Birth of the Binge

Serial Tv and the End of Leisure

Dennis Broe

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780814345276
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

A deep-dive into the practice and execution of contemporary television viewing.

Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure describes and details serial television and "binge watching, " the exceedingly popular form of contemporary television viewing that has come to dominance over the past decade. Author Dennis Broe looks at this practice of media consumption by suggesting that the history of seriality itself is a continual battleground between a more unified version of truth-telling and a more fractured form of diversion and addiction. Serial television is examined for the ways its elements (multiple characters, defined social location, and season and series arcs) are used alternately to illustrate a totality or to fragment social meaning. Broe follows his theoretical points with detailed illustrations and readings of several TV series in a variety of genres, including the systemization of work in Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley; the social imbrications of Justified; and the contesting of masculinity in Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dollhouse.

In this monograph, Broe uses the work of Bernard Stiegler to relate the growth of digital media to a new phase of capitalism called "hyperindustrialism, " analyzing the show Lost as suggestive of the potential as well as the poverty and limitations of digital life. The author questions whether, in terms of mode of delivery, commercial studio structure, and narrative patterns, viewers are experiencing an entirely new moment or a (hyper)extension of the earlier network era. The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, and Orange Is the New Black are examined as examples of, respectively, network, cable, and online series with structure that is more consistent than disruptive. Finally, Broe examines three series by J. J. Abrams— Revolution, Believe, and 11.22.63 —which employ the techniques and devices of serial television to criticize a rightward, neo-conservative drift in the American empire, noting that none of the series were able to endure in an increasingly conservative climate. The book also functions as a reference work, featuring an appendix of "100 Seminal Serial Series" and a supplementary index that television fans and media students and scholars will utilize in and out of the classroom.

I

Metaseriality

1

Hyperindustrialism, Hypernarrativity, and the Home Screen

The scope and scale of television series changed dramatically beginning in 2004 with Lost, which presented an ever-shifting world/island that seemed to alter the rules of time and space in a narrative cosmos that likewise with its fractured continuity and continuing development across six seasons altered the face of the series, bringing to network television what had already begun in cable. In the next ten years, the Lost model would push beyond cable and even beyond the traditional television screen to the point where these new serial series are not watched but streamed, with the online service Hulu, in what is now becoming commonplace, contracting two of the biggest names in network television, J. J. Abrams and Amy Poehler, to shows that will never air on a television or cable network and with Netflix now enlisting ABC’s primary showrunner, Shonda Rhimes.1

Television studies’ descriptions of this epoch most often begin with a narratological summation of this new televisual model, which I call Serial TV or seriality and whose features include season- and series-long arcs; ever-expanding (and expendable) casts of characters and plots built around them; and a kind of audacity around narrative and storyworld leaps that is the equivalent on the small screen of big-screen special effects (Mittell 2015). Instead, we will back up a bit and first consider the overall philosophical context in which the political economy of this model developed, looking at changes in the social landscape in which these new narratives and this new, now-portable, technology came into practice. In that way we are first integrating this new hyperseriality into its industrial epoch, which Bernard Stiegler (1998) has termed hyperindustrialism.

We will then consider the ever-shifting tropes of seriality, including its hypergeneric combinations and its consumption pattern—binge watching—as part of an ever-increasing role for these series in the culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972). Finally we will look at the serial mode as a new, perhaps now-dominant, component of what is termed the ideological state apparatus (Althusser 1971) and its role in socializing and reproducing (segmenting and training) new generations for positions in an ever more precarious and ever more cognitive (or mental) economy. The conclusion of this chapter will illustrate the way the complex serial form may combat these tendencies through an examination of the final episode of Lost as both exhibiting and critiquing this new brave new world by contrasting the digital and virtual world’s utopian promises to what Slavoj Žižek via Jacques Lacan called “the desert of the real.”

The sociopolitical background against which this heightened seriality emerges, with its much more intense luring of an audience into a more complicated and extended fictional world, is one of a seemingly ever more powerful capitalist system centered in the Anglo (American and British) world (Gindin and Panitch 2012), as are the television series that circulate out from it. This system has, on the one hand, no limits, no recognizable opponents, as it continues to expand and commodify all aspects of everyday life. But in the real world, capital is all the time surging against boundaries and destroying them at its own peril. The earth itself is in grave danger as the energy and resources needed to power the capital-technological revolution (oil, fracked natural gas, radioactive minerals strip-mined for communication devices) are rapidly destroying the planet.2

Meanwhile, inequality both in the US and globally now stands, as Thomas Piketty claims, at a level unseen since 1913, when the world was on the brink of two world wars. Private wealth in the US now equals nearly seven times the gross domestic product for a single year while 20 percent of the population now lives near or below the poverty line.3 The Great Recession of 2008, brought on by the greed of (financial) capital, only amplified that condition, and the solution was not a (green) new deal in which the needy were put to work but a raw deal in which central-bank “quantitative easing” ensures that money fresh off the presses is used to restore the liquidity of banks, which now partially function as global casinos, and is then invested in the stock market. The result is that financial capital profits from its own miscalculations while those below suffer the consequences, even as they are blamed for bringing on the crisis.

The repressive state apparatus is everywhere apparent in maintaining this inequality both at home in the US, as the police become a highly militarized force waging war against the (black) victims of poverty, and abroad, as the US is now perpetually on the brink of provoking a war with Russia over its push to bring the Ukraine into the US-led NATO and resituate the European economy under its hegemony.4 At the same time, the US state, the caretaker of capital, also continues to rain bombs while its drones practice assassination in the Middle East and now in Africa as well as this rapacious capital continues its resource grab under the name of a perpetual war on terrorism. The US populace is asked never to think of the root causes of this war as the homeland is protected by the home screen, which itself drones on endlessly about both the “terrorist menace and the Russian threat.”5

It is not barbarism or civilization but rather barbarism as (capitalist) civilization, with its promotion of endless civil wars by playing the race card at home and around the world with a persecution of the poor under the code words “Muslim” or “Arab” as the West’s never-ending need for the resources to power its technologically advanced lifestyle continues unabated. The world is becoming a much uglier place as the unfettered reign of capital “progresses” nearly unimpeded.

Nevertheless, there is a refuge, a place of plenty where the capitalist promise of abundance can still be fulfilled, and that is in the digital or virtual realm. That realm may operate through what Adorno (1972) designates as desire unfulfilled and Stiegler (2013) characterizes as the process of reducing the object of desire to “a calculability,”6 but it nevertheless promises infinite pleasure and at an affordable price. (Thus, while the price of education, health care, and food from 2005 to 2014 has increased in the US by anywhere from 20 to 40 percent, the price of cell phones, toys, mobile accessories, computers, and televisions has fallen 40 to 100 percent, suggesting the poor, and increasingly elements of the middle class, while being denied basic needs and ways of advancing, are being offered the virtual world as a compensation.)7

Television seriality is entirely bound up in that promise. TV pilots present the lure of dark unsolved mysteries, with the series burrowing ever deeper into uncharted realms, though often the end game of these series disappoints fans for not answering the questions the series posed, as many complained regarding the ending of Lost. Other times the series too obviously let their wires show. In their apparently complex plotting, serial series posit what Roland Barthes would call a lure as an actual event in the lives of the characters and then a few episodes later resolve the embattled state in a way that showed that the supposed deep-seated conflict was only a way of prolonging the series. Season 5 of Glee (2009–15) featured a short arc in which the fiery Santana blazed with anger and envy at Rachel’s success on Broadway, a contrivance that was quickly and arbitrarily resolved a few episodes later as another false crisis arose to animate the next segment of a show that had long since lost its purpose.

Think Greedily, Distribute Locally

Against the postmodern, postindustrial description of a world splintered into local production units in which workers are free to pursue “flex hours,” Stiegler (1998) characterizes this as a “hyperindustrial” age, in which the drive toward capital accumulation, toward profit, is if anything more intense than in the previous “industrial” age. The drive itself is more centralized but is satisfied by catering to highly specialized demographics in a supposedly more “democratic” marketplace that in effect is often simply a reiteration of the same formula in slightly different bottles. In this way singularities become particularities, the difference being that the singular has been transformed into a quantity that is now calculable and programmable (Stiegler 2015, 78). One size no longer fits all, but that single size is now carved up into three or four sizes with these minute variations now defining “individuality” in the hyperindustrial age, just as Adorno’s moustache or French accent were the bearers of a previous marketized individualization in culture in the industrial age.

Stiegler’s characterization of hyperindustrialism also gives the lie to the postmodern slip of logic wherein globalized production is presented as decentralized, as fracturing into fragments with no recognizable whole. The television industry, for example, would seem to be a perfect illustration of this postmodern sleight of hand, with its proliferation first of cable channels, each challenging the power of the networks, and then of streaming services, now transforming themselves into streaming studios, so that television is so decentralized that it is no longer even seen on a screen. While all this is true, the proliferation of networks, channels, and streaming services also conceals the overall organization of an industry that is still largely run by the four major networks and the remnants of the old Hollywood studios who either own the majority of the predominant cable channels (Anderson 2005), produce the shows for the new streaming services, or serve as the site of apprenticeship for producers who have now thoroughly integrated ancient network formats.

Thus, for example, a show that looks entirely “modern” like Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black seems to have a representational pattern never seen on television before in its mix of comedy and drama set in a women’s prison with a predominantly minority cast. The show, though, was created by Jenji Kohan who comes out of a standard situation-comedy training and is best known for the Showtime series Weeds (2005–12). There is an episode in season 1 of Orange Is the New Black that has to do with “juvies” coming to the prison, with the inmates supposed to show them prison life to change their views. On the surface, the episode looks like nothing ever seen before, but in fact it follows a standard sitcom plot of kids visiting the place of employment of the main characters—used for example in an episode of The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98) where students visit the show’s set. Yet viewers fail to recognize these fairly transparent “transformations” that remain trapped within similar stock story ideas, and fans are utterly shocked when Orange is described as a standard example of the genre that sifts multiracial representation through a very traditional and leaking sitcom sluice.

Rather than starting from an industrial framework in terms of the monetizing of perception in the attention economy (Beller 1994), Stiegler starts from a phenomenological perspective in characterizing media beginning in the twentieth century as hyperinflating “tertiary retention.” Stiegler engages Edmund Husserl’s understanding of perception as situated in time and taking place in two dimensions, with primary retention being essentially sense perception and secondary retention the filtering of that sensation through immediate memory (Stiegler gives the example of perception of a single note in musical listening being primary retention and perception of melody, which involves the memory of previous notes now organized in a linked chain and taking place over time, being secondary retention). To this conceptualization Stiegler adds another, now more dominant, mode of longer-term memories constructed outside immediate perception and separate from both experiential memory and from species evolutionary (or epigenetic) memory. This external memory—of a past that we ourselves have not lived—is delivered to us through culture, through “technical objects that embody the knowledge of our ancestors, tools we adopt to transform our environment” (Howells and Moore 2013, 3). A dominant earlier method of transmitting these cultural memories through technical means is writing, part of the overall process of recording and transmitting memory that Stiegler’s philosophical mentor Jacques Derrida (1981) termed grammatization. This historical progression of transformed memory transmitted through the ages is treated by Stiegler, not primarily for its literary or cultural quality but for its technical quality, as the expression of an evolving technics that has been a crucial component in the species life of humans.

With the advent of recording devices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the photograph and recorded music, the potential for the “the sedentary processes left by the production of tertiary retention” (Stiegler 2013, 62) to influence and in fact to create memories increased. Indeed with the advent of analogical processes, these technologies of memory have gone from being techniques of transmitting knowledge to being an increasingly important part of the industrial economy. This has reached the point where today they are “integrally submitted to the imperatives of globalization and the mechanics of work” (22). This development was a major victory for capital and a major moment in its encroaching on not only the economic life of the populace but also on consciousness itself as the control of these memory-making devices was subsumed by capitalist investment (95) and as consciousness itself came to be seen as an “object of systematic exploitation” (58).

Beginning after World War II, with the advent of television and the spread of the power of US multinationals, this process intensified as advertising then viewed consciousness as merchandise, as a “disposable resource.” The mastering and the systematic exploitation of this “resource” became a condition of capitalist development so that “businesses no longer make products but now make memories” (Rifkin quoted in Stiegler 2013, 59).8 The advertising-and-attention onslaught was noted in its initial flowering in the consumerist moment of the 1950s by Vance Packard (1959) who described the “grandeur” of the US as bound up in “the creation of needs and desires, the creation of disgust for all that is old and outmoded.”9

This process reached yet another level of intensity in the moment at the beginning of the 1980s of the change from analogic to digital that allowed a kind of hyper-reproducibility and corresponded to the moment of the triumph of neoliberalism, with its attendant unfettered and largely unregulated globalization of capital. Stiegler calls this epoch “hyperindustrialism” to signify that the new digital age is primarily neither a postmodern, information-economy, nor postindustrial age. The factory system, which in part defined modernity, has not been exceeded but rather intensified so that this continuation of the industrial age into the virtual world is driven by capital and involves the “industrialization of all things” where calculation reigns supreme. This “domination of nature by the technical” (Stiegler 2013, 78), as Heidegger (1954) feared, has had disastrous consequences—for the planet and for first- and third-world working peoples, who are the detritus of this process—but has accelerated capital’s profits to the point where US stockholders in the period after the 2008 crisis, have seen their dividends, when adjusted for currency fluctuations, increase 10 percent.10

Today culture has not only been absorbed into the economy of capitalism but plays a crucial part in capital’s imperative to constantly expand. The harnessing of psychic energies now takes its place in the virtual world alongside the exploitation of forms of physical energy (Stiegler 2008a, 194). The intensification of this mental fracking, or “the assault on everyday life,” began in the period of the Reagan and Thatcher counter-revolution in the 1980s with the rise of the personal computer and the dismantling of the systems of social protection (Crary 2013, 70). The intensification was dictated not only by market imperatives but also ideologically by the need for modes of compensation as the income gap widened and it became apparent that neoliberalism’s promise that a “rising tide lifts all boats” instead elevated only yachts on the crest of the waves while everyone else’s waterlogged rafts and dinghies were engulfed in their wake.11 It is precisely the neoliberal period and the birth of this new technology that has seen the rise of Serial TV in the early 1980s with Hill Street Blues.

The importance of tertiary retention in this account is that the vast accumulation of memories created outside ourselves pattern a conscious lifetime and where “images I see and the sounds I hear are less different from my neigh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Oh! Williams!: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Television Studies
• Introduction: Down the Rabbit Hole of Seriality, Narrative Complexity, and Quality Television
• I: Metaseriality
• II: Serial Specificity
• III: Serial Auteurs and the Possibilities of Industrial Resistance
• Appendix: One Hundred Seminal Serial Series
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of TV Shows Mentioned
• General Index