Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Jason Mittell takes up as his task the laying out of a theory of genre’s intersections with television that goes beyond the traditional assumptions of textual primacy. His repeated refrain is that scholars need to understand and study genre as a collection of discourses that occur within and beyond texts to include interlocutors such as industry, audience, and academia. In doing so, he claims, we’ll be able to better understand what genres do (provide the structures for such discussions) and their role in culture(s). He suggests that for too long we have paid attention to only one of the three ways genre is used in such discourses (interpretation of texts), ignoring definition and evaluation. In order to understand how genre operates, he suggests that academics look at each of these three uses of genre within historical and specific contexts that, hopefully, take into account the full range of people and areas of discourse who interact with said genre. He also argues for some attention to both media specificity and form, for the purposes of paying attention to, for example, the extended production schedules of television as compared to the typically one-off productions of films, and as a way of contextually situating the form of a work or works given its textual precedents.

Mittell’s format splits much of these ideas off for longer discussion within discussions of different generic examples. I’ll briefly lay those out here.

His first chapter is the big theory chapter which sees Mittell develop, carefully and thoroughly, much of what I’ve written above here. Here he does the heavy lifting which allows each subsequent chapter to develop offshoots and spend as much time as possible on the case studies. He draws on Foucault’s notion of discursive practices to arrive at the three things people do with genres: define them (this is what constitutes a genre), interpret them (this is what a genre does in the culture), and evaluate them (put them into hierarchies, use them as cudgels against other people or ideas). Here he also identifies a difference between television genre, or the way that genres operate in relation to television, and genre television, or the specific examples of texts that fall within certain generic categories.

His second chapter is a model of the way academics can study the historical processes of television genres, using the historical development of the quiz show genre to uncover the pre-existing discourses that were weaponized in the scandals of that genre in the 1950s. Here he demonstrates the importance of a deep archival search for related materials from all kinds of people who interacted with quiz shows, from the letters written by audience members to the behind-the-scenes discussions of the people making the shows and the reportage about the scandals. Having such a deep and wide understanding of what the cultural assumptions surrounding the genre were at the time is crucial, he argues, to understanding why the scandals were so contentious in the first place.

His third chapter is focused on uncovering the industrial shifts that occurred to turn cartoons from short films in front of (or between) films and which appealed to a wide audience through their association with Saturday morning (and therefore a narrowing of audience to mostly children) and eventually to a network of their own (which broadened the audience again somewhat). Here he shows how the production and exhibition sides of television can influence how a genre is understood by audiences and the culture at large.

His fourth chapter is an investigation of the audience practices of talk shows in the late 90s used to show the efficacy and importance of studying real audiences as places where genres are used and interacted with. He notes particularly how evaluation plays a large role in the real audience interactions with genres and how even sub-genres can be evaluated and hierarchized. Here he leans heavily on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a culture-influenced concept of taste in order to explain how audiences use their understandings of genre to make distinctions between shows and their audiences in a hierarchical fashion.

His fifth chapter is an investigation of the genre precedents for Dragnet, following David Bordwell’s concept of historical poetics to contextually situate a discussion of the formal aspects of the show in order to illuminate where those ideas came from and what other cultural ideas they were attached to prior to their intermingling in Dragnet.

His sixth chapter is a study of genre mixing in which he argues against the concept of hybridity given its biological roots and the fact that it doesn’t fully explain what happens when genres mix, in addition to containing some iffy notions of “purity.” Mittell advocates instead for genre mixing as a term, and claims that when genres mix their salient features aren’t worn away but rather highlighted by the interactions between those genres and the discourses surrounding them.

Mittell’s project is admittedly limited given its focus on US television. He advocates for further research using the medium and community specificity in other locations and populations, even though some of the larger ideas might also be transferrable across geographic lines.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Mittell mostly argues with television genre theorists who ignore the way genre operates outside of the text. His big project is to expand the notion of what genre is and where it occurs, and as such he pushes back on a lot of the work that has come before (much of which is problematically based on filmic genre studies). He uses ideas from Foucault (via Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott), Rick Altman, and David Bordwell to bolster his own, and he works hard to give scholars a model that they can use in their own research. In this way it is a great work of theory.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Mittell spends the first chapter doing the heavy theoretical work before dedicating most of the remaining chapters to case studies of different types. Each case study is preceded by a brief theoretical justification, where Mittell weighs the benefits and deficits of prior ways of studying whatever it is he is looking at before he does the same for his new method. He also spends much of his time laying out methodological practices, including archival research, surveying, and, yes, textual analysis. He doesn’t view these methods uncritically, however, noting the potential pitfalls of each of them before suggesting that they can still be useful tools so long as academics know what they’re doing.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Mittell’s biggest rhetorical move is in setting up various examples of the way genre study in the world of television is usually done before knocking it down as inadequate for a variety of reasons and propping up his own vision for television genre studies. He identifies a problem and then fixes it, and does so by advocating a fuller accounting of the kind of discourses that surround genres and television.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I think Mittell’s concept of genre in relation to television is really strong and useful, and I’m already thinking about ways that it might apply to my own work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

genre, genre television, television genres, television, discourses, discursive practices, discursive formations, historical poetics, definition, evaluation, interpretation, audience, industry, production, genre mixing, context, history, intertextuality, generic clusters,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Despite the strengths of what may be understood through aesthetic paradigms, definitional approaches and formal analyses [of genre] have distinct limitations. One such limitation of formal analysis is that examining the mechanics of a text cannot generally explain how that text functions within larger cultural contexts, which I would contend is the main goal motivating cultural media studies – and is certainly the central goal of my project. […] To avoid dubious assertions about audiences, we must look beyond the text itself – to understand how genres work beyond mere textual mechanics, we need to look behind the wheel as well as under the hood. (3)

Just as audiences and industries use genre definitions to make sense of media, people interpret genres and associate them with certain meanings on a daily basis. This is the question that interpretive genre criticism might shift toward, asking how a given genre has accrued particular meanings in a historically specific instance. Thus, instead of reading outwards from a textual interpretation to posit how people make sense of a genre, we should look at the meanings people make in their interactions with media genres to understand the genre’s meanings. […] Instead of asking what a genre means (the typical interpretive question), we need to ask what a genre means for specific groups in a particular cultural instance. (5)

Genres only emerge from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting in a common category. But how do these texts interrelate to form a genre? Texts do not interact on their own; they come together only through cultural practices such as production and reception. […] Even when one text explicitly references another (such as in the case of allusions, parodies, spin-offs, or crossovers), these instances become activated only through processes of production or reception. […] Thus, if genres are dependent on intertextuality, they cannot be an inherently textual component. (8)

Genres transect the boundaries between text and context, with production, distribution, promotion, exhibition, criticism, and reception practices all working to categorize media texts into genres. But by decentering the text as the site of generic essence, a potential problem emerges – if genres are categories that do not emerge from intrinsic textual features, then isn’t any system of categorization potentially a genre? […] Genres are more than just any category. They must be culturally operative within a number of spheres of media practice, employed by critics, industries, and audiences. (10)

Discursive formations do not adhere to seemingly clear boundaries, such as between texts and audiences. Foucault emphasizes that discourse is a practice, and as such, we must analyze discourses in action as they are culturally operative, not in abstract isolation. Thus for genres, we must look at how they transect boundaries that have inadequately located genre primarily within the bounds of the text. Genres do run through texts, but also operate within the practices of critics, audiences, and industries – anyone who uses generic terms is participating in the construction of genre categories. Thus we might look at what audiences and industries say about genres, what terms and definitions circulate around any given generic instance, and how specific cultural assumptions are linked to particular genres. These discursive practices concerning genres should not be used as a “check” against textual genre features, as traditional scholars have used “commonsense” cultural genre definitions to verify their own textual definition. Rather, the discourses surrounding and running through a given genre are themselves constitutive of that generic category; they are the practices that define genres and delimit their meanings, not media texts themselves. Since genres are formed through intertextual relationships between texts, then the discursive enunciations that link texts under a categorical rubric become the site and material for genre analysis. (13)

Following Foucault, Bennett, and Woollacott, we can break down the discursive practices that constitute genres into three basic types: definition (“this show is a sitcom because it has a laugh track”), interpretation (“sitcoms reflect and reinforce family values”), and evaluation (“sitcoms are better entertainment than soap operas”). These discursive utterances, which may seem to reflect on an already established genre, are themselves constitutive of that genre – they are the practices that define genres, delimit their meanings, and posit their cultural value. Cultural practices of definition, interpretation, and evaluation are the three primary ways genres circulate and become culturally manifest; thus these practices should be the central objects of study for genre analysis. (16)

Although genres are constantly in flux and under definitional negotiation, generic terms are still sufficiently salient that most people would agree on a similar working definition for any genre. Even if we cannot provide an essential definition of a genres core identity, most of us still know a sitcom when we see one. Discourse theory offers a model for such stability in flux – genres work as discursive clusters, with certain definitions, interpretations, and evaluations coming together at any given time to suggest a coherent and clear genre. However, these clusters are contingent and transitory, shifting over time and taking on new definitions, meanings, and values within differing contexts. (17)

Since genres are systems of categorization and differentiation, linking genres distinctions to other systems of difference can point to the workings of cultural power. The ways these linkages might play out are limitless. While there is certainly a strong tradition linking genre analysis and gender differences down to their etymological roots, we can broaden this approach to include other axes of identity differentiation as well, such as race, age, sexuality, class, nationality, etc. We might also look at how genre differences are implicated within hierarchies of cultural value, both between genres and within one specific genre; the common process of generic evaluation locates genres within social hierarchies and is one of the crucial ways in which genres are culturally constituted. (26-7)

Depending on the specific era, topic, and events within a generic history, historians should look beyond media texts to explore how genres operate in sites such as trade press coverage, popular press coverage, critical reviews, promotional material, other cultural representations and commodities (like merchandise, media tie-ins, and parodies), corporate and personal documents, production manuals, legal and governmental materials, audience remnants, and oral histories. (31)

How do industries produce film genres through techniques such as marketing (advertising campaigns, trailers, posters, press releases, star publicity, internet presence, merchandising), distribution (packaging, saturation versus rollout, targeting markets, international sales, re-releases), exhibition (placement in film bill, location of theaters, showtimes, ratings, theatrical technologies), and non-theatrical practices (availability and location within video stores, sales to television, editing for new markets)? (57)

If we are to understand media audiences within a cultural approach to genre, then we need to look beyond the realm of the text, as texts contains neither the audience nor the genre. (95)

In these [contextual] approaches, analyzing relevant historical contexts, including other texts, genres, institutional practices, and social forces, reveal the pressures and limitations that limit the potential polysemy of texts, giving clues to the probable negotiations that actual readers engage in through the process of reception. While acknowledging that contextual analysis can never guarantee the actual meanings that viewers might take away from their media consumption, a contextual approach offers a happy medium between a polysemic free-for-all (as some caricatures of cultural studies have attributed to “straw theorists”) and the textual determinism typical of most critical approaches. (96)

Yet I believe we might examine form without being formalists – studying form does not have to be an end unto itself. Since cultural approaches to media studies have suggested that texts are one of the important sites in which meanings are made and political processes are played out, it behooves us to engage closely with textual practices to understand how texts are encoded, both industrially and formally. The formal analysis of media texts can – and should – be one of the most productive tools available to examine the processes that constitute our cultural field of analysis. We can move beyond formal analysis as a closed exercise without abandoning the insights that such examinations might provide. One such model, which has not received adequate consideration by cultural television scholars, is David Bordwell’s approach of historical poetics, situating formal practices of media making within explicit historical contexts of production and reception. (122)

Genres can be – and often are – mixed through the various discourses of generic definition, interpretation, and evaluation that constitute genres as cultural categories. Looking at the material ways that genre mixing plays out in cultural practice leads to distinctly different conclusions than have been asserted by both traditional genre critics and postmodernists – through the case studies below, I contend that generic mixing generally does not lead to the declining importance of genre, but actually reinforces and reasserts the role of genres in media practice. (155)