We’re all television stars in a pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article responds to James Bennett and Su Holmes’s essay ‘The “Place” of Television in Celebrity Studies’ from the inaugural issue of Celebrity Studies, reflecting on developments in the field over the past ten years, especially the expansion of social media, its intersection with the authentic ordinariness expected of the television celebrity, and 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic. If domesticity and ordinariness are hallmarks of the television star (Mann 1992), a pandemic makes us all television stars. As film stars, television stars, ‘digital stars,’ and ordinary people all remained confined to domestic spaces in 2020, it seems prudent to theorise celebrity in this moment just as Bennett and Holmes suggested in 2010: television fame has much to tell us about fame in a pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• television celebrity
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice Leppert

Alice Leppert is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA. Her research focuses on the historical intersections of cultural politics and feminised film and television genres. She recently published TV Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcoms with Rutgers University Press (2019).