Television and criticism PDF
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Television and Criticism About the editors ‘I’ve been D Television Edited by Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson Solange Davin is a freelance researcher a searching my soul v specialising in audience studies and i n tonight’: the Ally Television and Criticism unites distinguished particularly in public responses to scholars from the fields of literary criticism, medical narratives on television. She / J and Criticism McBeal Effect a media studies and film studies to challenge has explored viewers’ relationships with ck Jill Barker the medical dramas Casualty and ER, s the traditional boundaries between high o soap operas and documentaries. She is n Edited by Solange Davin and low culture. currently researching the role of medical and Rhona Jackson dramas in contemporary society. Through a theoretical lens, this volume addresses such topics as the blurring of Rhona Jackson is Programme Leader for Media Studies and Broadcast Media genres, television and identity, and the at the University of Derby. She teaches sophistication of television audiences by a number of modules on television examining examples from soap operas, audiences and is particularly interested Te Television as Our Common Shakespeare televised adaptations of classic novels, film in the interdisciplinary potential of le History: History Cultural on American v noir and popular shows like Queer as Folk, theoretical application and the place i s Seinfeld and Ally McBeal. Ranging from of television in popular culture. She is io as Television Heritage: Television and n currently researching television and Anne Wales Classic Novels the Special Shakespeare to Dragnet, this comprehensive a national identity. n and English Relationship study will interest cultural studies scholars d and media buffs alike. C Television between the UK r i ti Len Platt & the USA c i sm ‘The story you Curtis Breight are about to see is true’: Dragnet, Film Noir and The Skilled Aspects of the Postwar Realism Viewer Soap Opera and R. Barton Palmer Rhona Jackson Other Stories Dorothy Hobson The Culture of Post-Narcissism: Post- Television’s Vanishing Terms? Teenage, Pre-Midlife Singles Culture Traditional Aesthetics and in Seinfeld, Ally McBeal and Friends Television Drama in the Age Michael Skovmand of Reality TV (cid:62)(cid:72)(cid:55)(cid:67)(cid:21)(cid:46)(cid:44)(cid:45)(cid:34)(cid:38)(cid:34)(cid:45)(cid:41)(cid:38)(cid:42)(cid:37)(cid:34)(cid:38)(cid:41)(cid:44)(cid:34)(cid:42) (cid:37)(cid:37) Felix Thompson (cid:46) (cid:44)(cid:45)(cid:38)(cid:45)(cid:41)(cid:38) (cid:42)(cid:37)(cid:38)(cid:41)(cid:44)(cid:42) www.intellectbooks.com TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 1 Television and Criticism Edited by Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 2 TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 3 Television and Criticism Edited by Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson (cid:94)(cid:99)(cid:105)(cid:90)(cid:97)(cid:97)(cid:90)(cid:88)(cid:105) (cid:55)(cid:103)(cid:94)(cid:104)(cid:105)(cid:100)(cid:97)(cid:33)(cid:74)(cid:64)(cid:16)(cid:56)(cid:93)(cid:94)(cid:88)(cid:86)(cid:92)(cid:100)(cid:33)(cid:74)(cid:72)(cid:54) TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 4 First Published in the UK in 2008 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2008 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-147-5/EISBN 978-1-84150-228-1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 5 C ONTENTS Introduction 7 Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson Our Common Cultural Heritage: Classic Novels and English Television 15 Len Platt Aspects of the Soap Opera and Other Stories 25 Dorothy Hobson Shakespeare on American Television and the Special Relationship between the UK & the USA 37 Curtis Breight Television as History: History as Television 49 Anne Wales ‘The story you are about to see is true’: Dragnet,Film Noir and Postwar Realism 61 R. Barton Palmer The Skilled Viewer 75 Rhona Jackson The Cultureof Post-Narcissism: Post-Teenage, Pre-Midlife Singles Culture in Seinfeld, Ally McBeal andFriends 89 Michael Skovmand TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 6 Television’s Vanishing Terms? Traditional Aesthetics and Television Drama in the Age of Reality TV 101 Felix Thompson ‘I’ve been searching my soul tonight’: the Ally McBealEffect 115 Jill Barker Index 125 TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 7 I NTRODUCTION Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson The number of research studies into television is vast, and their variety of foci demonstrates the diverse ways it has been understood in academic terms. How television has been theorized has depended on whether it has been approached as, say, visual medium or cultural form, public broadcaster or domestic reception, institution of power or democratizing force. For instance, Thomas Elsaesser (1969)1contended that, despite film and television both being visual media, because film was received in the cinema and television in the home, their conditions of viewing determined that the audience experience varied accordingly. Then, John Ellis’s Visual Fictions (1982)2 outlined how the institutions, texts and audiences for film and television operated and overlapped. And, in 1991, John Caughie3 argued that the finite nature of film and the flow of television were sufficiently dissimilar to demand a corresponding difference in critical approach and suggested that a more effective understanding of television could be gained were it approached in terms less of text than of reception, of consumption rather than production. Alternatively, Raymond Williams (1974)4 advocated that television was more than visual medium, and that television as cultural form should be the centre of attention. As well as being the first to propose the concept of ‘flow’ to explain how television programming was structured, and, accordingly, how viewers related to it, he argued that television’s power derives from it being a public medium received in the domestic sphere. Whilst a tool of popular culture as well as a cultural form itself, it is a repository of texts and theinfluential conveyor of meanings and messages, which audiences watch, receive and engage with. Additionally, studies into television as institution have concentrated on power and control,5 technological developments and the resulting fragmentation of audiences, and, mostrecently,globalization6and regional/local television.7 TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 8 8 | TELEVISION AND CRITICISM Research into television audiences has developed from the very early effects research heavily influenced by Robert Merton’s Mass Persuasion (1946),8 which has been resurrected on a regular basis, usually as a result of moral panics following particularly tragic incidents such as the murder of James Bulger in 1992. However, whilst American effects studies have for over twenty years concluded that television is likely to have negative effects on ‘vulnerable’ viewers,9 UK research remains inconclusive.10 As a response to these perceived failings of effects research, the uses and gratifications audience model grew in popularity, UK researchers in particular choosing to begin with the premise of the active audience who purposefully select what they want to watch to fulfil specific needs.11Plus, research has been undertaken into the influence that social class12 and gender13 has on viewers, and how television traditionally targeted a family audience, viewers responding according to their role in the family unit and family dynamics.14 Critics have summarized many of the approaches to television. Robert C. Allen’s Channels of Discourse: Reassembled in 1992 compiled a number of perspectives, including, for example, articles on television as genre15and as ideology.16Following this, John Corner (1997: 249)17maintained that theories about television fall broadly into one of four categories: ‘representation, medium, institution and process’. And in 1998, Christine Geraghty and David Lusted’s The Television Studies Bookexamined the nature of Television Studies,18 with Charlotte Brunsdon posing the question, ‘What is the “Television” of Television Studies?’19 There have been publications on specific programmes and genres.20Plus, studies have shown how television can be understood in terms of its value to society. So, for instance, books about how to apply theories of Cultural Studies21 all include television as a key component toexemplify how the theories work. Assorted books and articles on television, therefore, abound. So, what is the place of this volume? It is fair to say that the majority of people would acknowledge that television is central to contemporary society, so this collection demonstrates that, correspondingly, television criticism has become an important focus for a variety of critical applications. Other compilations have drawn together studies which demonstrate the diversity of what can be studied in terms of Television Studies. This book points to the number of different disciplines which Television Studies has been influenced by and can draw on in order to explain its centrality to Cultural Studies in general, research into media influence, and ways in which the television audience can be approached which do not rely solely on the effects or Uses and Gratifications traditions. Thus, the chapters in this volume illustrate ways of approaching the study of television whilst also establishing the critical place of Television Studies in the wider locus of cultural criticism. Although there are, inevitably, overlaps throughout, we have attempted to present chapters in an order which has a reasonable logic. As it is likely that TV and Criticism.qxd 21/4/08 14:00 Page 9 INTRODUCTION| 9 the first thing most people think of when discussing television is ‘What’s on?’, the central focus of the first three chapters is television programmes. There follows three chapters which illuminate how certain television critical approaches have developed by integrating theories from other disciplines. And the final three chapters explore the role of contemporary television in terms of the interface between ‘individualism’ and ‘the social’. The texts discussed in chapters 1, 2 and 3 illustrate the contemporary relationship of literature to television. They demonstrate how criticism can reveal both the significance of television programmes’ literary origins and their influence in terms of popular understanding of contemporary culture in general. Len Platt begins with ‘Our Common Cultural Heritage’, where he looks at how reproductions of classic literary oeuvres on the small screen in turn reproduce conservative societal and literary values. Beginning with Jane Austen, he seeks to understand what might be involved in the practice of reproducing ‘Literature’ in the modern, industrial and visual form that is television. Challenging notions that the classic serial simply reproduces the novel text in a neutral form, Platt sees the televised novels as a modernist intervention that reconvenes the novel as ‘safe pleasure’ and historical spectacle. At the same time as the televised novel ‘smoothes out’ many of the contradictions, complexities and idiosyncrasies of the written text, it becomes more directly ideological, a crucial means of reproducing conservative notions of gender identity, class and nation for the maintenance of a highly traditional version of the literary canon. Then, Dorothy Hobson discusses how the roots of what is often considered as the archetypal television form – the soap opera – can be found in traditional literature, which may help explore the genre’s universal popularity. ‘Aspects of Soap Opera and Other Stories’ identifies the origin of soap opera and continuous series, two major forms of drama production which dominate national and global television, in oral literature, folk tale, the literary realist writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the serial novels of Charles Dickens and the domestic and personal detail of the novels of authors like Jane Austen or George Eliot. Hobson applies to soap opera literary theories such as Ian Watt’s notion of the individual and the universal, E. M. Forster’s characteristics of the novel, the Bildungsromanand K. L. Walton’s theories of ‘Pretending Belief’ which may help to explain the popularity and universal appeal of the genre. Curtis Breight examines the complex relationship of UK and US TV through the analysis of an after-school programme with Shakespearian overtones. He analyses the made-for- American-television film My Dark Lady as one obscure, albeit key, example of how traditional English culture and its highest exponent, William Shakespeare, constitute the central contribution to an otherwise political, military and economic relationship dominated by the United States from as far back as World War II. My Dark Lady,afilm designed for ‘after-school’ impressionable viewers who are taught that the ‘Mother Country’ of England is still relevant, even indispensable, to upward mobility in cash- and class-stratified America, epitomizes how ‘disabled’ Americans, in this case
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