The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV: Production Design and the Boomer Era

Abstract

Attending to creative labor, meanings of the visual, and discourses of nostalgia, Alex Bevan, lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland, Australia, brings a multi-disciplinary perspective to an analysis of nostalgic production design in twenty-first-century US and British television. With specific foci on sets, props, and costumes across a three-part structure, Bevan examines multiple scripted and reality-based series to grapple with the ways that these design elements shape the programs’ nostalgic milieus. Her multi-pronged argument is that much television in the twenty-first century, especially that espoused as “quality,” is steeped in mid-century nostalgia, and that the construction of that nostalgia via design elements leads not to a simple, regressive valuation of the past but instead invites a negotiation of historical memory in ways that speak to the social and political struggles of the present. Bevan is especially interested in struggles over identity, in particular gender, race, and class. Mad Men, which originally aired in 2007–2015 on the US cable channel AMC and was subsequently distributed worldwide, is Bevan’s most central and frequent case; the show’s attention to these very identity issues, alongside its famously stylish, midcentury design features, makes it an apt choice. Alongside this attention to nostalgia via design, Bevan also seeks to highlight the labor of production design itself, drawing upon ethnographically influenced methods of media production studies to examine the practices of television design professionals. Here, she challenges assumptions about television as born of the creative vision of individual writer/producers, demonstrating the influence of those media industry workers whose labor is typically made invisible. Through interviews, observations, and tours of sets and warehouses, Bevan details the specific choices and contexts that shape design labor. The analysis combines respectful attention to the craft of Elana Levine is professor of media, cinema, and digital studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. ehlevine@uwm.edu © 2019 Elana Levine DOI: 10.1080/ 17547075.2021.1973780