The discussion of genre as a means by which to explore television texts is a complex one. The central problem in many studies is the assumption that genre is self-evident, as if the years of film genre studies can simply be applied to television without question. Often it is treated as
something that has been ‘dealt with’ and so genre specific studies avoid dealing with questions about the very formation and understanding of genre itself. The purpose of this thesis is to examine a particular moment within the crime television genre in an attempt to remedy the pervasiveness of this assumption. Using contemporary methods of genre studies put forth by Jason Mittell31 it will explore issues of gender and the place of thematics in television genre studies itself. While at the time Mittell’s work was seen as an important step in the development of television studies, very little work has followed up on the suggestions he made. This thesis both makes use of Mittell’s suggestions for the study of television genre and extends them to
incorporate further, television specific, methods for the study of genre.
Crime drama is a prolific genre with a long history. In recent years there has been an upsurge, not only in the production of crime television, but in academic interest in the genre. Perhaps it is a combination of these factors, both its history and its pervasiveness, that has seen many
assumptions about the crime genre being made. The last decade crime television has been at its most prolific for some time yet most writing on it has ignored questions of genre. Work on The Wire and CSI claim these shows to be exemplars of a genre that is then never elucidated upon, suggesting that crime drama is a fixed and stable concept. To this end, this thesis will challenge the assumption that the issue of genre in the crime drama has already been dealt with and
31Mittell, Genre and Television : from Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture.
instead examines crime drama as the varied, complex and profuse genre it was between 2005 and 2010. This thesis asks not only how crime drama functioned as a genre, but what this can teach us about contemporary genre studies as a whole.
In his book Genre and Television Mittell sets out a method of study that emphasises the fluid boundaries of genre and the need to concentrate on context as much as, if not more than, text.
He claims that genres are not intrinsic to texts themselves but are formed through a discursive cluster that includes multiple paratexts. These clusters can include anything from marketing and scheduling data to the aesthetics of the show. Each one of these modes of textual articulation forms a cluster, their discursive nature borne out of the way in which they influence one another;
the whole system existing in a symbiotic relationship. In formulating a method of ‘cultural genre analysis’ Mittell asks, if this constantly circulating and shifting cluster is what forms genre, then is the centre hollow32? As a way of understanding the crime drama this thesis works to find a way of dealing with discursive clusters and finding a place in this ‘hollow’ centre for narrative and thematic concerns; concerns that Mittell suggests are secondary to other textual elements.
Ultimately crime drama is a genre inextricably linked to its narrative; the very fact that crime fiction sometimes goes by the nickname whodunnit is testament to this narrative centrality. By investigating how themes and narrative tropes function in much the same way as other elements –such as the history of the genre or industrial concerns - that Mittell activates in the examples throughout his book, this thesis argues for a way of addressing cultural issues through genre without defaulting to old methods of genre study.
That being the case, this chapter begins by exploring different methodologies, presenting the case for the use of Mittell’s work; work which built on that of other genre scholars such as Stephen
32Ibid. p22
Neale33 and Rick Altman, before further adapting it for television studies. Furthermore, the process of selecting texts for study is outlined with an exploration of how they fit together in a continuum of central narrative themes. This introduces one of the central tenets of my argument, that genres function through a series of continua allowing for conformity and deviation at the same time. Something I call a system of graduated articulation, as fixed conventions are activated in different ways across the genre. Certain tropes remain entrenched in the genre and what changes between shows is the extent to which they foreground them. This presents a concept of genre that revolves around the idea of points of cohesion, collections of shared elements that do not have to be activated in the same way. These function much like Mittell’s discursive clusters, historically situated and working in multiple combinations to form an understanding of genre that is both stable in the historical moment but also able to shift over time. However, these continua foreground narrative concerns as a way of articulating and understanding these clusters. Unlike many previous genre studies, this thesis sets out to argue for narrative as an essential component of theorising genre.
Finally in this chapter, the shows that are the focus of this thesis are contextualised within the recent history of the genre, examining how it has developed and changed over the last twenty years. Looking at the precursors for many of the genre conventions that form the points of cohesion around which this theory revolves helps illustrate how entrenched they are in the genre.
This section elaborates on the idea that no text can be exemplary by placing these particular shows within a context of long-running tropes that have been part of the genre in different ways for decades.
The transfer of methods of genre study from literature to film and then to television has meant that much of the theory is unsuited to television as a broadcast medium. The problem with this
33 Specifically, Neale, "Questions of Genre."
mostly unadapted transfer is twofold: first the fundamental question that has been central to genre studies from the very start, what exactly genre is and where it is situated. Secondly, there are questions about how television is received; issues of flow, network identity and viewer practices problematise studies of television to a far greater extent than studies of film. Since this thesis explores the workings of genre through the lens of current gender politics in crime
television, it is essential to situate the argument within current genre scholarship. My goal is not to produce a taxonomy of crime television, but to establish a working definition. In simpler terms, this chapter will set out how I have categorised my chosen texts as crime shows, what framework I have used to do this and what other textual elements must be accounted for when defining boundaries through the method of genre.
Most genre studies incorporate an historical overview of theory, in an attempt to determine where current thinking sits in the evolution of genre theory. This is not something I plan to address in detail as others (Feuer34, Mittell35) have done it well in the introduction to their own ideas. Nevertheless, in order to place my analysis within current scholarship, it is essential to give an understanding of recent genre work. After all, an understanding of genre and its methodogical place is essential to this thesis, as Feuer suggests it is only through “classifying literature according to some principle of coherence, we can arrive at a greater understanding of the structure and purpose of our object of study.”36 By classifying texts and being reflexive about the method involved in this classification we are able to learn more about the corpus through the process of comparison. However, while I shall not be reworking ground that has been covered numerous times, it is important to acknowledge the shifts in television genre scholarship as television studies worked to define itself as separate from film. In the 1990s television began to be understood as distinct in its own right, rather than simply a descendant of film, and it was
34Feuer, "Genre Study and Television."
35Jason Mittell, "A Cultural Approach to Genre Theory," Cinema Journal 40, no. 3 (2001).
36 Feuer, "Genre Study and Television.", p106
suggested that new, more specific ways were needed to explore its texts37. Having developed originally within literary studies, genre categories were broad, arbitrarily defined, made little space for non-narrative formats and their provenance was somewhat debated. Theories covered multiple approaches with a lack of cohesion within the discipline. Genre categorisation came from the creators of the text as a way to sell them to particular audiences; genre was a list of motifs, a particular setting or a particular actor; it was investigated diachronically as a way of mapping shifts over time. As this list suggests categories used for the definition of genre were shifted to suit the needs of the author. Studies of industry could define genre through economic factors, studies of history could look at genre as a set of period defined cycles. Even studies of genre itself were caught up in issues of who defines genre. For example, Feuer describes genre as ‘analyst constructed’38, terms used to differentiate ones chosen texts from others. Essentially genre made the job of exploring texts and their ideological meanings easier as it narrowed the field. Very few theorists made any attempt to combine these ostensibly abstract concepts and look at genre as not just discursive in terms of who defines it but discursive in terms of what defines it (Neale being one of the notable exceptions39). In discussing Feuer’s theories John Fiske writes:
“Feuer(1987) suggests there are three main strategies for constructing generic categories. The first is the aesthetic, which confines itself to textual
characteristics. The second she calls the ritual, which sees genre as a conventional repeated “exchange between industry and audience, an exchange through which a culture speaks to itself.” Generic conventions allow the negotiation of shared cultural concerns and values and locate genres firmly within their social context.
The third approach she calls ideological and this is her most problematic one. At one level, this view of genre accounts for the way that genres can be called upon
37 For example see Jeremy G. Butler, Television : critical methods and applications (Belmont, Cal.:
Wadsworth Pub., 1994).
38Feuer, "Genre Study and Television."
39 Stephen Neale, Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1996).
to deliver audiences to advertisers, and structure the dominant ideology into their conventions. More productively, however, Feuer suggests that the meanings of programs for viewers are influenced, even manipulated, by the genres they are fitted into.”40
While agree that each of these categories has a place in the process of understanding genre, to treat them as separate entities creates as many problems as ignoring the provenance of genre categories. What is more productive is to treat these three categories as discursive in the same way genres themselves are treated. The aesthetic notion of genre stems from the ideological and the ritual and also feeds into them, none of these categories accounts for everything on their own and none of them work in a vacuum. Generic identity is found in the multitude, and so the theory of genre adhered to in this thesis is one which builds off Feuer’s notion of categories, but sees them as a continuous whole.
A Further issue at this time was that these ideas, as with much of genre theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s, worked best with film studies, a forum in which texts, perhaps due to their modes of consumption and the existence of a canon, could be more easily grouped together and those groups more easily separated from one another. However, there is something to be said for Cawalti’s writing on Hollywood formula, and his suggestion that formula is defined as a
“conventional system for structuring cultural products” 41. This conception of genre as a way of understanding the formulas of mass produced cultural artefacts can be useful when looking at such prolific television genres as crime dramas. That being said, for the most part film genre theory did not work well with television theory as it ignored the complexity of flow, most famously written about by Raymond Williams.42 The existence of flow, this constant stream of texts that connected news with adverts and then with dramas, meant that distinctions between texts became more blurry and as a consequence so do generic boundaries. There was also the
40 John Fiske, Television culture (London: Methuen, 1987). P109
41 John Cawelti, The six-gun mystique, 2nd Ed. ed. (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984). P29
42 Raymond Williams, Television : technology and cultural form (London: Fontana, 1974).
issue of the evolutionary model of genre history, one that prefaces building toward the ‘ultimate’
enunciation of the genre before descending into parody. This model suggests that genres have a beginning and an end, that there is some kind of cumulative trajectory followed ultimately by decline. As if genres have a ‘true’ essence. This is a model I resist, instead working toward a model of genre history that is more erratic, with texts building on the past but not in an ordered manner, something I address in more detail at the end of the chapter.
In an earlier article written by Mittell speaking to the call to end the ‘the textualist assumption’43 (as explored by theorists such as Feuer) the suggestion seems to be that it is even more important with regards to television than it was to film. That is to say that genre had typically been seen as a property of texts, something inherent that was used to categorise and define them44. In the 2001 essay “A Cultural Approach to Genre Theory”45, Mittell sets out a new way to investigate genre when dealing with television studies. Placing the existence of genre outside as well as inside the text, Mittell sets out to define genre as a cluster of extra, inter and paratextual artefacts that work in combination to create the notion of genre, dismissing the idea that any text contains its own innate genre codification. He suggests that “the category itself emerges from the relationship between the elements it groups together and the cultural context in which it operates”46, placing the elements that create genre, from scheduling and advertising to critical response, into a cluster which functions in a particular way at a particular historical moment. Thus he gives the example of Wheel of Fortune, arguing that the genre of ‘game show’ is not formed by the existence of this one show, but from the way this show interacts in terms of production, scheduling and textually with other shows deemed ‘game shows’. This does not eliminate the use of genre as a
categorising tool: rather, it creates a more useful way to establish those categories, allowing for a
43Feuer, "Genre Study and Television.", p4
44 For a relatively recent example look to Nick Lacey, Narrative and genre : key concepts in media studies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
45Mittell, Genre and Television : from Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture., p3
46Ibid., p6
broader understanding of what helps form them. It attempts to take into account the complexity of television texts and the difficulty one finds when trying to extricate one text from the
multitude; whether that be selecting a particular show for further study or a single episode from within a series. If the text is not the sole foundation for categorisation then it no longer bears the brunt of having to be truly ‘representative’, instead it is just one articulation among many.
Moreover, by addressing the numerous paratexts linked to a primary text, it helps make a path through the feedback loop of reference and self-reference that is contemporary television, a medium built on repetition and recycling. More than ever before contemporary television not only builds on but relies on the audience’s awareness of previous texts and contexts; shows continually refer to each other, either in text or in paratexts. As such, an awareness of all these factors becomes essential when trying to understand the ways in which shows work together and attempt to differentiate themselves, both through systems of reference and reflexivity. Audiences will be told they will like Lie to Me because it is like Bones, however it is different from Bones because it incorporates elements of The Mentalist while making explicit references to CSI.
Reference is the central means of definition, so only through incorporating all referential material can you get a sense of how these shows operate. This methodology makes room for complex hybridity by allowing a wider range of contributing factors to define genre. Through Mittell’s method genre is understood as a system of discursive categories rather than descriptive or proscriptive ones as Robert Stam47, for example, tries to establish.
In his Introduction to Film Theory Stam sets out a view of genre full of inconsistencies as to what factors are worthy of becoming genre identifiers. In his definition genre categorisation can be anything from budget to a text’s narrative location, but these factors are discreet and do not allow for a deeper understanding of the text. In Stam’s theorising any category can be used, but they are not used in conjunction. Using Mittell’s model on the other hand, negotiation becomes
47Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Film and theory : an anthology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000). p14
possible as the textual cluster activates multiple identifiers, making what was once rigid now a flexible methodology. Rather than inconsistency, these different categories can all be used at once, none of them arbitrarily presented as more important than another. However, while this does create a complex, rigorous framework around which to build the idea of genre, Mittell is quick to point out that there is still a certain amount of instinctive reasoning that goes into defining a text’s genre,
Although genres are constantly in flux and under definitional negotiation, generic terms are still salient enough that most people would agree on a common working definition for any genre. Even if we cannot provide an essential definition of a genre's core identity, we all still know a sitcom when we see one.48
There is thus a certain ineffable element to genre definition, one that feeds off the nexus of texts Mittell defines, unarticulated but resonating out of the interplay between all texts. There is a sense that something ‘fits’, is part of the cacophonous whole. As Andrew Tudor suggests, “Genre notions —except in the case of arbitrary definition—are not critics’ classifications made for special purposes; they are sets of cultural conventions. Genre is what we collectively believe it to be.”49 Part of the work of this thesis is to establish how shows ‘fit’ using this system of graduated
articulation. What is explored is not only what it is we have collectively agreed to believe, but how
articulation. What is explored is not only what it is we have collectively agreed to believe, but how