Quality Telefantasy

How US Quality TV Brought Zombies, Dragons and Androids into the Mainstream

Andrew Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032156255
• eBook ISBN: 9781000554632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the relatively new genre of 'Quality Telefantasy' and how it has broadened TV taste cultures by legitimating and mainstreaming fantastical content. It also shows how the rising popularity of this genre marks a distinct and significant development in what kinds of TV are culturally dominant and critically regarded.

By expanding and building on the definition of US Quality TV, this book brings together a number of popular science fiction, fantasy and horror TV series, including Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Westworld, as case studies which demonstrate the emergence of the Quality Telefantasy genre. It looks at the role of technology, including internet recap culture and subscription video on demand distribution, in Quality Telefantasy's swift emergence, and analyses its success internationally by considering series created outside the US like Kingdom (South Korea, Netflix) and Dark (Germany, Netflix). The book argues that Quality Telefantasy series should be considered a part of the larger Quality TV super-genre, and that the impact they are having on the global TV landscape warrants further investigation as it continues to evolve.

This is a valuable text for students and scholars studying or undertaking research in the areas of television studies, new media and pop-cultural studies.

1 Battlestar Galactica and True Blood Transitioning to Quality Telefantasy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003244998-2

Introduction: genre in transition

Quality Telefantasy is best understood as a development of the Quality TV super-genre to include telefantasy. Immediately preceding the rise of Quality Telefantasy in the 2010s, several series on both broadcast and cable television began to experiment with mixing telefantasy and Quality TV elements. This chapter argues these can be considered ‘transition’ series because they represented a period of transition between two ‘consecrated’ types of Quality TV (Altman 1999, 82): the Difficult Men (Martin 2013) dramas that dominated the Quality TV super-genre during TV III (Thompson 2007, xvi), and Quality Telefantasy, which has come to dominate it during TV IV. Most of these experiments were short-lived, like Carnivàle (HBO 2003–2005) and Stargate Universe (Syfy 2009–2011), but others enjoyed greater success, such as Heroes (ABC 2006–2010) and Lost (ABC 2004–2010). This chapter focuses on two such ‘transition’ series: Battlestar Galactica and True Blood. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Rick Altman understands film genre as a process similar to the development of language (1999). Descriptive adjectives (romantic) develop into definitional nouns (romance) which refer to specific film genres (Altman 1999). I argue that Altman’s approach can be fruitfully applied and extended to TV, in that the transition series Battlestar Galactica and True Blood are Quality Telefantasy in its developmental adjective stage (1999, 50). Battlestar Galactica was conceived as a quality example of telefantasy, designed by established sci-fi TV writer Ronald D. Moore as a culturally elevated version of similar shows for the Syfy cable network. In Battlestar Galactica’s case, telefantasy was the more stable genre associated with both the showrunner and the network, with the adjective ‘quality’ distinguishing it from other examples of telefantasy. By contrast, True Blood was a programme for the quality-branded cable network HBO (Johnson 2011), already associated with an ‘aura of distinction’ (Johnson 2011, 31). True Blood was overseen by established Quality TV showrunner Alan Ball. In this case, quality was the established genre noun linked to both Ball and HBO, while Ball’s new experiment makes telefantasy the adjective. This adjective/noun distinction is important to make because it helps explain the cultural and industrial context in which Quality Telefantasy developed as a genre. Despite the different ways they combined Quality TV and telefantasy, both Battlestar Galactica and True Blood were associated with discourses of legitimation of the 2000s. For example, Time Magazine TV critic James Poniewozik called Battlestar Galactica the best series of 2005, while anticipating audience incredulity at his critical elevation of sci-fi TV by stating: ‘[l]augh if you want, but this story of enemies within is dead serious, and seriously good’ (Poniewozik 2005). Quality Telefantasy can be best understood as a development of the Quality TV super-genre to include telefantasy, in which Battlestar Galactica and True Blood mark the transitional, adjectival stage. Though Battlestar Galactica and True Blood have already been the focus of a number of scholarly analyses, here I will reconsider them in light of the emergence of the Quality Telefantasy genre.

In retrospect, Battlestar Galactica and True Blood contained many of the characteristics that would become key to Quality Telefantasy from 2010 onwards as subsequent chapters will explore, but these two programmes were produced before that genre had been consecrated by both industry and audiences (Altman 1999, 82). Altman uses the term ‘genre films’ to describe those films which are ‘produced after general identification and consecration of a genre through substantification’ (1999, 53). Extending Altman’s work to contemporary television, the transition series Battlestar Galactica and True Blood can be understood as pre-genre in terms of Quality Telefantasy. It is important to identify these messier moments of transition in between consecrated genres (Altman 1999, 82), as it prevents an ahistorical rewriting of generic development. This rewriting frequently smooths over the numerous unsuccessful variations and experiments which are also an important part of genrification. For example, when Game of Thrones is understood in popular and critical discourse as the direct successor to The Sopranos (Hughes 2014), it downplays the role that transition series like Battlestar Galactica and True Blood played in acclimatising industry and audiences to the combination of telefantasy and Quality TV. In both film and TV studies, analyses of genre have tended to focus on instances of substantification, which leaves the murkier adjectival stages of generic development under-examined. This chapter analyses the Quality Telefantasy genre in its formative, adjectival development but more broadly asserts the need for more detailed scholarly understanding of genrification in its transitional stage.

Legitimation through verisimilitude

Battlestar Galactica and True Blood both privilege a sense of realism associated with Quality TV over genre expectations for telefantasy, albeit in different ways. At the time of their reception, this sparked positive discourses of taste and distinguished them from most if not all (see discussion of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the introduction to this book) other telefantasy series airing at the time. Realism does not refer to an objective representation of reality, but rather the conveyance of truthfulness or believability to audiences. A sense of realism has been key to Quality TV’s claim to cultural distinction. Drawing on the audience research of Alice Hall (2003), Daniela M. Schlütz argues that fictional authenticity is made up of many different types of realism employed in different combinations (2016). These include factuality, narrative realism, plausibility, typicality, perceptual persuasiveness and emotional realism (Schlütz 2016, 102–103). Robert Thompson argues that Quality TV of the 1990s ‘aspires towards “realism” ’ to distinguish itself from other TV (1996, 15). This strategy rests on the presumption that TV as a whole tends to be unrealistic and thus culturally unimportant. By being more realistic than the rest of TV, the early Quality TV series that Thompson identified presented themselves as more important than the rest of TV. Similarly, Schlütz identifies a larger category of ‘authenticity’ as one of Quality TV’s enduring characteristics (2016, 100–103). Though Quality TV scholars differ when it comes to the mechanics by which Quality TV conveys realism, Quality TV and a sense of realism are inextricable from one another.

Creating a sense of realism in TV is a matter of audience expectation and experience. For TV to be judged realistic by an audience it must fit with their expectations of possibility and fidelity. In other words, realistic things should happen in the worlds and to the characters on-screen. Those things should look, sound and feel realistic to the viewer. Drawing on the work of Steve Neale (2000) and Stephen Prince (1996) in particular, I identify three types of realism, namely generic realism, cultural realism and perceptual realism. These categories of realism can be present in different combinations and different contexts. Traditionally, telefantasy is driven by its own internal logics of possibility: generic realism. Vampires and interstellar spaceships are entirely fictional, and until recently, efforts to render them either culturally or perceptually realistic on TV were uncommon. However, these fantastic elements can be deployed in culturally or perceptually realistic ways, demonstrated in Battlestar Galactica and True Blood. For example, outside of sci-fi genre confines, interstellar spaceships that quickly and easily transport humans across vast distances do not yet exist and therefore are unrealistic. However, their mechanisms and use can be rendered perceptually believable through production design and digital special effects. Likewise, vampires can engage in culturally relatable relationships and inhabit a plausible facsimile of contemporary society. In these ways, even the unrealistic elements of telefantasy can be infused with the sense of realism traditionally associated with Quality TV.

Generic realism

In different ways, Battlestar Galactica and True Blood ask audiences to draw on their cultural expectations of real life, rather than their expectations of telefantasy genres. As Steve Neale argues, genres contain ‘specific systems of expectation and hypothesis’ (2000, 27). He describes two distinct categories of realism: ‘socio-cultural’ verisimilitude and ‘generic’ verisimilitude (Neale 2000). In Neale’s understanding, adapting Tzetvan Todorov’s work, generic verisimilitude refers to what is possible or likely to occur within a given genre, whereas socio-cultural verisimilitude refers to audience expectations of what is possible or likely in the real world (2000). Different genres employ different ‘regimes of verisimilitude’ (Neale 2000, 28) and so what seems reasonable or likely in one genre might appear outlandish in another. In both Battlestar Galactica and True Blood, generic realism is de-emphasised or rejected in favour of cultural and/or perceptual realism.

Cultural realism

In Quality TV, the gap between cultural and generic realism has traditionally been small. Audiences have been trained to expect Quality TV series to hew closer to expectations of real-world plausibility than other genres. Quality TV series, especially the Difficult Men dramas popular during TV III (Martin 2013, discussed in the introduction), usually took place in spaces recognisable to US viewers. These were locations associated with the realistic genres of the Quality TV super-genre (Thompson 2007, xvi), such as the family homes and offices of workplace dramas, as well as the court rooms and police stations of police procedurals. By contrast, the gap between generic and socio-cultural expectations in telefantasy is typically vast. Telefantasy series are more likely to be set in fantastical alien worlds and magical realms rather than the predictable, mundane but inherently plausible spaces that had become associated with Quality TV.

Despite its inherent un-reality, telefantasy and cultural realism are nonetheless connected. In Catherine Johnson’s examination of telefantasy, she argues that what brings together sci-fi, fantasy and horror TV series is their shared representation of ‘events and objects that confound culturally accepted notions of what is believed to be real’ (2005, 4). She also employs Neale’s concepts of ‘generic verisimilitude’ (2000, 28) and ‘socio-cultural verisimilitude’ (2000, 30) to examine how the fantastical typically exists in a liminal space between expectations of fiction and lived reality. As Johnson argues, a degree of ‘socio-cultural verisimilitude is a particularly important device [in making] fictional worlds plausible or believable’ (2005, 4). For example, Star Trek’s characters travel between worlds on warp-powered starships meeting alien civilisations, but they still eat meals at tables, sleep in beds and engage in friendships and romantic couplings. Truly far-fetched concepts such as different alien species being able to easily communicate with one another are explained away with sci-fi technological innovations. Star Trek’s characters’ fantastical experiences are thus rendered relatable and understandable to TV audiences. Both Neale and Johnson’s conceptual understandings of cultural realism are supported by and roughly align with Hall’s description of ‘plausibility’ as a category of TV realism (2003, 629). Hall describes this category as representing ‘events or behaviours [in TV] that have the potential to occur in the real world’ (629). Telefantasy must have some degree of cultural realism to make sense to audiences. Precisely how believable a series is contributes to how culturally legitimate it is considered. As this chapter will explore, in merging Quality TV and telefantasy conventions, Battlestar Galactica and True Blood infused their fantastical worlds with a much greater degree of cultural realism than was typical at the time.

Perceptual realism

Creating a sense of realism in TV is about managing audience expectations of possibility, but it is also about creating an audio-visual experience which feels realistic on a sensory level. An audience’s reading of a given text as generically or culturally realistic is often informed by a third category: perceptual realism. In 1996, Stephen Prince used the term to describe the challenge digital effects technology posed to the indexical sense of realism film had traditionally possessed. This problematised ‘photographically based notions of cinematic realism’, including André Bazin’s oft-cited ‘realist aesthetic’ which relied on the assumption of a photographic referent essential to cinema (Prince 1996, 28). In Prince’s understanding, digital effects render the truthfulness of the film image in doubt (1996, 32). He concludes that the ‘perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audio-visual experiences of three-dimensional space’ (1996, 32). While Prince explicitly discusses perceptual realism in relation to film, this approach is equally relevant to TV, where digital special effects have become increasingly common. Adapting this understanding across to TV, I argue that texts need not necessarily conform to the lived cultural experience of audiences to seem realistic. Hall’s audience research into TV viewers’ perception of realism supports this assertion. She defines ‘perceptual persuasiveness’ as ‘the degree to which a text creates a compelling visual illusion, independent to the degree to which the content may relate to real-world experience’ (2003, 637). Therefore, dragons and spaceships on a TV screen can feel realistic, so long as they are crafted and rendered with sufficient audio-visual detail and fidelity. This applies to not just fantastical TV but naturalistic Quality TV as well. I argue that perceptual realism can be achieved with more traditional filmmaking techniques as well as modern digital special effects. Few audience members would have visited a New Jersey mobster’s mansion like that represented in The Sopranos or have worked in a 1960s advertising firm like Don Draper in Mad Men. Nonetheless, the locations, sets and their inhabitants’ makeup and costumes are rendered in such detail that they require relatively little suspension of disbelief from the audience to accept them as plausible. It is generally understood that creating perceptual realism takes time, money and skill, and so it is effectively aligned with ‘aesthetics of expense’ that are part of Quality TV’s claim to distinction (Baker 2018, 43).

Battlestar Galactica: telefantasy and the beginning of legitimation

Battlestar Galactica can be understood as telefantasy producers branching out into Quality TV, representing Quality Telefantasy in its adjectival stage. Battlestar Galactica premiered on Syfy as a miniseries in 2003, then an ongoing series in 2004 that depicted the ragtag human populace aboard spaceships on the run from a race of killer robots. The series was adapted by Ronald D. Moore from an earlier ABC sci-fi series of the same name (1978–1979). Both series feature an alternate version of humanity living in a distant star system on 12 colonised planets. This advanced human civilisation develops interstellar travel, as well as a race of servile robots called Cylons, who eventually rebel against their masters then disappear, decades before the series’ narrative. The 2003 miniseries, which acts as an extended series pilot, features the unexpected return of the Cylons, who launch a series of devastating nuclear attacks on the human colonies. Only a small group of spaceships escape, led by the battleship Galactica. The series’ four seasons mainly feature the human survivors evading the Cylons while searching for a mythical thirteenth human colony. The series concludes with a truce between the humans and a rogue faction of Cylons, who settle together on a planet which is revealed to be a prehistoric version of Earth. While Battlestar Galactica struggled to reach a mainstream audience, it was extremely well received by critics and lent a degree of legitimation to Syfy that the basic cable network had not previously experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the rise of Quality Telefantasy
• 1 Battlestar Galactica and True Blood: transitioning to Quality Telefantasy
• 2 The Walking Dead: the three key elements of Quality Telefantasy
• 3 Game of Thrones: recap culture and Quality Telefantasy
• 4 The Marvel/Netflix superhero series: adapting comic books into Quality Telefantasy
• 5 Westworld: self-reflexive Quality Telefantasy
• Conclusion: the future of Quality Telefantasy in (and outside) the United States
• Works cited
• Appendix: Quality Telefantasy corpus
• Index