Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television by Annie Berke (review)

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, in the midst of a chat about future projects, a senior scholar asked me for recommendations of exemplary studies of individuals in media contexts. As a well-known scholar of the television industry, she wanted to turn her attention to the individuals who created and experienced cultures of production from the inside. Certainly, such studies exist—many of them influence my own work on aging stars—but none came to mind in the moment.1 Today, dear scholar, I’d like to suggest Annie Berke’s Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television as a sterling addition to that category. Berke’s book, published in January 2022 by the University of California Press, is notably the first in the new Feminist Media Histories book series edited by Shelley Stamp.2 Like the journal for which that series is named (also founded by Stamp), Their Own Best Creations seamlessly bridges the fields of media studies and feminist studies via a rich and lively exploration