It is an evocative image: the pleasant suburban cul-de-sac has been replaced by a street and driveways shaped like a hand with blood flowing from the homes.
Here is a description of the show from the Peacock website:
Peacock has shared the official trailer for John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, a six-episode horror anthology series from the mind of the legendary namesake director, writer, and producer, exploring true tales of terror in suburbia.
Each episode will delve into the monstrous evil that lurks beneath the surface of friendly suburbia through the lens of one frightful tale. In addition to firsthand accounts, the episodes will include cinematic reenactments, personal archives, and historic town press coverage.
Many cultural products in the last one hundred or so years have endeavored to tell the dark truths of suburbia. Behind the smiling nuclear family or the facade of the new suburban single-family home are less desirable practices and relationships. These stories suggest the suburbs put on a particular face but they are actually something else.
Placing horror in the middle of the suburbs builds on this. Not only might viewers or readers want to learn about the dirtier parts of suburbia; they might want scares and terror.
“Terror” is not typically a term used to describe the suburbs nor is the idea of “monstrous evil.” But that both are “lurking beneath the surface of friendly suburbia” continues an ongoing narrative that the suburbs are not what they seem.
A new generation of women is discovering the midcentury look, albeit for wildly varying reasons. Perhaps most divisively, there’s the “trad wife” movement, an online community of traditional women whose retro fashion reflects their religious, conservative and even sometimes far-right values. Then there are women who profess “vintage style, not vintage values,” combining hourglass silhouettes with a progressive worldview. And then there are those women and designers who just happen to appreciate the bygone charm of a swirly skirt…
The contemporary interpretations of 1950s fashion run the gamut from a sprinkle of yesteryear—winged eyeliner, a Grace Kelly headscarf, cat-eye sunglasses—to full-on June Cleaver dress-up. Fans of the look share makeup tutorials and life philosophies on TikTok. On
Pinterest, the somewhat disturbing tag “Stepford wife” includes images of Nicole Kidman in the spooky 2004 remake alongside black-and-white photos of women vacuuming. On Etsy, a gateway to the style, vintage hounds source period pieces, as well as replicas from purveyors like “Hearts and Found” and “Son de Flor.”
The 1950s housewife look isn’t limited to online rabbit roles and vintage shops. It’s also bleeding into high-end runway fashion. Prada has long made ladylike pieces like full skirts, capri pants and fitted sweaters cornerstones of its line, and Dior’s fall 2023 collection played up the house’s heritage of hourglass shapes.
Missing from this discussion is any explicit mention of the suburbs. The suburban lifestyle of the 1950s was a particular one. Even as it suggested middle-class success, it was not home to all nor offered equality. The country was relatively prosperous. The examples of fashion images from the era hint at the suburbs, whether it is Leave it to Beaver or I Love Lucy (two shows part of a study I published on TV shows set in the suburbs) or The Stepford Wives or Barbie (who has a dreamhouse).
The suburbs have an ongoing legacy that plays out in all sorts of contemporary issues and conversations. That it should be part of fashion should not be a surprise, even if it may not appear obvious to start.
Mattie Parker, the mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, says a focus on crime, homelessness, parks and reliable infrastructure has positioned the city of 950,000 as an attractive alternative to Chicago, San Francisco and New York, which have struggled with perceptions of deteriorating safety in the aftermath of Covid-19.
The 39-year-old Republican, broadly considered to be a moderate in deep-red Texas, says that Fort Worth’s pitch to lure businesses highlights its roots (the city’s slogan is “Where the West Begins”) and small-town vibes, even if its stockyards are now more of a tourist draw than a genuine agricultural enterprise. The nostalgia for cattle ranching and cowboys generated by the hit television series Yellowstone and 1923 — created by Taylor Sheridan, who partly grew up in Fort Worth — are only adding to its allure.
“Fort Worth continues to be an incredibly unique city that is very proud of our Western heritage,” Parker said in an interview at City Hall, where a display case held shovels from groundbreaking ceremonies over the years. “And the timing couldn’t be better because of this fanfare and frenzy over Yellowstone and 1923.”
In Fort Worth, it’s common to see cowboy hats and boots paired with a tailored suit. Unlike nearby Dallas, which mostly feels like any other major metropolis, Fort Worth embraces its sense of place. There’s plenty of live country music, two-step dancing and Tex-Mex cuisine.
This is a long list of reasons for growth. Additionally, Fort Worth is part of the growing Sun Belt.
I would be very interested in seeing some data regarding the connection between a popular television universe and population growth in a particular city. Are these shows also causing population growth in Montana? It makes sense for a local leader to make the connection to a show people like as it is always helpful to have good press.
The Bewitched update would focus on Tabitha Stevens, the 13-year-old daughter of witch Samantha and human Darrin. She juggles two lives attending middle school while also being secretly enrolled in a magical academy run by her grandmother, Endora — D’Ambrosia describes the premise as “Hannah Montana meets Harry Potter.”
Will the new Bewitched also include any of suburbia or will it primarily focus on schools? Interestingly, the two comparison TV shows mentioned above also include suburban settings. Hannah Montana was primarily set in Malibu, California while Harry Potter included scenes in and around the Dursley’s house on Privet Drive.
If the new version does include the suburbs, there is an opportunity for the suburbia depicted to look quite different than that of the 1960s. The suburbia often depicted on television then often portrayed nuclear family life in single-family homes on quiet streets. The suburbs today are more complex, diverse, and varied. There is an opportunity here to depict not only updated characters and storylines but also settings.
The top six cities on the list are Midwest cities (including Buffalo on the western edge of New York). In this list, the first city in the West is San Jose at #7, the first city in the South is Macon, Georgia at #13, and the first Northeast city is Danbury, Connecticut at #14.
I do not know if these differences are statistically significant but it is interesting to consider why Midwest metropolitan areas might lean toward AM radio. A few possibilities:
-A long history of important AM stations.
-Is the Midwest less dense compared to some other parts of the country or Midwest people do further drives and AM’s longer signal keeps them connected?
-Radio stations on FM or AM in different areas provide different content. Is this linked to more or less interest in music, news, sports, talk, or other content?
-Are there are other lifestyle markers of Midwesterners that are somehow linked to AM radio?
Of the top 20 radio markets in the country, I think only the Washington, D.C. area is not on this list with at least 20% of listeners tuning into AM radio. What are people in DC listening to?
Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.
“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” Blank remembers noticing the difference from the moment AT&T took the reins at Time Warner; overnight, she said, HBO’s sound went from best-in-class to worst. During the last season of Game of Thrones, she said, “we had to beg [AT&T] to keep our old spec every single time we delivered an episode.” (Because AT&T spun off HBO’s parent company in 2022, a spokesperson for AT&T said they weren’t able to comment on the matter.)
Netflix still uses a dialogue-anchor spec, she said, which is why shows on Netflix sound (to her) noticeably crisper and clearer: “If you watch a Netflix show now and then immediately you turn on an HBO show, you’re gonna have to raise your volume.” Amazon Prime Video’s spec, meanwhile, “is pretty gnarly.” But what really galls her about Amazon is its new “dialogue boost” function, which viewers can select to “increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” In other words, she said, it purports to fix a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Instead, she suggested, “why don’t you just air it the way we mixed it?”
This change in how television audio works contributes to needing subtitles to understand what is being said.
I wonder if the bigger question is whether this significantly changes how people consume and are affected by television. If we are reading more dialogue and descriptions, does this focus our attention on certain aspects of shows and not others? Could this be good for reading overall? Does it limit the ability of viewers to multitask if they need to keep up with the words on the screen? Do subtitles help engage the attention of viewers? Do I understand new things I did notice before in the world with fewer subtitles? Does a story or scene stick with me longer because I was reading the dialogue?
Does this also mean that as Americans have been able to buy bigger and bigger TVs for cheaper prices, they are getting a worse audio experience?
And if the “Succession” audience is smaller, the money is, pointedly, bigger. Rewatched in 2023, the idea of luxury in “Dallas” looks quaint, almost dowdy. The aesthetic is Texan country club; the Ewing homestead, the size of a decent suburban McMansion, is a toolshed next to the Manhattan aeries, Hamptons manors and Italian villas that the Roys flitter among.
Some of this is a matter of modern premium-cable budgets vs. the grind of old-school network-TV production, of course. But it also reflects the changed, distorting nature of modern riches. In 1980, American wealth inequality was still near its postwar lows. Since then, the wealth of the top .01 percent has grown at a rate roughly five times as much as that of the population overall. Today, the very rich are very, very, very richer.
The holdings of Waystar Royco — Hollywood studios, cruise lines, newspapers, amusement parks, a king-making right-wing news channel — make Ewing Oil look like a franchise gas station. We know only vaguely how Logan Roy built his empire, but it was enabled partly by the media-consolidation and antitrust deregulation, beginning in the “Dallas”/Reagan era, that allowed his real-life analogues like Rupert Murdoch to make their own piles.
On the other hand, mansions are even bigger, more extravagant, and can be of better build quality. Having multiple such dwellings extends far beyond the McMansion owner in the suburbs.
Another question: do the super wealthy make use of all that square footage and the features or are these part of a real estate investment? The McMansion owner is also hoping to get a return on their investment but the amount of money involved with extra-large properties is at another level.
Courtesy of Architectural Digest, see more about some of Succession’s dwellings here.
The Brady Bunch only lasted five seasons, but its cultural footprint has endured. The ABC comedy — which followed a blended family of eight, their live-in maid and, at certain points, a dog — ran from 1969 through 1974 before inspiring TV movies, a satirical feature remake (and sequel) and countless pilgrimages to 11222 Dilling Street. It has been called the second most-photographed home in America, trailing only the White House, though there is little evidence to back up such claims.
I am sure someone could try to quantify this. Scan through all of the pictures on the Internet including photo upload sites? Perhaps measure the number of visitors each year to different houses and estimate how many pictures they might take?
A better question to ask might be this particular house is so popular for pictures. It is tied to a popular TV show, it is accessible to the public who can see the home from the street, it is located within the second largest metropolitan area in the United States, and there are a lot of tourists in the area. Still, it is a home built in 1959 that looks rather unremarkable from the outside. This might be a story about (1) the power of TV in American culture and (2) the importance of TV in this particular era of suburbia and Baby Boomers.
I wonder if any other TV shows would be in a top 10 of photographed homes in the United States.
That, perhaps, is the point that all those critics who dismissed the Kings League have missed. It may well be a circus. But Piqué might respond that there is nothing wrong with being a circus. Circuses are popular. They draw a crowd, they hold the gaze, because nobody is ever quite sure what is coming next.
While the circus itself has passed peak popularity in the United States, the argument above appears to have some merit: the average resident of society today is presented with a vast array of circuses. Some are free, some are not. They come through various media forms. They all promise to try to entertain or engross you. Novelty and spectacle are key. The speed at which it all happens is new as is the number of options.
What does this do to the potential viewers? Does it enhance their lives in the long run? Do people want their lives dominated by circuses or would they rather invest in longer-term pursuits, relationships, and community life?
The example above presents a modified form of soccer/football with its own twists. Fans of the regular game plus others interested in a fast-moving and entertaining time can tune in or attend. How long does this last?
Imagine an even-simpler version of the original late-’80s “SimCity” video game: a crude digital map dotted with a handful of pixelated single-family houses. But try to click on the screen — like, say, on the icon of a bulldozer or a factory, or just anything — so you can start laying out commercial blocks and parks and creating your pretend metropolis, which is the objective of most city-building sims, and you’ll be met with a jarring sound effect and a pop-up message: “ERROR. CAN’T BUILD IN NIMBYVILLE.”
Below that is one of many snarky excuses: “Housing is a human right! Just why does it have to be here?”
Such are the Sisyphean pleasures of “Sim Nimby,” a new desktop city-building game where more clicks just lead to more error messages, and nothing ever gets built. The only winners in Nimbyville are the ones programmed to prevail: Not In My Backyard neighbors, or NIMBYs, who block new housing developments at every turn…
So Nass and Weeks hunkered down in a Park Slope bar one evening and hashed out the litany of anti-development NIMBY-isms — more than 50 in total — that the game spits back at prospective builders as a jazzy 8-bit music theme plays. There’s some comic hyperbole at the expense of preservationists (“We can’t tear down that historic brownstone. It’s where Gene Quintano wrote ‘Police Academy 3: Back in Training’”) and some dad-joke-grade gags (“The only thing urban I want to see here is Keith Urban”). Other one-liners — “This is a NICE neighborhood,” “Will someone please think of the property values?” and “Affordable housing? What, you gonna build them an affordable country club too?” — are perhaps less fanciful to housing advocates.
How realistic should city building games be? I have wondered this for years starting with playing Simcity in the late 1980s. How much does the game reflect actual city planing practices and urban outcomes versus presenting a glamorized experience where it is easy to plop in properties, development happens easily, and issues are quickly addressed (as long as the player has enough money and a little bit of sense). Overall, it is pretty easy to build a thriving city.
This version might be too realistic. Players of video games want some level of difficulty or obstacles to overcome but not ever-present problems that make it difficult to do anything. Random disaster? Okay, a player can deal with that. A never-ending chorus of NIMBY concerns? It is too much to handle. The concerns of residents in Simcity are usually addressable; for example, move the residence further from industry, quickly put a park nearby to quiet the criticism, or find another way to improve the quality of life.
I do not know if the player gets some extreme options to address the NIMBY concerns. Have them annex themselves into their own community and build in a neighboring community? Remove all of the residences via eminent domain? Wage a political battle against them? If this is a Simcity where the residents do not want anything new, then growth is not possible and that does not work even in video games.
Legally Sociable 