Our So-Called Patreon Episode: Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson's Creek

Dolls of Our Lives

Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney

Society & Culture, History

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For this year's October Patreon, we chose a topic that can be truly scary: revisiting high school.

A lot of people have turned to sitcoms to see what their teenage years might be like. With her latest book, journalist Thea Glassman makes a case for the importance of teen dramas such as Dawson's Creek, Glee, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. In revisiting seven hit shows from the late 1990s/early 2000s, Glassman pulls from insider interviews and offers perspective on why we ought to care about these characters. Through seven essays, Glassman gives us plenty of moments for nostalgia, asking us to remember Carlton's dance moves and the angst of the drawn out Joey/Pacey/Dawson love triangle. Whether you watched these particular shows or not (Friday Night Lights, anyone?) you will appreciate Glassman's take on youth culture. We discuss the sitcoms we loved as well as what we're enjoying these days (including some content on the other end of the life spectrum, ahem, Golden Bachelor).

Original air date: October 27, 2023

Transcript

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0:15.9	Welcome everyone to Dolls of Our Lives. This is the podcast where we're reliving the American girls series book by book except here on Patreon where we're doing whatever you tell us or we decide
0:22.0	that we think lives in the world of the show.
0:24.0	I'm Mary.
0:25.0	I'm Allison.
0:26.4	Welcome to the O.C. beep.
0:29.5	I'm not going to suppose I know you don't like that, but I was thinking about iconic teen show quotes to in honor of our subject today we read a book called do you have the title in front of you?
0:39.7	I do I consistently called this Freaks Geeks and Dawson's Creek, but it is actually Freaks Gleeks and Dawson's Creek by Thea Glassman.
0:50.7	Yes, I also was getting that title messed up. I also read this on
0:54.2	Kindle so on my phone so that was kind of an experience. You're going to see me like
0:58.2	waving my phone around and it's not because I'm not paying attention but I do like that you can kind of highlight things on the Kindle so I was like highlighting stuff that made me laugh or seemed interesting.
1:08.0	So I mean overall this book kind of like we were saying before like you could do this as like
1:14.8	discrete chapters like it's a chapters on specific shows that she's
1:19.4	identified as significant for reasons that we can discuss but you can kind of take it in small doses. Like you could read the
1:26.0	Fresh Prince of Bell or chapter and walk away. But it, you know, it does work as an overall book I think.
1:32.8	If you had to summarize this, it's a kind of case study
1:36.7	collection of seven very prominent, I would say
1:40.8	primetime teen sitcoms, and so the title kind of hints at that.
1:45.6	The kind of case studies that she puts together for this book are on
1:50.2	The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, my so-called life, Dawson's Creek, Freaks and Geek, the O.C. Friday Night Lights, and Glee.
1:58.0	And she moves between each of those with not a ton of preamble and not a ton of conclusions at the end but it really just kind of sets up that all of these
2:07.5	shows matter for different reasons and they shifted the landscape of TV and you just dive right into each of them but I would say each
2:15.1	chapter does hang pretty separate from the other. I think that's true I almost wondered if she did that on
	...

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