Loveday Writing

I’ve always loved analysing fiction, whether it be in the form of books, TV shows or movies, and this love goes right back to my high school days. However, I’ve only written a few TV show analysis pieces, the first one dates back to 2013, Marital and Gender Roles in The Brady Bunch and House Husbands.

In Marital and Gender Roles in The Brady Bunch and House Husbands, I compared the marital and gender roles presented in The Brady Bunch, specifically the episode “The Grass is Always Greener” where Mike and Carol switch their weekend roles with their children (Mike cooked with the girls and Carol practiced baseball with the boys), with an episode in the second season of House Husbands where Abi, a full-time hospital doctor, becomes the stay-at-home parent, while her husband, Mark, returns to full-time work at a marketing company. During the episode, Abi, who struggles with being the stay-at-home parent for the first time in her life, feels the need to compete with another school mother, Dimity, who is shown to be a dedicated and ideal housewife.

I chose to compare these two episodes of these two shows to explore how far marital and gender roles have evolved in the time between them. “The Grass is Always Greener” aired on 13 March 1970 and the episode of House Husbands I compared it with aired on 9 June 2013, that’s 43 years between each episode.

I felt compelled to write this piece as these two episodes stuck out to me, especially the House Husbands episode, where the marital and gender roles depicted in The Brady Bunch were simultaneously regarded as outdated yet still expected. This is shown when Dimity is revealed to be treated as a second class citizen and neglected by her husband, who Abi encourages her to leave, which leads to Dimity staying with her. While Mark is shown to enjoy Dimity’s housewife tendencies, he later admits to Abi that he doesn’t expect her to be a housewife.

Another TV show analysis piece I wrote, Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology, highlighted a YouTube playlist of the same name that was created by Professor Caleb Lack, a psychology professor at the University of Central Oklahoma. Lack describes the playlist as a “series of short documentaries, each around 10-15 minutes long, that examine the various types of mental disorders displayed by characters in popular media.” All of the documentaries were created by his undergraduate students for an assessment task.

I wrote this analysis piece as I discovered the playlist about a decade ago and fell in love with it, as it was a unique way to analyse characters in TV shows, books and movies. However, the playlist also shows how talented the writers who created these characters are and how their characters’ relatability is a big factor in why people fall in love with them and the shows, movies, or books that they exist within.

My most recent TV show analysis piece was actually a series, Exploration of the afterlife on television: Upload vs The Good Place. It was originally supposed to be a one-off piece, however due to its length and the complexity of the topic I was exploring, I decided to break it up into three parts: The first part focused on how the concept of the afterlife is explored on Upload, the second part focused on how the concept of the afterlife is explored on The Good Place, and the final part focused on the benefits and shortfalls on the types of afterlives both shows created and explored.

I wrote this series as I found that Upload’s digital, socioeconomical, and reincarnation-based afterlife and The Good Place’s moral, philosophical, and Heaven and Hell-based afterlife were unique and hadn’t been explored or portrayed on television before, and I wanted to do a deep dive into both shows and their respective concepts of the afterlife.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself unemployed for six months and during that time, I found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole, discovering many channels dedicated to film and TV show analysis. One channel in particular I feel a lot of love for is The Take, and in the future, I plan on taking inspiration from them.

Stay tuned for more TV show analysis pieces in the future.

Behind the Reviews – Edition #34 will be released next week and will focus on my Charmed analysis pieces.