Television Authorship

Abstract

Unlike the well-established tradition of auteurism in its sibling art cinema, in the case of television, the question of authorship continues to be fraught: subject to contestations not only over who can be called the television author but over whether that author exists at all. The heavily collaborative and standardized nature of most television production has been a long-standing issue for discussions of authorship, which have often argued that the concept is not useful for analyzing television—putting emphasis instead on the polysemic television text—or else focused on the struggle for control and agency between creative practitioners and television networks. Two main strands that coalesced early on in scholarship locate the television author either in the producer or the writer, with additional early work on directors mostly reaching a dead end. Over time, the focus has shifted to invest authorship in a hyphenate writer-producer figure, and in the late 2010s, both academic and popular criticism is often concerned with the figure of the showrunner. While not an official title credit, it is this figure of the individual seen as exercising full creative control of a show that is now often celebrated or indeed critiqued as television’s auteur. In the United States, the study of television authorship can be broadly mapped onto ideas of periodization in television and is bound up with issues of quality, cult, and artistic legitimation. Moments and figures of frequent interest to scholars are the anthology writers of the “golden age”; the late 1970s emergence of MTM and Norman Lear’s work with Tandem Productions as early birds of “quality” television, as well as ideas of studio authorship and company style; the appearance of the showrunner concept in the mid-1990s with Dick Wolf and cult showrunners such as Joss Whedon; and the auteurist branding of HBO from 1999 (The Sopranos) onward, leading into ideas of a “second golden age” led by the showrunner as auteur. Today’s “Peak TV” period is characterized by interest in the position of the author in transmedia television, in questions of representation and diversity in television production, and in the complex relationships between producers and audiences in a digital participatory culture. In the United Kingdom, in the meantime, much scholarship has centered on particular historical “playwrights” in the mold of Dennis Potter, and the question of television authorship is bound up with questions of literary adaptation and high and low culture. Changes in modes of production of television globally are now opening up the field to broader interest in television writers and producers as authors, but research is still scarce.