Description
Book SynopsisThe Evil Twins of American Television examines evil-twin depictions in over fifty years of television, comparing male twins to female twins and male-writer depictions to female-writer depictions. Kristi Rowan Humphreys evaluates The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, among other television programs that use the twinning trope to explore themes of feminism and identity. Employing traits identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique as belonging to the evil side of her schizophrenic split theory, Humphreys analyzes the ways in which these alter ego characters embody the desire for a separate self and independence through loose inhibitions, career interests, political interests, intellectual prowess, and assertiveness. This book then compares female-written twin episodes to male-written twin episodes, finding that when evil twin episodes are written by women writers, the twins are presented less as oppositional binaries and more
Trade ReviewIn writing about the use of the twin trope in television plots of the 1960s, Humphreys (Baylor Univ.) illustrates how these series portrayed gender roles of the period against the background of new feminist identity influenced by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Humphreys contrasts portrayals of twin characters by analyzing specific scripts from 1960s series—The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and Doctor Who—and she also brings more recent series into the discussion (e.g., Friends, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Knight Rider). The author details the similarities of portrayals in which one twin was “good, happy, and content” and the other “bad or evil,” often with the same actor playing both twins. The final chapter discusses the sex of the various scriptwriters of these series, pointing out that twin characters in the few scripts written by women were more complex than those in scripts written by men.
Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.
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In Evil Twins of American Television: Feminist Alter Egos since 1960, Kristi Rowan Humphreys meticulously intertwines her personal childhood narrative with a more complex social framework that is built upon Betty Friedan's pivotal work The Feminine Mystique. Humphreys provides an intriguing examination of traditional and not-so-traditional gender roles of popular 1960s situation comedies. Her work is not just a must-read for the nostalgic fans of 1960s television but a blueprint for gender and popular culture scholars interested in tackling the past, present, and future of the evil twin in popular television and film. -- Deborah Phillips, Muskingum University
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter One: The Patty Duke Show
Chapter Two: Bewitched
Chapter Three: I Dream of Jeannie
Chapter Four: Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and Doctor Who
Chapter Five: Male Television Writers vs Female Television Writers
Conclusion
