Seeing It on Television

Televisuality in the Contemporary US ‘High-End’ Series

Max Sexton, Dominic Lees

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501375965
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501359415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Televisione

Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US 'High-end' Series investigates new categories of high-end drama and explores the appeal of programmes from Netflix, Sky Atlantic/HBO, National Geographic, FX and Cinemax. An investigation of contemporary US Televisuality provides insight into the appeal of upscale programming beyond facts about its budget, high production values and/or feature cinematography. Rather, this book focuses on how the construction of meaning often relies on cultural discourse, production histories, as well as on tone, texture or performance, which establishes the locus of engagement and value within the series.

Max Sexton and Dominic Lees discuss how complex production histories lie behind the rise of the US high-end series, a form that reflects industrial changes and the renegotiation of formal strategies. They reveal how the involvement of many different people in the production process, based on new relationships of creative authority, complicates our understanding of 'original content'. This affects the construction of stylistics and the viewing strategies required by different shows. The cultural, as well as industrial, strategies of recent television drama are explored in The Young Pope, The Knick, Stranger Things, Mars, Fargo, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, and Vinyl.

1

Reconfiguring Televisuality in high-end television

The high-end continuing series has been part of the US television landscape for more than three decades, including shows such as Sex and the City (1998–2004), The Sopranos (1999–2007), Lost (2004–10) and Mad Men (2007–15). The desire for high-end programming has been a major factor in winning subscribers to premier cable outlets such as HBO; as well as what were basic cable networks, such as AMC, Showtime and FX; and, more recently, streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. The world of subscriber-supported pay television has been the story of US television in the last few decades, and the financial model of individual projects satisfying a brand is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. However, the increase in budget allocation for content production, as well as the growth in the number of subscribers – at the time of writing the number of customers for Netflix is 190 million ‒ tells us little about critical attitudes to style in the high-end series and the ability of Televisuality to innovate and introduce something new.

Work by John T. Caldwell and Greg M. Smith of finding the essential basis of Televisuality in 1980s and 1990s television has situated formal practices in historical contexts of production.¹ For Caldwell, television became stylistically exhibitionist due to its move towards a ‘film look’ when ‘cinematic values brought to television spectacle, high-production values, and feature-style cinematography’.² At the same time, Caldwell notes that new combinations of existing ideas about style demonstrate not only the need to explore the use of high production values but how the industry legitimizes itself by overproducing and complicating such values.³ In this way, scrutiny of the legitimization of the expansion of formal devices in contemporary high-end drama can be made to reveal the origin of meanings to do with televisual textual practices, as well as evaluate the process of stylistic innovation in complex drama. If narrative has aesthetic goals and desired effects on the audience member, the investigation of contemporary high-end television is useful because it not only analyses how narrative is shaped and transformed by style in high-end drama but also demonstrates how systems of value can be used to interpret the meanings created by style in contemporary shows.

This critical approach to television style is influenced by David Bordwell’s approach to historical poetics, situating formal practices of film-making within contexts of production and reception.⁴ Such an approach can be transplanted to demonstrate how television directors, showrunners and producers have used or otherwise defied methods of television production. Style refers to ‘how’ a production is expressed as much as ‘what’ it is, and the scrutiny of stylistic practices can show change, as well as stability. The technological, economic and social context in which a stylistic device functions as it gives form to content becomes the basis on which textual significance can be discussed.

It should be recalled that, historically, television has been regarded, in the decades before the 1980s, as ‘textually anaemic’, although Caldwell has identified many instances of a clear use of style in earlier shows and other scholars have written about style in the formative years of television.⁵ Television was understood as a domestic appliance and, unlike cinema, not a symbol of mass culture, with an elevated status. In the 1990s, John Caldwell argued that the television programme had been written out of the history of the medium and was hopelessly general about forms.⁶ However, recent studies of television style have demonstrated the value of building a television poetics that accurately characterize stylistic traits of particular modes of production during its history from studio-based drama to shooting on location. Such studies seek to promote an understanding of television that has developed both conventional and complex approaches to its programming, including drama. More recently, high-end television has evolved into a sophisticated dramatic mode by integrating earlier televisual modalities, as well as cinematic modalities. Yet, if television poetics was given little scholarly attention, as Jason Mittell has argued, recent scholarly work has not only identified stylistic characteristics at historical moments but highlighted ‘how cultural meanings and assumptions are encoded in the program [and] we can see how these textual elements fit into larger cultural and generic categories’.⁷ In this way, high-end television style in the past decade can be shown to be significant because its techniques are related to cultural-aesthetic concerns requiring further enquiry.

Since the 1990s, an increasing trend for complex drama has been to signal its originating network’s ability to produce a show or even cluster of shows that are ambitious in terms of narrative and style. According to Deborah L. Jaramillo, branding in television is a matter of product differentiation, and a subscriber network like HBO needs to offer different yet familiar programming.⁸ For example, about a decade ago, networks such as FX and AMC began to sell their original series, such as Sons of Anarchy (2008–14) and Breaking Bad (2008–13) to Netflix, which quadrupled its subscription base from 12.27 million in 2009 to 47.35 in 2013.⁹ What was driving audiences to subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms such as Netflix was original content, especially serialized drama. For example, a show such as Fargo (2014–2020) from the once ‘basic’ cable network, FX, represents the accelerating trend of constructing a network brand that incorporates a series with impressive pedigrees, which relies on crossover talents taken from theatrical film. Fargo the television series is a loose adaptation of the film of the same name directed by the Oscar-winning Coen brothers and includes A-list actors such as Billy Bob Thornton. Nevertheless, a loose adaptation of an earlier indie film, Fargo the television series, continues, in many ways, to be rooted in the particularities of television long-form drama. This is true especially in its use of serialized narrative, the extended biographies of its characters and even the representation of emotional states, as character psychological traits are developed across episodes.

By 2015, FX, which had started in a Manhattan apartment twenty years earlier, was no longer using repeats to fill its schedules but using a strategy centred on original content in shows such as Sons of Anarchy and Fargo, winning 27 Emmys and receiving nominations for another 163.¹⁰ However, it is difficult to make aesthetic judgements about television programmes being ‘excellent’ or ‘superior’ compared to other drama, as might be, initially, assumed by the term ‘high-end’ drama. Other terms such as ‘complex’ or ‘innovative’ also remain problematic because they assume an aesthetic system, which relies on dominant cultural norms. Television Studies is less about developing a method of aesthetic judgement in which a cohesive system offers an argument about innovative formal techniques as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ programmes. Instead, analysis of the style of high-end drama can go beyond matters of taste. This book is not about mere ‘formalism’ that assumes, for example, cinematic style is superior to television, but it seeks to approach style in high-end television drama as the physical manifestation of complex themes and narratives by exploring how these, then, form a cultural, as well as industrial, logic of distinction.

Although there has been an accelerating tendency of using higher production values in television drama, Deborah L. Jaramillo strikes a word of warning by noting that what has happened in the cinema limits our understanding of television aesthetics. For her, ‘Cinematic should be a contentious word in the field of television studies. It should raise the eyebrows of anyone who thinks and writes about television; instead it has become commonplace for scholars and popular critics to use the term as shorthand when discussing [a] complex visual and aural style in scripted series.’¹¹ A complex televisual style is not inherently cinematic. If Jaramillo is wary of, for example, how spectacle on television is referred to as cinematic because it includes ‘artistry mixed with a sense of grandeur’,¹² it can also be shown that, for example, in Stranger Things, visual style offers opportunities to create a specific form that extends earlier television style, while forming a crossover with some types of theatrical film. Similarly, rather than the use of spectacle normally found in theatrical film, it can be shown how increased spectacle in shows such as The Knick and Mars is linked to the narrative complexity of character and story, which has been influenced by the development of a recent televisual aesthetic.

A mode of television that can be identified as ‘high-end’ demonstrates that aesthetic practices have been reconfigured as technology and economics are rapidly changing. Since the beginning of the noughties, televisual textuality has altered from modes associated with network television to the full complement of cable/satellite TV options, including, most recently, streaming OTT services.¹³ A mode of high-end television and its principles of textual composition need to be explained as practitioners of contemporary television drama follow, modify or reject older stylistic methods to communicate narrative information. At the same time, stories continue to mobilize a range of television poetics that are watched on a popular, domestic medium. The case for analysing contemporary style’s existence and its increased visual exhibitionism relies on understanding its ability to finding solutions to the problems of telling a complex narrative and how it commands attention.

Value within original programming

One of the most notable features of high-end drama is its fulfilment of the demand for original material. Originality in complex serial drama can be described as one of the basic requirements for viewers to notice content in a cluttered media landscape of multiple, competing networks. Such competition has led to a repositioning of new and established broadcasting, cable and streaming networks to seek content that can take producers into the broad sunlit uplands of television’s third golden age.¹⁴ Unlike ‘Least Objectionable Programming’ during an older era of US television history, networks and producers take the types of risks that, historically, were difficult for a medium to be watched in the home, unlike cinema.¹⁵ The de sire for risk encourages strategies believed to bring success. In the 1990s, HBO became known for original programming, and its tagline of ‘It’s not TV’ marked it off as distinct from network television content, in part due to its ability to deal with controversial issues, including sex and bad language, suggesting greater authenticity and insight about dramatic characters.¹⁶ As Horace Newcomb notes about HBO, its attitude to older television drama was a ‘retro activation’, which implied denigration of meanings about television that had hitherto existed.¹⁷ In the age of digitalization and globalization, this repositioning has evolved into a continuing strategy of branding a network as capable of taking risk while, at the same time, creating opportunities to produce original content. Simultaneously, programmes have become more of a marketable commodity, as well as a vehicle for the interests and concerns of writers and producers interested in shows that have enhanced moral or ethical insight.

It is important to recognize t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reconfiguring Televisuality in high-end television
• 2 Passionate realism: Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope
• 3 Independent style : Stephen Soderbergh’s The Knick
• 4 Fargo : Adaptation of a cinematic text
• 5 A wealth of allusiveness : Stranger Things, Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl
• 6 Performance modes in collision : The Leftovers
• 7 Televisual spectacle : Mars
• Conclusion
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright