Television for All Women?
This chapter analyzes the content and reception of the first season of Devious Maids within an institutional context. In doing so, it views the series as a contested form of feminized popular culture that is emblematic of the cable television industry's incessant search for new audiences in the early twenty-first century. More specifically, the chapter considers: What do the production, content, and reception of Devious Maids reveal about Lifetime's strategies as “television for women”? In doing so, the chapter argues that while Devious Maids is a complex text that portrays Latina womanhood in some nuanced ways, the postfeminist and postracial sensibilities of the show discourage most audience members from engaging with the potentially transgressive aspects of the series.