An exploration of Japan's television culture focused on primetime serials called "trendy dramas," popular primetime serials featuring well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles

In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.

"“Scripted Affects, Branded Selves is a very important book that no one wh is interested in Japanese popular culture, women’s studies and media studies can ignore.”" - Asian Anthropology

"“Any scholar of Japanese or international media, or of contemporary Japanese culture in general, will find much rich material to mull and to integrate into a model of Japanese society and Japan studies that goes a long way toward transcending the rather tired categories with which so much foreign Japanology still operates.”" - Journal of Japanese Studies

"“Lukács very convincingly weaves a study of production and consumption together in a way that leaves the reader wondering why studies such as this have not been done before. For anyone interested in the anthropology of television, media, and Japan studies in general, this book will be a valuable resource to draw upon.”" - Social Science Japan Journal