Complex TV

The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling

Jason Mittell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780814738856
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

1

Complexity in Context

This book’s main argument is that over the past two decades, a new model of storytelling has emerged as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial forms that have typified most American television since its inception, a mode that I call narrative complexity.1 We can see such innovative narrative form in popular network hits from Seinfeld to Lost, The X-Files to How I Met Your Mother, as well as in critically beloved but ratings-challenged programs such as Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Boomtown, and Firefly, not to mention series that failed both commercially and critically, such as Reunion, Day Break, FlashForward, and The Event. HBO has built its reputation and subscriber base on narratively complex series, such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, and Game of Thrones, and cable channels Showtime (Dexter, Homeland), FX (The Shield, Justified), and AMC (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) have followed suit. Clearly these programs offer an alternative to conventional television narrative form — the purpose of this chapter is to explain how and why. As a background for the rest of the book’s more topically focused investigation, this chapter outlines the formal attributes of this storytelling mode, explores its unique pleasures and patterns of consumption, and suggests a range of reasons for complex television’s emergence in the late 1990s and continued growth throughout the 21st century.

In trying to understand the storytelling practices of contemporary American television, we might consider narrative complexity as a distinct narrational mode, as suggested by David Bordwell’s analysis of film narrative. For Bordwell, a “narrational mode is a historically distinct set of norms of narrational construction and comprehension,” one that crosses genres, specific creators, and artistic movements to forge a coherent category of practices.2 Bordwell outlines specific cinematic modes such as classical Hollywood, art cinema, and historical materialism, all of which encompass distinct storytelling strategies while still referencing one another and building on the foundations of other modes. Kristin Thompson has extended Bordwell’s approach to television, suggesting that programs such as Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective might be usefully thought of as “art television,” importing norms from art cinema onto the small screen.3 Although certainly cinema influences many aspects of television, especially concerning visual style, I am reluctant to map a model of storytelling tied to self-contained feature films onto the ongoing long-form narrative structure of series television, where ongoing continuity and seriality are core features, and thus I believe we can more productively develop a vocabulary for television narrative on its own medium terms. Likewise, contemporary complex serials are often praised as being “novelistic” in scope and form, but I believe such cross-media comparisons obscure rather than reveal the specificities of television’s storytelling form. Television’s narrative complexity is predicated on specific facets of storytelling that seem uniquely suited to the television series structure apart from film and literature and that distinguish it from conventional modes of episodic and serial forms.

Complex Serial Poetics

So what exactly is narrative complexity? At its most basic level, narrative complexity redefines episodic forms under the influence of serial narration — not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms but a shifting balance. Rejecting the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form, narrative complexity foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres. Complex television employs a range of serial techniques, with the underlying assumption that a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time, rather than resetting back to a steady-state equilibrium at the end of every episode. While today’s complex narratives can be markedly different from their 20th-century predecessors, they built on numerous innovators from the 1970s forward. This new mode is not as uniform and convention driven as episodic or serials norms traditionally have been — in fact, complex television’s most defining characteristic might be its unconventionality — but it is still useful to group together a growing number of programs that work against the conventions of episodic and serial traditions in a range of intriguing ways.4

The key prototypes for complex television emerged in the 1990s, setting precedents that more recent programs adopted and refined. The cult hit The X-Files exemplifies what may be the hallmark of narrative complexity: an interplay between the demands of episodic and serial storytelling, often oscillating between long-term arcs and stand-alone episodes. As Jeffrey Sconce discusses, any given X-Files episode might focus on the long-term “mythology,” an ongoing, highly elaborate conspiracy plot that endlessly delays resolution and closure, or might offer self-contained “monster-of-the-week” stories that generally exist outside the arcing scope of the mythology.5 Although X-Files features an influential array of narrational innovations, the program’s eventual creative and critical decline highlights one of the key tensions inherent in narrative complexity: balancing the competing demands and pleasures of episodic and serial norms. According to many X-Files viewers and critics, the series suffered from too great a disjunction between the overly complex and endlessly deferred serial mythology and the detached independence of monster-of-the-week episodes that might ignore or even contradict the accrued knowledge of the conspiracy. For instance, the highly regarded reflexive episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” mocks the program’s nested conspiracies, while its events undermine some of the revelations of the ongoing mythology concerning alien presence on Earth. Despite viewers’ cultish devotion for unraveling the mysteries driving Agent Mulder’s endless quest, this episode (as well as many others) left viewers unsure as to how to consistently fit events into the storyworld. Viewing tastes thus divided between conspiracy buffs, who saw the sometimes reflexive and tonally divergent monster-of-the-week episodes as distractions from the serious mythological mysteries, and fans who grew to appreciate the coherence and range of the stand-alone episodes in light of the increasingly inscrutable arc — personally, I found myself in the latter camp before abandoning the series entirely.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are arguably more adept at juggling the dual demands of serial and episodic pleasures. While both programs (together and separately) present a rich and ongoing mythology of a battle between the forces of good and evil, plotlines are centered on season-long arcs featuring a particular villain, or “big bad” in Buffy’s parlance. Within a given season, nearly every episode advances the season’s arc while still offering episodic coherence and resolutions. Even highly experimental or atypical episodes balance between episodic and serial demands; for instance, Buffy’s “Hush” features a literal monster-of-the-week, known as The Gentlemen, who steal the voices of the town of Sunnydale, leading to an impressively constructed episode told virtually without dialogue. Yet despite the episode’s one-off villain and highly unusual speechless mode of storytelling, “Hush” still advances various narrative arcs, as characters reveal key secrets and deepen relationships to move the season-long plot forward; many other Buffy and Angel episodes similarly offer unique episodic elements with undercurrents of arc narration. These programs also interweave melodramatic relationship dramas and character development with story arcs — Buffy, at its most accomplished, uses forward plot momentum to generate emotional responses to characters and allows relationships to help advance plots, as exemplified by how “Hush” simultaneously offers closure to a monster-of-the-week, furthers the relationship between Buffy and Riley, and adds new wrinkles to the season-long arc concerning the Initiative. Numerous other series have found their own distinct patterns for interweaving long-term story arcs within the frameworks of clearly defined episodic parameters, such as individual character flashbacks on Lost or Orange Is the New Black or the case-of-the-week structure of Veronica Mars or Pushing Daisies.

But narrative complexity cannot simply be defined as prime time episodic seriality; within the broader mode of complexity, many programs actively work against serial norms but also embrace narrative strategies to rebel against episodic conventionality. For instance, Seinfeld has a mixed relationship to serial plotting — some seasons feature an ongoing situation, such as Jerry’s NBC sitcom pilot, George’s impending wedding, or Elaine’s new job. These story arcs work primarily to offer backstory for in-jokes and self-aware references, as when George suggests a potential story for an episode of his and Jerry’s sitcom “about nothing” based on the night they waited for a table at a Chinese restaurant, the plot of an earlier episode. However, these arcs and ongoing plots demand little cumulative knowledge, as actions and events rarely matter across episodes — arguably a result of the infrequency of significant actions and events on a series committed to chronicling insignificant minutiae. While certainly a viewer’s appreciation of the storyworld is heightened the more alert one is to ongoing references such as Art Vandelay or Bob Sacamano, narrative comprehension does not require engaging in any long-term arcs as with X-Files or Buffy. Yet Seinfeld offers a wealth of narrative complexity, often through its refusal to conform to episodic norms of closure, resolution, and distinct storylines. Many episodes leave characters in an untenable situation — Kramer arrested for being a pimp, Jerry running into the woods after becoming a “wolf-man,” George stuck in an airplane restroom with a serial killer — that function not as cliffhangers as in serial dramas but rather as comedic punch lines not to be referenced again.

Seinfeld and other narratively complex comedies such as The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia use television’s episodic form to undercut conventional assumptions of returning to equilibrium and situational continuity, while embracing conditional seriality — some storylines do in fact continue, while others are never referred to again. Arrested Development, a more explicitly serialized comedy, subverts these conventions even more, as most episodes end with a “next week on Arrested Development” teaser, showing scenes continuing that episode’s stories. However, regular viewers soon learn that neither will future episodes portray these scenes nor will they have actually occurred within the ongoing storyworld (although in the third season, the series varies this norm by allowing some of the teaser material to occur diegetically). Likewise, The Simpsons generally embraces an excessive and even parodic take on episodic form, rejecting continuity between episodes by returning to an everlasting present equilibrium state of Bart in fourth grade, Maggie as perpetual toddler, and a dysfunctional family stasis. However, there are exceptions to these norms: Apu gets married and has octuplets that grow from in utero to toddlers over the course of many seasons, suggesting that at least three years have passed in Springfield’s life cycle, yet nobody else has aged. Often making jokes about the need to return to equilibrium state, The Simpsons offers ambiguous expectations over which transformations are “reset” after each episode (frequent losses of jobs, destruction of property, and damaging of relationships that will be restored by next week’s episode) and which will be carried over serially (such as Apu’s family, Skinner and Krabappel’s relationship, and Maude Flanders’s death). Thus these complex comedies selectively engage serial norms, weaving certain events into their backstories while ambiguously discarding other moments into the more commonplace realm of forgotten episodic histories, a distinction that viewers must either overlook as inconsistency or embrace as one of the sophisticated traits of narrative complexity; evidence of fan practices online suggest that the latter is more common once viewers accept the shifting rules as one of the pleasures offered by these complex comedies.

Such examples highlight why we should conceive of contemporary television seriality not just as a simple marker of continuity but as a multifaceted variable, with a range of potential storytelling possibilities. We traditionally think of television seriality as typified by the endlessly deferred openness of soap operas, with decades of narrative accumulating within the memories of their multigenerational fan communities. As I discuss in chapter 7, soap operas were synonymous with American television seriality for decades, but there are different elements of serial continuity beyond the model pioneered by daytime melodrama. In the introduction, I suggested that serial narratives are composed of the four main elements of storyworld, characters, events, and temporality — by breaking down seriality into its constitutive elements, we can see that even highly episodic programs are serialized in certain ways. Nearly every fictional television series has a serialized storyworld and characters, meaning they are an ongoing, consistent narrative element.6 Every episode of the classic episodic procedural Dragnet takes place in a fictionalized version of Los Angeles and features the same central character of Joe Friday, even if that episode’s events are not cumulative with previous installments. Contemporary programs regarded as highly episodic, such as the crime procedural Law and Order or the sitcom Two and a Half Men, still maintain consistent and persistent storyworlds and characters so that viewers recognize the places and people they encounter each week. It is rare for a program to violate such serialized characters and world building, such that it becomes noteworthy when Louie plays with the form by having the same actress play Louie’s date in one episode and his mother in another episode’s flashback — a decision that creator Louis C.K. says was motivated not for thematic commentary but just because he liked the actress for both parts, and he treats the series more like an anthology of short films rather than a continuing series.7

When we talk about a serialized program, we are usually referring less to the ubiquitous persistence of storyworld and characters and more to the ongoing accumulation of narrative events — what occurs in one episode will have happened to the characters and storyworld as portrayed in future episodes. Most classically episodic programs are ambiguous on this front, simply choosing to ignore previous events rather than explicitly to deny their existence, while more playfully reflexive series will acknowledge this lack of event serialization, as with South Park’s weekly death of Kenny, only to be reborn the following week. Programs whose narrative events do accumulate serially usually articulate this buildup through the memories of characters — people reference previous occurrences such as a romantic connection or personal discovery, expressing continuity through dialogue and character actions, as discussed more in chapter 4. Settings also have memories, where the physical evidence of narrative events can be seen, as with the wreckage of a space battle on Battlestar Galactica or characters moving apartments on Community. Oftentimes, frustration with a serialized program stems from moments when viewers’ memories are more acute than those of characters or the storyworld, as a viewer might wonder why characters do not seem to remember what happened previously to them and behave accordingly or why the set does not reflect the aftermath of the last episode’s events. A challenge for serial television is conveying consistent norms for how much narrative continuity viewers should expect in a given program, which is generally established by the degree to which characters reference previous events and the storyworld displays the impacts — the more a series reminds us that narrative events have a cumulative impact, the more we expect strict continuity and consistency. Thus when the first season of Heroes concluded with some illogical discontinuity concerning a character’s powers and fans critiqued this inconsistency, creator Tim Kring commented in an interview, “theoretically you’re not supposed to be thinking about that”; however, Kring’s statement directly overlooks that the entire season had been focused on characters discovering and discussing the mechanics of their powers, establishing our expectations for consistency within the series.8

Of course, there are different types of narrative events that may or may not be serialized. One key distinction is between major and minor events, or what Seymour Chatman calls “kernels” and “satellites.” The major kernels are central to the cause-and-effect chain of a plot, while minor satellites are inessential to the plot and thus could be omitted without impacting narrative comprehension; however, satellites provide texture, tone, and character richness.9 One of the pleasures of consuming a serialized narrative is trying to figure out whether a given event might be a kernel or a satellite in the larger arc of a plotline or series as a whole. Critics, fans, and television writers frequently reference Chekhov’s Gun as a storytelling axiom: playwright Anton Chekhov’s oft-repeated advice that if you hang a gun over the mantle in the first act, it must be fired by the end of the play. In Chatman’s terms, Chekhov’s Gun might be called a kernel initially presented as a satellite; thus serial viewers can attune themselves to look for Chekhov’s guns, searching for apparent satellites that might eventually turn into kernels in later episodes. Sometimes satellites resolve in fairly quick succession within a given episode or in the next, as with a seemingly inconsequential moment in Breaking Bad ’s “End Times” when Walt spins a gun on a table; this scene first seems to exist solely to portray Walt’s emotional state, but it is revealed in the next episode to...