ABSTRACT
In this paper, I discuss audience understandings of Tina Fey's 30 Rock, Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation, Mindy Kaling's The Mindy Project, and Lena Dunham's Girls. While these women and their shows have been written about and analyzed in the popular press and to a lesser extent in scholarly circles, there is a notable absence of research exploring how audiences understand these shows. Through focus group interviews, I explore audience interpretations of these shows that engage—in some form—with feminist discourses and ideas, paying particular attention to how audience members think these women showrunners impact these shows, and how they see feminism playing a role (or not) in these shows. I argue that while these audience members enjoyed the shows, ambivalence permeated their understanding of and relationship to the shows, not only in their perceptions of the shows as feminist, but also resulting from their interpretation of the humor and gender dynamics of the shows. Ultimately, the audience members' conflicted interpretations of the shows reflect larger trends in the post-feminist media environment. Further, their readings of the shows point to the potential limits of feminist humor for post-feminist audience members.
