Television Theory

Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

I’m going to start doing shorter recaps for the books and essays that feel less crucial to my understanding of what’s going on or don’t bring as much to the table. It’s no knock on the works themselves, especially as I really enjoyed reading this one. I just need to get through this faster and I don’t foresee it being as important to my exams as other works I’ve already covered.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have one big idea in this text. It’s a little complicated but not too bad. Basically, they have a series of propositions that inform how they understand what media do and how they interact with each other. They examine this through the lens of new digital media like the web browser or VR, but it applies pretty generally across most media.

They claim that media works in two ways towards one goal. The two ways are immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the idea that a medium is a way to experience as closely as possible the thing represented in that medium, an idea most closely associated with point-of-view perspective in visual art forms. Hypermediacy is the idea that a medium is actually more multiplicative in ways that draw attention to the medium itself, as seen in a computer interface or television’s overwhelming combinations of different media like video and text and animation. Both of these interact with each other and are dependent upon each other, such that a medium is never wholly one or the other. Both of them are ways to get transparency, or an experience of something represented within the medium either via the act of getting closer to it or, paradoxically, further away but from many angles.

This is all tied in with their idea that remediation, or the movement of an idea or representation from one medium to another, is what mediums are. They contend that every new medium is simply the recreating and reformation of previous media in an attempt to get closer to transparency via a new combo of immediacy and hypermediacy. Its a convincing argument that they spend the majority of the middle of the book developing as they look at quite a few different media for how they remediate and employ immediacy and hypermediacy.

Their final section looks at the philosophical impact of their ideas as they develop ideas alongside Stanley Cavell and Laura Mulvey about how media position the self and incorporate their ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy into the fray. It’s all a little outside of my area of interest, but it was interesting to skim. They also push back against Marshall McLuhan’s technological determinism for its ignorance of the social and economic factors involved in the development and use of media but keep his concept of remediation and the interrelation of different media.

 

Media of Serial Narrative edited by Frank Kelleter

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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.

Storytelling in Film and Television by Kristin Thompson

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David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003)

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?

Kristin Thompson spends most of the four essays (collected from a speaking series given about a year earlier) here arguing for the value of looking at individual episodes, seasons, or series as objects of analysis. Opposing Williams’ idea of flow where viewers are basically unable to distinguish between what is the programming and what is the interruption (in terms of ads or even changes of show or channel), Thompson suggests (rightly) that viewers are not only able to make such distinctions, but that the storytelling, which aligns with her conception of the classical Hollywood storytelling structure, helps viewers make this distinction and forms the fundamental argument for her desire to focus on shows in every scale as the objects of study for television scholars. While this argument may seem somewhat unnecessary, I’d wager it only really seems that way now, in 2020, almost 2 decades after Thompson first made this argument. Her mode has become the standard, but TV scholarship is still relatively new, and it is very possible that the time between her argument and now has been shaped by that very argument.

To focus more on how that storytelling works, she notes that film is reliant upon redundant storytelling that uses dangling hooks and multiple narrative threads, and that TV weaponizes those concepts to ensure that viewers understand what is happening in an episode, season, and series. It’s a compelling argument.

She also, in the third essay, argues that the prevalence of TV has changed the way that we tell stories overall. She claims that the concept of seriality has become so embedded in the public consciousness that it has influenced film and literature, leading to a resurgence of sequels, prequels, and saga style storytelling. I find this claim to be very credible, but I think it both needs some more bolstering and some further thought given the developments of the past 20 years. But I guess that’s what I’m here for.

In her fourth essay, she argues that there can be such thing as Art Television the way there is Art Film, following Bordwell’s famous essay outlining the six features of art cinema. She shows that there are pretty tight homologies between the two media in how they handle the same ideas, using David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet as her primary examples.

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?

As I said above, she only really argues with (or even references outright) Raymond Williams’ concept of flow. Otherwise, she’s obviously positioning herself as an argument for what might be seen as a standard film theory angle on TV theory. I think it’s important to notice what is similar between the two media, as well as what is different. Though I wouldn’t go as far as McLuhan does on the concept of medium specificity, there are definite differences that make for real, meaningful variances in how the two media handle similar ideas/stories/techniques. Thompson provides a good first step here by noting that there is a tendency towards a unified act structure in different types of TV in a way that is similar to the classical Hollywood style, but there’s so much more to explore (and that was already explored after Thompson’s publication).

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

Textual analysis of several different kinds of TV shows, including some extended dialogue scenes that are presented in script form.

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

By trying to port film theory ideas to TV theory, she both argues for their fundamental similarity and notes the obvious differences.

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?

Her argument is pretty foundational for TV studies as far as I can tell, as her focus on aesthetics and poetics is a core from which other kinds of analysis can be built. I’ll definitely be going back to her ideas on serialization, even if I don’t think they’re as fully developed as they need to be.

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

film, television, poetics, serialization, serials, sequel, redundant narration, dangling hooks, art film, art television, flow

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

In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, I argued further that the norms and widespread use in recent decades are essentially still those of the “Golden Age” of studio filmmaking in the decades before 1960. This is not to say that all films draw on all aspects of that model, and certainly there are some films that stretch the conventions. I mean rather that the norms are still there to be drawn on, and most films do. Here I would like to take one further step and suggest that many of these norms have been adopted or adapted by television precisely because they have been so suited to telling straightforward, entertaining stories. (19)

Thus it would appear that in some cases even half-hour programs that are not interrupted by commercials tend to include major turning points that divide them into large-scale parts, or acts – though obviously here the authors were not required to time these moments as precisely as they did. With the increasing number of original series produced by premium channels like HBO in the U.S., one might wonder whether these commercial free programs also fall into evenly timed acts. A look at one half-hour sitcom, Sex and the City, and one roughly hour-long drama, The Sopranos, suggests that act structure is somewhat more flexible in such programs, but that it is not abandoned or radically altered. (51)

Such divisions of programs into acts, whether rigidly or flexibly proportioned, are not simply arbitrary. They give an episode a sense of structure, much as the balanced movements of a classical concerto do. They provide the spectator with a sense of progress and guarantee the introduction of dramatic new premises or obstacles at intervals. They allow for the rising and falling action that many writers refer to as crucial to good plots. Regular turning points also give variety to a story, ensuring that the action does not simply involve a character striving toward a goal and meeting a series of similar obstacles. Thus there are reasons why even television episodes that are broadcast without breaks would draw on an act structure. (54-5)

Currently all the familiar studios of Hollywood’s golden age are subsidiaries of large multinational corporations. In many cases, adaptations are attractive because such companies already own the rights to various narratives that have already been produced in one medium but which are available to be recycled in another. Moreover, these huge companies have been able to market their products, including movies, in part by using synergy. That is, a company’s TV stations will promote its movies, while its record division puts out the soundtrack, and so on. Such marketing now has also come to mean selling the same narrative over and over in different media. (81-2)

What, then, of serial narratives? It is possible that the vogue for sequels, series, and serials in film reflects an influence from television. […] These films [in the Lethal Weapon series] also, however, incorporate the mild seriality of much serious television, with the characters and their situations gradually changing. (103)

It is apparent, then, that the tendencies toward adaptations of stories among media, toward sequels, and toward seriality are all part of a general stretching and redefinition of narrative itself. In particular, the notion of firm and permanent closure to any given narrative has loosened across media. Series television, with its broad possibilities for spinning out narratives indefinitely, has been a major impetus in these tendencies. They, along with the innovations and interwoven multiple plot lines discussed in the last chapter, seem to me some of the most intriguing areas where an analyst might explore the aesthetic specificity of series television. (105)