Rashna Wadia Richards, Cinematic TV: Serial Drama Goes to the Movies

Abstract

Cinematic TV promises to provide much that should be of interest to television studies: a comprehensive interrogation of its titular concept, and an ‘innovative theoretical framework’ for exploring intertextuality. The book focuses on a number of high-end television drama serials in the so-called ‘American Quality TV’ tradition, although it slips easily into reading its selection as co-extensive of the wider (and, one would hope, more cosmopolitan) field of ‘contemporary serial TV drama’. The slippage would be less of a concern were it not underpinned by an introductory, US-centric history of relations between television and cinema, which quickly dismisses television as having been a ‘vast wasteland’ until it was rescued by the arrival of ‘widely acclaimed creators […] from the film industry’ in the late 1990s (p. 4). More promisingly, Wadia Richards acknowledges difficulties presented by use of ‘cinematic’ as an evaluative term, proposing instead that television should be so-called because it appropriates cinema, revealing an inherently ‘archival impulse’ (p. 3) that manifests through a range of intertextual modalities: homage, evocation, genre and parody.