Jason Mittell

Media of Serial Narrative edited by Frank Kelleter

by

Various versions of the Planet of the Apes

Kelleter, Frank. Media of Serial Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017.

This book collects essays by a wide range of narrative media scholars and divides them into four different sections based on medium (comics/lit, film, television, and digital transmedia), even though there are obviously overlaps between those media as stories branch out and find homes in different media. I want to come back and read all the essays I skipped because they weren’t directly connected to the other works on my reading list, but for now I read the intro, all of the film and most of the television essays (I’m not allowed to read the essay by Sean O’Sullivan as he is on my exams committee). Here’s the brief summary of each.

“Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality” – Frank Kelleter

Kelleter, editor of the book, uses his introduction to talk about what he calls “popular seriality” or the sense of seriality that has pervaded most media forms. He juxtaposes this to the idea of the “work” that has dominated popular and academic conceptions of the media landscape, an idea of a full and complete object that can be fully studied and explained or taken in. Popular seriality, on the other hand, extends on almost interminably, constantly inventing and reinventing the story such that it cannot be studied, explained, or taken in the same way as a singular work. He calls out, like the title says, five ways of looking at popular seriality: as evolving narratives (where there is a feedback loop between everybody involved in the production and reception of the serial that all create change within the narrative); as narratives of recursive progression (where narratives constantly are revised and reformulated as they are adjusted and continued such that what might be the main idea at the beginning might not be even part of the story by the end); as narratives of proliferation (where we must take into account the wide array of official, semi-official, and unofficial stories that are told with elements of the narrative, particularly what Kelleter calls “serial figures” who retain some central core while also shifting greatly depending on their incarnation); as self-observing systems and actor-networks (where serials become what Kelleter calls “entities of distributed intention” that attain an agential status through the reflection and work of the people involved in its making or experiencing); and as agents of capitalist self-reflexivity (where serial narratives become ideologically wrapped up in the idea of renewal via duplication, a core tenant of capitalism itself).

Kelleter’s ideas start off relatively benign but become increasingly more troubling as they go along, largely because they seem so plausible. His last two ways of looking at popular seriality will be something to wrestle with as I continue my work on serialization as a storytelling strategy.

Based on the points discussed so far, we can describe popular series as self-observing systems, in the sense that they are never just the “product” of intentional choices and decisions, even as they require and involve intentional agents (most notably, people) for whom they provide real possibilities of deciding, choosing, using, objecting, and so on. In shaping the self-understanding of their human contributors, series themselves attain agential status. As praxeological networks, they experiment with formal identities and think about their own formal possibilities. And they do not do so instead of human beings but with and through dispersed participants, employing human practitioners (who are sometimes much younger than the series in question and who will often express a sense of practical commitment to it rather than a sense of originating authorship) for purposes of self-reproduction. Series are not intentional subjects but entities of distributed intention. (25)

At its most abstract, my (systems-theoretical) argument suggests that popular seriality, understood as a larger historical phenomenon that has accompanied Western modernity since the mid-nineteenth century, supports a practical regime of continuation itself. What is being continued here is the contingent, but historically powerful, partnership between democratic ideologies and a particular system of cultural production. It is worth remembering in this context that one of the most difficult problems of serial storytelling consists in translating repetition into difference. Following Eco (1990), this has been said so often that we sometimes like to move beyond these terms. But we ignore Eco’s lesson at our own peril, because what looks like a simple matter of narrative technique on closer inspection turns out to be a core problem of modernity itself: the problem of renewing something by duplicating it. This problem lies at the heart of an entire system of cultural production that, for want of a better term – and without need for revelatory pathos – is still best described by the name it has chosen to describe itself: capitalism. (29)

“Inevitability of Chance: Time in the Sound Serial” – Scott Higgins

Higgins writes about old film serials like Flash Gordon, and observes that not only do the serials have a pretty obvious 5-part structure in the small episodes (three action beats at the beginning, middle, and end with two dialogue segments that come between each of the action beats), but also that there is also a somewhat standard overall structure for the full run of the serial where the opening and closing episodes contain most of the narrative progression while most of the episodes between do relatively little to progress the plot in any real way. Though these early serials are not my main area of interest, they are nevertheless influential for the movies and shows that I am interested in, and so Higgins’ ideas must be contended with as I think about whether or not my objects of study stick to these structures or deviate from them meaningfully.

“Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula” – Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer

Denson and Mayer productively develop their own conception of the “serial figure” by claiming that they are the character who, via their liminality and ease of crossing borders, often takes up a kind of media-ness as they adapt and change depending on the time and situation they appear in. These figures don’t usually change over time, at least not in the way we think of traditional character growth or change. Instead, they adapt (or are adapted) to fit within one historically-rooted idea or another while retaining a core truth(s), especially including the ability to change form or inhabit different planes of existence. It’s a very intriguing idea, even if my own area of interest is in the very opposite phenomenon (where characters do change, usually offscreen, from their previous incarnation).

In particular, we are interested in the way that Dracula embodies and paradigmatically exemplifies a “spectral” logic that enables serial figures to proliferate across media channels, passing from literature to film to radio to TV and to digital media, exhibiting all the while and uncanny sort of resiliency that is the product as much of the figure’s flexibility as of its iconicity. By serial figure, we mean a type of stock character inhabiting the popular cultural imagination of modernity – a “flat” and recurring figure, subject to one or more media changes over the course of its career. We see serial figures as integral and ideologically powerful components of the political and economic order of modernity, part of a system that works expansively to increase commensurability and connectivity. Serial figures operate in this system as mediating instances between the familiar and the unknown, the ordinary and the unusual. […] These figures parasitically appropriate the media ensembles of a given period, taking up residence in them and making them their own. In doing so, they function as markers and active agents of the very process of media change. In a certain sense, they become media – epitomizing the fact that media are never only transparent means of transportation but that they also imprint their “traces” indelibly onto the “messages” or “contents” they convey (Krämer 1998: 74). […] These large-scale media transformations tend to be read in terms of “innovations” (or, more recently, “updates”) and thus suggest that media history is a directed and linear process. But serial figures, with their feedback loops and self-reflective logics of iteration, epitomize the fact that the evolution of media systems is a non-teleological process: overdetermined by competing forces, random, accidental, and consequently always also haunted by a sense that “things could have been otherwise) (Denson 2012). In this respect, not only are serial figures subject to constant narrative revision and adjustment for the sake of retrospective continuity, but they also invite counter factual questions (“what if?”) about the course of media history itself, thus situating themselves as the ideal conceptual figures for media archaeological inquiries. (108-9)

“Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Serialization” – Frank Kelleter and Kathleen Loock

One of the two essays that directly touches upon my area of interest, this essay by Kelleter and Loock is rife with interesting ideas and examples. The central conceit is that the remake is not fundamentally distinct from the ways that serials work, from the ideas of revision and cinematic self-historicization (where a remake or sequel tends to confer a certain status upon the original film that is sometimes only recognized or reignited by that sequel or remake) to enable what they call second-order serialization, or serial narratives about (and by way of) serial narratives.

Unlike daily cartoons or telenovelas, feature film iterations cannot structure rhythms of everyday life. Instead, they often structure seasonal, generational, and media-historical sequences. (131)

In short, the early [Planet of the Apes] films, the 2001 remake, and the 2011 prequel/reboot – made so many years apart – all lay claim to being state-of-the-art, thereby reflecting, with varying degrees of success, distinct media specific moments of an expansive narrative consumer aesthetics. In this manner, popular culture’s increased availability for re-performance and comparison invites deeply autobiographical engagements with commercial material, to the point of structuring individual personalities and their life stories in terms of progressing brand (dis)attachments. But media generations can also recognize themselves in the cultural concerns of remade films, which are usually accentuated more sharply there than in non-serialized formats. (142-3)

“New Millennial Remakes” – Constantine Verevis

Verevis, like Kelleter in the opening essay, identifies several ways that a phenomenon happens or works, in this case the object of study is the spate of remakes that occurred in the early years of the new millennium. Verevis claims that these remakes are intermedial and transnational, that they embrace the postauteur (where the marks of authorship shift from originality towards reproducible trademarks), that they are characterized by proliferation and simultaneity, which lead into the final idea that they do not compete but coexist with the originals. There’s some strong crossover with the ideas presented in the previous essay by Kelleter and Loock, but Verevis uses the essay to draw out some minor differences in the concepts presented in each.

By the beginning of the new millennium, however, there was evidence of a discursive shift, with subsequent industry discourses framing publicity more positively around a new film’s “remake” status by ascribing value to an earlier version and then identifying various filters – technological, cultural, authorial – through which it had been transformed (“value-added”). In the first instance, this move can be seen as a commercial strategy (a way to sell a back catalogue), but it also identifies a serial practice in which the remake does not simply follow an original but recognizes new versions as free adaptations or variations that actualize an implicit potentiality at the source. This trend, which has increasingly led to authorized remakes that bear only a generic resemblance to their precursors, seems to have found its apotheosis in the “reboot”: a legally sanctioned version that attempts to disassociate itself textually from previous iterations while at the same time having to concede that it does not replace – but adds new associations to – an existing serial property. In other words, it marks out not merely a critical historical moment in which remakes no longer linearly follow and supersede their originals but also a digitized, globalized one in which multiple versions proliferate and coexist. (148-9)

The remake has never been a static thing but a concept that is always evolving. And while it may be too early to draw conclusions as to the nature of a distinct historical period, these notes should demonstrate that the present and future of cinema is a re-vision of its past, especially in the new millennium, and that aesthetic and economic evaluations of film remakes (good or bad, success or failure) are less interesting than the cultural and historical significance of new millennial remaking practice. (164)

“The Ends of Serial Criticism” – Jason Mittell

At the start of the TV section, Mittell focuses on arguing that the study of serial storytelling is fundamentally different from that of the singular work because it has formal and production-based differences that must be paid attention to. He writes of the way that a show might use one element (a taped confession in Homeland, for example) in different ways throughout the series to mean different things in different situation, a point that he extrapolates to write of the way that a long-running show can contain multiple different political (or other) perspectives, sometimes conflicting ones, over the course of the show. These realities mean that academics studying serial stories must be cautious of trying to pin a show or story down to one particular position, particularly if they are writing about a show that isn’t yet finished. Even a finished show might come down on one side or another, but that still doesn’t negate the variety of perspectives contained within the show.

His second point is that shows and other serial stories have the ability to incorporate audience sentiments within the show, but that such a possibility doesn’t cancel out other criticism of the show. To demonstrate this point, he writes of the way that Walter White uses much of the same language that the misogynist “fans” of Breaking Bad used in talking about Skyler White during a climactic speech to her. While this makes for a powerful example of the ways that shows can respond to their bad fans, Mittell takes pains to point out how the show fostered such fans to begin with through season after season that positioned Skyler as an obstacle to Walter instead of a more fully developed and understandable character. The overall point of Mittell’s essay is that we, as academics interested in looking at serial media, must pay attention to the plurality of polysemy of the form, a polysemy that comes not just from applying different lenses to a singular work but from the series itself, which by their nature contain multitudes of different meanings.

We can understand these serial instances of political reframing through the lens of articulation, as defined by Stuart Hall (Grossberg 1986): dominant forms of political ideology are forged by the contingent linking of social practices to cultural meanings, which frequently shift and transform within new contexts. […] Serial articulation depends on the practice of reiteration, where repeating and reframing help define which linkages are maintained and which are discarded over the course of a series, highlighting how the political interpretations of serial narratives are always subject to revision and recontextualization. Seriality itself is wrapped up within this notion of articulation, as the connections between the already-seen and the new installment are the chemical reactions that create resonances of meanings, emotional engagements, and layers of cultural politics that encourage viewers to keep watching for new linkages and recontextualizations. (175)

As argued by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch (1994, analyzing conventional episodic forms), the power of television narratives to raise cultural questions is at least as important as their power to provide ideological answers. Television’s ability to act as a cultural forum is even more vital for long-form serialized narratives whose potential answers providing closure are deferred for weeks, months, or even years. Such temporal gaps highlight how much political meaning making occurs within the broader temporal frame of serial consumption, as the politically explosive questions that Homeland raises remain ambiguously unanswered for months, creating a temporal gap for viewers and critics to fill with their own shared practices of interpretation and debate. (176)

It is fairly straightforward business to interpret a television program using the field’s well-established critical tools, isolating the particular episodes and moments that best support an argument or focusing on opinions that will help label a text ideological and/or progressive. But once you account for how serial television works over time and across various cultural sites, it becomes hard to say anything about a program’s politics with any conviction that is not draped in contingency, partiality, and competing perspectives. That might also be true for a stand alone cultural work like a novel or film, as a text’s multiple layers of meaning contradict itself and create enough interpretive varieties to sustain decades of competing scholarly interpretations. But a serial text talks back to its critics by rearticulating the meaningful moments through reiterations and recontextualizations, as with Homeland‘s video, or by putting the words of its most rabidly misogynist viewers into its protagonist’s mouth, as with Breaking Bad‘s climactic phone call. Interpretive criticism of a moving target that both serially rearticulates itself and directly incorporates its own cultural reception is of a distinctly different order than the stable polysemy of a novel or film, or even the post-serialized finality of a television series that has completed its run. (181)

“Sensing the Opaque: Seriality and the Aesthetics of Televisual Form” – Sudeep Dasgupta

Dasgupta spends much of this essay adding on to Mittell’s concept of the “drillable” TV text, those shows that invite and inspire audiences to investigate and try to fully understand the plot, characters, and world depicted therein. Dasgupta suggests that if Mittell claims that these kinds of shows create a sense that audiences can completely take in and understand a text through this drilling process (which happens largely online after initial airing), they also usually contain moments of opacity that are un-drillable, pure sensation and meaningless. Dasgupta’s premise is intriguing to say the least, as it pushes back against the standard academic stance that everything is explainable and understandable with enough work, but I have to say that I was just not smart enough to follow the rest of the essay. I just couldn’t make sense of Dasgupta’s references to other academic works and theories, which left me without a lifejacket in the middle of an ocean of non-understanding. I’ll go back to this one in the future to try to figure it out, but for right now, I’m throwing the towel in.

How to Watch Television edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell

by

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.

Thompson, Ethan, and Jason Mittell, eds. 2020. How to Watch Television. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press.

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)

Genre and Television by Jason Mittell

by

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s Lost

Mittell, Jason. 2004. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge.

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)