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Essays exploring how labor unions, union organizing, and strikes and job actions have been portrayed in mainstream television.
Stories about unions and class struggle are notoriously under-represented in corporate media. Sometimes, though, storylines make it out of Hollywood writers' rooms and onto your television screen. The purpose of this collection is to explore how labor unions, union organizing, and strikes and job actions have been portrayed in mainstream, scripted episodic television shows. How do such episodes reflect their times, and how do they shape them? Fourteen writers from the worlds of academia and labor activism examine four decades of Hollywood creatives squeezing workplace power struggles into sitcoms, cartoons, sci-fi and more. From prestige dramas like the Sopranos and House of Cards to sci-fi classics like Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Battlestar Galactica and even SpongeBob SquarePants, The Simpsons, and professional wrestling, how do union plotlines reflect their times, and how do they shape them?
"'So Long, Dental Plan!" is the most important book on the representation of unions and working class people in popular culture in recent memory. Who knew that contemporary television has so frequently acknowledged the importance of, let alone the existence of, unions in America? A must-assign for any intro to television class and will work well for advanced students of popular culture, too." — Kathleen Newman, Carnegie Mellon University
"A timely text that reminds us that we can find joy in labor and organizing. From The Nanny to Everybody Hates Chris to For All Mankind, Shaun Richman's collection shows that writers can be passionate fans who are also critical and celebratory of an important and underrepresented part of popular television. How we tell stories of labor and unions is fundamental to how we understand them and "So Long Dental Plan!" is a vital addition to television studies." — Jamie Cohen, City University of New York Queens College
Shaun Richman is author of Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century and We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912–1953. He teaches labor history at State University of New York Empire State University.