Electric Melodrama: Susan Seidelman, Childhood and the Girl Next Door

Susan Seidelman’s work featuring young girls finds itself negotiating melodrama’s oscillation between emotional highs and lows and the search for meaning. While melodrama has historically been associated with “women’s pictures,” melodrama as a form has taken a prominent place in many other genres. The emotional highs and lows attributed to the melodramatic form are also part of the experience of childhood. Children and teens experience and perform emotional excess in their everyday existence. Children’s television programming often mimics a child’s emotional swings in its characters, sound, visuals, and dialogue in such a way as to nurture both a camaraderie in the emotional experience itself and to reaffirm the normalcy of such emotions. While the majority of Susan Seidelman’s work has been directed at adult audiences, she has on occasion ventured into the realm of childhood. Seidelman’s Confessions of a Suburban Girl is a visual memoir of her own childhood, a delightfully nostalgic romp through childhood in 1960s Philadelphia, an era energized with innocence, hope, and dramatic social change. And while Confessions is an adult look back at childhood, Seidelman focuses on female independence and her admiration for the agency of the “bad girls”— themes that permeate many of her later works. But it is in her earlier work directed at children that Seidelman’s expertise with melodrama aesthetics finds its apex, as she keenly captures the emotional excesses of childhood. This chapter argues that Seidelman’s use of melodrama in the four Electric Company episodes she directed, rather than produce historically “weepy” girl images, privileges girl power and agency, particularly when faced with male control.