Organizing in popular culture: Teen drama television and Jane Mcalevey

Organizing is a term that has had a widespread use in both social media, where calls to organize are frequent and sometimes vague, and in real union and community organizing spaces where organizing has built serious threats to power and delivered major wins for workers. The word is less used in popular culture television and film, yet villains who are bad bosses, evil real estate developers, or power hungry corporate CEOs are regulars on screen, and sometimes, briefly, protagonists do seek a larger community of their neighbors, peers, or coworkers in order to fight against workplace injustices, gentrification, and corporate greed, etc. My project combines left cultural studies debates about the political possibilities in popular culture and a deep dive of scholarly ideas about a genre that I want to call attention to: teen drama television. My research finds that the tropes and trends in teen drama television, particularly its emphasis on place and history in a small town or a town made small, provide a rich basis to tell stories about collective power. I argue that good representation of organizing actually starts elsewhere with the real relationships, tensions, and self-interest of the people in a specific place and time. I argue for a framework for analyzing the political possibilities within popular culture that draws from labor union organizer and theorist, Jane McAlevey, and focuses on how problems are solved on screen and by who. To develop this framework, I assess the dominant way that problems are solved in television and film today, which I call the Meddling Kids model, where a small found family crew solves problems by exercising extraordinary talent and grit to thwart threats to their town, while the rest of the town seems asleep at the wheel. In contrast to this model, I study the rare appearance of an organizing narrative in popular culture where main characters go beyond their close circle to see their power in tandem with their neighbors, peers, and coworkers. I argue that when organizing happens even briefly on screen, it undermines the dominant way that problems are solved in teen drama television and in television and film more broadly.