Inside the Box: Accessing Self-Reflexive Television

Abstract

After some high-profile staffing shakeups in the federal government in the fall of 2004, the Sacramento Bee ran a piece in the “Lifestyle” section comparing two recently promoted female officials: National Security Advisor and now former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and C.J. Cregg, the press secretary who had just stepped into the position of chief of staff on the political TV drama The West Wing.1 “Yes, we know that one of them is a real person and one of them isn't (and yes, we even know which is which),” professed author Rachel Leibrock, but the fact that such a disclaimer is necessary only underlines the article’s premise: real and televisual zones are overlapping and corresponding rather than sharply discrete. Leibrock's article, although flippant, demonstrates that the cultural and symbolic borders between Condoleezza and C.J., between the world we inhabit and the world television characters inhabit, are both decisive and insubstantial. Leibrock gestures to a commonsense understanding of this topology— entertainment is contained within the four edges of the television screen, while the reality in which we participate exists outside it—but both television itself and television scholars have wrestled with the permeability of this threshold in practice. In this paper, I figure this boundary spatially, as the distinction between what’s inside and outside of the television set, precisely to argue that the partition formed by the sides of the television box isn’t as rigid as it might appear at first glance. While the inside/outside binary is a key axis in discourses of television, it is the inevitable failure of any attempt to stabilize it that is most enlightening, and analysis of television thus calls for a critical approach that can inhabit and express constitutive ambiguity and contradiction as fluently as does television itself. Here, I review some of the literature that focuses specifically on self-reflexive television (or television as self-reflexive), a formal device that explicitly thematizes television and its border wars with the real. I ask how we, as critics, can take into account the rigorous recuperative ability of capitalism without simply slipping into a nostalgic privileging of stable distinctions between reality and entertainment, fact and fiction, outside and inside. In the midst of navigating this theoretical landscape, I apply its models to a close reading of a self-reflexive episode of The West Wing—Access, which takes the form of a fictional documentary about C.J. Cregg and her role as press secretary—considering the textual, spectatorial, and economic operations in evidence. I hope to demonstrate how the key problematics I outline function in this specific case, but also to demonstrate an intellectual approach that leaves space for their complexities and contradictions. If I’m attempting to theorize television as a medium that holds contradictory spaces—the inside versus the outside (of the TV set, of the home, of the subject)—in distinction but simultaneously in imbrication, then writing about it, in consequence, must venture a parallel sort of paradox. There is a line to be walked between not discounting self-reflexivity’s meaningful critical function and not being naively optimistic about the audience’s ability to take up this critical position—the line, precisely, of there no longer being reliable lines at all. Ultimately, I argue that, while it is important to hold in view the complicity of self-reflexivity with consumer capitalism, the multiple subjectivities and realities of television's boundary crossings render this alliance far from simple or totalizing. The West Wing, from which I take my artifact, is a drama series that ran for seven seasons on NBC (1999-2006). Palpably bred in the climate of the Clinton administration, it portrays the personal and political tribulations of Democratic President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his immediate staff. A paragon of what’s colloquially termed “quality television,” it is known demographically for its liberal, educated audience; formally for its high production values and luscious, cinematic visual style, extraordinary acting by an all-star ensemble cast, and fast-paced, cerebral dialogue; and narratively for “educationally” offering “a realistic, behind-the-scenes peek” into the inner workings of government.2 In other words, the program’s “quality” status evokes a complex of overlapping and often conflicting interfaces with reality. Its supposed “superiority” inheres in its “realistic” depiction of politics, but the fact that it goes “behind-the-scenes”