and Undone (Amazon Prime Video, 2019-2022) show their characters’ ambivalence towards neoliberal feeling rules through time loops and time travel, while Search Party (TBS/HBO Max, 2016-2022) employs excessive genre-bending, paratexts, and satirical, absurd humour. All three half-hour programmes share a particularly dark tone, which differentiates them from their televisual predecessors, as they dig deeper into tropes of trauma, grief, and mental distress. The tensions between characters’ individual, independent selves and their relational selves capable of acknowledging interdependence and the need for mutual care are a crucial component of characters’ ambivalence and affective dissonance and manifest as anxiety and mental distress. These contradictions are repeatedly worked through via time loops and generic experimentation as female protagonists negotiate contemporary anxieties around expectations of self-sufficiency and independence on the one hand, and a desire for relationality and care on the other. In this context, time loops and the invocation of parallel realities enable articulations of the intensity of the emotion work that is required of neoliberal subjects and may invite critical reflections on undervalued emotion work and affective labour in viewers’ own lives. This thesis traces televisual representations of the complex entanglement of individualism and resilience with care and vulnerability, as well as the relational work that is required to transcend the market logics of neoliberalism on post-recessional TV.