Dimensiones

Throughout most of its history, television studies as a discipline has typically avoided attempts to consider television from an aesthetic perspective, preferring to view it as a medium of mass communication rather than as a form of artistic expression49. As Sarah Cardwell writes when discussing the contested nature of television aesthetics,

The term functions as a signifier of difference and distinctiveness within the field of television studies, wherein approaches that focus on sociological, ideological and

49

See, for example, Jason Jacobs, British Television Drama: The Intimate Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press , 2000).

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broader cultural matters, but which neglect stylistic analysis and reject aesthetic evaluation, have been historically dominant.50

Each of these approaches avoided attending to television’s expressive properties and instead focused on issues of ideology, semiotics, audience reception and various other contexts that influenced how television is produced, distributed and consumed. Christine Geraghty writes that “most textual analysis of television pays attention to narrative as an organizing system but devotes less space to other elements such as the audio and visual organisation”51

. For Geraghty this has historically been because “television’s audio/visual pleasures are often deemed to be limited by size of screen and poor-quality image. At various points, critics have argued that television’s visual resources are too limited for aesthetic pleasure”52

.

The development of the analysis of television style often paralleled significant changes in technology. The ephemerality of television influenced early work, which tended to focus on theories and approaches that encompassed the whole medium, such as Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘flow’53

or Horace Newcomb’s emphasis on the intimacy of the television screen54. As technologies like the VCR made it possible to detach individual programmes from the flow of the television broadcast, increased attention began to be paid to the aesthetic construction of television series, most significantly in John Caldwell’s work on ‘televisuality’55

. Caldwell identified how the arrival of cable television in the United States proved a spur to creativity and innovation within the television industry, assisted by technological developments that made it increasingly easy to produce visually distinctive programming. The advent of cable meant that the programming options available to the consumer multiplied significantly, and the arrival of

50

Sarah Cardwell, ‘Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond’ in Jacobs and Peacock (eds.), Television Aesthetics and Style, p. 23.

51

Christine Geraghty, ‘Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6:1 (March 2003), p. 33.

52 _Ibid. 53

Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (London: Fontana, 1974).

54

Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (New York: Anchor Books, 1974).

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the remote control meant that channel surfing for compelling content became an influential aspect of television viewing. In response to this, television producers sought to give their programmes a distinctive visual aesthetic that could stand out in the crowded televisual

landscape. While Caldwell characterises these aesthetic developments as being almost entirely concerned with surface appeal, rather than expressive potential, the status of television as a primarily dialogue-based form of communication was being gradually eroded.

In his research, Caldwell also challenged the claims about television viewing made by critics like John Ellis, who sought to establish an essentialist argument about the differences in viewing experience between television and cinema. During the 1980s Ellis argued that while cinema has historically been understood to encourage the ‘gaze’ of the audience (involved, attentive, active), television’s domestic setting, lack of sophistication, and visual simplicity meant that it was watched with a ‘glance’ (distracted, inattentive, passive)56. As Caldwell demonstrated, even at the point when Ellis was writing his book (early 1980s), series like Miami Vice (NBC, 1984- 1990) were already challenging Ellis’ conclusions. As Caldwell writes,

Not only is television currently stylish, but it can be stylish in an extremely self- conscious and analytical way. While high theory was speculating on television as a distracting verbal-aural phenomenon, something very different was happening within the producing industry. There, in producer story sessions, in conversations between DPs and gaffers on sets, and among editors in postproduction suites, an awareness was growing of television as a style-driven phenomenon heavily dependent on the visual.57

The status of television as a visual medium was already well established when Caldwell’s work was published, and it has only become more relevant and accurate in the past twenty years as technological development has continued. As Creeber notes, “with the introduction of Home cinema, Wide/Plasma screens, High Definition, Surround Sound, DVD and Blu-Ray, some

56

John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1992).

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critics [have] argued that the boundaries between cinema and television [are] increasingly merging”58

. While it is true that these developments have not had equal impact on every genre of television, it is certainly the case that television drama has increasingly sought to convey information visually rather than aurally59.

These developments have contributed to the growing uses of textual analysis within television studies, with a particular emphasis being placed on questions of style. Discussing this increased emphasis on the analysis of style in television studies, Robin Nelson writes;

This emphasis arises partly from the creative exploitation of the better quality of the medium’s sound and image and partly because, in an age of well-produced DVDs of major television series, it has become possible for close textual readings on repeated viewings, both by fans and academics alike. Above all, however, it is because the ‘high- end’ of small screen fictions aspires to cinematic production values… The visual style, the ‘look’, of TV drama texts has become another key aspect, besides narrative form and other principles of composition, to invite analysis.60

For scholars like Nelson, Creeber, Geraghty and others who have advocated a greater role for textual analysis, particularly in relation to questions of style, part of the motivation is that both scholars and viewers have benefitted from changes in technology that make such analysis much easier and thus more widespread. More recently, Jeremy Butler has provided a significant formalist overview of the stylistic properties of television, which takes a primarily historical approach to the analysis of television style, tracing the relationship between industrial and technological changes in the industry and the way these have impacted the appearance of television programming61. The changes effected by technological developments have placed a

58

Glen Creeber, ‘It's Not TV, It's Online Drama: The Return of the Intimate Screen’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 14:6 (November 2011), p. 594.

59

For more see Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style, (New York: Routledge, 2010).

60

Nelson, State of Play, pp. 10-11.

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greater emphasis on questions of television style, both within the academy and within the wider television industry. Yet for some scholars it is precisely because the aesthetic status of television drama series has become so validated that caution should be taken by television scholars not to fall into undesirable habits (principally aesthetic evaluation). At the same time, there are numerous scholars who see those same habits as both desirable and necessary for the further development of textual analysis and television studies in general. Before addressing how this research is positioned in relation to these on-going debates, it is worth considering the position of textual analysis throughout the development of television studies as a discipline.

TV Studies and Textual Analysis

Textual analysis has had a somewhat contested history in the development of television studies, at least partly because of how interdisciplinary the discipline has been since its inception, and also partly because its early adopters came from a range of academic traditions. While it is somewhat reductive, the major distinction that existed and to some extent still exists is between the more quantitative and scientific methodologies pursued by scholars from the social sciences, and the more qualitative and subjective approach favoured by scholars from the arts and

humanities. As Newman and Levine write,

Much of the early academic study of the medium was undertaken within the largely American field of mass communication, which typically relied upon social-scientific methods in considering television’s effects upon its viewers and the larger populace… less common was the study of television programming as texts, as works of art or even generators of meaning, though some more humanistic television inquiry was underway as early as 1962.62

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The problem for the arts and humanities practitioners, particularly those committed to the kind of close textual reading found in film studies and English literature, was that the cultural status of television (along with the audio and visual constraints of the technology) was so low that it was very difficult to convince sceptical observers that television was worthy of the same kind of attention. Regardless of whether this was true, it posed a significant problem for those wishing to study the medium as a whole – studying television as if it were an art form like literature or cinema was bound to draw ridicule, so the focus shifted to those areas that were less reliant on textual analysis, or textual analysis became incorporated into more acceptable areas of inquiry.

Another significant obstacle to the practice of textual analysis within television studies was the influence of post-structuralism and the emergence of audience studies, both of which challenged the viability of textual analysis as a methodology. As Nelson outlines;

Post-structuralism, having established the multi-vocality, or slipperiness of the sign and the process of signification, was broadly disseminated in television studies through John Fiske’s Television Culture. The idea of the ‘polysemic’ text gave full rein to a range of readings from a variety of reading positions. The findings of 1980s audience research into how people actually read television seemed to confirm reception theory’s emphasis on a lack of textual fixity.63

While not the originator of these ideas64, Fiske’s book was particularly influential in introducing audience studies to television scholars and thus proved particularly significant in the

development of the discipline. The development of ethnographic research not only foregrounded the value of empirical evidence in studying television, but significantly undermined the validity

63

Robin Nelson, ‘Quality Television: The Sopranos is the Best Television Drama Ever… In My Humble Opinion…, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 1:1 (2006), pp. 58-71. …’, p. 65.

64

See for example, Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis

(eds.), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128-138; Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley,

Everyday Television ‘Nationwide’ (London: British Film Institute, 1978); David Morley, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980); Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985).

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of textual analysis as an approach. Audience research clearly demonstrated that television texts could be read by different viewers in vastly different ways depending on their class, race, gender, sexuality or nationality. This being so, any attempt on the part of a television scholar to produce a reading primarily based on textual analysis was considered somewhat suspect, as on some level it implied that there was an ‘ideal’ reader who would view the same text in the same way, even though the evidence demonstrated this was not the case. As Glen Creeber

summarises;

If audiences can read a text in a number of ways, then what is the validity and relevance of one textual interpretation? A textual analyst may give their reading intellectual credibility through the application of a dense theoretical discourse (like semiotics or psychoanalysis), but it is still only one interpretation among many.65

On a general level these developments were desirable, particularly because they demonstrated that the television audience was not merely a passive sponge for the dominant ideological messages being conveyed through television programming. As Fiske wrote, “to be popular, the television text has to be read and enjoyed by a diversity of social groups, so its meanings must be capable of being inflected in a number of different ways”66

. The consequence of these developments in the 1980s was that textual analysis became increasingly unfashionable as a methodological approach and, as Creeber writes, “for many textual analysis became the remnant of an embarrassing (literary and even Leavisite) tradition that was now despised and ridiculed, and was regarded by some as intellectually simplistic and passé”67.

This condition persisted long enough that as recently as the late 1990s, Charlotte Brunsdon could survey the current state of television studies and write that “academic and popular writing

65 _{Glen Creeber, ‘The Joy of Text?: Television and Textual Analysis’, Critical Studies in Television: The International}

Journal of Television Studies,1:1 (Spring 2006), p. 82.

66

John Fiske, Television Culture, 2nd edn. (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 66.

46

about the medium is haunted by anxiety about the cultural legitimacy of watching television”68. Yet only a few years later followed calls from Jason Jacobs and Christine Geraghty to not only embrace textual analysis as a methodology, but to do so in relation to the subject of evaluation. Moreover, Jacobs directly linked this impulse to changes in television content, arguing that “the continued sense that the television text is mostly inferior to the film text and cannot withstand concentrated critical pressure because it lacks ‘symbolic density’, rich mise-en-scène, and the promotion of identification as a means of securing audience proximity, has to be revised in the light of contemporary television”69

. While the question of evaluation has continued to struggle to find widespread acceptance, the debate that has grown up around the issue has clearly had a galvanising force on the use of textual analysis in television studies, and the anxiety about television’s cultural legitimacy is no longer apparent either amongst scholars or popular writers.

The Aesthetics Debate

In recognition of these developments, the past fifteen years have seen a growing scholarly interest in the aesthetic analysis of television that utilises methods of close reading and textual analysis which have more typically been found in film studies. For the reasons set out above, this has prompted heated debate, particularly when such analysis is accompanied by an

evaluative element that valorises a particular programme because of some purported exemplary element of its artistic construction70. Christine Geraghty, Jacobs and Cardwell have all called for a greater emphasis and appreciation of those aspects of television texts that television scholars

68 _{Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘What is the “Television” of Television Studies?’ in Christine Geraghty and David Lusted}

(eds.), The Television Studies Book (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 96.

69

Jason Jacobs, ‘Issues of Judgement’, p. 433.

70 _{For further examples see John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture, (Oxford}

University Press 2000); John Caughie, ‘Telephilia and Distraction: Terms of Engagement’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3:1 (May 2006), pp. 5-18; Ted Nannicelli. ‘Ontology, Intentionality and Television Aesthetics’,

Screen 53:2 (Summer 2012), pp. 164-179; Jason Jacobs, ‘The Medium in Crisis: Caughie, Brunsdon and the Problem of US Television’, Screen 52:4 (Winter 2011), pp. 503-511; Jeffrey Sconce, ‘What If?: Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries’ in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (eds.), Television After TV: Essays on A Medium in

47

consider particularly worthy of attention71. Rather than attempting to construct an account of television aesthetics that encompasses the whole medium, as earlier theorists like Williams and Ellis did, these authors argue that different criteria should be established for different categories of television, and that this process necessarily involves aesthetic evaluation. As Mittell explains,

An evaluative critique does not aspire to the status of fact or proof. By claiming that a given program is good or that one series is better than another, I am making an argument that I believe to be true, but it is not a truth claim… evaluation is an act of persuasion rather than demonstration.72

The overt focus on aesthetics and evaluation is also meant to acknowledge that, as Cardwell writes,

The selection of programmes for analysis and criticism within any particular approach, for any specific purposes, including aesthetic ones, is in some sense an evaluative action that recommends particular texts to other viewers… Texts are selected precisely because they fulfil, for each writer, the functions that their particular approach requires. If the writer is interested in aesthetic concerns, he or she will be by definition drawn to texts that best reward those interests.73

The writers most invested in the development of television aesthetics take the position that it is acceptable to try and engage the reader through the detailed explication of their own subjective enjoyment of a given series or episode, provided one is upfront about the assumptions that one brings to one's work.

This remains controversial. The most prominent critic is Matt Hills, who describes the whole project as 'dangerous'. Hills argues that an aesthetic evaluation necessarily involves the scholar

71

Sarah Cardwell, ‘Television Aesthetics’, Critical Studies in Television, 1:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 72-80; Geraghty, ‘Aesthetics and Quality’; Jason Jacobs, ‘Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4:4 (December 2001), pp. 427-447.

72

Mittell, Complex TV, p. 207.

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advancing their own subjective taste in a way that makes it seem objective or inevitable. Despite the denials of the critics, he says, there remains what he calls a ‘pre-structuralist’ philosophy at play in their arguments, which are “readily identifiable by virtue of the fact that they position aesthetic value as textually inherent (that is transcendent) rather than as textually and

evaluatively relational”74_{. Hills still sees evidence of ‘traditional aesthetic discourse’ in much of} their work – a tendency to treat particular qualities as objectively rather than subjectively valuable. Hills claims that these underlying tendencies in the work of television aesthetes carry “dangers for the debate over TV and value, because it threatens surreptitiously and unreflexively to reinstall versions of aesthetics to which TV studies and cultural studies were arguably

founded in opposition”75 .

Hills argues that if any criteria of aesthetic value are to apply, they should be determined by the audience, not by the academy;

Focusing on how academics could or should make value judgements about television means adopting a specific position from which to speak and write. However, an

alternative position could involve not setting out scholarly judgements of value, however provisional these may be, but rather investigating how aesthetic judgements are made by all sorts of non-academic audiences.76

The problem, as Brunsdon has noted, is that this attitude has resulted in a situation where “there is something rather odd about our fascination with what ‘real’ (i.e., other, non-academic) people think about television when it is combined with a principled refusal to reveal what academics think about it”77

. Jacobs is more pointed in his rejection of Hills’ argument, writing that “flattery