Contemporary American Television Research Articles

Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television

Uma nova forma de entretenimento tem surgido nas ultimas duas decadas conseguindo sucesso de publico e critica na televisao americana. Tal modelo se diferencia por usar a complexidade narrativa como uma alternativa as formas episodicas e seriadas. O objetivo deste artigo e remontar as caracteristicas formais deste modelo de narracao, o storytelling , explorar as particularidades de seu modo de fruicao e de compreensao, alem de apontar justificativas para sua emergencia nos anos 1990. Para entender este fenomeno, precisamos utilizar a narratologia formal de modo a tracar sua estrutura e suas fronteiras, e ao mesmo tempo incorporar outros metodos para investigar como este modelo narrativo se cruza com os campos das industrias criativas, das inovacoes tecnologicas, das praticas participatorias e da compreensao dos espectadores.

Hidden Agendas, Endless Investigations, and the Dynamics of Complexity: The Conspiratorial Mode of Storytelling in Contemporary American Television Series

In this paper, I explore a particular kind of narrative construction pervasive in contemporary American television series. Popular shows such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, 24, Alias, or Fringe all similarly construct long-running narratives around their protagonists’ attempts to solve central underlying mysteries. By doing so, these series amass ever more complex backstories and perpetually complicate their individual webs of intersecting subplots and long-term story arcs. Drawing on narratology, concepts developed in television studies, and Mark Fenster’s work on Conspiracy Theories, I argue that the series’ success is indebted to a particular way of telling their stories—which I call the ‘conspiratorial mode’—that makes them ideally suited to operate within the competitive environment of post-network television. This article sketches the narrative structure of these conspiratorial shows, situates them in the context of contemporary television, and considers their curious dynamics of narrative progression and deferral. Finally, its goals are to suggest reasons for the recent resurgence of conspiracy narratives in television beyond and apart from a paranoia that is supposedly widespread in contemporary American culture.

Review: Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. £45.00 (hbk), £16.99 (pbk). 291 pp

Review: Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. £45.00 (hbk), £16.99 (pbk). 291 pp

Dossier: Perspectives on Failure

Dossier:Perspectives on Failure The Editors Media history is lined with failures, flops, and false starts across the areas of aesthetics and style, technology, social and political representation, media studies' methods and models, and industry and business. We approached a number of well-known media scholars working in a variety of fields and asked them to discuss a favorite, overlooked, or particularly important instance of failure in one of these five arenas. Their thought-provoking answers complement and extend the concerns raised elsewhere in this issue, covering a range of topics from submarine movies to PowerPoint presentations and from telephonic cats to prepositions. We thank our contributors for their responses and hope that the reader will find this collection as engaging as we do. The Aesthetics of Failure Jason Mittell To study the aesthetics of American television requires us to examine failure. Not because, as many might assert, television fails as an aesthetic medium. In fact, I would argue that television of the last twenty years is arguably our most robust aesthetic medium. Rather, television creativity itself is immersed in failure, and failure needs to be seen as the default norm, not the exception. Clearly, this is tied to the raw numbers of television programming. In the commercial American system the vast majority of program ideas never get optioned into a script, and most scripts are never filmed as pilots, and a small fraction of pilots makes it into an aired series. Thus, simply getting a show on the air should be regarded as a success. But the economics of television place the failure threshold much higher, as most series only turn profitable after multiple seasons, making failure a nearly universal condition by the only measures that matter to the television industry. From a creative perspective, failure is much more muddy. Many programs that have turned a profit via the magical realm of syndication are viewed by critics and creators with scorn-sure, programs like Gilligan's Island, Empty Nest, and Coach could be seen as successes, with long, profitable runs both on- and off-network, but it would be hard to find a serious defense of their aesthetic achievements. Meanwhile, television history is littered with "Brilliant but Cancelled" pilots and abbreviated first seasons, programs whose aesthetic choices fail to find their groove in the commercial system-think Firefly, Frank's Place, and Freaks & Geeks, just from the F file. But it's a mistake to link innovative aesthetics with commercial failure and industrial success to formulaic retreads. If you ever get a chance to see an unaired pilot, odds are it earned its failure. Likewise, some of the most successful shows in television history were incredibly innovative and adventurous aesthetically, from Dragnet's paradigmatic telefilm style to Seinfeld's narrative architecture, Cheers as a trailblazer for sitcom story arcs to ER's groundbreaking visual style. Instead of bemoaning the failed aesthetics of television, we should look to what both successful and cancelled innovations can teach us and how they help shape the possibilities of the medium. For my own current project analyzing contemporary American television narrative forms, launched here in Velvet Light Trap 58, I have been forced to think about how narrative innovations stem from both commercial successes and failures-and rethink that very boundary itself. I have kept a running list of programs that might [End Page 76] be categorized as part of the mode of narrative complexity I outline in that article. As of January 2009 I count ninety-seven narratively complex series that made it to television since 1999, which I see as the moment when a few innovations coalesced into a full-fledged trend. Of those, forty-two might be deemed successful, gaining a renewal beyond a single season, with a few still too recent to judge. A nearly 50 percent success rate is remarkable for commercial television, where failure is much more commonplace. For comparison, thirty new series debuted on network broadcast television in 1997, with only three lasting beyond that season. To be fair, many of the shows on my list aired on basic or premium cable, where competition is thinner and the ratings thresholds are lower. But nonetheless, the commercial success...

Reviews: Life on Mars, Social Issues in Television Fiction, Watching the World: Screen Documentary and Audiences, Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture, Tony Garnett, a National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, Alan Bennett, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama, Public Issue Television: World in Action, 1963–98, Television and

Reviews: Life on Mars, Social Issues in Television Fiction, Watching the World: Screen Documentary and Audiences, Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture, Tony Garnett, a National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, Alan Bennett, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama, Public Issue Television: World in Action, 1963–98, Television and

Quality TV: contemporary American television and beyond

Dealing primarily with the post-1996 era shaped by digital technologies and defined by consumer choice and brand marketing, this book brings together leading scholars, established journalists and experienced broadcasters working in the field of contemporary television to debate what we currently mean by quality TV. They go deep into contemporary American television fictions, from The Sopranos and The West Wing, to CSI and Lost. But how do we understand the emergence of these kinds of fiction? Are they genuinely new? What does quality tv have to tell us about the state of today's television market? And is it quality? Original, often polemic, each chapter proposes new ways of thinking about and defining quality TV. There is a foreword from Robert Thompson, and heated dialogue between British and US television critics. Also included are interviews with W. Snuffy Walden (scored The West Wing among others) and with David Chase (The Sopranos creator).

Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television

Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television Jason Mittell Alongside the host of procedural crime dramas, domestic sitcoms, and reality competitions that populate the American television schedule, a new form of entertainment television has emerged over the past two decades to both critical and popular acclaim. This model of television storytelling is distinct for its use of narrative complexity as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial forms that have typified most American television since its inception. We can see such innovative narrative form in popular hits of recent decades from Seinfeld to Lost, West Wing to The X-Files, as well as in critically beloved but ratings-challenged shows like Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Boomtown, and Firefly. HBO has built its reputation and subscriber base upon narratively complex shows, such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Wire. Clearly, these shows offer an alternative to conventional television narrative—the purpose of this essay is to chart out the formal attributes of this storytelling mode, explore its unique pleasures and patterns of comprehension, and suggest a range of reasons for its emergence in the 1990s. In trying to understand the storytelling practices of contemporary American television, we might consider narrative complexity as a distinct narrational mode, as suggested by David Bordwell's analysis of film narrative. For Bordwell, a "narrational mode is a historically distinct set of norms of narrational construction and comprehension," one that crosses genres, specific creators, and artistic movements to forge a coherent category of practices. 1 Bordwell outlines specific cinematic modes such as classical Hollywood, art cinema, and historical materialism, all of which encompass distinct storytelling strategies while still referencing one another and building on the foundations of other modes. Kristin Thompson has extended Bordwell's approach to television, suggesting that programs like Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective might be usefully thought of as "art television," importing norms from art cinema onto the small screen. 2 Although certainly cinema influences many aspects of television, especially concerning visual style, I am reluctant to map a model of storytelling tied to self-contained feature films onto the ongoing long-form narrative structure of series television and thus believe we can more productively develop a vocabulary for television narrative in terms of its own medium. Television's narrative complexity is predicated on specific facets of storytelling that seem uniquely suited to the series structure that sets television apart from film and distinguish it from conventional modes of episodic and serial forms. Narrative complexity is sufficiently widespread and popular that we may consider the 1990s to the present as the era of television complexity. Complexity has not overtaken conventional forms within the majority of television programming today—there are still many more conventional sitcoms and dramas on-air than complex narratives. Yet just as 1970s Hollywood is remembered far more for the innovative work of Altman, Scorsese, and Coppola than for the more commonplace (and often more popular) conventional disaster films, romances, and comedy films that filled theaters, I believe that American television of the past twenty years will be remembered as an era of narrative experimentation and innovation, challenging the norms of what the medium can do. Thus for argument's sake it is useful to explore how today's television has redefined narrative norms in a series of ways that I label "complex." Even though this mode represents neither the majority of television nor its most popular programs (at least by the flawed standard of Nielsen ratings), a sufficiently widespread number of programs work [End Page 29] against conventional narrative practices using an innovative cluster of narrational techniques to justify such analysis. 3 Obviously, the labels "conventional" and "complex" are not value-free descriptions, just as terms like "primitive" and "classical" signal evaluative standpoints in film studies. While I have argued elsewhere for the importance of questions of value in studying television, a tendency that contemporary critical approaches dismiss, I do not propose these terms as explicitly evaluative. 4 Complexity...

The fourth network: how Fox broke the rules and reinvented television

When Garth Ancier left NBC for the start-up FOX network, NBC head Grant Tinker told Ancier he was making a terrible mistake. I will never put a fourth column on my schedule board, Ancier recalls Tinker telling him. There will only be three. Today, fewer than twenty years later, FOX is routinely referred to as one of the Big Four television networks while more recent arrivals like UPN, PAX, and the WB strive to be number five. The Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, and the many executives who have worked at the FOX network over the years changed the rules of the game. They showed it was possible to build and sustain a fourth American television network through innovations in prime-time shows, sports, children's entertainment, news, and new business models that challenged the assumptions of how the industry operated. Daniel Kimmel's lively account of the FOX story carries the reader from the launch of the ill-fated Joan Rivers Show in 1986 to the challenging media environment of the twenty-first century-an environment FOX helped create. The Fourth Network is filled with behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing, outsized personalities, improbable risk-takers, and the triumphs and disasters that led to such signature television series as The Simpsons, Beverly Hills 90210, The X Files, and America's Most Wanted. For better or worse-or perhaps a bit of both-the story of the rise of FOX is the story of contemporary American television.