In June 2001, the Screen Actors Guild released the African American Television Report, a study commissioned by SAG that provided an analysis of both the quantity and quality of African American representation on network television. Conducted over a five-week period in the fall of 1999, the study was authored by Darnell Hunt, a sociology professor and director of the UCLA Center for African American studies.

Hunt concluded that African American characters on television are largely "ghettoized" by three contributing factors: network placement (most African American-centered shows were limited to UPN and WB), time slot (shows featuring all-black casts aired on Monday and Friday nights only), and show type (blacks were more likely than any other racial group to appear in sitcoms).

The study's findings were widely published, and the resulting public criticism prompted the major networks to promise reform. So now, a year later, are those public discussions and corporate adjustments reflected in the networks' fall offerings? Comparing some of the conclusions of the SAG study with the fall lineup, it seems that not much has changed.

African American Television Report: African Americans are over-represented in prime time and are concentrated in sitcoms.

According to the study, while African Americans comprise about 13 percent of the U.S. population, black characters accounted for nearly 16 percent of the characters on network shows during prime time in 1999. This would, at first glance, seem to be a good thing. But in this case, quantity definitely does not equal quality.

"We compared the distribution of characters with the time they had onscreen and we saw these really troubling patterns with how African American characters were being used," Hunt said in an interview with PopPolitics.

"Most African American characters with the highest screen time were the ones who appeared in African American-oriented situation comedies, those same six or seven shows that accounted for almost half of all African American characters on TV, and happened to be on two networks, primarily UPN and WB, and on two nights a week, Monday and Friday. If you get rid of those two nights a week, then you cut away half of the characters and the lion's share of the characters who have meaningful roles. That's what we meant by ghettoization," Hunt said.

Looking at the fall network schedule, few adjustments have been made. African American characters are still highly concentrated in sitcoms, and the shows in which they appear are still limited to certain nights and networks, although the configurations have changed, as we'll see below.

AATR: African Americans are underrepresented on FOX and NBC.

Hunt and his research team noted that "less than 10 percent of characters appearing on FOX and about 11 percent of those on NBC were African American," and most of these characters weren't central to the programs' narratives.

A year later, NBC and FOX are doing slightly better when it comes to giving black characters more substantial roles. NBC's programming is still overwhelmingly white, but at least one of the network's fall sitcoms, Hidden Hills, will feature a black couple in its group of suburban characters. (Only the white couple, however, is pictured on the NBC site.)

FOX has kept the critical and popular favorite The Bernie Mac Show as part of its Wednesday night lineup and will add Cedric the Entertainer Presents..., a comedy variety show starring one of the Original Kings of Comedy, in the half-hour directly following Bernie Mac. It is also slated to introduce Wanda At Large, a midseason comedy about an African American TV morning news show correspondent. 

ABC appears to be in stasis, although My Wife and Kids, starring Damon Wayans, is returning. CBS is introducing Robbery Homicide Division, which includes two African American detectives among its main characters, and the heavily advertised new crime drama Hack, which features an African American detective, Marcellus Washington (Andre Braugher), who helps a white ex-cop, Mike Olshansky (David Morse), with his vigilante crimefighting. 

While Braugher's role will allow him a good deal of screen time, the role of a black sidekick is still all too familiar. As BlackVoices.com columnist Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn observed in a recent column, "[M]ost African-Americans can be found on the sidelines, either as helpmate to the white star ... or co-starring in an ensemble cast."

CBS's reality shows, meanwhile, have generally included token black contestants -- one black male, one black female on both Survivor and Big Brother. The new Survivor: Thailand is nothing if not consistent.

The WB (formerly one of the networks on which African American-oriented sitcoms were concentrated) is doing worse. The network will no longer broadcast The Hughleys, a sitcom featuring an all-black cast. In fact, it won't offer any programs featuring African American characters in lead roles, even though WB was once known for introducing programs like The Steve Harvey Show and The Jamie Foxx Show. 

Aside from ER repeats, the rest of WB's lineup -- from original dramatic series like Smallville and Gilmore Girls to syndicated broadcasts of familiar shows like Friends and The West Wing -- adds little diversity. 

AATR: Prime time scheduling remains largely segregated.

The SAG report noted that shows airing on Monday and Friday nights "accounted for more than half of all African American characters appearing in prime time."

The fall network schedule indicates that things have largely remained the same. UPN, for example, is airing all of its African American-oriented sitcoms sitcoms (The Parkers, One on One, Girlfriends and Half and Half) in a two-hour block on Monday nights. Those shows account for half of the network's primetime offerings (UPN only needs eight shows to fill three nights; Thursday is devoted to WWE Smackdown and Friday is movie night).

But is this concentration ideal for viewers? Not quite, according to Hunt.

"In a way, this [ghettoization] is creating this segregated television audience that works against this notion of living in an integrated society where everyone's sort of living together with one another and understanding and appreciating the diversity of what we have here," Hunt said.

"Instead, there's this assumption made by programmers and people who are putting these shows together that somehow we have to niche market to an individual group, and we can't come together and enjoy the same things," he added.

And in a move that's drawn criticism from viewers and from the shows' stars, ABC and FOX have placed their African American family sitcoms, My Wife and Kids and The Bernie Mac Show, respectively, in direct competition with each other -- at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. This programming decision forces viewers to choose between two critically acclaimed black sitcoms, or at least requires them to remember to set their VCR.

Getting out of the TV ghetto

In the SAG study, Hunt describes two types of programming that are relevant to this discussion: "resourceful" programming -- shows that manage to use a diverse cast and to do well; and "missed opportunity" -- shows that didn't even try to diversify.

"There are a lot of shows on TV that do well, are in the top 10, and have diverse casts, and we highlight those in our report," Hunt said. "The Practice was an example of a show that was highly rated in 1999 and had a very diverse cast and had the African American characters in important, lead roles in many episodes, where they were the hero or heroine of the episode and got a lot of screen time and the show did extremely well in the ratings."

"Lots of shows could do that, but they don't even try," Hunt continued. "Or they have this unspoken rule-of-thumb that says 'the more people of color we put on the show, the less marketable that show will be to the broader (i.e. white) audience, which I think is faulty logic, and there are plenty of counter-examples to disprove the assumption."

Indeed, shows like The Practice beg the question of why other dramas and comedies have not integrated African American characters into their own narratives. It's hard to understand why, for example, Joey and Chandler couldn't have at least one close black Friend as a series regular; or why, in cosmopolitan New York City, the ladies of Sex and the City rarely date African American men and have no African American girlfriends or coworkers; or why we don't see more complex African American characters on TV -- characters like Six Feet Under's Keith, a black, gay cop with some anger management issues, whose portrayal is one of the main reasons viewers tune into the show, or any one of several characters from The Wire.

Hunt notes that it requires more than just getting African American actors on screen at any given moment -- though that does matter. And it requires more than "creating shows for black people" and then relegating those shows to secondary networks. Achieving programming diversity is about creating characters and scenarios in which black characters are portrayed as more than the villain/gangsta or comic sidekick/helper or incidental neighbor. In other words, it's about creating representations that reflect, in some meaningful way, the culture at large.

Attention, Single Mamas: George W. Bush has a proposal for you: a marriage proposal. That's right, he wants you to get married. You're particularly encouraged to don a bridal veil if you're on welfare and/or parenting as part of an unmarried couple. If you act now, you might even be able to get hitched before Congress makes its decisions about Bush's plan to fund marriage initiative and abstinence-only education programs with welfare dollars. The Administration is proposing the allocation of $400 million for marriage initiatives ($300 million at the federal level, with an additional $100 million dollar bonus for states that get the most women married or have 'successful' marriage initiatives), and $135 million for abstinence education, to be drawn from welfare funds.

These marriage initiatives are part of Bush's proposal for the reauthorization of the nation's welfare laws. In late February, Bush unveiled his welfare plan during a speech at a Catholic church in Southeast Washington. In his speech, Bush stated that the welfare policy should focus on the creation and maintenance of stable families, announcing that his "administration will give unprecedented support to strengthening marriage." As Washington Post staff writer Amy Goldstein reported, the White House plans to require states to include "explicit descriptions of their family-formation and healthy-marriage efforts" in the welfare plans they submit to the federal government. The House passed Bush's welfare legislation (HR 4737) in May, and the Senate is working on its welfare reform bill now, with hopes to have its work finished in July.

The proposal for welfare reauthorization put forth by the Bush Administration builds upon the "success" of the 1996 reforms. Bush's proposal calls for tougher work standards, which would require welfare recipients to work 40 hours per week (supposedly, in 1996, states had the option of allowing 20 hours of work and 10 hours of flexible activities, and states chose to enforce 30 hours of work instead, allowing two of those days to be used for narrowly-defined education and training activities), allocating $400 million for marriage promotion campaigns, and spending $135 million on abstinence education. Increased spending for childcare (for mothers and fathers who have to work those 40 hours), or for training or education for welfare recipients, aren't part of this proposal.

What's Happening with Welfare Now

In order to better understand Bush's proposals for welfare reauthorization, as well as their potential effects, it's a good idea to revisit the 1996 reforms that created the current welfare systems in place across the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA) in 1996. This new law replaced existing welfare programs with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which was enacted with the stipulation that Congress would have to reauthorize TANF by the end of September 2002. The TANF law defined primary objectives for welfare reform as "promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; preventing and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families." In this formulation, states were able to define who constituted a family, and what types of assistance different family units might receive (note that the language of the law does not require that parents be married, only that they share parenting responsibilities in the home). Immigrants (even those with children who are U.S. citizens) are ineligible for any assistance, regardless of their familial status.

The TANF reforms set a five-year lifetime limit for welfare recipients (such that if an individual or family has received five years' worth of benefits, they will be ineligible for future assistance), and increased work requirements, while simultaneously creating stricter definitions of countable "work" activities. Under TANF, single parents must work 30 hours per week, and parents in two-parent families must work 35 hours per week (though in many states, like Montana, two-parent families have to work up to 60 hours a week to qualify for assistance) to be eligible for welfare assistance. Parents cannot receive TANF funds while pursuing further education or training, unless this training is part of a vocational education program or is specifically applicable to the recipient's job, and is supplemental to 20 hours of other work activity. Recipients cannot count parenting/childcare, literacy education, ESL courses or college study as work activities. While TANF does provide some childcare benefits, and may waive work activities requirements for parents who cannot find adequate childcare, recipients are often not informed about these benefits.

The TANF legislation's efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock births materialized in the form of annual $100 million "illegitimacy bonuses" to the five states that had achieved the greatest reduction in the number of out-of-wedlock births. These efforts were supplemented by federally funded "abstinence-only" education programs, for which $250 million was allocated.

According to some poverty rights and feminist activists, TANF's effects have been detrimental to welfare recipients, and their status as a foundation for similar legislation is highly problematic. In response to TANF's flexibility on family formation initiatives, 23 states have instituted "family cap" policies for welfare recipients, denying welfare assistance to children born to parents already on welfare, or placing tougher work requirements on mothers who exceed the family cap. NOW-LDEF notes that non-marital births have not decreased as a result of these initiatives. In at least one state (New Jersey), the reduction in out-of-wedlock births was concurrent with an increase in abortions.

We don't yet know the results of "abstinence-only" education, but as the NOW-LDEF site observes that the "education, mentoring, and counseling programs funded under the law must adhere to a specific set of eight tenets, such as 'sex outside of marriage is likely to be psychologically and physically harmful'," while not providing important information about taking measures to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

Even with TANF funding, families on welfare often don't receive enough assistance to make ends meet, or to avoid serious hardship. Though they may be working 30 to 40 hours a week, recipients still may not rise above the poverty level, if their jobs pay less than a living wage. Without the education or training necessary to prepare for better employment, parents may find themselves without viable options for advancement once their benefits run out.

State Marriage Initiatives

As a result of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act's emphasis on the formation and maintenance of two-parent families, several states have begun to experiment with different initiatives linking marriage initiatives with welfare funds. In West Virginia, TANF funds have been allocated to add a $100 bonus to families' monthly benefits if the parents on welfare marry each other. Oklahoma is working on a $10 million Marriage Initiative plan that includes public education campaigns, youth outreach and education, the integration of pro-marriage counseling in social service programs, and a specific religious initiative encouraging religious leaders to encourage their church and synagogue members to undergo pre-marital counseling. The Michigan Family Independence Agency, partially financed with welfare funds, was established to provide marital and family counseling and anger management courses to interested individuals. Utah has allocated a portion of its TANF surplus for a marriage education campaign that will be developed over a two-year period, and the state legislature raised the minimum age for marriage from 14 to 16 years old.

Arizona has been particularly gung-ho in its marriage initiatives. According to the NOW-LDEF, the state has allocated $1 million for marriage skills classes offered by community-based organizations, and it has established a Marriage and Communication Skills Commission, whose projects include the creation and distribution of a "healthy marriage" handbook to all couples applying for a marriage license, and funding vouchers for low income couples attending marriage-skills classes. The Arizona legislature also passed a Covenant Marriage law in 1998, "under which couples promise to stay married for life and renounce their legal right to a no-fault divorce."

Fighting for alternatives that empower single mothers

The very real possibility of building further ties between marriage initiatives and welfare money has been a call to action for a number of welfare advocates and activists, for feminists, for civil rights leaders, and for those in support of individual citizens' privacy and right to choice regarding marriage and family planning. These activists and advocates are working to raise awareness about flaws in current and proposed welfare policy, and to warn Americans about the threats such policies pose to families on welfare, as well as to the public at large.

In a recent interview, Dorian Solot, Co-founder of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, an nonprofit advocacy organization that works to promote "equality and fairness for unmarried people, including people who choose not to marry, cannot marry, or live together before marriage," identified several flaws in the logic of state and federal marriage promotion initiatives. "The first problem is there's no evidence that promoting marriage will help anyone get out of poverty," Solot said. "If we agree that the purpose of welfare is to help people escape poverty, then we have no reason to believe that marriage is going to help us achieve that goal. The second problem is that there's an assumption that anyone who wants to can get married, and so of course there are gay and lesbian people who can't marry, heterosexual people who can't marry because they're not in a relationship, because their partner is abusive and not marrying is a really wise decision. Perhaps the third problem is the belief that if women marry, the guy they're marrying is going to be the guy on 'Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire'--when the reality is that the men that most poor women marry are poor men, and don't have the resources to get their families what they need and to get on their feet financially.

"There's a certain body of research about the positive effects of marriage, and that's what a lot of these policy arguments are based on," she noted. "But we don't know anything about whether marriages that are produced or coerced by government agencies have those same effects--in fact, there may be good reason to suspect they don't have the same positive effects, because maybe we need to be trusting people to make that very private decision themselves."

Solot acknowledges that it's difficult for many politicians and public figures to openly oppose these marriage promotion proposals. "Everyone loves marriage--there isn't really anyone who'll say 'I'm against marriage,' which makes it hard to criticize these proposals and means that all politicians need to be behind them, politically. But the reality is they don't even begin to address the realities of peoples' lives, particularly poor peoples'.

"I think that most of the people who are opposing or critiquing the marriage promotion proposals think marriage is great and don't have any problem with the idea that we should help build strong families and strong marriages, but do have problems with spending money to do that."

For Kate Kahan, Executive Director of Working for Equality and Economic Liberation (WEEL), a grassroots organization that started in response to welfare reform, fighting marriage promotion campaigns at the state and federal level has been both personally and politically important. Kahan, a single mother with a nine-year-old son, was on welfare and going to college when the 1996 welfare reforms happened. "I experienced that big transition of welfare reform personally, and barely finished college," she said in a recent interview. "I bring a strong feminist element and approach to this [work], and one of the big issues that everyone in this organization has had is this direct attack on women's private lives by trying to control who they marry and whether or not their children are illegitimate through welfare policy."

Kahan and her colleagues made an important discovery early on in their poverty-rights work, that they could build power through coalition-building with similar groups in the region (WEEL is based in Montana). "One of the things that's significant about what we've done is we've figured out pretty quickly that we are totally divided along state lines," Kahan said. "All of our welfare programs are different, and even if our folks are experiencing the same circumstances, all of our policies are so different. We figured out that what we needed to do was work across state lines and build our power, and so we started a regional network of seven western states working on welfare issues.

"People in the progressive community were shocked we were able to figure that out; it was pretty soon after welfare reform. We immediately identified the reauthorization of the welfare reform bill as something we needed to be involved in, and because we had the experience from the ground--our members, some of us staff members, had been there directly. That element was missing in '96 in the debates, and is an absolute necessity for the 2002 debates."

Through a particularly serendipitous turn of political events, Kahan's home state was thrust into the welfare-reform spotlight. "Montana has key congressional delegation for the welfare reform issue," she said. "Montana Senator Max Baucus is chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the committee which holds jurisdiction over welfare. Essentially, Senator Baucus will be responsible for creating the welfare bill that will go to the President. Given this situation, WEEL and allies on the state level began an assertive education campaign focused on Montana's experience with welfare reform. This education work has led WEEL and their allies into the national spotlight due to its level of success in educating Senator Baucus on which welfare policies make sense for people on poverty. Senator Baucus has publicly denounced government involvement in whether or not low-income families should be married, thanks to WEEL's efforts."

"I see this as an issue of choice, hands down," Kahan continued. "We can relate this to issues we've seen in the past where restrictive policies have begun with low-income women, but didn't stop there. For example, the Hyde Amendment that restricted money going into any sort of abortion services for low-income women has resulted in tremendously scary debates about whether or not you should be able to get birth control if you're on Medicaid. Or, there are the sterilization efforts on the reservations--those are all direct, concerted attacks on low-income women, and they end up domino-effecting to affect all other women. I see this as the exact same thing--when restrictive policies start with low-income women, they don't stop there."

Aside from the potential future ramifications these marriage-welfare policies may have for low-income women and the public at large, feminists and welfare advocates are concerned with the effects these policies have on women and children who are facing domestic violence situations, for whom barriers to getting a divorce can be deadly.

"We do advocacy work at WEEL, so we help people navigate their way through the very complicated welfare systems we have now," Kahan said. "One of the main reasons that people call here for advocacy, over 50 percent of the time, is domestic violence, and they're in a situation where they can't get on assistance. I see this marriage promotion piece as being another barrier for women leaving, because if you go into a welfare office and you see a poster with a nuclear family saying 'You want more welfare benefits, talk to your caseworker,' or you have your case worker saying 'No, you should really go to this marriage counselor before you leave,' it's going to be deadly. That's one of my main concerns.

"I have personal experience with having been a young mother. I had little to no job experience when I went to apply for welfare, and I had $7 too much in my bank account, so I got turned away. I ended up not being able to get a job, and I got married to the father of my child. Two years later, I left a very violent home. Marriage wasn't the solution to my poverty or my son's poverty. If I hadn't left that home, I would have died, and that's reflected in so many of the women's lives that we work with."

Kahan realizes that the struggle to raise awareness about these marriage promotion campaigns, and about the importance of questioning and critiquing the Bush administration's proposals is a rhetorical one. Effecting specific material changes to improve the lives of families on welfare means going beyond simple, individual "solutions" like marriage. It also means making these issues relevant to the population at large.

Kahan and other welfare and civil rights advocates are ready to make specific arguments to populations who might not consider themselves implicated in welfare reform or marriage promotion. In Kahan, and WEEL's, case, these arguments come in the handy form of an activists' handbook that Kahan has produced to inspire and inform people who want to fight conservative welfare reform plans.

"Different people will relate to this issue from different angles," Kahan said. "There's the choice angle; this really starts to get at reproductive freedom. The privacy issues, we've all seen these when addressing healthcare and women's healthcare. There's also a lot of racist policy--this is really geared towards getting African American women to marry and get off welfare. There's a wage gap argument: these proposals totally ignore the fact that women don't make as much money as men. There's a discrimination argument: this clearly discriminates against gay and lesbian folks.

"I think it's racist and sexist policy specifically veiled in family values rhetoric," Kahan added. "We've seen this strategy before, many times. The Bush proposal for welfare offers over-simplified, band-aid solutions to the complex issues surrounding poverty in our country. Framing such superficial proposals in family values rhetoric completely avoids addressing the very real issue of poverty. So far, the democrats haven't figured out how to get out of the familiar corner such rhetoric has backed them into. It seems pretty obvious to me that capturing the debate back to one that addresses poverty and the needs of America's poor is imperative and not that difficult. After all, Bush isn't talking about poverty reduction in any way, shape or form."

Even some Republicans may find themselves siding with folks like Kahan and Solot. "It's so contradictory to the spiel you usually get from Republicans, that the government shouldn't be involved in people's private lives," Kahan said.

Strengthening Families

It's important to note that most people who are opposed to policies that link marriage to welfare are not anti-family. Kahan and Solot agree that there are reasonable, constructive ways to help families on welfare. Both women stress the importance of creating and supporting policies that would allow mothers and fathers to care for their children materially and emotionally. WEEL's "Family Strengthening" proposal calls for an end to discrimination against unmarried, two-parent families, funding for at-home care programs that would allow low-income parents to choose to stay home with their children, increased funding for high-quality childcare, working to ensure that child support dollars are received by families, and protecting families in domestic violence situations as well as helping them through crisis.

"Parents need to be able to take care of their kids in a real way that makes sense," Kahan emphasizes at the end of our interview. "They need to get the money that's owed to them through child support, and we need to create more opportunities to help struggling families get out of poverty."

"If your criteria are children's well-being," Solot observed, "the programs that helped children the most were the ones that raised their parents' incomes, whether that was through helping them get jobs, or jobs that paid living wages, or less direct ways like ensuring they had transportation to get to work, or child care. When you add up families' total assets and incomes, the families who have more have their children doing better. Those kinds of programs are a lot more complicated, and nowhere near as appealing as just saying 'Oh, get married.'"

Alana Kumbier is television editor for PopPolitics.com

Recently I've been wondering: When exactly did I become a fangurl?

Was it at the Multiple Alternative Realities Convention last month, when my friends and I found ourselves whispering answers to "Buffy/Angel Jeopardy" questions during a game session, or later that evening, when I was dressed up as Darth!Willow, dancing with a group of vampires for the evening, to a set dj'd by Dr. Demento?

Or was it last fall, when I obsessed about what to wear to see filmmaker Jim Jarmusch speak at our local contemporary arts center? Or last summer, when my drag king friends and I danced onstage at a club in New Orleans, lip-synching and busting boyband-style moves during a homoerotic performance of 'NSync's "Bye Bye Bye"?

I don't know when it happened exactly, just that it did, and now I've found myself, at 26, involved in more fandoms than I care to count.

In a recent New York Times article about potential copyright violation by Star Wars fans who digitally revise George Lucas' films, Jim Ward, Lucasfilm's vice president for marketing, offered his company's take on fandom: "We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line," he said. "We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is."

Ward was referring to fan edits of Star Wars circulating online, and about which of these the company deems appropriate and which violate Lucasfilm's copyright. The sort of fan behavior Ward supports is the fandom of appreciation and consumption. It's a fandom that's pleasurable for many, one that's accessible if you can afford a movie ticket or CD or a cable hookup.

While this definition makes sense for Lucasfilm -- or for just about any large corporate production unit interested in selling its film, featured celebrity, band or television show and then protecting its interest by controlling use and distribution of the product -- it's a limiting interpretation for most of the popcult-obsessed fans I know.

The definition of fandom is a tricky one. If you regularly watch a particular TV show each week, does that make you a fan? Or is it more than that (taping the show, discussing it with others, re-viewing it, quoting dialogue, taking screencap photos to post on your Web site, which will then be the basis for others' bad fan art?) Is it standing in line for a ridiculous length of time to see a film's opening, or working with digital technology to create a version of the same film other fans may enjoy more?

It's my belief that fandom exists along a broad spectrum -- including, but not limited to, fans whose idea of participation is sitting back and enjoying a show's broadcast, to those who read spoilers and speculate a series' plots in online forums weeks in advance, or to those who put their creative energies to work writing fan fiction. These writings, which are based on a show/band/movie/etc. and introduce alternate storylines and/or character relations, are then posted online (or, if you're old-school, distributed via fanzines).

While I don't want to create a hierarchy of fan behavior by suggesting that it's better to be one sort of fan than another, I do believe that those on the further-out end of the fan spectrum are the most interesting, because while they're actively consuming popcult product, they're also creating it. Instead of solely behaving in the appropriate, good-Lucasfilm-fan-way (consuming, collecting, appreciating), these fans are putting their consumption to work, making their preferred cultural product meaningful in different contexts and mediums.

If being a bad, obsessive fan means learning how to use various technologies in new ways for your own ends, such as digitally editing videos and manipulating images in Photoshop, creating and maintaining fan Web sites, building virtual communities around shared interests, or exerting creative agency in any number of other ways, then there are millions of "bad fans," operating online and off -- and they're all the more informed and engaged because of it.

At present, I'm somewhere in the middle of the fandom-spectrum, operating as a purely appreciative consumer in some cases, and demonstrating a more rabid obsession in others. There are TV shows I sit and watch each week like a normal person (watching "Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska" counts as research for a cultural critic!), but then there's also "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Three years ago, I started watching the show, alone in my apartment, and didn't tell friends about my viewing. I was a cultural studies grad student curious about the representation of the show's young lesbian couple, Willow and Tara. I didn't realize I was a BTVS addict until the next fall, when I found myself living in New Orleans without cable TV, begging a Tulane University faculty member who I'd heard was doing scholarly work on the show to lend me her tapes of the episodes I'd missed during the first few weeks of the new season.

Then came the cable subscription I couldn't really afford on my salary. And then, a few months later, I was at Tower Records, scooping out the BTVS official fan magazine and the BTVS lunchboxes and memorabilia. Shortly thereafter, I got together with a college friend whose devotion to BTVS fandom inspired and amazed me: She was co-writing and co-presenting her scholarly work about BTVS's biggest online fan forum, The Bronze (here's the original forum, started during the WB days, and the new UPN forum). She was writing her own fanfic. She was a co-editor at a hip, snarky, girlie pop culture site. She and her cohort introduced me to the world of spoilers and online discussion about the show. And she made me understand that what had seemed like crazy-obsessive fan behavior was really OK, because while it is obsessive, it's also intellectually and socially engaging, and a whole lot of fun.

I still have moments of shame. When I found myself searching online for Spike/Giles "slash," fanfic in which characters are re-written in a romantic or sexual way, usually in same-sex pairs (see cultural critic Constance Penley's book Nasa/Trek for some of the best slash theorizing around), or when I do things like derail my household's Thanksgiving plans so that we can tape the episodes of an FX BTVS marathon, I've had to pause and ask myself at what point fandom becomes extreme. But there have also been moments of pride.

I love that this past Christmas all of my roommates exchanged gifts that were BTVS-related. Some of them we bought (the boardgame, the Sunnydale High Yearbook, several volumes of Buffy-inspired comics), but others we made (bedazzled t-shirts with "Slayerette" and "Spike" ironed and glittered across their fronts, CDs of this season's musical episode, games we've devised to play around our burgeoning vampire obsession). Fandom became a way to express our collective participation and to acknowledge each other's relationship to the show and its characters.

In our house, BTVS is the only show we all watch together; it's the only weekly event guaranteed to bring us all together on the couch to watch, critique, squeal and moan, and then later take what we've seen and interpret it, write about it, co-opt it and appropriate it for our own use. And this is the part of fandom that I think is the most valuable, the part that Ward misses in his definition: In this particular mode, it's more fun to admit our obsession and put it to some creative use than it is to watch passively from our spot on the couch.

Alana Kumbier is the television critic for PopPolitics.com, where this article originally appeared.

Everyone�s talking about MTV�s new reality show, The Osbournes. My middle-aged library co-workers are impressed with wife/mother Sharon�s household management skills. The suburban neighborhood kids show off their best Ozzy impersonations. Mechanics at our local Wal-Mart say they haven�t missed an episode. Even George Bush admits he�s a fan.

Sam Donaldson and Cokie Robertson seem to be the only holdouts, having recently opined on their ABC talk show that they find the show incomprehensible, profane and too low-cult for their tastes -- issues that don�t seem to have turned many other fans away.

For a show that initially received little hype, The Osbournes is amazingly successful, reaching approximately 6 million households each week. Recent cover stories (Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone) didn�t appear until well into the show�s run, and MTV didn�t do much advertising for the show before its March debut. There are reasons to have doubted its success: The Osbournes arrived at a moment when reality shows seem to be degenerating into more tawdry scenarios; the focus is on a rock star who�s not at the top of the charts (and who is definitely not young, hip or on MTV�s TRL); and it�s broadcast on a cable network not known for family-values programming.

MTV is, however, known for its reality programming. It shouldn�t be that surprising that the network that gave us more than 10 years of The Real World (which seems to have lost touch with reality considering its formulaic casts and conflicts) could do so well with The Osbournes.

None of MTV�s other ventures into reality and reality-esque programming (Road Rules, Cribs, Undressed) have matched The Osbournes� success -- but somehow the network created a hybrid of its lesser shows that�s greater than the sum of those parts. The Osbournes concept was spun from an episode of Cribs that featured the family moving into its plush new Beverly Hills home and provides the conflict and voyeuristic elements that make The Real World such a guilty pleasure.

The end result is nicely packaged as a wacky sitcom, complete with schmaltzy title song (Ozzy�s �Crazy Train, interpreted by a crooner at lounge-speed), and credits that list each family member by name as well as by role (e.g. Ozzy Osbourne as �The Dad�). Most significantly, The Osbournes currently has the cleverest comic editing on TV. For each shot of Ozzy embodying his rock star persona in front of concert crowds and hordes of fans, we get many more of the 53-year-old out-of-shape father of two shuffling around the house, bewildered by the complicated TV remote or stepping in the dogs� water dish. During the debut episode, Sharon Osbourne (�The Mom�) describes her teenage son Jack�s status as a loner and outsider at school while we see footage of Jack decked out in camouflage and a helmet, stalking around the house with a family cat, then poking at an empty cardboard box with a bayonet.

The key to The Osbournes� success is this: It gives us everything we want from reality programming while fully acknowledging the extraordinary nature of the family�s situation. We are privy to the glamorous, excessive side of celebrity-family life -- underage admission to nightclubs like the Roxy for teenage siblings Jack and Kelly, mother-daughter shopping sprees on Ozzy�s credit card, extravagant birthday parties, house calls by pet therapists, and a cameo appearance by Special Guest house visitor Elijah Wood, who graciously helps to clean the dog pee from a soiled cushion in the den.

The Osbourne kids are spoiled in ways we imagine the offspring of rock stars to be. When Jack sasses back to his nanny, Melinda, or when Kelly mopes around because she doesn�t have a special record label of her very own (like Jack), it seems like this is the role for which they�ve been groomed. It�s also hard to blame their parents: Ozzy and Sharon love each other, and their children, very much. When the excesses allowed by the family�s situation lead to trouble -- like Jack�s all-night partying, drug use and club hopping sprees -- the family sits down and talks it out. Granted, this discussion is peppered with censors� bleeps and is incomprehensible at times due to Ozzy�s slurred speech, but it�s heartfelt and earnest all the same.

Even though he�s a celebrity, Ozzy is also a very real father: He�s a problem-solver, he�s honest (using himself as an example of why Jack and Kelly might not want to abuse drugs or start addictions at an early age), and he�s up-front with his kids. In another favorite Osbournes moment, as the kids get ready to go out for a night of clubbing, their dad implores, ''Don't drink, don't do drugs, and if you have sex, wear a condom,'' much to Kelly�s embarrassment.

During a serious family talk about Jack and Kelly�s respective bad behaviors (Jack�s marijuana use and late-night parties, Kelly�s possession of a fake ID), Ozzy and Sharon work with the teens to try to resolve these issues. What�s refreshing about their approach is that both parents seem open to letting Jack and Kelly in on the discussion -- Sharon begins by asking both of them if what they�re doing is �right� and suggests that the family work together to create a better structure for the kids.

Jack and Kelly are both allowed to whine and to air their complaints, while Ozzy and Sharon seem ready to offer some solutions and advice. When Kelly complains about feeling alienated at school because she�s Ozzy�s daughter, he suggests maybe she should be home-schooled. When Jack refuses to admit to getting high and playing around on the computer in his bedroom (he claims he spends this solitary time reading), Ozzy warns him about the slippery slope of addiction -- what seems like something Jack �chooses� early on will become something he craves and needs later. Ozzy�s best argument to Jack against habitual drug use? �Look at me!�

While neither child seems immediately affected by the family chat, Sharon notes later while talking to the camera that Kelly had come to her the day after the discussion and said she had reconsidered hanging out with some of her friends, the ones with whom she'd gone clubbing.

I worried when watching the show�s debut episode that Kelly�s whining and Jack�s bad attitude would make the show difficult to watch. This is, surprisingly, not the case. Yes, they can be horrible to each other and to their parents and their nanny at times. But they�re also exemplary teenagers. And there are moments when Kelly�s malaise seems strikingly familiar. The way they fight, they way they broadcast their disputes to their parents, and the way they seem constantly both privileged and vulnerable wins me over in the end.

Like Married with Children or The Simpsons, The Osbournes both exaggerates and reflects the state of the modern family, and it does so with near-universal appeal -- proving that reality TV works best when its subject matter is more real.

Alana Kumbier, television editor for PopPolitics, lives in Columbus, Ohio.