TV’s New Landscape
What does a low-rated 2015 sitcom have to do with the state of television today? A lot, says Vincent Stephens in his new book.
What does a low-rated 2015 sitcom have to do with the state of television today? A lot, says Vincent Stephens in his book Broads, Sisters, Exes: Feminist Millennial Television (Wayne State University Press, 2025).
Stephens, an American studies scholar, was so fascinated with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—a genre-bending CW show from 2015–2019—he began examining it through an academic lens. Then he noticed a broader theme: Girls, Insecure, and Fleabag were among a wave of shows by and about millennial women.
“They’re telling stories about characters who we haven’t seen before, and they’re telling those stories in really stylistically refreshing ways,” says Stephens, BU’s assistant provost for faculty development and success and previously the associate dean for diversity and inclusion at Arts & Sciences.
“These shows pushed and challenged and said, ‘We need to let more people in. We need to tell broader stories.’ The television industry, in order to survive, had to embrace tastes that were previously considered marginal.”