Broads, Sisters, Exes: Feminist Millennial Television

Millennial feminists have shaped the trajectory of television. In this book, author Vincent L. Stephens considers nine pivotal series that ran between 2012 and 2020: Girls, Orange Is the New Black, Broad City, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Fleabag, Insecure, Shrill, and I May Destroy You. Across these series, women-led creative teams translated techniques from indie films, inverted gendered television tropes, and engaged in innovative temporal storytelling. These series, often including showrunners who also act, write, and direct, are born of a new ecology of television driven by the rise of streaming and a demand for more inclusive narratives, and their formal and thematic innovations have transformed the television we see today. Through elegant prose deeply rooted in an intersectional feminist perspective, Stephens expands the aesthetic and narrative grammars of contemporary television.