Saint Mary’s Professor Examines Important Connections in TV

Dr. Byers is a leading researcher in popular culture.

As a child, Michele Byers was not allowed to watch much TV; usually it was only the occasional episode of Sesame Street or The Friendly Giant.  Today Dr. Byers is a leading researcher in television culture and the production of identity in series such as My So-Called Life, Beverly Hills, 90210, Sex and the City, Degrassi, Dexter and CSI.

The route to becoming an arbiter of pop culture began when Byers wrote her doctoral thesis: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the insurgence of television as a performance text. “That was in 1998,” she says, “at a time when no one was writing about Buffy."

Since then, the Buffy series has become the show most written about by academics---a distinction evidenced in several Buffy bibliographies---and Dr. Byers has channeled her energies teaching the language of media as a Professor in Saint Mary’s Department of Sociology and Criminology.

“So much of the way we understand the world is through TV,” says Byers, who in a recent publication compares Trailer Park Boys to Going Down the Road, Canada’s iconic leaving home narrative about a couple of poor Cape Breton boys who move to Ontario for a better life. “The Trailer Park Boys are not about to go down the road,” she explains. “It’s a radical notion for Nova Scotia, but the boys love their trailer park and they want to stay there. They may not have the potential for upward mobility, but they do have community and a place where they can be happy. “

Dr. Byers says that only a decade ago it seemed “almost silly” to research and write scholarly papers about television shows like Buffy and Trailer Park Boys.  “Now TV has come up in the world, with channels like HBO producing shows that are as complicated as most movies. “

As a researcher, Byers is thrilled with what she describes as a big blank canvas in the field of TV research. “The lack of attention paid to Canadian TV makes it a relatively untapped source for study,” she says. All of her grants so far have been related to Canadian TV, including a recent SSHRC Research Grant in the amount of $48,600 to gain a better understanding of the ways in which Canadian comedies such as Trailer Park Boys, Little Mosque and Being Erica produce "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful categories of Canadian identity in terms of both national and regional narratives.

At present, Dr. Byers is also working with Dr. Jen VanderBurgh, a colleague in the English Department, on a number of projects related to Canadian TV archives. “We could form our own institute,” she laughs. “Canadian television has a very small pool of researchers and there are about as many of us here at Saint Mary’s as there are anywhere else.”

In teaching the language of popular culture, Byers wants her students to be critical readers of media culture and to understand it as another set of tools for understanding the world they inhabit. “I want them to take ownership of the media they enjoy,” she says, “and to feel okay about enjoying it at the same time that they're critically appraising it.  I want them to see that you can be critical without destroying the pleasures of spectatorship.”

Michele Byers has had ample practice bridging the divide between fan and critical fan. “Even when part of me is completely immersed in a TV show, I can step out and take it apart.” She is currently immersed in reality series Jersey Shore, the Food Network, and the medieval fantasy, Game of Thrones. “And Season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm has just started,” she says. “There’s always something new on TV.”  

And, by the way, there is no rigid TV-viewing policy for Michele Byers’s two-year old daughter and five-year old son; “We don’t have any hard and fast rules,” she says, “it’s all about what’s within reason and appropriate for each particular child.”

To see Dr. Byers' website click here.

This page last modified Tuesday, 02-Aug-2011 08:43:56 ADT