Greg Daniels and Michael Schur’s Parks and Recreation

This is the first anthology I have to deal with on this list, and I’m not going to go into the kind of intense detail I usually go into for these kinds of things. Mostly, I’ll give a brief overview of what the purpose of the anthology is (and whether it seems effective based on what of it I read) and then look at the essays I selected in brief, just covering the thesis and methodology of said essays.

Collection Overview

In their introduction, Thompson and Mittell work to position this book as an “owner’s manual,” accessible to both lay readers and students who might be using the book as a first step in research. As such, the essays have been kept short, and are focused on a particular series with one area of investigation (as can be seen in the essay titles). This can also be seen in the introduction’s focus on explaining what critical inquiry is, separating it from the “thumbs up, thumbs down” world of evaluation. This is all very introductory stuff, but they lay it out well and it could even be used as a way of introducing the concept of media criticism in a classroom.

Funnily, I’ve only seen two of the shows that I read essays about as of the time of this writing, and I kind of want to leave that as a guessing game for you. Leave a comment with your guesses!

“Better Call Saul: The Prestige Spinoff” by Jason Mittell

Mittell is a talented writer and television academic, and so it is no wonder that his essay here is really great at being both succinct and clear-eyed about its premise: that the concept of “prestige TV” is somewhat antithetical to the way TV has operated throughout most of its history as an imitative form, and that a spinoff of a prestige TV show is doubly antithetical and required a deft handling from its showrunners to mark it as both indebted to the original show and as something worthy of attention in its own right. Mittell nicely lays out what the term “prestige TV” has come to mean in its focus on a more masculine style and deliberate moral grayness that at one time felt new but now has settled into a concrete style. Through a close reading of the show’s first episode, Mittell shows how some of the very things that read as callbacks to those who were coming from Breaking Bad could also be read as pretty basic genre signifiers of prestige TV, thus bridging the gap between the two seemingly opposed impulses.

Concepts like “prestige” or “formulaic” are not inherent markers of quality; rather, they fit into larger constructions of taste and value embedded within broader cultural hierarchies such as gender, class, and education. Early television was viewed as a “lowbrow” medium compared to literature, theater, and film, largely because the domestic mass medium was seen as less elite and more the domain of women and children. As the category of prestige television rose in the twenty-first century, much of its cultural legitimacy was earned by distancing itself from traditional feminized genres such as melodramatic soap operas and embracing the cinematic and literary cache of serious drama while employing established film writers, directors, and actors. […] Even though a prestige drama can be great TV, we must not assume that only prestige series are high quality, nor that the sophisticated style of prestige is a guarantee of aesthetic success. Instead, we must remember that labels like “prestige,” “quality,” and “lowbrow” are all cultural constructions, used to reinforce hierarchies steeped in social power and identity. (15-6)

“One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling” by Abigail De Kosnik

De Kosnik here argues that soap operas have a unique potential to tell stories over decades, which allow for some unprecedented storytelling opportunities. She argues that the soap opera form encourages three elements in its storytelling. The first is the ability to plant character traits much further in advance than can happen in typical tv or other stories. Even things that weren’t intended as seed for a later payoff can be utilized in this way, she claims. Secondly, there is a mirroring ability to have events ripple throughout a much longer timespan than can normally happen. Finally, the rough approximation of real-time allows for a tighter sense of relevance and identification on the parts of audience members. Each of these, De Kosnik claims, makes the soap opera into a more-realistic-than-normally-considered medium for storytelling, a claim she backs up by demonstrating how one character (Vicki) on OLtL has been a source for storytelling surrounding the concept of child abuse that has had semi-realistic long-lasting repercussions.

A deep seed and long reveal need not have any “authorial” intent behind it, but the reveal must accord with viewers’ recollection of characters’ histories in order to ring true. (73)

No matter how long these male-oriented narratives [of James Bond and comic book films] remain a part of the popular cultural landscape, they rarely allow their core characters to substantially age, or to undergo the significant psychological and emotional crises that accompany different stages of life – by their emphasis on repetition rather than character growth, they lack the kind of narrative journey that One Life to Live writers were able to give viewers who followed Vicki’s advancement from youth into middle age. (73)

“Buckwild: Performing Whiteness” by Amanda Ann Klein

In this essay, Klein does a bit industrial reading of what she calls the MTV identity shows, those programs like Jersey Shore and Teen Mom which focused on a specific subsection of society to appeal to those audiences as well as a broader audience. She claims that shows like Buckwild, which was the “redneck hillbilly” version, encouraged people to sell themselves as being the heightened version of their identity, a melding of real-world and “reality” that makes people into the pawns of capitalism at best and can have deadly consequences, as happened for the star of Buckwild, at worst. This falls in line somewhat with Racquel Gates’ arguments about the “negative” depictions of black women on reality shows, though Gates sees in this melding a place for agency while Klein’s view is more ominous and insidious.

In the midst of this so-called crisis of whiteness, Buckwild likewise offers a model of whiteness emblematic of resilience and resourcefulness in the face of economic hardship. The Buckwild cast works menial jobs (or in some cases, no jobs at all) but embraces and celebrates the freedom this unfettered lifestyle provides. They engage in a kind of rural bricolage, turning old pickup trucks into swimming pools and “skiing” on old garbage can lids tied to the back of RTVs; such resourcefulness suggests that being poor and white isn’t all that bad as long as you can still have fun. Furthermore, the series effectively rebrands whiteness as freedom, ingenuity, and bravery, thus reclaiming it from negative signifiers like poverty, racism, and lack of education. (119)

Indeed, Buckwild‘s tragic ending highlights how on-screen identities and material bodies are bound tightly together in MTV’s identity cycle. When your job is to play yourself, you are never not working. And when being yourself means endangering your body, then both work and being yourself is a never-ending state of precarity. (124)

“Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum” by Heather Hendershot

Hendershot argues that the age of niche TV has made it almost impossible for a tv show to be “controversial” in the way that they were back during the era of the Big Three stations when everybody was watching roughly the same things. There is no longer a “cultural forum” (borrowing from Newcomb and Hirsch) where ideas can battle it out in the span of a single show or episode, instead each show seems more ideologically one-sided. Hendershot then argues that Parks and Rec is a show that at least gives voice to both sides of a debate, even if its framing and handling indicate a left-leaning bias. She interestingly notes that the characters of Leslie and Ron are opposites but ones that aren’t ideologically pure themselves. Each one leans obviously in one direction or the other, but has championed tendencies towards their opposing ideology. It is this balance that resurrects the cultural forum within the show.

Can programs hope to address – or even confront, challenge, or offend – a “mass” rather than a “niche” audience, or does our narrowcasting environment ensure that politically ambitious programs preach to the choir? If the old cultural forum idea truly fizzled out with the decline of the dominance of the Big Three networks, would any series dare to speak to a heterogeneous audience? There is at least one program that strives to do exactly this: NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Celebrating the virtues of local government and staking a claim for the value of civic engagement and the possibility of collaboration – or at least peaceful coexistence – between different political camps, Parks and Recreation offers a liberal pluralist response to the fragmented post-cultural forum environment. (232)

“Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life: TV Revivals” by Myles McNutt

McNutt’s essay is the one most clearly relevant to my area of study, as he is talking directly about the kind of show I am interested in studying. Here, he talks most about the balancing act such shows have to pull off as they try to walk the line between industrial and fan pressures, each of which is vital to the revival’s very existence. He notes that an environment in which a cancelled show retains some sense of cultural cache, from streaming availability to even podcasts like Gilmore Guys, is crucial for setting the grounds for such a revival as it gives the industry an indication of the show’s ongoing popularity while its continuing relevance ensures a welcoming audience. He notes also, however, that these are not guarantors of a well-received revival once it actually happens. Fans are a fickle friend, and especially when the show in question was seemingly cancelled before its time, the pressure can create an environment that is difficult to navigate.

The logic supporting the trend of television revivals depends on three key factors. The first, and simplest, is that television development remains driven by existing media properties: movies, past television series, books, video games, and even podcasts are developed into new series based on the idea that an existing fan base and cultural awareness will create a built-in audience for that series. […] Revivals, however, are dependent on more than brand recognition. The second key factor to a revival is ongoing success in aftermarkets: The trend is built on shows that have had a significant afterlife beyond their initial broadcast, whether through traditional syndication, DVD sales, or – increasingly – through streaming platforms like Netflix. A series’ presence in these aftermarkets provides continued visibility, such that new viewers can become invested in the series and existing viewers can have their interest in the series refreshed. In a contemporary marketplace, a show’s fanbase is not just those who watched a show when it aired but also those who have been exposed to it through the increasingly large number of spaces where that television series lives. […] Third, and most intangibly, there needs to be evidence that people are taking advantage of this opportunity, and that viewers are still invested in these characters. (252)

Revivals are made because both industrial logic and fan narratives support their existence as a way to leverage continued interest in the series while also providing characters with the conclusion or continuation they deserved: If the series were to continue, however, the fan narratives shift dramatically, and “Another Year in the Life” risks reading as a cynical iteration of an existing franchise rather than a necessary revival of a story fans are invested in. Revivals sit at the complicated crossroads of industrial logic and creative imperative, and Gilmore Girls is neither the first nor the last program to explore the challenges of bringing a series back to life in an age where revisiting your favorite show is as easy as looting up Netflix or Hulu. (258-9)

“The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics” by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins writes about a different set of audience-creator tensions. While he notes that comics like The Walking Dead seem like they’re perfectly suited for adaptation, especially as the industry continues in its trend towards mining previously existing IP for whatever its worth, he also points out that they can come with their own set of audience expectations and pressures in the form of fidelity towards the source material. He writes about how one big scene from early in the comics got pushed back by about a season in order to foil fan expectations, and how other relationships were given greater depth on the show than was allowed within the relatively short confines of a comic book. He also writes about the fan tensions around the CDC subplot that ends the first season, and how the show’s creators didn’t want to deviate too much from the comic creator’s desire to leave the zombies’ origins unexplained. Jenkins looks for the letters published at the end of the comics for evidence of fan investment and creator response surrounding these topics.

As this Walking Dead example suggests, there is no easy path for adapting comics for the small screen. There are strong connections between the ways seriality works and comics and television, but also significant differences that make a one-to-one mapping less desirable than it might seem. Television producers want to leave their own marks on the material by exploring new paths and occasionally surprising their loyal fans. The challenge is how to make these adjustments consistent not with the details of the original stories, but with their “ground rules,” their underlying logic, and one good place to watch this informal “contract” between reader and creators take shape is through the letter columns published in the back of the comics. It is through this process that the producers can help figure out what they owe to the comics and to their readers. (390)