TV's View of Women The nature of the relationship bet

The nature of the relationship between women and the mass media has been considered in recent years by sociologists and psychologists as well as media critics, in part based on a concern that the way women are portrayed in the media has a deleterious effect on the way women are viewed in society at large. Women's roles in society have been changing through the determined efforts of feminists and sympathetic political groups over the past two decades, and some of these changes are clearly reflected on television, in film, and in other media portrayals. At the same time, it is evident that progress in changing media portrayals is behind the curve as far as the degree of equality that should be depicted, the roles given to women in the media, and the roles women play behind the scenes in the media as well. When it first went on the air in the 1970s, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was considered a breakthrough because it presented a young woman in the working world rather than as a wife and mother. A more recent example of a working woman in a television comedy is found on Murphy Brown. A comparison of the two shows will be performed using two methodologies, one considering the shows as television shows and analyzing how they are produced and what need they seem to fulfill for a television network, and the other considering the nature of their treatment of women and of other social issues and considering the positive and negative images that infuse each of the shows.

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nged a television tradition which relegated women to the roles of wives, victims, or courtesans. The single woman had been featured before, as in That Girl, but in that series the main character was watched over by her father and her fiancT. Mary Richards was in her 30s, an age at which she would be expected to be married in the traditional scheme, and yet she was embarking on a new life (Dow, "Hegemony" 263). One approach to an examination of this show is to consider its structure and the technical details of how the show operates as a situation comedy. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the early users of the three-camera technique pioneered by I Love Lucy, an approach in which the program is filmed on a soundstage before a live audience. This places some constraints on the nature of the stories told--it precludes real exteriors, for instance, and also limits the number of sets that can be used in any given episode because of the difficulty in moving them around during filming. The Mary Tyler Moore Show centered primarily on two sets--Mary's apartment, and the newsroom where she worked. The latter included her boss's office, while the apartment was a one-room affair, with an off-screen bedroom. The split between home

Category: Psychology - T