The presence of performance and the stakes of serial drama: accrual, transience, companionship

Abstract

This thesis shows how performance is a critically neglected but crucial aspect of serial televisiondrama as an art form. One of serial drama’s obvious storytelling attractions is its ability to involveviewers in relationships between characters over long periods of time. Such involvement takes placethrough a recurring structure of episodes and seasons, whose unfolding reflects the extensive,ongoing history through which interpersonal bonds form and develop, deepen and decay. Thecharacters we watch onscreen are embodied and performed by actors. Television studies, however,has persistently overlooked screen performance, hampering appreciation of serial drama’s affinitywith long-term relationships as a resource for aesthetic significance. Redressing such neglect, thisthesis directs new critical attention to expressive stylistic relationships between serial form, screenperformance, and the subject of companionship in some recent US serial dramas. The focus of that attention is a particular aesthetic quality: the provisional, which emergesthrough serial drama’s distinctive tension between permanence and transience. In the first chapter,I argue that the provisional is central to an affinity between screen performance, seriality intelevision drama, and companionship as an aspect of human life. Chapters Two and Three thenshow how the art of the provisional in particular series has been underappreciated due to televisionstudies’ neglect of performance and expressiveness as dimensions of serial form in televisionfiction. The final two chapters of the thesis highlight contrasting treatments of provisionality,performance, and the survival of social bonds in two critically celebrated US dramas of the mid-2000s: Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) and Homeland (Showtime, 2011–19). In doing so, this thesisilluminates the significance and value to be found in an under-explored dimension of experiencemade available by performance in particular serial dramas. Its original contribution is to highlightoverlooked features of this medium whose potential aesthetic significance should be a priority forthe criticism of serial drama in television studies.