Arts & Culture
American Film Institute tapped UC Santa Cruz scholar to determine the top television programs for 2025
Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media L.S. Kim joined critics, actors, producers, and writers on the American Film Institute’s Television Jury to formulate a list of the year’s outstanding television programs
As an associate professor in UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media Department, L.S. Kim’s interest in strategic and informed media-making is what she teaches in classes on television, Asian Americans and the media, feminism, and racial representation. She also is the author of Maid for Television: Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy.
Because of her expertise, Kim was chosen to be a juror for the American Film Institute Awards. Kim joins critics, actors, producers, and writers on the Television Jury to formulate a list of the year’s outstanding television programs, while another group of jurors deliberates the notable films of the year. This year’s honorees include “10 outstanding films and 10 outstanding TV programs deemed culturally and artistically representative of this year’s most significant achievements in the art of the moving image,” according to a press release from the organization.
The AFI Awards kick off awards season. The 2025 press release was issued on December 4, meaning that the AFI Awards are announced before the Golden Globes and the Oscars. Kim says they serve to recognize the art of film and television and inspire both audiences and artists. The winners—which this year include Adolescence, Andor, Death by Lightning, and The Pitt—are varied in both the platform they are presented on and in their genres.
When she first started as a juror in 2009, Kim and her colleagues were sent dozens of DVDs. Now they use digital screeners, which they start watching in October. In mid-November, the jury members submit their nomination list. A ballot is generated, and they vote by Dec. 1.
Bob Gazzale, AFI’s president and CEO, who also acts as a juror, says Kim’s commitment, dedication, and thoughtfulness make her a great juror.
It’s important to have scholars like her on the jury, he says.
“She has a more expansive worldview and a knowledge of the historical nature,” he said. “She is excellent.”
As an undergraduate student, Kim originally majored in government and minored in film. She considered law school, but she decided to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at UCLA’s film school.
“I still held the same social and cultural concerns about how people perceive, come to know, and treat (or mistreat, misunderstand, and misperceive) each other,” she said. “Instead of going into discrimination law, I went into film and television.”
Kim says part of the reason she has been drawn to studying television is that the medium has many female viewers: female audiences have been acknowledged and even aimed at since its beginning. Television offers programming to women and supports women’s stories.
“They had to treat female characters differently: they were not objectified in the same way as in film,” she said. “For example, Lucille Ball—she was a certain kind of comedic spectacle, but she was also the heroine and producer. Everyone knew that Lucille Ball was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood.”
Some of the television programs Kim has nominated in the past year are Mo, a series by comedian Mo Amer based on his life as a Palestinian refugee in Houston; Forever, a series based on Judy Blume’s teen novel, adapted for the screen with Black characters in the main role; North of North about a young Inuit woman in a comedy set in an Arctic community; and Hacks, about a young woman hired to write for a legendary Las Vegas comedian.
“It’s very self-aware. It is self-reflective,” Kim said of Hacks. “It’s about women in the Industry and in a genre that they ‘don’t belong’ in, which is late night comedy.”
L.S. Kim understands that not all her nominations will be voted onto the awards list, but she values the opportunity to emphasize titles and bring them to the attention of her colleagues at the renowned American Film Institute.
“There are no winners or losers,” Bob Gazzale said. “There’s just an alphabetical list from a unique jury system.”
Gazzale says the awards are a way for AFI to look back, and are meant to create what he calls an “almanac of excellence.”