Complexity / simplicity

Moments in television

Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Éditeur: Manchester University Press
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526148742
• Sujet: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Sous-sujet: Televisione

An exciting new strand in The Television Series, the 'Moments in Television' collections celebrate the power and artistry of television, whilst interrogating key critical concepts in television scholarship.Each 'Moments' book is organised around a provocative binary theme. Complexity / simplicity addresses the idea of complex TV, examining its potential, limitations and impact upon creative and interpretative practices. It also reassesses simplicity as an alternative criterion for evaluation. Complexity and simplicity persuasively illuminate the book's chosen programmes in new ways.The book explores an eclectic range of TV fictions, dramatic and comedic. Contributors from diverse perspectives come together to expand and enrich the kind of close analysis most commonly found in television aesthetics. Sustained, detailed programme analyses are sensitively framed within historical, technological, institutional, cultural, creative and art-historical contexts.

1
‘WTF June?’: The Handmaid's Tale and the significance of unexpected choice

Trisha Dunleavy

Produced for Hulu and co-financed with MGM, The Handmaid's Tale (2017–present) is a high-end, long-format TV drama adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name. With three seasons aired to date, an international audience that continues to build, and as the recipient of prestigious industry awards,¹ The Handmaid's Tale (THT) has been a notable success for US-produced, non-broadcast TV drama.

As a serial drama that follows and extends the diegetic world of the novel, THT's most discussed distinction as multi-season TV drama is its visualisation of Atwood's nightmarish Gilead, the post-apocalyptic, faux-theocratic and totalitarian society that has replaced contemporary America.² An important feature of this dystopian world is the epidemic of infertility that has helped to form it, a problem that Gilead's male oligarchy addresses via the enslavement of the few still fertile women as ‘Handmaids’. Whilst every Gilead resident is held to a rigidly proscribed role and strictly heterosexual identity, THT's central interest is the subjection and sexual servitude of women. Though all Gilead women and girls endure minimal agency over their lives, absolute rule by a fundamentalist patriarchy, and the imperative to build a new population to support it, combine to legitimate the ritual rape of Handmaids by Gilead's leaders. THT's primary character is Handmaid Offred (Elizabeth Moss) who in this chapter is referred to only as ‘June’, her original name.³ Having been forced from her home, separated from her family and trained for a life of service, June is eventually assigned to the household of a senior member of this patriarchy, Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his Wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).

‘WTF June’, is the label that one reviewer, anticipating frustration and disappointment on the part of THT viewers, gave to the closing scene of its 2018 Season 2 finale episode.⁴ Having dangled the real possibility that June will escape from Gilead, the narrative twists sharply in this scene when she chooses the more dangerous of two possible options, deciding to remain in Gilead, while sending her infant, Holly/Nicole, to Canada under the protection of her trusted friend, Emily. In making this decision, June chooses not to take what appears to be a one-off opportunity to escape her life as a Handmaid – one that she has ardently pursued earlier in this season and that others have risked (or lost) their lives to create.

This chapter's position is that THT is ultimately a complex rather than a simplistic TV drama. It sees June's decision as one that opens THT to narrative complexity because it sustains and deepens, rather than resolving, this drama's central conflict. Notwithstanding this, the chapter highlights THT's capacity for simplicity in THT's tactical deployment of Gilead as a situational ‘problematic’ (Ellis 1988: 154); a construct well established in TV fiction whose overriding function is to maximise a show's longevity. These indicators of THT's capacities for complexity and simplicity converge in the moment of focus for this chapter, as one that culminates in June's ‘WTF’ choice. Albeit frustrating for viewers who ‘want her to make a different decision’ (Bruce Miller cited in Wigler 2018a), this choice, along with the developments that contribute to and mitigate it, can be analysed as an effective demonstration of the narrative fundamentals of multi-season TV drama.

The institutional function of multi-season TV drama serials

In institutional terms, the function of the above narrative turn is to extend this show's life as a TV drama. By contrast with the 1990 feature film adaptation of Atwood's novel, which concludes with Offred's escape to freedom, all of THT's seasons have ended in ways that leave the narrative open to new episodes.⁵ As a TV drama created to function as a brand vehicle for Hulu, a ‘premium’ (or subscription-funded) TV service, THT is a very different type of screen product from the 1990 film. Premium TV networks commission high-end dramas to attract and maintain subscribers and their business model is one that favours original drama in serial (rather than episodic series) form. But the imperatives arising from a premium model, to maximise the number of subscribers and reduce monthly subscriber turnover or ‘churn’, also mean that the dramas these networks commission are more often multi-season than single-season shows. From the perspective of premium TV networks, the ideal ‘flagship’ drama is a serial that is not only enticing for its characters, story and aesthetics but also has the capacity for multi-season continuity. As an outcome demonstrated by the blockbuster international popularity of HBO's Game of Thrones (2011–19) among other examples, multi-season continuity encourages a TV drama's audiences to gradually build from one season to the next, the media ‘buzz’ that attends this process ensuring that the show amply fulfils the branding function that motivated its creation.

Serial dramas have become increasingly prevalent as non-broadcast TV services have expanded. This development has been ensured not only by the larger number of premium services operating and competing but equally by the capacity of internet delivery to bring an unprecedented flexibility to the consumption of serial drama. The addition of the internet has seen television evolve from a multi-channel to a ‘multiplatform’ medium in which broadcast, cable/satellite and internet-only TV services and platforms co-exist (Dunleavy 2018: 11–13). With this range of platforms allowing viewers to decide when, through what means and for how long they watch, high-end serial dramas continue to flourish. As a drama designed to exploit the opportunities of TV's multiplatform era, the payoff for Hulu of June's ‘WTF’ decision is that THT can return for a compelling third season and more seasons beyond it.

Revise and reset: adjusting the objectives of primary characters

Despite the fact that THT, as a multi-season serial, is unavoidably subject to the above industrial conditions and outcomes, reviews of the show have been mixed, and there is a sense that in prolonging this particular story – as one in which the worst acts of violence are also directed at female characters – THT is indulging in ‘torture porn’ (Miller 2018). Particular vitriol was incited by Season 2's final episode, ‘The Word’, which ended in June's shock decision to remain in Gilead. Interpreting this decision as the show's effort to ‘jump the shark’,⁶ Judy Berman (2018) wrote, ‘The question is, what – besides a third season of The Handmaid's Tale – could possibly come out of [June's] bravery? Does she really have a better chance of getting Hannah out of Gilead from the inside, where she is subject to the Waterford's whims? […] Her decision may be heroic, but it's not what I call smart.’ Questioning the authenticity of June's choice, because it reverses her evident desire, at the outset of this season, to escape, Margaret Lyons (2018) wrote, ‘Even though people died to help [June] escape at the beginning of the season, she's determined now to stay in Gilead, because I guess Season 3 has to be about something […] So all the show can do is walk in circles.’

Unconvinced and frustrated by June's opting against escaping from Gilead as Season 2 ends, the above comments seem to conflate her decision to remain there with a commercial opportunism that is somehow harder to excuse in such an acclaimed TV drama. Yet an alternative view, which this chapter evaluates through its analysis of this turn as a pivotal moment, is that June's decision opens THT not only to narrative continuity (its ostensible purpose) but also to narrative ‘complexity’. Whilst this decision foregrounds June's capacity to revise her goals as her circumstances change, it also ‘resets’ THT's central conflict – June's incarceration as a Handmaid in Gilead – allowing this to be further elaborated and developed.⁷

THT is by no means the first acclaimed and ‘complex’ serial drama to require its central character to make decisions which seem in conflict with earlier choices they have made. In this regard, June can be compared with Breaking Bad’s Walter White. By the end of Breaking Bad's second season, Walter (Bryan Cranston) has enjoyed such notable success as notorious ‘meth king’ Heisenberg that he has earned far more money than his family will ever need if he should die from the lung cancer condition that motivates him to ‘break bad’ at the show's outset. Even though it is difficult to rationalise Walt's decision to continue as Heisenberg beyond Season 2, when he could have simply retired, the continuation of his criminal trajectory was so central to Breaking Bad's concept that its writers had every incentive to further develop it and find ways to authenticate it as a revised goal. Hence, even though Walt is reluctant and terrified as he ‘breaks bad’ at the show's outset, he comes to relish the power over others that his ...