Distorting Perception to Influence Reception: the Troubling Impact of TV Series Representations on US Politics and Society

While troubled representation has been studied from the standpoint of its impact, for instance its potential for change, troubled reception has been comparatively neglected. One notable exception, Stuart Hall’s work on encoding/decoding, may now be dated, due to the appearance of new communication strategies that seek to influence reception from within. As I explain through three case studies (Shooting the Warwicks, Rifkin, 2015; The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu, 2017-; House of Cards, Netflix, 2013-18), the current mode of influence arises from new types of interference between stable expression and unstable reception. I then argue that this troubling trend comes from the palimpsestic overlapping of three culturally dominant notions: surveillance, reality TV (or televised reality), and intermediality. Finally, I offer the tentative conclusion that the reception of some shows or films currently seems to be under some form of control, but neither because the production frames the reception, nor because viewers are subservient to some ideology or hegemony. The cause is that guidelines on how to receive the show are intermedially and therefore invisibly scattered over different platforms.