From Carnival to Media Convergence: Professional Wrestling and the Making of an American Television Genre

Pro-wrestling is an inherently American television genre: The stories that wrestling programmes tell frequently hearken back to the American Dream of upward mobility; the characters featured—from the American patriots and evil foreigners of the 1990s to today’s media influencers and right-wing conspiracy theorists—mirror the American zeitgeist; and the steady global expansion of the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) media empire, personified through its chairman Vince McMahon, is a prime example of American capitalism. In addition to their ‘Americanness,’ wrestling programmes exemplify contemporary post-cinematic forms of entertainment: they are comprised of aesthetic and narrative elements from different types of media (e.g., literature, film, theatre, video games), tell serialised transmedia stories, and are distributed globally via a multitude of digital streaming platforms. Over the course of this seminar, we will investigate the history, the narration, the aesthetics, the reception, and the distribution of American television wrestling. While we will primarily examine pro-wrestling in the context of media convergence, our investigation will also consider current academic debates on genre, gender, and pandemic media. This seminar will provide students with a deeper understanding of post-cinematic forms of entertainment and help them gain more insight into the narrative setup, cultural impact, and popular appeal of an understudied TV genre that attracts millions of international viewers on a weekly basis.