All Comments
Comments on the Book
-
Introduction (44 comments)
-
I see the point behind your careful address of the question (‘how indicative is a small group’s behavior for broader tendencies’), still I would be glad to have your ‘definition’ on this small (fan) group, as the behave you describe tells more about a specific fan consumption of television than about general viewer reactions. (Does this come maybe in a later chapter?)
-
Yeah, this is a delicate balancing act. I hope that I make these points clearer in the Orienting Paratexts chapter – maybe we can return to discussing it when we get there in my serial rollout?
-
-
“especially in discussing how Soap innovative serial sitcoms in the 1970s” –> there seems to be a missing verb here.
-
Indeed there is!
-
-
Your choice of the word “formulaic” is an interesting one in this context; 24 was pretty much all formula, of course — it just wasn’t the expected formula. Maybe it’s the difference between formulaic and algorithmic — both use formulae, but one is generative and the other is… not?
-
Hmmm – that makes sense (and I highlight 24′s formulae, if not algorithms in another chapter). I do think “formulaic” in this context does suggest the TV norms of conventional routines & structures. But if other people think it needs clarifying, I certainly can.
-
-
There’s something interesting in your simultaneous resistance to the suggestion that complex television narratives have become “novelistic” and use of the term “poetics.” I recognize, of course, that poetics applies to far more than poetry; what allows it to do so without undermining medium specificity? (And on the other hand, what prevents “novelistic” from similarly permitting one to discuss narrative in a fashion that might still be medium-specific?)
-
Great question! My answer is that there’s a long tradition of poetics as a mode of formal analysis that goes beyond poetry, so by the time it gets to me, the connections to poetry are tenuous & less weighted. I know no similar tradition of “novelistics” beyond the literary, although I may be wrong. Would it be worth iterating this in a footnote or the text? Or does that seem like a weak rationalization?
-
-
Perhaps they might even be motivated to do so here!
-
Is the extension in the third sentence, “both in academic pubs and on blogs” necessary? Your writing is your writing, no?
-
True, but I do want to validate blogging as a mode of scholarly communication.
-
-
Those parentheticals get a little cumbersome. Plus, the second verb in each pair is at least as important as the first to me, as I assume they were to you; the parentheses dampen that import.
-
I was going for a parallelism, where my research as an act of consumption (and production) is highlighted. Perhaps it doesn’t work.
-
-
The TWW reference here seems a little obscure: you’ve nodded to your reasoning for using it (that you felt in 2000 that it was atypical, whereas Revenge’s techniques go unnoticed), but for contemporary readers, I think it needs a little more setup than this. Either that, or maybe use an example from a more widely viewed show? Contributing to this is the vague way you describe it; it’s harder to get a sense for why it’s a relevant reference when you can’t quite remember the sequence even if you were a TWW viewer.I’m floundering a bit: basically, the two series are so far afield from one another, that comparing them is useful only if either a) the reader has seen both of them, or b) they are described with enough detail to be able to get the comparison without having done so. And I’m not sure either test really passes in this par. fwiw
-
(CommentPress ate my carriage returns!)
-
Also, the title of the ep is “What Kind of Day Has It Been?”
-
-
That makes sense – I’ll try to clarify the reason for the West Wing reference, and describe it better for unfamiliar viewers (and correct the ep title!).
-
-
I wonder if “Complex Television” is the best term for what you are suggesting. It suggests a contrast with “simple television,” which seems odd to me. Following the multitude of story lines on a soap opera hardly seems simple. Old production and distribution models also do not seem simple, even if they are less complex than current modes.”Complex television” is also mulltiply ambiguous (which perhaps you intend), but the term doesn’t capture the *storytelling* aspect that it appears you will emphasize. Maybe something like “complex televisual narratives” is closer, but an awkward phrase.Setting these aside, your real focus seems to be on “a new mode of television storytelling.” This suggests a single new mode, which seems false. 24, Alias, Community, Lost, etc., may all be complex, but (and you might prove me wrong here) they all seem to be complex in different ways. Perhaps “new modes of teleivision storytelling”?
-
This is a big question – I’m wondering if you’ve read on to the next chapter & if that satisfies the concerns you raise? It’s hard to layout the term & all of its… complexity here without getting bogged down in the weeds. I could certainly indicate that these issues will be addressed in the next chapter, but I try to avoid too much self-citationality like that. What do you think?
-
-
I really like the Revenge example here. It’s an excellent choice for the introduction to frame how commonplace these techniques have become.
-
Absolutely, and it should be so validated. I’m just not sure adding it this way doesn’t actually belittle it in a strange way. As if it’s been tacked on.It’s a hard question, I’d say.
-
I’ve always used parentheses to denote information not central to the idea of the sentence, which seems like the opposite of what you want to convey. Maybe a slash between each? Or a hyphen? You could introduce them in Table 1. ;)
-
Just a typo correction:An ‘s’ is missing in the last word of this sentence: “In the past 15 years, television’s storytelling possibilities and practices have undergone drastic shifts in medium-specific way.” Also, in the following sentence I think it should be “almost a cliché” instead of “almost cliché.”Are these kinds of nit-picky comments also helpful in this format, or would you prefer to save that for a later stage of revision and focus on content-related questions here?
-
Please do continue to nit-pick – while I try to catch all style/copy issues before posting, getting many eyes to catch mistakes & make suggestions is great help!
-
-
It should be “complement,” not “compliment” in the first sentence.
-
a minor stylistic remark: “with” occurs three times in the first sentence which somehow disrupted my reading flow
-
story –> points.”while a conventional formulaic approach is viewed as a commercial failure”: i think i would like this better if it was phrased in a more qualified manner, like the preceding “can succeed”. perhaps: “can fail commercially”?
-
the distinction between form and content in this paragraph seems a bit rigid to me. “not interested in analyzing such meanings”: but aren’t those meanings connected to the formal complexities you’re interested in? doesn’t narrative complexity correlate with particular representations, isn’t the militarization/heroicization of the female body in _Alias_, or the discourse of conspiracy in _24_ at some level connected to the aesthetic choices and formal affordances of these shows? i understand why you don’t want to read these programs as “reactions” to 9/11 or the “war on terror”, but this paragraph sounds a little bit like it’s deliberately outsourcing these issues to other scholars so it can better celebrate the medium. i wonder if this is necessary: granting a complex medium the respect (and admiration) it deserves, i think, includes granting it complex critique (and a critique of complexity). i understand that you will address some of these concerns in the chapter on “evaluation” – and i remember that your evaluation of _Mad Men_ had a lot to say about the form-content-intersection (the form of its content, the content of its form). perhaps this interrelationship between form and content could be addressed here already, even though it’s only the introduction where of course you have to paint with broader strokes?
-
I see that you later partially retract this, but I get your point. Maybe just change “not interested” to “not focused”? In part, this is just a standard caveat & turf-marking statement, highlighting what I won’t be doing here. But it also is trying to rhetorically highlight how we can study formal questions without claiming that politics aren’t important, which some scholars have argued.
-
-
okay, this paragraph is saying now what i wanted the previous one to say. perhaps i misread paragraph 8 (as distinguishing too strongly between formal complexity and cultural meaning)
-
i like the parentheses – especially the final one (“and rewatched”), which breaks the mold and turns out to be a punchline, almost, in the way it complicates the reading/writing, passive/active structure
-
american tv certainly differs from other tv cultures, but i don’t know if i would locate this difference in its striving for narrative infinity. telenovelas work the same way, and there are never-ending-soaps even in germany. (was it eco who said that (potential) endlessness is a defining feature of all serial forms, not just tv?)
-
I’ll qualify it, but the difference is that in US, infinity is the norm, while it is exceptional most other places (like German endless soaps, or the British Eastenders). Most telenovelas are actually designed with a set run time, with sequels if they turn out to be particularly popular.
-
-
why oh why is everyone so afraid of canonization? there’s nothing like a good canon debate!
-
one harsh word about Dallas and i will stop reading immediately!
-
I’ll only mock the “it was all a dream” season…
-
-
While the West Wing reference makes sense as an early example, I think the show that actually made this kind of storytelling (“multiple flashbacks to various timeframes”) appear commonplace, and, more importantly, acceptable to viewers as “normal TV storytelling,” is Lost. Give it credit! After Lost, EVERY TV show has used these devices, but after The West Wing, only a few.
-
One of the challenges of the book is to make it not just use Lost as my go-to example. I hope nobody will be able to claim that I underrepresent Lost’s place in this story in the larger context of the manuscript!
-
-
(Sorry if this is hyper nitpicky.) Your point regarding the storytelling device in the West Wing scene now seeming cliché seems to echo the point made in para 6. I wonder if it would be worth avoiding the use of the word “cliché” in both paras. (As is, it struck me as maybe a little repetitive.)
-
Makes sense – and not nitpicky at all! Thanks for commenting…
-
-
Writing “not focused” should do the job, I guess.Anyhow, Jason, I wonder if your short diagnosis on 90s television studies could be somehow misleading here. Caldwell’s work in the 1990s already thematized the neglection of form or formal aesthetics in TV studies. So I would somehow underline Frank’s comment: What is the epistemological challenge for a study centered on form when it comes to questions of “content”? Given the fact that contemporary TV shows of different genres share so many recurrent subjects, motifs or objects (just think of the prominence of surveillance technologies, torture, therapy etc.), it is clearly something I would expect to have an effect on TV formal means and formats. Maybe it could be productive to replace the “old” distinction of form and content by a new one: that of media and form, as Luhmann would suggest.
-
Hmmm – I’m torn here. On the one hand, this paragraph does what I think it should: stake the terrain & justify it. I don’t want it to be a major new argument (like shifting from content to medium), but I also don’t want it to come across as outdated. I think Caldwell’s talking about a very different model of “form” so I don’t really build on his take on visual style & production modes.
-
-
it should be “as the nexus”, not “at”…
-
Phrases like “methodological contextualization” and “associated paratexts” reduce the seriousness of your work here. If open scholarship is to be truly meaningful, the trappings of academic obfuscation can and should be dropped.
-
-
Book Proposal (41 comments)
-
In looking at the ways in which the author casts its shadow onto the text, David Simon and Kurt Sutter are the two most recent elements of interest, I would say.
Simon because of the energy and drive he employs in trying to pre-define its work and claim ‘auctoritas’, both in terms of models and inspirations; he is certainly not an elusive author, and his real life assertive and intense personality almost manages to ‘kill’ the implied author of his work by overtaking our perception of it. This is also due to the unusual nature of his most important work (The Wire), so intellectually charged and carrying almost from its inception the burden of being ‘the best show ever’. The Wire’s reception has always been structured in a heavy ‘top-down’ pattern, even more than other HBO shows; it’s so embedded in the series’ DNA that such a strong connection with its primary form of authorship is easily understandable.
Sutter, on the other hand, might be the first author to provide a meta-narrative evolution of his own role. We always note how the last decade (with a bit of help from the 90s) has brought to prominence the anti-hero figure, and Sutter has taken this to a whole new meta-level positioning himself as the first equivalent of the anti-hero at the level of authorship. An agent who not only assumes the new perception of authors but builds on it, giving a narrative connotation to his presence that results in what we know very well in the Twitter-sphere and with his blog.
I believe these two case studies constitute an evolution in the study of televisual authorship. Whedon’s authorship is probably still a product of the 90’s, Moore’s is heavily shaped by the genre element, while Cuse&Lindelof are a full-blown mass market phenomenon of the 2000’s (crucial but also crossing over to other fields).-
I agree that both Simon & Sutter are great examples of these issues. Simon enters into the public conversation via traditional media (op-eds, interviews, lectures) but creates a bold persona that almost denies his status of TV writer, while Sutter is all about self-defining through his own media presence & performing an exaggerated identity. I think especially concerning season 5 of The Wire, Simon’s personal story became so linked to the story that it colored many critics’ opinions.
Thanks for the comment!
-
-
This might be a good place to mention Babylon-5′s creator. On the one hand the show features a very strong writer model, given that jms not only created a broad world, but also wrote so many episodes. On the other hand, there’s the active fan world, both in resource creation (Lurker’s Guide) and active discussion with jms (email, Usenet).
-
JMS is a great prototype for this, using old “new media” to engage fans directly, as well as having a publicly known “5-year plan” for the narrative. Incidentally, I think back on how the concept of having such a plan for a TV series seemed ridiculous back in the 90s, while in recent years the assumption is that any hyper-serialized show should be planned out. Thanks for helping to start the conversation!
-
If you want this book to have appeal to non-academics, you must unpack the prose. Although I realize this is a book proposal and therefore density makes sense, if you want to draw readers in more, it is essential that you give examples to illustrate the terms you use and to give more time and space for each phase or concept to be parsed.
-
Oh, the planning. They evolved, they rebelled… and they have a plan! Yes, the shift in perception has been huge. Now there is almost a stigma for those who do not have a master plan set out from the start. It is the mark of authorship, I suppose. The one exception in the past few years has been 24. We regard it as one of these ‘new’ texts of the age of narrative complexity (which does not automatically translate into quality, as you have pointed out in the past), and it was indeed cutting-edge, unique televisual storytelling, but it was run basically like a old-school soap opera, making it up as they went along. That’s the core contradiction of 24, and what makes it fascinating (because – for a while – it worked).
On a similar subject, it would be interesting to look at how this new exposed form of authorship deals with ‘intermittence’, or the unfortunate circumstance in which the author leaves before the show’s end. That’s the flipside of the authorship coin – think Aaron Sorkin (one of, if not the most unique and recognizable single voice in American contemporary visual storytelling) with The West Wing, and how it changed the show immensely.
Or even the curious case of Shawn Ryan, who is certainly a primary force in recent years’ serial landscape, but is not the classical author that we have in mind when we think of his ‘classical’ role in The Shield. He switches back and forth from network to cable, he’s the showrunner for a year over there, then he’s over here assisting with this other thing… what does that say about his own fluid, intermittent authorship? -
Agreed 100%! The proposal needs to present lots of content quickly. The book will focus a lot more on telling the story & engaging readers. Thanks for commenting!
-
Great points! I definitely plan on talking about Sorkin & his departure, which caused changes in the show & in the paratextual discourse.
I think Shawn Ryan is an interesting case – he’s regarded less as a singular creative voice, like Whedon or Sorkin, and more as a supremely effective manager of a writing room. In part because he’s a super nice guy (he’s a Middlebury alum so I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with him a few times) & doesn’t place himself in the center of attention with either his writing style or public persona. So he was asked to help David Mamet run The Unit, brought in to rehab Lie to Me, and partnered with Ted Griffin on Terriers (which Ryan says is written in Griffin’s voice). Ryan is more in the mold of the old-school TV producer rather than the contemporary auteur, but some of his shows are marked as more “authored” than others. -
I’m not sure how you plan on laying out the chapters, but as a reader and as a scholar, I’d want this historical context sooner. Because up until now, this argument was striking me as rather presentist. I would want this info upfront: how does the formal and narrative paradigm you’re talking about differ from other historical moments, what are the points of continuity, how do other modes of narration exist alongside the one you’re talking about, etc. This is to say — the kind of narrative practice you’re laying out isn’t the only kind of television textuality at work in the medium at the moment. I think it needs some more context, even briefly.
-
The plan is to have the chapters arranged as listed here, alphabetical beyond the Intro & Complexity in Context chapters. In the Complexity chapter, there will be some history, mostly on the rise of complex experiments in the 1990s, but this is the place for the deeper history of things like the two-parter. For someone looking for more history earlier, they could certainly read this chapter first, but I would imagine that many readers would also rather skip the history. The goal of this structure is to allow & encourage different reading strategies.
Thanks for joining the conversation! -
It is understandable that you would avoid spending much time on radio in a project about television, but the History section might benefit from a brief explanation of how the narrative forms of radio shows were transferred to television. Gunsmoke was “Gunsmoke” before it hit TV, and Dragnet the TV series was essentially the radio show with pictures. It could be said that the development of complex narrative strategies in TV marked a shift, not merely from the early years of American television, but from the early days of network radio, when the idea of series (and the sponsors that came with them) took hold.
-
I agree, and will definitely discuss radio narrative precedents for soap operas & primetime series (like thatAmos n Andy was explicitly framed as a serial). I’ve written enough about Dragnet in my first book, but the norms of the episodic procedural clearly predated TV. Thanks for commenting!
-
-
I love the idea of an iPad version with embedded video! Re: the two-level model, I recommend, if you haven’t seen it, The Exploit by Alex Gallaway & Eugene Thacker.
-
Re: play, you may find my Flow piece “The Play Paradigm: What Media Studies Can Learn from Game Studies” helpful: http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-play-paradigm-what-media-studies-can-learn-from-game-studies-ted-friedman-georgia-state-university/
-
Thanks for this link – I read it a couple of years ago, but forgot about it. Definitely speaks directly to the point I’m trying to explore here.
-
-
What about critiques of complexity for complexity’s sake? I’m thinking here of examples such as the punk attack on prog rock as bloated and inauthentic, and celebration of “simple” 3-chord song structures and blunt lyrics for their directness, energy, clarity, and accessibility for both artists and fans. Does the book presume that complexity per se is inherently a good thing, and that “complex TV” is better than “simple TV”? If so, why? If not, how can you avoid having the implications of the term (sophistication, artistic ambition, cultural capital) naturalize a hierarchical valuation of “complex TV” over “simple TV”? Is there room in your discussion for shows that are complex yet aesthetic failures (Flash Forward?), and shows that are simple yet aesthetic successes (maybe an intentionally primitivist show like Lucky Louie?)
-
I totally agree with your last point – in an earlier piece about evaluation, I use the examples of 24 and Everybody Loves Raymond – I much prefer the effective simplicity of the latter to the inelegant complexity of the former. I’m not sure that we’re at the stage where there’s a punk backlash – to extend the music analogy, we’re still in the late ’60s (as I’ve compared The Wire to Astral Weeks and Lost to Sgt. Pepper). I don’t think we’ve seen the too-ornate-for-its-own-good equivalent of ELP yet…
Thanks for the comments!
-
-
I’d be interested in a radio background as well. There’s a large body of sf and horror radio, which influence writers in those genres across multiple media, inc. tv.
-
I would recommend rethinking the title, only because you use the word “Television” twice between the title and subtitle. Even using “TV” would make it less redundant. My suggestion would be to try a play on words. Keep the subtitle as-is, but change the title to “TV Complex”. This would also be a more eye-grabbing title: a simple, large-font phrase that will provoke curiosity.
-
The title is a placeholder until the manuscript is done, as such things typically get worked over with the press. I’m reluctant to use “TV” for some reason – it feels somehow diminutive!
-
-
This paragraph might be a bit long. Shorter paragraphs tend to help you hold a reader’s interest and the proposal format is one that is seeking to keep the attention of someone who has a lot of these to go through. Try cutting it at places that present new ideas, like “Television has embraced genre mixing”. By the way, that should be hyphenated: “genre-mixing.”
On the sentence regarding daytime television structures, make the last clause the first: “Though the relationship between primetime and daytime serials is more complicated than is typically acknowledged, these recent developments…” At present, the last clause is like a tail on the end of the sentence and makes the sentence feel long. If you put it up front, it sets up the main idea of the sentence and allows it to have more prominence in the reader’s mind. It also makes this clause feel less like an afterthought.
Notice that in the above example, I changed “although” to “Though” and added an “is” between “than” and “typically.”
Okay, I’m not sure if you’re wanting the feedback to be this detailed. So, I’m going to stop making notes before I edit the whole proposal! Let me know if this is what you’re looking for.
Good concept, by the way. As a media and pop culture writer, I’d say this is definitely a subject worth discussing!-
I’m not sure if copy editing is that useful at this stage (and I fear what a peer-sourced copy edit would look like), but thanks for reading & commenting!
-
-
Speaking of long paragraphs, this formatting hid some of my paragraph breaks. Didn’t want to look like a hypocrite! ;)
-
Don’t forget technological innovation and its impact at the production level.
-
Chad – what specifically are you thinking of in terms of production technology? Certainly the rise of HD matters in terms of visual style & cultural value, but do you see related shifts in narrative form? Thanks for commenting!
-
-
Dear Jason, this paragraph is of great interest for me (as the rest of the book proposal of course). I wrote an article recently on the use of cyberethnography to analyze viewers’ practices. I studied the TV practices of BSG’s fans. If you are interested in reading it, I can send it to you.
-
I was thinking specifically of Jeremy Butler’s work regarding the shift toward zero degree style in the sitcom. It also strikes me that the timeframe when you began to notice increasing levels of complexity also seems to coincide with the rise of computer editing, which makes me wonder how much the increase in editorial choices has altered narrative form. I can certainly recall examples where an acknowledgement of these choices made their way into episodes.
For example, I might point to the Scrubs episode “My Life in Four Cameras” the viewer is treated to half of the ep shot in multi-camera mode and half in single-camera mode. Of course, this shift in production mode is also paired with the high degree of reflexivity that marks that show. This shift in production mode complicates the episode for viewers by asking them to recognize the creative processes–a level of understanding that presumably will extend to the viewing of all episodes of the program. Other programs, like iCarly, also intertwine production and distribution technologies into the stories that they tell.
Of course another way to view technology and narrative would be through a transmedia lens. In particular, blogs and Twitter accounts maintained by fictional characters might be of interest. Or, recognizing the ways that HIMYM extends beyond the program through Robyn Sparkles’ MySpace and music videos to Barney Stinson’s authoring of a best selling book might prove fertile grounds for technological exploration. There is also a great scene from the “Kept a Guy Locked in a Trunk” episode of My Name is Earl where a character directly references TVWithoutPity.com and makes a meta-level joke about meta-level jokes.
I hope that clarifies my comment a bit.-
Definitely clearer! I’ll certainly be talking about the transmedia technologies in the Transmedia chapter. And the rise of self-consciousness in production form is part of the operational aesthetic, like the mockumentary style, the Scrubs ep, etc. The first point about digital editing is a really interesting idea, but I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that it’s been an influence in narrative complexity – perhaps the rise of digital editing has encouraged a more streamlined production process, which has enabled more time to be spent on visuals & staging? But I don’t know for sure.
I do know that the ease of video editing seems not to have made much of a difference in the writers room. For instance, Lost obviously had a massive task in maintaining continuity, but Gregg Nations (the continuity guru) didn’t use video clips in his records – instead the continuity database was just a bunch of MS Word files. So the opportunity to use the easier technology seemed not to matter in that instance. But I’ll keep looking for connections…
-
-
Sorry about that formatting. It looks like spaces exist between graphs until you press enter.
-
I’ll add a voice in support of a growing audience in traditional literature courses — noting that televisual texts are now sometimes integrated with conventional material (particularly in studies of serial literature), though the courses themselves may not be marked out as “television studies” courses.
-
I had a similar set of questions, in part because of the potential circularity of starting with the terms of value established by these works themselves, which circulate within the same discourse field as television studies (i.e., TV does/does not have aesthetic value). Is there a way to get around the problem that the shows in question market specifically to discriminating consumers (which would certainly include how we TV-loving-academics see ourselves)? They do this by differentiating themselves from “conventional TV” on many of these same markers of cultural value — auteurism, aesthetic complexity, highbrow citations, genre play, etc…
-
“structural constraints based around commercial breaks and rigid schedules”
One of the crucial opportunities this book stakes out is the opportunity to dismantle what most creative artists would see as a false premise. Constraints enable creativity — not the opposite. Think of the sonnet sequence as a case in point: there’s hardly a form more formulaic, repetitive, rigid, and periodic. All of which may produce brilliantly complex art.-
Agreed – and I’d point to Sean O’Sullivan’s work arguing that the 13-episode season functions like a sonnet in terms of the macro-structure of the series. And the moments in which the rigidity of routine & structure is violated creates moments of expressive possibilities that seem unavailable in more free-form artistic forms. Thanks for the comments!
-
-
Two related issues to address in this paragraph:
Fair use: I’m curious how convinced potential publishers are that video quotations constitute fair use?
Platform: one of the things I think we (scholars) badly need from born-digital monographs is some degree of standardization, so we can find out how to make multimedia arguments well and build audiences for them. I very much like the idea of scholarship that sits closer to — and works within — vernacular communication forms. With those two issues in mind I’d eschew the standalone app model and explore a format already being tested (which might entail rethinking the press of choice…) by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/) and/or Critical Commons (http://criticalcommons.org/).-
In terms of fair use, I’m confident that we can use the video clips as fair use, following the guidelines of the SCMS policy paper from last year. NYU Press seems supportive, but if they back down, we could release the digital version through MediaCommons (which has an agressive fair use policy).
As for the platform, I agree that establishing standards & easily replicable models is key. I’m looking into Scalar (which I’ve been told might be app-able), and if it ever crosses the development threshhold, Sophie is another model. The reason I’m leaning toward an app is that I fear the web-based model of publishing is not well-suited to long-form reading – it seems like many people would rather printout a PDF or webpage than read it on their computer. But the app model seems to growing as a way for many people to read via a mobile device, and would force a digital reader to stay in the platform where multimedia possibilites are active. However, I recognize that everything could change in 6 months, so my mind remains open…
-
-
Long-form argument is clearly a key value here.
For this monograph, the real question I have is how much of it should unfold — advance — through multimedia modes and how much via conventional text, as here. I am persuaded by video essays by Laurence Lessig and Michael Wesch that multimedia forms work well for much longer arcs of analysis than we are used to. I found the video essay by your student Michael Suen, on “Storytelling in the Wire“, quite compelling and I’d be very open to a monograph that unfolds in whole or in part in this mixed-media way. It would put the evidence much closer to the argument.-
This is a key issue – can I use the video & interface possibilities to strengthen the argument, rather than just using video illustrations (which are certainly valuable but don’t tap the full possibilities of the format)? I’m inspired by work like Michael’s and my colleague Christian Keathley (and his students creating multimedia essays), but am not sure that I have the editing skills to convey ideas that effectively. But it will definitely be something I’ll try during the gap between finishing the manuscript and publishing the digital format.
-
-
For the Peyton Place section, I would love to see if you could get an interview with Michael Gleason. He was a staff writer there, did rather traditional series writing in the ’70s, and then wound up at MTM as co-creator and showrunner of Remington Steele — which had a largely serialized character and relationship storyline within a traditional mystery structure where the cases were solved at the end of the episode.
It’s curious to me that he was the only executive producer at MTM at the time of Hill Street and St. Elsewhere who had experience writing serialized drama. I wonder what those dynamics were like at MTM, and whether Gleason’s previous experience on Peyton Place was considered valuable as the serialized form was being developed. -
I am particularly interested in this chapter on Comprehension as I am presenting a paper at the upcoming SCSMI conference inquiring into an aspect of memory and serial TV. Is it likely to be available online soon? I would be very pleased to be able to reference it!
-
It’s unlikely to be ready by SCSMI, but you might want to look at my essay (which will be folded into the chapter) “Previously On,” about serial TV & memory (and originally presented at SCSMI). The blog version is online, or it’s in this book.
-
-
-
Orienting Paratexts (38 comments)
-
A couple of quibbles. First, pay-tv has quite literal barriers to access, no? (unless, “commercial” means “with commercials” not “for commerce”?). Second, re: “a television producer’s first job is to avoid alienating potential viewers” — is this still true (“Throughout its history”)? I don’t think your average producer for Adult Swim, Daily Show, Bill O’Reilly, or Jersey Shore necessarily cares about alienating some audiences, do they?
-
Well-quibbled. I’ll clarify & caveat appropriately…
-
-
Granted, I haven’t read below this yet, so maybe this will be covered, but the choice of “orienting” is telling, inasmuch as it sort of suggests that there is a correct way to view a text. If one must be oriented by another, it presumes the other knows “their way around” and could sort one’s own confusion out. So I hope you will address the power and meaning implications of this suggestion that the paratexts know their way around (especially when, as you earlier write, they have been “outsourced” to others, and hence may not be penned by the series creators or writing team), and that there is a right way to see a text
-
Building on my above comment (par. 9, I believe), I wonder if we could talk about disorientation too? After all, Mad Men uses history pretty loosely, and thus I imagine that the experience of reading it next to a timeline of what “actually” happened in the US at the time would create all sorts of meanings that Weiner and his rather historically-indifferent writing team weren’t aware of. All of which gets me back to wondering how orientation, disorientation, and intentionality are related, according to you? I might appreciate discussion of what role intentionality plays for you
-
You’re asking the easy questions, huh? ;) I don’t get into intentionality here, but do in the just-posted Authorship chapter. I’ll try to contextualize that more here. (And I believe the Mad Men writing team would bristle at being called “historically-indifferent,” as they seem to pride themselves on historical accuracy.
-
-
Or, to elaborate a tiny bit more, I guess what I’m asking is for you to define orientation. IS it about giving someone the “right” way to see something, or do you see this as a model of contestation, where there is no right answer except for the one that wins out in a battle of various orientations?
-
Jonathan, I see this more as individual viewers orienting themselves within the textual universe, not a definitive mode of viewership…but that’s just my reading…
-
Yeah, I meant what Paul suggests – it’s a strategy of consumption & comprehension, not a requirement of a text (although some texts certainly invite it). And many of the orientations I chronicle are definitely not “correct” but rather expansive and transformative.
-
-
“Such intertextual expansion is an invitation to rethink our impressions of the original series, orienting ourselves to a new way of categorizing and grouping the characters.”… and to add mythic resonance to characters. Any D&D player knows that certain character types match different alignments, and thus, for instance, we’re invited now to see whoever is in the Lawful Good slot as a paladin.
-
Good point… but do you think Lt. Daniels is a paladin?
-
-
It might be worth noting how videogames can orient us spatially (and/or disorient. Anyone who has played the Lost Via Domus game knows how annoying the character navigation is in the woods/jungle). Or even just virtual worlds (talk to your colleague Louisa Stein about the Gossip Girl Second Life world, for example).And I can’t think of examples of TV DVDs that do this, but Lord of the Rings’ DVDs include maps of New Zealand as Middle Earth.
-
Excellent point – I’ll connect that in the Transmedia chapter.
-
-
Not a major comment by any means: but missing an “of” in the first sentence between “examples” and “online”
-
Just a thought here, but you make it sound as though the only two options for viewing the relationship between official paratexts and fan-created paratexts as “same realm of viewing practices” and “opposed to one another.” I’d think that there’s some grey area, where fans may recognize and respect the official paratexts but treat them differently than fan-made ones.
-
Definitely not my intent – I shall clarify!
-
-
Firefly is a great example of what might happen if a complex narrative is shown out of order by a network. Fox aired episodes out of order (even ordering Whedon to make a new pilot) and the narrative flow was lost
-
Excellent example, which shall be added.
-
-
To me, the best example of this practice represented officially are those “meta-moments” in a show when they reflect on their own fictionality. Bones does this occasionally, but Raising Hope and Arrested Development rely on it. Also, see the Buffy episode “Normal Again” which pulls a St. Elsewhere
-
True, but I’m trying to avoid getting too much into discussions of intertextuality within the text – rather I want to look at how paratexts attempt to reframe a text in an expansive fashion.
-
-
Just a question now: is there a literary tradition to this? I’m thinking of novels of Tolstoy or Dickens that might have a “cast of characters” synopsis at the start, or even a serialized novel like the Count of Monte Cristo that might recap characters that have disappeared for awhile (apologies – you may have discussed this in a different chapter)
-
Good question – I can’t think of any, but I’ll ask some of my literary experts.
-
-
Reading through this paragraph I wonder (and forgive me if you mention it later) if it would be worthwhile to discuss the temporality of the fans’ experiences creating paratexts as well. The edit history of Wikipedia provides a useful examination of the temporal structure of fans’ creation of meaning within the show as well…
-
I think I nod toward this later, and a bit in the Complexity in Context chapter (in terms of how DVDs change TV screen time, for both text & paratext), but not sure if it goes in enough depth.
-
-
Again, minor stylistics, but I’m not a fan of the shift into first person for the sentence “ We watched hours of flash-sideways stories without knowing how to orient ourselves to this fictional world relative to the core storyworld that many fans had invested a great deal of time and energy mapping and documenting. ”
-
Yeah, it’s inconsistent. Thanks!
-
-
General comment: in this chapter, you introduce the various navigational aids which help viewers to navigate and understand complex series. To my mind, the setup here (and in the previous chapters) resonates with the interdisciplinary field of complexity theory, which, while science-based, has been influential in the humanities. To link this with the key question “how can we make sense of complexity?”, the volume Observing Complexity (William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, U of Minnesota P, 2000) might be a helpful footnote reference.
-
As I’ve been writing, I’ve been thinking that I may need to add a conclusion chapter about complexity theory a bit. I really don’t want to have to wade too deep there, but rather offer some potential resonances. Thanks for the citation!
-
-
“such these”: one word too many? — when i read the title of this chapter i wondered if “paratexts” would be enough. now i see that you distinguish between “orienting paratexts” and “transmedia paratexts”. makes sense. still, the contrasting of “orienting” and “transmedia” seems to mix two different categories (the counter-term to “orienting paratexts” would be “disorienting paratexts”, the counterterm to “transmedia paratexts” something like “monomedial (or media-inherent?) paratexts”). i think your emphasis is on intra-diegetic orientation provided by viewer-created paratexts … perhaps just call this chapter “audience orientation”, “viewer orientation” or “orientation practices”? just a thought.
-
“FlashForward”
-
i like this paragraph (and it kind-of makes me wonder if we’re not living in a tommy westphall universe after all) … but the scope of the term “orientation” is enlarged quite a bit, no?
-
perhaps it might be interesting to ask how such audience activities also help a series to chart its own (unknown) future – and how it helps producers to orient themselves in the field of possibilities (and constraints) that’s an unfolding narrative. “charting a moving terrain”: i think this applies not only to viewers but also to producers and writers, and to the ways a series relates to itself. in other words, i think i would like to hear more about the inter-action (in terms of ongoing orientation) between a running text and running paratexts. serial narratives as feedback narratives: does this complicate the notion of mysteries being solved (i think jonathan gray asked a similar question regarding “correct” vs. “incorrect” reading/orientation)?
-
“meta-discussion of fandom”: i wonder did all contributors actually assume that there was a standing puzzle to be solved (i.e. discussing right/wrong decisions) or were there also practices assuming that this might be a game that moves as you play it?
-
fascinating subchapter. perhaps some words in the end (or throughout) about the types of “orientation” generated by the community’s interaction with the television series on the one hand and its theorizing about/ordering of its own interior interactions on the other?
-
i’m not sure if you want to establish “spreadable media” vs. “drillable media” as a difference in type – or perspective? the latter would make a lot of sense to me: die-hard fans, intensely focussing on their object of engagement, probably tend to regard the unfolding series as a standing & hopefully rewarding puzzle, a mystery to be solved (and a disappointment if it offers no such solution) — while, when we take a step back, observe the series in relation to other series, to its immediate media environment, its cultural conditions, and in interaction with its die-hard fans, we might be more drawn to descriptors that stress spread and sprawl? if so, “drillable” and “spreadable” media are not opposites (“rather than”) but, relating to the same phenomena, perspectives?
-
“but rather as opposing vectors of cultural engagement”: i guess i was talking about “spread” as an observational stance above, not as a form of engagment. if you phrase it like this, it makes sense to talk about “vectors” going into different directions.– as for “legitimacy”, i feel tempted to quote david simon’s word of wisdom with which you started: “just be.” — (and might there be a slight performative contradiction between “we need to” and “shift our normative stance”? or what do you mean by “shift”: find another, better normative stance or get rid of the question of normativity altogether. i’m all for the second option & think that, in that case, the best way to get rid of normativity is to not even pay it too much attention. same with questions of legitimacy ;-)
-
ps: and i don’t mean the game of wiki-interaction which seems (asfar as i know wikis) to be usually very aware of its own fluidity and malleability. what i mean is the fans’ assumption about their object of engagement: do the contributors mostly act in the roles of “onlookers” who assume that their various interactions (shared pleasures, quibbles, contestations) refer to a stable text – or is there also an understanding that they might actually be players/inter-actors with and within the larger moveable game that is the unfolding development of the series “lost”?
-
For the most part, I would agree that place-based authenticity is largely observed by those who are natives of a given city.However, two points:1) Attempts to establish spatial realism as tied to specific places are often incredibly transparent – when a show moves to a new setting (like, for example, Glee setting Nationals in Chicago), viewers who are aware the show films in Los Angeles (which is an increasing number of viewers in an Internet age) might look to see what strategies they might undertake to establish place-based authenticity. In the case of Glee, the only effort I saw was a single bucket of Garrett popcorn, which I only identified as Chicagoan because it had appeared on the set of Happy Endings, which is equally faking Chicago. As a result, while we might not observe minute geographical incoherence (such as Homeland citing real D.C. locations while shooting in N.C. equivalents), we CAN observe signifiers of place designed to mask larger incoherences, which could lead viewers to be skeptical of the show’s spatial geography more generally.2) While I am aware that neither you nor I would be a “general” viewer in this sense, the reason I know about most of the above examples is because people made it known via Twitter – heck, that’s what has me here writing this comment at this particular point in time. Message boards, social media, and post-air analysis have all allowed for spatial realism to spread beyond those who actually live within a particular place, and as I look toward my own project specifically focused on space/place I find myself seeing more and more conversation on this subject. Granted, I’m looking for it, and run in circles where it would be more prominent, but I do think that the transition from “recognition” to “transmission” is becoming more common.
-
You sort of speak to this in paragraph 21, and get to it a bit with fantasy here, but what is the value of spatial ambiguity to a series like Lost? And how is that value perceived by audiences? It seems like there’s a tension there, in that spatial ambiguity seems to give writers the license to change the story as they see fit, leading to some of the conflict between fans and creators over the notion of “master plans.”I think of Lost particularly because the spatial ambiguity gave the series the ability to randomly introduce both a Temple and a Lighthouse in its final season, but in both instances some fairly vocal fans rejected those locations based on their perception of the space of the island, or what we could consider an accumulated diegetic place-based authenticity. Paratexts played a big part in establishing this, but does the freedom of ambiguity undo some of that work through the primary narrative’s willingness to add new locations willy nilly?
-
-
Complexity in Context (35 comments)
-
“Bordwell outlines specific cinematic modes such as classical Hollywood, art cinema, and historical materialism” Did you deliberately left out ‘parametric’? (not if I wouldn’t understand that…)
-
“we might consider narrative complexity as a distinct narrational mode, as suggested by David Bordwell’s analysis of film narrative” I thought that Bordwell always lowered the relevance and significance of narrative complexity (see, among others, his Film Futures (2002) and Buckland’s distinction in his Puzzle films’ Introduction (2009))
-
Yeah, I was just listing examples, not being comprehensive. As for the Bordwell’s take on such films, he definitely places the puzzle film as a subset of classical narration. I’m mixed on this depending on the film. But I’m trying to take his concept of “mode” and apply it to TV storytelling, not make direct parallels with the specific modes of film he discusses.
-
-
This isn’t a useful comment, still I wanted to share my fav example on viewers’ memories and eventual frustration related to serial narratives. This is from Stephen King’s Misery:- Cliffhangers.- I know that, Mister Man!They also call them serials.I’m not stupid, you know!Anyway, my favourite was Rocket Man,and once it was a no-brakes chapter.The bad guys stuck him in a caron a mountain road, knocked him out,…..tore out the brakesand started him to his death.And he woke up and tried to get out,…..but the car went off a cliff before hecould escape, and crashed and burned,…..and I was so upset and excited!And the next week I was first in line.They start with the end of the last week,…..and there was Rocket Man tryingto get out, and here comes the cliff,…..and just before the car went off the cliffhe jumped free, and all the kids cheered!But I didn’t cheer.I stood right up and started shouting…..”This isn’t what happened last week!Have you all got amnesia?”"They just cheated us!This isn’t fair!He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car!”
-
Nice – I haven’t read Misery in decades. Reminds me of my favorite quotation about cliffhangers: ”It wasn’t a cliffhanger, but that’s the cliffhanger – the fact that it wasn’t a cliffhanger. We made you think that we were leading up to another cliffhanger, and that’s actually the cliffhanger.”-R. Kelly, organic intellectual, on his brilliant commentary track to his masterpiece, Trapped in the Closet
-
-
Another associative comment (as complex tv shows play a lot with mysetries…): Shklovsky on ‘Chekhov’s gun’: “In a mystery novel the gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.”
-
What about separate and address the (subjective) ‘time of engagement’ of participation / of forensic practice, etc. This could make sense especially if you differentiate serial viewership and its specific weekly pleasures from the binge-consumption of DVD’s boxed aesthetics (see the difference of time-investment of forensic activity between shows consumed differently).
-
Good point – I don’t want to draw a line between Screen Time and Engagement Time (or the like), as I think they’re more similar in type. I think I’ll add the following sentence in the next paragraph to emphasize this element:”Additionally and importantly, these gaps allow viewers to continue their engagement with a series in between episodes, participating in fan communities, reading criticism, consuming paratexts, and theorizing about future installments, all vibrant practices that I discuss throughout the book.”
-
-
“the market for complexity may be more valued on television than film.” I see your point, still I’m not completely convinced about this.
-
“the prestige of these programs furthered the channel’s brand image of being more sophisticated than traditional television” Last week I tried to argue that most non-American viewers know nothing about this branding as they don’t watch these programs on television. Non-American audience doesn’t know / care about the network or channel brand (for them the little channel-’stamps’ are nothing else but irritating extra-diegetic visuals that cover some part of the screen).Furthermore: Even if local tv channels do their best to minimize the time difference between the shows’ original premiere and their own programming, most of the viewers (the forensic ones you are writing about) download the next episode the following day. I’m wondering if you want / are able to address this difference in viewership.
-
It’s a great point, and could be quite important to the industry if foreign distribution becomes an even greater part of the revenue pie. Of course the market to distribute globally is impacted by branding – the international distributors are more likely to pick up an HBO property than Spike TV, because the former has more of a reputation within the industry – even if the viewers abroad will never see the distinction. Perhaps I’ll add a footnote discussing this.
-
-
I really like this part, however I would be glad to see a bit more elaboration on the claimed difference between reflexive self-awareness of modernist cinema and operational reflexivity.Or, what is the difference (if there is at all) between your Lost-example and Hitchcock’s operational reflexivity in his Rear Window? See Lisa’s / Grace Kelly’s words: “Let’s start from the beginning again, Jeff!”
-
I think Hitchcock’s reflexivity is quite similar, although less pervasive (and due to the lack of seriality, not inspiring similar gap-filling engagement). A moment like Janet Leigh’s murder in Psycho could be seen as a narrative special effect, as it so clearly calls attention to how you’ve been tricked into thinking she’s the main character. I’ll add a sentence, but probably can’t afford more space to it.
-
-
“we want to be competent enough to follow their narrative strategies but still relish in the pleasures of being manipulated successfully.” See Fincher’s extension on this: “What people want from movies is to be able to say, I knew it and it’s not my fault”
-
I’m personally quite interested in David Milch’s work, and, unless I missed something in your list of shows to be discussed, I don’t think one of his creations or writing credits has been listed. Was NYPD Blue more or less complex than the X-Files, for instance? Deadwood than the Sopranos?
-
I should have kept reading! What interests me in part about Milch is the complexity of his creation combined with his willingness to engage in heroic exegetical labors about it. The feature in John from Cincinnati where he painstakingly explains the dream episode to the assembled cast, who are obviously bored out of their minds, is a fine example of this.
-
Milch is definitely an interesting figure. I think NYPD Blue is a hybrid show, certainly with less formal experimentation and long-arc storytelling than X-Files, but still groundbreaking in its own way. Deadwood’s innovations seem less structural than tonal, so I really don’t deal with it much throughout. And I haven’t watched John from Cincinnati.
-
-
-
i’m not sure i follow the argument from sentence 3 to sentence 4 (after footnote 12). first you say that many tv innovators started their careers in film – and the first names mentioned are directors -, but then you say that television is attractive to these people because it’s less director-centered than film. i think the emphasis is on the writers here, who work better with producers than directors, but in that case putting david lynch and barry levinson first is a bit confusing.
-
Makes sense – I reworked it.
-
-
“constraints like these make television distinct from nearly every other medium”: perhaps it’s worth mentioning that cartoons and comic books, but also dime novels & “Heftchenromane” often work on a similar model – and have often used these constraints as incentives for medium-specific innovations as well
-
Great point!
-
-
again, comics – and other forms of popular seriality – would be good examples for the “infinite model” of storytelling. and again, i’m not sure if this is what most distinguishes american commercial tv from tv cultures elsewhere (or from other serial forms). i take your point, earlier on (re. my comment in the introduction), that commercial perpetuation plays a more important role in american tv than in latin america or germany, but even in public television, the fate of a series (if it’s not a mini-series) is strongly dependent on ratings. i could name countless examples of series in german tv (even before the introduction of commercial cable channels) that “kept running as long as they generated decent ratings”. still, there’s a decisive difference between american tv and other tv cultures, but i think it has to do with a different (often much more playful) professional ethos of commercial creators in america (and, perhaps, with a validation of storytelling competition that is less established in european popular culture)
-
i think miklos kiss has a point but the telling exception is HBO: i would say that more and more european viewers are quite aware that an HBO show is an HBO show. also, reviews in newspapers increasingly tend to make references to channels, and not just HBO (AMC is becoming a well-known brand on the international market as well)
-
“making it up as they go” as “a clear aesthetic condemnation for a complex narrative where unity and continuity is a value”: i’ve always wondered about this. “unity and continuity” aren’t the first terms that come to my mind when i think of “complexity”. couldn’t enjoyment of complex tv also reside, exactly, in the cleverness with which the producers “make it up as they go”, i.e. in their complexity management (how they react to unforeseen viewer engagements, how they let themselves be carried away by certain possibilities of their story and then manage to reign it all in again) rather than by the methodical unfolding of a master plan? the question (or complaint) would not be, “did they just make it up as they went”, but: “how well did they keep up with their runaway narrative”? operational aesthetics indeed. (of course i know that many viewers were disappointed by the ending of “lost” precisely because they wanted more unity and continuity and closure. but i wouldn’t discount that other viewing stance, especially as one that enjoys the very complexity of complex serial storytelling)
-
Agreed 100% that there are competing pleasures & goals here. I do think that the most vocal fanbase wants to believe that a serial is guided by a controlling vision (previewing thoughts to come in my Authorship chapter), rather than we’re watching an improvisatory unfolding. I’ll caveat a bit here.
-
-
just as a footnote, along the lines of the question raised after your göttingen workshop on this scene (“competency for what?” and the “stress test” paradigm): i wonder what you make of the hectoring, hectically working, and completely self-assured therapist (who, it seems to me, doesn’t just “suspect” that Josh is lying, but who seems to know exactly which flashbacks are true and which are not, as if he’s the strategically hyperventilating but ultimately trustworthy showrunner himself)?
-
i think this is an excellent introductory — or core — chapter for the book. i know the original “velvet light trap” essay quite well (having (co-)translated it into german) but i like this one even better. i like how it ties together all the key-terms of the following chapters, and how it streamlines and brings up to date the arguments of the earlier piece. the only thing i would have liked to see added (and what could perhaps still be added?) is some engagement with the concept of “complexity” itself — not necessarily as a systemic term, even though i think that systems theory might provide some interesting insights into the specific types of narrative “unity” and narrative “continuity” (and also operational aesthetics) that are made (and unmade?) by ongoing, feedback-oriented, multi-authored, serial narratives (as opposed to more traditional notions of unity and coherence). and i think i would introduce the framework of digital culture and procedural literacy earlier in the chapter & would love to read more about it; in terms of complexity “in context”, both ideas seem very important to me.
-
@Jason: it’s an interesting question how far an international distributor’s programming preferences overlap with the viewing preferences of the audience. The other day I was listening a radio interview with a programmer of the Dutch national tv channel who named a lot of American series they plan to bring in, but never mentioned these shows’ channels.I can imagine a (near) future, when American TV channels will be streamed live and globally. Then viewers’ awareness of channel branding will be globally equal. @Frank: “the telling exception is HBO” Exactly, because there is, for example, a European HBO (contrary to Fox, AMC, etc.) which naturally advertises its shows tied to its channel brand.
-
In the part of the paragraph that begins around ‘This is not to suggest…’, might it be useful to make reference to the epigraphs that The Wire uses at the start of each episode – especially given that, if I’m not mistaken, the one for ‘The Buys’ is ‘The king stay the king’, and thus relates to the moments you isolate? This would reinforce your argument that the unity of the programme’s episodes come from mood/tone/theme – the makers can be seen to signal this through this particular feature.
-
Great point – thanks!
-
-
Since you judge the DVD to be “as or more important” than the other developments, I wonder: what about the advances at the other end of the technological apparatus, i.e. flatscreens, widescreens, and HDTV? The large-scale adoption of these new TV sets falls into the exact time frame under consideration here. In a way, current TV screens are in themselves a more complex display technology–they allow more information/pixels to pass through the bottleneck of the cable. Briefly addressing these, you could extend the analogy to novelistic canonization: the quality of the display (fine printing / expensive plasma screen) may support claims for higher cultural value of the content.
-
Yes, this is an important simultaneous development. Newman & Levine have a good account of this in terms of cultural value. But I’m not certain that HD has led to innovations in narrative strategies, as much as opening up new visual pleasures, encouraging potentially new genres (or modes of presenting those genres), etc. I don’t want to distract by raising the other technology, so I may just bury this in a footnote.
-
-
In the middle of the paragraph: “processing” and “processes” in one sentence.
-
Thanks!
-
-
Just a thought, but I wonder if this definition of narrative complexity here has the potential to be a little misleading. I appreciate that the merging of serial and episodic forms has enabled much of the narrative complexity to which you refer; but, as you say in para 8, narrative complexity is not wholly dependent on the presence of serialisation, and you demonstrate this further within the chapter — in some of your discussion of narrative spectacle, for example. So might it be worth briefly defining (in para 5) this “broader mode of complexity” that you refer to in para 8?
-
-
Beginnings (19 comments)
-
as beginnings go, these two paragraphs make a perfect chapter opening, i think. it’s always a good beginning that’s simple and clear without sacrificing complexity. difficult to write, too. i’m envious. “viewers frequently enter a series midstream”: there’s a connection here to the discussion of digital culture in the core chapter (and a hint why serial storytelling may be particularly appropriate to, and attractive in, an era of digital synchronization). (of course some would say, this is also how we enter life: always in midstream.) — so, i really like this opening: deft introduction of a major theme–the special temporality of serial narration–without getting bogged down in the philosophical sophistries that often attend discussions of temporality & seriality. don’t change a word! (well, perhaps one: repetition of “new” in paragraph 2, line 7).
-
“see understand”: one verb too many”teach us how to watch the series”: makes sense. i would like to hear more about how this is different from the teaching modules of digital games. one difference seems to be that a game usually reaches its players as a relatively finished product already (within limits, of course, and “finished” doesn’t mean “closed”, never does). a tv series, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily know where it will be going & what exactly it needs or wants to teach about itself. i often feel that a tv series has to learns about /itself/ over time — it needs to explore itself — it can find itself, lose itself — deal with its own character flaws and unforeseen effects (think sopranos) etc. (the same happens when you serialize games, of course.) i think that all these improvisational and self-explorative aspects of serial storytelling give a special meaning to the “educational” function of pilots, season beginnings, etc.
-
Great point about the comparison to game tutorials. As for the change over time, indeed that’s true – I think one thing pilots do is lock-in the initial concept of a show as a reference point for both viewers and producers. For some programs, it’s a reference point that a series moves past (most commonly sitcoms), but for others, it’s a struggle to keep continuity of plot & tone from the initial concept. I’ll elaborate.
-
-
Hank has not yet moved into his new house with the attic. It would be weird to think of his sister living unnoticed in his old place as well. I don´t think we even get to see it, so the mechanics of her staying there is not at all delineated. In contrast they go into great detail how the arrangement worked in the new place.
-
Right. But… it is implied in a later episode that all the crazy stuff that Hank was noticing is Steph’s doing. So I take it as implied that Steph was squatting with Hank from the start of the season, even if the mechanics were not spelled out. Thanks for commenting!
-
-
i really like the examples you’ve chosen & how you’re using them to explain pilots. only in this second HIMYM paragraph i began to wonder if the argument’s not trailing off. i see how this paragraph ties in important themes from other chapters — and that’s very helpful — but at the same time it seems to lose sight a bit of the educational/inspirational poetics of pilots (and be more about HIMYM as a show). still, interesting to read and important connections to other chapters/concerns. perhaps move the final sentence to the beginning of the paragraph to signal that all of this is still under the heading of “pilots”?
-
Makes sense – balancing the examples & the thread was tricky in this section.
-
-
(three cheers for linguistic disorientation & unsubtitled strangeness! that’s how the best teaching experiences start. but perhaps worth mentioning — in terms of /what/ alias teaches us when it teaches us to watch it — that linguistic disorientation here is all about being tortured by powerful foreigners.)
-
“A pilot is always a promissory note for what is to come, more than a blueprint to be followed, and much can change as a series develops”: this takes care of my comment above. still, i would say that concerning the “educational” poetics of pilots, there are a lot of interesting implications worth pursuing & still contained in this sentence, “much changes as a series develops”
-
was there really something sinister behind MV’s glossy surface? it was a great show, and it’s been awhile since i watched it, but i don’t remember it as being heavily invested in inside/outside dinstinctions. but as i said, it’s been a while
-
i mean Miami Vice (MV) not VM (veronica mars)
-
I’d say that it’s less about inside/outside, than MV highlights that there’s a corrupt & dangerous element underneath Miami’s surface beauty.
-
-
“a brief frisson of pleasure” … love it.
-
very convincing close reading. and i like how the subchapter broadens the textual analysis onto some overarching cultural questions, re. gender and seriality. i think i would have liked to see something like this for the entire chapter, too, not only for the VM-example. do you have the time and space to extend the close reading of “complex” pilots toward a thick description of pilot complexity? i.e. what’s the cultural work of some of the expository techniques and attendant themes you have surveyed (initial disorientation and its gradual resolutions, complex tv’s affinity for scenes of therapy and torture, time/space-experiments, the overtly experimental setup of many shows: what type of (media) “education” is taking place here, since the 1990s? what are these shows teaching us when they teach us about their intrinsic norms? what are these intrinsic norms doing beyond their own storyworlds, what are some of their extrinsic — and joint cultural — practices?) that’s a handful, i know, but your analysis is such a perfect setup for these questions that readers might be curious to hear a few hints, at least, in this direction?
-
“learning experiences” i mean
-
sorry again for the double post – sometimes the comment doesn’t seem to go through, so i tried to recreate it & then the first one will show up again hours later. just delete one (haven’t figured out yet how i can delete my own)
-
Yeah, it has to do with some quirks in the spam filter. Happy to monitor & delete!
-
-
-
Transmedia Storytelling (1 comment)
-
While functioning as a sort of “transmedia lite”, I would add 2nd Screen applications for mobile and tablet devices to the list here. Not only can narrative elements be included in, elaborated on, or entirely added to 2nd screen viewing (see Psych‘s “#Hashtag Killer”), but they can also attach much of the paratext to the primary text, blurring the line that separates the two. (e.g., if a network/production company deliver content via the 2nd screen, why would said content be treated as less of the narrative than the content delivered through the 1st?)
-
Comments on the Blog
Recent Comments in this Document
May 21, 2012 at 8:41 pm
While functioning as a sort of “transmedia lite”, I would add 2nd Screen applications for mobile and tablet devices to the list here. Not only can narrative elements be included in, elaborated on, or entirely added to 2nd screen viewing (see Psych‘s “#Hashtag Killer”), but they can also attach much of the paratext to the primary text, blurring the line that separates the two. (e.g., if a network/production company deliver content via the 2nd screen, why would said content be treated as less of the narrative than the content delivered through the 1st?)
See in context
May 21, 2012 at 3:50 am
You sort of speak to this in paragraph 21, and get to it a bit with fantasy here, but what is the value of spatial ambiguity to a series like Lost? And how is that value perceived by audiences? It seems like there’s a tension there, in that spatial ambiguity seems to give writers the license to change the story as they see fit, leading to some of the conflict between fans and creators over the notion of “master plans.”I think of Lost particularly because the spatial ambiguity gave the series the ability to randomly introduce both a Temple and a Lighthouse in its final season, but in both instances some fairly vocal fans rejected those locations based on their perception of the space of the island, or what we could consider an accumulated diegetic place-based authenticity. Paratexts played a big part in establishing this, but does the freedom of ambiguity undo some of that work through the primary narrative’s willingness to add new locations willy nilly?
See in context
May 21, 2012 at 3:37 am
For the most part, I would agree that place-based authenticity is largely observed by those who are natives of a given city.However, two points:1) Attempts to establish spatial realism as tied to specific places are often incredibly transparent – when a show moves to a new setting (like, for example, Glee setting Nationals in Chicago), viewers who are aware the show films in Los Angeles (which is an increasing number of viewers in an Internet age) might look to see what strategies they might undertake to establish place-based authenticity. In the case of Glee, the only effort I saw was a single bucket of Garrett popcorn, which I only identified as Chicagoan because it had appeared on the set of Happy Endings, which is equally faking Chicago. As a result, while we might not observe minute geographical incoherence (such as Homeland citing real D.C. locations while shooting in N.C. equivalents), we CAN observe signifiers of place designed to mask larger incoherences, which could lead viewers to be skeptical of the show’s spatial geography more generally.2) While I am aware that neither you nor I would be a “general” viewer in this sense, the reason I know about most of the above examples is because people made it known via Twitter – heck, that’s what has me here writing this comment at this particular point in time. Message boards, social media, and post-air analysis have all allowed for spatial realism to spread beyond those who actually live within a particular place, and as I look toward my own project specifically focused on space/place I find myself seeing more and more conversation on this subject. Granted, I’m looking for it, and run in circles where it would be more prominent, but I do think that the transition from “recognition” to “transmission” is becoming more common.
See in context
May 19, 2012 at 11:56 am
It’s unlikely to be ready by SCSMI, but you might want to look at my essay (which will be folded into the chapter) “Previously On,” about serial TV & memory (and originally presented at SCSMI). The blog version is online, or it’s in this book.
See in context
May 19, 2012 at 11:36 am
I am particularly interested in this chapter on Comprehension as I am presenting a paper at the upcoming SCSMI conference inquiring into an aspect of memory and serial TV. Is it likely to be available online soon? I would be very pleased to be able to reference it!
See in context
May 9, 2012 at 7:42 am
Just a thought, but I wonder if this definition of narrative complexity here has the potential to be a little misleading. I appreciate that the merging of serial and episodic forms has enabled much of the narrative complexity to which you refer; but, as you say in para 8, narrative complexity is not wholly dependent on the presence of serialisation, and you demonstrate this further within the chapter — in some of your discussion of narrative spectacle, for example. So might it be worth briefly defining (in para 5) this “broader mode of complexity” that you refer to in para 8?
See in context
May 9, 2012 at 12:33 am
Phrases like “methodological contextualization” and “associated paratexts” reduce the seriousness of your work here. If open scholarship is to be truly meaningful, the trappings of academic obfuscation can and should be dropped.
See in context
May 6, 2012 at 6:05 pm
ps: and i don’t mean the game of wiki-interaction which seems (asfar as i know wikis) to be usually very aware of its own fluidity and malleability. what i mean is the fans’ assumption about their object of engagement: do the contributors mostly act in the roles of “onlookers” who assume that their various interactions (shared pleasures, quibbles, contestations) refer to a stable text – or is there also an understanding that they might actually be players/inter-actors with and within the larger moveable game that is the unfolding development of the series “lost”?
See in context
May 6, 2012 at 5:53 pm
“but rather as opposing vectors of cultural engagement”: i guess i was talking about “spread” as an observational stance above, not as a form of engagment. if you phrase it like this, it makes sense to talk about “vectors” going into different directions.– as for “legitimacy”, i feel tempted to quote david simon’s word of wisdom with which you started: “just be.” — (and might there be a slight performative contradiction between “we need to” and “shift our normative stance”? or what do you mean by “shift”: find another, better normative stance or get rid of the question of normativity altogether. i’m all for the second option & think that, in that case, the best way to get rid of normativity is to not even pay it too much attention. same with questions of legitimacy
See in context
May 6, 2012 at 5:36 pm
i’m not sure if you want to establish “spreadable media” vs. “drillable media” as a difference in type – or perspective? the latter would make a lot of sense to me: die-hard fans, intensely focussing on their object of engagement, probably tend to regard the unfolding series as a standing & hopefully rewarding puzzle, a mystery to be solved (and a disappointment if it offers no such solution) — while, when we take a step back, observe the series in relation to other series, to its immediate media environment, its cultural conditions, and in interaction with its die-hard fans, we might be more drawn to descriptors that stress spread and sprawl? if so, “drillable” and “spreadable” media are not opposites (“rather than”) but, relating to the same phenomena, perspectives?
See in context