Lexington Books
Pages: 138
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-8329-9 • Hardback • August 2019 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-4985-8331-2 • Paperback • March 2022 • $39.99 • (£31.00)
978-1-4985-8330-5 • eBook • August 2019 • $38.00 • (£29.00)
Kristi Rowan Humphreys is lecturer in the Department of English at Baylor University.
Introduction
Chapter One: The Patty Duke Show
Chapter Two: Bewitched
Chapter Three: I Dream of Jeannie
Chapter Four: Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and Doctor Who
Chapter Five: Male Television Writers vs Female Television Writers
Conclusion
In writing about the use of the twin trope in television plots of the 1960s, Humphreys (Baylor Univ.) illustrates how these series portrayed gender roles of the period against the background of new feminist identity influenced by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Humphreys contrasts portrayals of twin characters by analyzing specific scripts from 1960s series—The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and Doctor Who—and she also brings more recent series into the discussion (e.g., Friends, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Knight Rider). The author details the similarities of portrayals in which one twin was “good, happy, and content” and the other “bad or evil,” often with the same actor playing both twins. The final chapter discusses the sex of the various scriptwriters of these series, pointing out that twin characters in the few scripts written by women were more complex than those in scripts written by men.
Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.
— Choice
In Evil Twins of American Television: Feminist Alter Egos since 1960, Kristi Rowan Humphreys meticulously intertwines her personal childhood narrative with a more complex social framework that is built upon Betty Friedan's pivotal work The Feminine Mystique. Humphreys provides an intriguing examination of traditional and not-so-traditional gender roles of popular 1960s situation comedies. Her work is not just a must-read for the nostalgic fans of 1960s television but a blueprint for gender and popular culture scholars interested in tackling the past, present, and future of the evil twin in popular television and film.
— Deborah Phillips, Muskingum University