Jonathan Gray has a few things he dislikes. The voice of pop artist Celine Dion, for instance, is like nails on a chalkboard for the professor of communication arts. He also doesn’t care much for the TV show “Two and a Half Men.”
“It pretends that it’s offering the viewer different modes of masculinity, but all roads lead back to the same misogynistic 30-car pile-up,” he says.
Gray has done more than just express his negative feelings about pop-culture artifacts. He’s spent most of his career exploring our complex relationship to the things we like—and dislike—and what that says about our relationship with the modern media landscape. It’s a topic he explores from a different perspective in his latest book, Dislike-Minded: Media, Audience and the Dynamics of Taste.
Gray has also studied pop-culture fandoms, trying to understand why people develop such a deep attachment to the entertainment properties they enjoy. But in doing so he quickly realized he was only looking at a very narrow piece of the overall audience. In 2003, he switched it up and wrote a piece about the nature of anti-fandoms—the people who love to hate things that hold popular sway—a piece that still gets plenty of clicks and citations nearly 20 years later.
But the anti-fandom pool wasn’t as revealing as Gray had hoped, and he turned to exploring the nuances of an activity regular, non-fanatical people are doing daily, as they scroll through their social media feeds: disliking things.
“In cultural studies, we are interested in audiences we can’t predict,” says Gray. “And there are all sorts of voices that aren’t being heard. I wanted to go out and listen to them.”
Working with a team of students, Gray surveyed more than 200 people, many from marginalized groups, getting them to do just that—talk about television shows and other media they disliked and why they disliked them. The results of those interviews form the heart of the book—and raise some interesting questions about consumers and media.
“Our research indicated that people are disliking things because they’re representative of a systematic failure with media,” Gray says. “I was interested in answering the question, ‘What did they want from the media instead?’”
For example, one of the individuals Gray’s team interviewed was a Black woman living in a small Midwestern town. She expressed her dislike of the long-running VH-1 Network series “Basketball Wives” because of its loudly ostentatious characters. Another interviewee who identified as gay talked about hating the ABC comedy “Modern Family” because what he saw as the show’s tendency to heteronormalize the representation of its lone gay couple.
In both instances—and, in fact, in most of the interviews conducted for the book—Gray found something far afield from French critic Pierre Bourdieu’s oft-cited description of disliking something as performative snobbery. While it remains true that sometimes people look down their noses at certain shows simply to suggest their taste is better than anyone else’s, Gray found that someone’s dislike of something may actually have far more to do with expressing a deep sense of disappointment. He says there is both value and potential in that act.
“In disliking the “Basketball Wives” show, what the viewer was really saying is that she lives in a place where people think they know Black culture because of what they see on TV,” Gray explains. “There’s a long list of poor representations of Black individuals on TV. She thought maybe this show would do something better.”
It’s not just serialized TV shows. Gray points to the annual broadcast of the Super Bowl. While the NFL proudly points out that one in three Americans watch the game and the spectacle of its pop-culture-defining commercials, Gray points out that it also means two out of every three Americans aren’t watching. The ones who ignore the Big Game may or may not be expressing an active dislike, but they’re definitely excluded from feeling part of it, or from feeling that it reflects their identities and likes in a meaningful way.
“There’s this sense of powerlessness among some of the people we interviewed,” says Gray. “This sense that their opinions don’t matter. That’s why the stakes feel higher when Hollywood does notice the issues and representations they’re concerned about.”
Listening more closely to these voices could represent a new approach to understanding audiences—an approach that goes beyond standard focus groups and Nielsen ratings. It can be hard to break through active dislike. But viewer disappointment comes from a different place—and represents an opportunity to change. Disappointment can be easier to work with than active dislike.
“The things that mattered to most people had to do with a sense of disappointment,” says Gray. “Viewers just want the media to do better.”