Spare the Snark, Or Why It Matters Who Invented the TV Recap

Roland Barthes lecturing on the enigmas and symbols of Survivor: All Stars

A New York Times Magazine article appeared not long ago with this headline: How Roland Barthes Gave Us the TV Recap. Hmmm. How Raymond Williams Gave Us the TV Recap? Maybe. (I will say no more about this appreciation of Barthes, which has very little to do with TV in particular and is concerned with his mode of criticism of popular culture.) I might have left these thoughts behind if not for a tweet I saw a few days ago by Emily Gould, someone I happen to associate with the NYT Mag, saying (not terribly seriously) that Nora Ephron invented the TV recap in her book Scribble Scribble, a collection of columns first published in Esquire in the 1970s. If two is a trend, then identifying the Ur-TV recap is now a thing.

But hey, didn’t the NYT Mag explain, not that long ago, who actually invented the TV recap? Did I not read a longish article about this recently enough that I remember it fairly well? And doesn't everybody already know that it was Television Without Pity aka TWoP, not Barthes or Ephron, that popularized if not invented the TV recap?

As five seconds with Google revealed, the TWoP article I had in mind (“The Remote Controllers,” by Marshall Sella, October 20, 2002) was published practically ten years ago. Evidence, if any was needed, that both the TV recap and I are, you know, old. So I went back and read that piece and it gave me a series of little shocks. 

It also helped me to see that the recap emerged at a particular moment in TV's history, and in the history of TV's cultural legitimation (which you might not need me to tell you is the topic of my book written with Elana Levine, Legitimating Television). Recognizing the distinctness of this moment and the difference between then and now tells us something important about television's place in contemporary culture -- about how TV and the culture of TV have changed. 

Ten years ago in TV and media history is at once of our time and before it. We can see ourselves in that world without having to change too many of the details, but some important things are different. 

Ten years ago online communities were burgeoning and the culture industries were quickly incorporating their efforts as audience feedback, e.g., by paying attention to the discussion boards on TWoP as the NYT Mag discusses at length. There was already a networked, digitally connected culture in which producer and consumer distinctions of old were being renegotiated. Television was being taken more seriously than in the past, and the HBO “Not TV” brand was well established with The Sopranos as its key prestige product. It was not so crazy to think that intelligent people would devote large portions of their leisure time to the explication of television shows. Part of what appealed to me about TWoP when I started to read it was that it confirmed that others like me existed, passionate viewers of Gilmore Girls and other shows I would never miss.

But ten years ago also seems like back in the day: Dawson’s Creek and ER and Friends and NYPD Blue were still on the air, the WB still existed, J.J Abrams was best known for Alias, Joe Millionaire was the reality TV outrage of the fall season. No one outside of tech nerd circles knew about blogs or wikis, "social media" wasn't a phrase on anyone's lips, friend wasn't a verb, and you being Time’s person of the year was still a ways off. iPods were “the perfect thing,” still strictly music players, and shuffle was a notable feature. DVRs were an early adopter technology; the NYT Mag article doesn’t mention TiVo. BitTorrent was brand new and file-sharing of TV wasn’t a widespread practice. Streaming video had not exploded and people were most likely to catch up on old shows by buying or renting DVDs. Convergence Culture and The Wealth of Networks and The Long Tail and Here Comes Everybody and Remix were yet to appear. Film/TV/media studies departments were just realizing that it would be good to have a new media person. 

My most exciting frisson in reading this ten-year-old story about TV recaps came in the passages where unfamiliar terms are placed in quotes and explained: “show runner,” “shout out,” “IRL,” “spoilers.” The meaning of spoilers in this context is a shade different from what people usually mean today: ten years ago TV spoilers were typically plot details learned from sources in TV production, rather than from other viewers watching before you do. I get excited to read straight-faced usage of “the Net” to describe the online experience. Reading articles like these, you get to see today’s common sense, our everyday ways of thinking and behaving and thinking about behaving, spelled out for an uninformed reader. Historians of the recent past really get off on this stuff. 

(In several of my research projects I have found that old NYT Mag articles often offer the best evidence of formations of bourgeois American taste in media and technology. The magazine tells cultural elites what to pay attention to and how to understand it. It captures ideas that are in the air, but also circulates those ideas, marking moments of transition and emergence. It often expresses the place of media in popular imagination almost perfectly - it has more than once been that source I was looking for that crystallizes all the thoughts I hoped to find in the popular discourses of the time. (You think historians go to primary documents without hoping to find specific ideas? Really?) Here are a few examples, all well worth reading today even if you’re not doing research on these topics, all deserving to be remembered as key formulations of popular sentiment in a specific historical moment:

-"The Space-Age Pinball Machine," September, 15 1974 (early video games, which I will quote in my book on video games in progress)

-"TV Rocks with Music," May 8, 1983 (MTV, quoted in my essay on the history of the attention span)

-"The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel," October 22, 1995 (serialized prime-time TV shows, quoted in Legitimating Television))

Another thing reading this article made me think about was: I haven't read recaps in years, if by recap people mean the sarcastic and exhaustingly detailed episode summaries, interspersed with personal asides, that I used to read at TWoP. (There is some controversy about what "recap" should describe, and whether it's appropriate to use the same term for snarky blow-by-blow à la TWoP and for episode reviews in a more analytical style of The A.V. Club -- for more see this post by Myles McNutt.) In the past ten years, writing about last night's TV shows online has become a significant genre of popular critical writing. Google the title of any popular current show + recap and you get page after page of links to summary and commentary of single TV episodes. Much of this writing differs in voice and style from the TWoP recaps of old. Much of it is written by pro critics for mainstream publications. Authors of these recaps are not the outsiders that the meagerly compensated TWoP freelancers were ten years ago. The recap style of today, especially in treating high-end shows like Mad Men, is basically old-fashioned film or lit crit in the casualized voice of internet writing. Authors are unlikely to include tangential asides about personal lives and pet peeves of the kind described in the NYT Mag article.

The big change between ten years ago and today, the most interesting thing to think about as far as I'm concerned, has to do with the attitude assumed in both the writer and reader toward television. TWoP in its heyday generally took a tone of condescension, and the objective was not only to summarize but also to be humorous, to poke fun and impress the reader with not just insight but wit. Some people I respect speak highly of contemporary reality TV recaps at Vulture or Gawker by writers of comical skill. Reality shows get different treatment from Quality TV - some TV is to laugh at, some is to admire. In the passage of time, the balance (among cultural elites anyway) has been shifting away from laughing at TV or thinking of TV as something trivial, and toward taking it seriously.

Another thing evidently happened: recaps became part of mainstream commercial media. Advertising on webpages about episodes of TV became substantial enough to sustain this practice on a much wider scale than ten years ago, and the TV biz welcomed the publicity, sending many critics advance screener discs to facilitate timely publication. These posts can instigate lengthy comments threads, which is good for attracting and keeping attention. It seems like every website that covers entertainment and the arts features morning-after TV writing aiming not only for readers but also participation and community. I'm writing this twelve hours after the Mad Men S5 finale and in my regular RSS and twitter scanning this morning I've seen enough links to postmortems that I could read about last night's episode all day at least. You find these recaps not just at TWoP and The A.V. Club and Vulture and zap2it, not just in the blogs of amateur critics, but in Slate, Salon, HuffPo, NYT, WaPo, The New Yorker, Grantland, indieWire, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, WSJ, Ad Age... I am easily driven crazy by talk of TV's new golden age, of TV finally becoming art in the past decade, but there is no question this is the greatest time ever for people who like to read episode-by-episode commentary on Quality TV shows. Not a lot of comedy at television's expense in this stuff.

The tone of the TWoP recap, its stance toward its topic of discussion, would not be typical of most writing online about television today, and never represented my attitude toward TV shows I liked enough to read about online. Its signature mode of snark -- its tagline is still "spare the snark, spoil the networks" -- combined admiration and fandom with a strong dose of contempt and superiority. Some of the shows being recapped were highly prestigious -- the NYT Mag article discusses fan dissatisfaction with storylines on The Sopranos like Carmela's infatuation with Furio -- but many were more like Survivor or Dawson's Creek, the show that inspired the antecedent of the recap site Mighty Big TV, which became TWoP. Today's recaps of reality shows might preserve the smugness of the TWoP recap, but most of the morning-after writing I have seen on episodes of Mad Men, for instance, treats the show with rather more reverence and aesthetic appreciation than I recall encountering in Gilmore Girls recaps ten years ago. 


In his excellent essay on TWoP as a form of audience labor, Mark Andrejevic quotes many members of the site's community to the effect that participation in online discussions often held more value for viewers than the TV shows they were ostensibly there to discuss. One participant told him that TWoP "changes TV from a brain-dead pastime to an art and a science;" another said: "bad TV becomes good TV when combined with TWoP." (35) Although fan discussions might have influenced producers, TWoP participants saw their ultimate goal not as communicating their feedback to the TV industry but rather impressing each other "with wit, insight, and above all, 'snark.'" (36) The superiority of recappers and their readers is a product of the cultural status of television in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as television becomes more legitimated but still carries many of the negative associations it has suffered historically. Performing snark would be a way for "savvy viewers" to demonstrate that they "are not taken in by the transparent forms of manipulation practiced by producers." (37) Community members would contrast their own position as "insiders" with the "clueless losers" who make up the larger TV audience. As one viewer told Andrejevic, "TWoP makes it easier for us to convince ourselves that we are smart, while watching DUMB television." (40) 


The distinction between active, smart, intellectually engaged TV fans and more passive and unintelligent ordinary viewers underscores the cultural values within which TV has been legitimated. As we argue in Legitimating Television, television's rise in status is premised on just this kind of distinction. TV worth valuing appeals to active and intelligent elites, and is routinely contrasted with other kinds of television associated with other viewers and with the medium's past. TWoP, as described in the NYT Mag of ten years ago, is what we call a "technology of agency," a way of making the viewer's experience of television one of active navigation, of assertions of choice and control rather than enslavement to the networks. It is one means of television's redemption by new technology. TV recaps emerge with the participatory internet, but also with the shift in cultural status of television. TV is important enough to give people something to talk about. However, it's still disreputable enough that participants have to show themselves to be smarter than the shows they watch.


The idea that Barthes or Ephron or anyone else invented the TV recap avant-la-lettre draws on a rhetorical trope familiar from the history of new media. Commentators frequently look for evidence that what we think is new is actually not, that novelty is deceptive, that much has been done already. Tom Standage's book The Victorian Internet, for examples, finds antecedents for many of today's "new" communication practices in the 19th Century. This kind of thinking can be a salutary historical corrective. To see that many of our hopes and fears about the internet are actually quite similar to earlier hopes and fears about writing and print, the telephone and telegraph, radio and television, cable and videotape -- these recognitions can be profound and unsettling. They force us out of presentist assumptions and into historical, contextual thinking. This is why I teach new media as the history of new media and disdain the wide-eyed, gee-whiz mode of Wired magazine. (More examples of the kind of new media writing I have in mind: Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New; Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation; William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination; Lisa Giltelman, Always Already New.)


But I wonder what gets lost in these identifications of now in then. The specificity of the TV recap is of a historical context in which technology, society, and cultural forms are all in flux. The TWoP story from ten years ago expresses many of the key ideas of television's legitimation at a time before we could have formulated that concept, when it was taking shape. The recap is an artifact of this confluence of forces. It fetishizes and reveres television, makes it an object of cult admiration. In offering instant feedback to TV producers, it promises that new technology can improve an old medium. As Sella writes in the NYT Mag:  


"Television began as a one-way street winding from producers to consumers, but that street is new becoming two-way. A man with one machine (a TV) is doomed to isolation, but a man with two machines (TV and a computer) can belong to a community."


This is so clearly the techno-utopian rhetoric of legitimation through the technologies of media convergence.


One more moment in that NYT Mag article is worth noting as a clear indication of the discourses of legitimation, of the recap caught between two valuations of TV. Robert Thompson, the NYT's frequent academic source on pop culture, is quoted complaining about television's low status and celebrating its elevation.


"'If this were happening at any other time in history, we'd celebrate it,' he insists. 'When readers hold parties for Bloomsday and discuss James Joyce, we consider it an apex -- people taking culture seriously. But when viewers discuss the minutiae of a TV show, we call them crazy. One's got to admire it. Essentially what the message boards are is a panel of unpaid experts, with passion, analyzing culture.'''


So television is worthwhile enough that a professor would compare its fans to those of the most admired modernist author, but its place is uncertain enough that the argument must be made in its defense. Today, I'd argue, the battle has largely been won by TV's elite champions.


As for Nora Ephron's writing that marks the invention of the recap: it is a column from July, 1976, on Upstairs Downstairs. It does summarize many plot events, filtered through the author's feelings about characters and her hopes and fears for them. It is not a recap as we know it, because it treats what seem like months or even seasons of drama. Upstairs Downstairs aired in the UK before it did in the US, and I haven't looked to see how it was scheduled here. But Ephron's writing does have much in common with the tone and sensibility of more recent online TV writing. She's passionate and personal, and reveals an intense investment in serial narrative. She is also, much to my excitement and to my absolute approval, staunchly anti-spoiler. This is how her story ends.


"We would all like to know some of the technical details of the show--how the writers are picked, how much of the plot is planned ahead of time--but it is too dangerous to find out. Someone, in the course of giving out information, might let slip a crucial turn of the plot. We would all rather die than know what is going to happen.


"Mostly, we all wish Upstairs Downstairs would last forever." (emphasis mine)


These two parting thoughts capture an ethos of televisual experience of seriality, one prizing the perpetual unfolding of narrative. In some ways they're at odds with the common sense of legitimation, with its emphasis on an aestheticized text and narrative closure. But they also bespeak the value of TV for daily life as well as for elite cultural experience. Caring enough about the story not to want to be spoiled and desiring for the story to continue forever are strong sentiments to attach to a medium so often in the 1970s made into a bogeyman to blame for society's problems. Of course, it would be safest to confess to these feelings in the pages of Esquire when they have been inspired by a British show airing on Masterpiece Theater. Ambivalence about television in discourses of legitimation goes back a long way, as we argue in our book, and certainly pre-dates the invention of the TV recap.

Reference:

Mark Andrejevic, "Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans," Television & New Media 9.1 (2008), 24-46.

Upgrading the Situation Comedy

I presented the following at the Console-ing Passions conference at the University of Oregon in Eugene on April 24 as part of a panel called Distinguishing Television: Television Genres and Cultural Value.



Despite frequent declarations of the death of TV comedy and the absence of “Blockbuster TV” sitcoms in recent Nielsen ratings, the past decade has seen a new movement in the American sit-com that has found many champions. Comedies such as Scrubs, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, 30 Rock, and Modern Family have explored forms of audiovisual style and storytelling rarely seen in American TV comedy before the year 2000. These are usually called single-camera shows for short to contrast them against the multiple-camera format of traditional sit-coms. Although rarely big hits, these shows win awards and accolades, appeal as Cult or Quality TV to upscale audiences, and have found some enthusiastic viewers in popular press critics like Time magazine’s James Poniewozik who admire them for being “more ambitious” than traditional comedies and television scholars who praise them for “reinvigorating the sitcom format” (Thompson, 63) or for “resurrecting” the genre through their “stylistic innovation” (Butler, 19). In discourses of television criticism both popular and scholarly, the style of these new programs is positioned as an upgrade on a lowly and exhausted formula -- as a welcome improvement to a genre often denigrated as unoriginal and inartistic.

I want to talk today about this idea of upgrading the situation comedy in terms of television historiography, and in particular in terms of our understanding of the history of television aesthetics. The upgrading I have described is part of a wider process of discursive legitimation of television which positions some forms of TV as more respectable than others, and contrasts putatively more aesthetically advanced contemporary TV against shows of the past. The idea that single-camera comedies are an improvement on the traditional sit-com rests on some questionable assumptions about television history and aesthetics, which I wish to interrogate. Most importantly, I want to insist that if TV scholars are to turn to questions of aesthetics (which I think is a really good idea!), we do so in a way that appreciates all of television history in aesthetic terms rather than just the most recent Quality TV that appeals to folks like us, and that we do so in a manner attentive to the cultural functions of aesthetic discourses.

I’m assuming this audience is pretty clear on what I mean by single-camera and multiple-camera shows, but just to be sure here’s a quick comparison. The traditional sit-com like All in the Family is shot on a three-wall set in front of an audible studio audience -- a production style Jeremy Butler calls the “multiple-camera proscenium schema,” which comedies share with soap opera, another genre with radio origins.

This format allows for the main stylistic emphasis to be placed on verbal and physical comedy, and on the comedians’ performance. Single-camera shows, by contrast, have no invisible “fourth wall” and no audible live audience (or laugh track). They use camerawork and editing much more prominently than multi-cam shows, often as sources of humor, as in punch-in flashback or fantasy shots (think “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah”). They are filmed "like a movie," allowing the camera to penetrate the space of the scene and to shoot from any angle. And as an alternative to the laugh track, many of them use music to punctuate scenes and set a comical tone, or in cases of comedy verité like The Office, awkward silences (Mills 2004, Thompson).

The contrast between multi- and single-cam styles in popular and critical discourse is often quite explicitly framed in terms of value and aesthetics: the newer style is positioned as an advance, and as a marker of television’s newfound artistic and cultural legitimacy. The old style is figured as primitive and unchanging, a relic of an earlier era of TV as mass medium but not as art. Specific characteristics of the old style like verbal setup-punchline/one-liner humor, dramatic entrances and exits, comedic performance style regarded as excessive, and the laugh track now might come off as corny or passé, good today mainly as something to laugh or sneer at – as an example of this attitude, consider the critical reception of The Return of Jezebel James (Newman). Advanced taste has shifted away from traditional forms of TV comedy. Thus the valuation of single-cam style depends on a historical progress narrative, a way of seeing TV history as leading up toward a more perfect present against which we can judge the failures of the past. This is often how histories of the arts proceed especially in the modern era, by figuring the new as a reaction to and improvement on the old. But TV scholars especially must be wary of hastily recognizing present-day Quality TV as the medium’s height of achievement without considering how aesthetic judgment and valuation function culturally to reaffirm social distinctions, especially those of class. The multi-cam shows with their historical mass appeal are the negative example against which the new single-cam shows with their upscale niche audiences are understood. Additionally, we must be wary of assuming that we can understand the historical significance of the present. Often the celebration of recent and contemporary TV aesthetics risks promoting the current shows, their audiences, and the industry’s strategies of marketing to them, rather than advancing a serious historical understanding of the medium and its forms and functions.

This presentist discourse of the newfound sophistication of television comedy ignores the place of the sit-com in the history of Quality TV. Today the paradigm of Quality is heavily serialized drama shot in a style often called “cinematic.” The single-camera comedy has arisen to its place of high status in the context of this reigning paradigm, and it is no coincidence that single-cam comedies share many traits with the legitimated dramas – not only production norms but also storytelling practices, as comedies also have become more serialized. But we must not forget that in earlier periods of TV history, the traditional multi-camera sitcom was central to conceptions of Quality. In the 1970s, when MTM and Tandem were the production studios most closely identified with programming of high cultural value, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family were among the medium’s most respectable programs. In the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s, NBC’s must-see TV lineup combined serialized dramas like Hill Street Blues and ER with traditional sit-coms like Cheers, The Cosby Show and Friends. Praise for the stylistic innovations of the single-camera sit-com often implicitly – or even explicitly – slights the value of the multi-cam show as such without regard to the aesthetic achievements – and cultural significance – of these earlier shows. In celebrations of the new sit-com, the style of old multi-cam shows is sometimes described as an impoverished antistyle (Caldwell), but the positive aesthetic appeals of these shows are generally ignored.

The discourse of the sit-com's reinvention presents a “before” and “after” of TV comedy, and I argue that the “before” is figured as a primitive form. In art history, primitivism is often identified as naïve, unsophisticated, and lacking tradition or stylistic development; the artistic movements that come after primitive stages are generally seen as bringing welcome innovation and advance, i.e., progress (Errington). In the case of TV comedy, the primitive multi-cam style is not only figured as banal and artless, but as having no significant stylistic history. This meshes with the idea that network-era television can be characterized as “least objectionable programming,” essentially unremarkable and aesthetically degraded, a characterization attributed to TV network executives from decades ago which some contemporary TV scholars still find acceptable (e.g., Lotz). The multi-cam shows are seen in the discourse of aesthetic progress as more or less homogeneous, the better to distinguish the new single-cam style. But this presentist celebration overlooks the diversity of the history of American television comedy and paints all sitcoms in the “old style” with a single brush to emphasize their uniformity.

Consider the variety among these shows, all of which are sitcoms predating the rise of the single-cam: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Andy Griffith Show, All in the Family, Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, M*A*S*H, Soap, Cheers, The Wonder Years, and Friends. Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke are black and white, but later shows are in color. Many of these shows were shot on film to give a polished look of high production values, while others such as All in the Family were videotaped to produce an effect of immediacy and liveness. Not all were shot in front of a live studio audience; some, like Bewitched, relied on special effects that could not be accomplished with typical live studio audience setups. Not all have laugh tracks; Dobie Gillis and The Wonder Years have voice-over narration. Not all are shot with the “three-headed monster” originated by Karl Freund for I Love Lucy; Andy Griffith and M*A*S*H were shot single-cam, and M*A*S*H aired without a laugh track in some countries. Not all multi-cam shows were shot with three cameras; Cheers and most multi-cam shows since the early 80s have been shot with four, an innovation of James Burrows beginning with Taxi which allows for larger ensembles, more expansive sets, and arguably more fluid editing. The traditional sit-com’s storytelling is quintessentially episodic, with every episode beginning as though the narrative has been fully reset and characters having no memory of previous events. But some traditional multi-cam sitcoms do have some serial aspects to their storytelling, like the relationship arcs on Friends. Of today’s multi-cam shows, not all are uniform in style either. As Christine Becker has written, How I Met Your Mother is shot with multiple cameras on a three-wall set, but without a live audience, a choice she argues makes for a more restrained performance style in contrast to shows that film before an audience. The point is that multi-cam shows are hardly uniform and static in style, but themselves have a stylistic history continuing through the present time.

I want now to go into more detail in considering the way that scholarly discussion of the new sit-com frames the new style in relation to the old style, and the implications of the terms this scholarship adopts for addressing TV style. In particular I’m talking about Jeremy Butler’s Television Style, which relies extensively on two sources for ideas about visual representation: David Bordwell’s work on film form and style, and John Caldwell’s Televisuality.

Much of Butler’s book is concerned with understanding how TV style in recent years has been become more prominent and aggressive, similar to the style of contemporary Hollywood movies that Bordwell calls intensified continuity, which is characterized by fast and aggressive editing, incessant camera movement, and shooting with very long and very short lenses. In some respects, this use of prominent visuals meshes with John Caldwell’s concept of televisuality to describe TV since the 1980s, which Caldwell terms “excessive” and “exhibitionistic.” Butler also borrows a term of Caldwell’s to describe the style of pre-televisuality/intensified continuity movies and TV: “zero-degree” style. Zero-degree denotes a lack of style – Caldwell defines it using the words “empty” and “meager” – or at least a style that isn’t noticeable or interesting. Critics of classical Hollywood cinema often describe its visual style as invisible or transparent, the better to focus the audience on the realism of the diegesis. (In Bordwell’s terms, “zero-degree” is roughly the same as “classical continuity,” though in The Classical Hollywood Cinema he rejects the term “zero-degree.”) In Butler’s argument, the multi-cam sit-com is the zero-degree sit-com, and the single-cam sit-com is the televisual sit-com. Butler celebrates the televisuality of the contemporary single-cam sitcom and even confesses that it brings him “pure aesthetic pleasure.” (216) “In the televisual schema, style is aggressive, roughened, and opaque, not smooth and transparent. It carries meaning. It makes jokes. It might call attention to itself.” (197) Butler discusses many aspects of Scrubs to offer evidence of this, including the show’s staging, shooting, editing, and use of sound.

I see two shortcomings here in the discussion of the style of the multi-cam sit-com in particular, as well as several additional issues of concern. First, both Caldwell and Butler adopt a Bordwellian, film-centered conception of style. They take for granted that style means those things that film or video can do that are unique to -- or at least distinctive of -- them as a medium. In Bordwell’s terms, these include editing, mise en scene, cinematography, and sound, though in the history of film criticism camerawork and editing have often been especially privileged as they are in Caldwell and Butler. This idea of audiovisual style has origins in classical film theory (writers like Arnheim, Bazin, and the Soviets of the revolutionary period), which was often concerned above all with defending the status of cinema as an art form and, thus, with finding those aspects of cinema that are essentially cinematic. Literary or theatrical techniques to be found in cinema, such as dialogue, are hard to defend as “cinematic” style, and have little place in the history of film theory and stylistics. So this idea of what “television style” consists of essentially takes the prevailing conception of film style, which is a product of cinematic medium essentialism, and imposes it on TV.

Second, those who promote the single-cam shows at the expense of the multi-cam shows fail to recognize the positive style of a theatrical genre like the traditional sit-com. While the camerawork, editing, and lighting of a multi-cam show might be unremarkable, they serve effectively to support the elements of style that are emphasized: writing and performance. As Brett Mills argues, the sit-com is among the TV genres most identified with live performance on the stage (Mills 2005). Instead of regarding this as “lacking style,” we can see it rather as having a theatrical rather than cinematic style (without intending these terms to essentialize either cinema or theater -- I mean that their styles share some significant elements with prominent uses of cinema and theater). The contemporary ideal of Quality TV is thoroughly cinematized – good television is supposed to look and feel like a contemporary Hollywood movie, or even to surpass it. An ideal of television art that makes theater values more significant than cinema values seems today hopelessly out of date. And yet an aesthetic appreciation of television that is not ahistorical should be sensitive to the significance of shifting tastes over time. An All in the Family episode was meant to come off like a one-act play, and was staged and performed as such. The idea of television recording a performance, rather than using camerawork or editing as performance, is not naturally stylistically impoverished as Caldwell and Butler suggest. Rather, it follows from a different conception of style and its uses.

This scene from season 2, episode 15 of Cheers ("Father Knows Last," orig. aired January 20, 1983) is typical of the power of the traditional sit-com's style. It begins as so many traditional sit-coms of its period did with the reminder that the show was filmed before a live audience, marking its style as theatrical. Camerawork and editing are fluid and emphasize reactions, as well as contrast between the confidence of the women and the cowardice of the men. In terms of cinematography and editing, there is little difference between this kind of style and that of numerous Hollywood films of the studio era. But we might say the dominant stylistic features are in the script and the actors' performances. The editing and camera styles serve to support the verbal humor, such as Cliff's reference to women as "petunias" and his remark that they are "hot for" him and Norm, and the bit about talking out of the side of your mouth. The comical value of the scene comes from the actors' styles of dialogue delivery and movement, as when Cliff and Norm saunter over to the end of the bar and back trying to appear nonchalant, and especially in the comical high point of the scene as they stand helpless in the face of the invitation to go out with the women, unable even to utter a word as Cliff vocalizes his terror. I confess to my own aesthetic pleasure when I watch shows like this, which delight me easily as much as the best single-cam shows. The images and sounds in a show like Cheers are not best considered as an antistyle or impoverished style. They may not be “televisuality” or intensified continuity or comedy verité, yet they are part of a robust and enduring tradition of comedy on television.

References

Becker, Christine. “Acting for the Cameras: Performance in the Multi-Camera Sitcom” Mediascape (Spring 2008).
Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (California, 2006).

Butler, Jeremy. Television Style (Routledge, 2009).

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Rutgers UP, 1995).

Errington, Shelly. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. (California, 1998).

Lotz, Amanda. The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU, 2007)/

Mills, Brett. “Comedy verite: contemporary sitcom form” Screen 45:1 (Spring 2004), 63-78.

_____. Television Sitcom (BFI, 2005).

Newman, Michael Z. “The Return of Jezebel James,” The Velvet Light Trap 64 (Fall 2009), 77-78.

Thompson, Ethan. “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007), 63-72.

***

Previously: 30 Rock, My Boys, and the New Sit-Com, Hating on Jezebel James: The Laugh Track as Bad Object, and Tween Comedies and the Evolution of a Genre.

Failure! or, Jezebel James returns again

The new issue of The Velvet Light Trap has the theme of Failures, Flops and False Starts and I'm pleased to have a short piece in a dossier called "Perspectives on Failure" consisting of brief articles on that theme. Other contributors include many scholars I have long admired, including some friends and blog readers. My contribution, on the short-lived Fox sit-com The Return of Jezebel James, is based on ideas I first formulated right here on this blog. I have pasted it below, with links in place of references where possible.

If you're signed into Project Muse through your institution, you also read my contribution here and the entire dossier here without bothering with any of those annoying pdf downloads. The full citation is, Michael Z. Newman, "The Return of Jezebel James," The Velvet Light Trap 64 (Fall 2009), 77-78.)

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Admirers of Gilmore Girls (The WB/The CW, 2000-2007) were largely disappointed by Amy Sherman-Palladino's subsequent effort, The Return of Jezebel James, which ran for three episodes in early 2008 before the Fox network killed it. (As I write in early 2009, all seven completed episodes can be viewed online at Hulu or downloaded from iTunes.) Reviews were scathing and ratings were low when Jezebel James, a half-hour comedy starring Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose, first aired on a Friday night in March. Among its most despised aspects was the sound of audible laughter from its studio audience. A critic for the New York Times compared it to peanut butter on pizza. It was the show's misfortune to have arrived at a moment in television history when most of the aesthetically advanced comedies had abandoned the audience laughter (real or fake) that had been part of the sitcom format since radio days and that Brett Mills calls "the convention which has traditionally most simply and effectively defined the genre" (38). It was the curse of Jezebel James to aim to be too classy, and its failure is in part a testament to the fickle arbitrariness of taste standards as they change over time.

While it has suffered a decline in mass popularity, the sitcom genre has enjoyed a creative renaissance in the aughts, largely a function of having cast aside many of its most enduring conventions. In addition to the laugh track, many sitcoms jettisoned the three-wall set, the live studio audience, the pattern of verbal setup/punchline humor, and theatrical entrances and exits. (The shorthand distinction between old and new styles is multi- versus single-camera, though "single-camera" shows like The Office might shoot with multiple cameras.) New sitcoms replace audible laughter with wacky music and ironic voice-over narration, as in Scrubs (NBC, 2001-08, ABC 2009-) and Arrested Development (Fox, 2003-06), or awkward pauses, as in The Office (NBC, 2005-). Many shows interpolate hyperclever, ultrabrief fantasy or flashback scenes that would be impossible to include when shooting in front of the traditional live audience. New sitcoms forgoing the three-wall stage would thus appeal as more cinematic and less theatrical. The absence of audience laughter would likewise signal a move away from a theatrical style that has been essential to the sitcom aesthetic throughout its history.

When Jezebel James debuted in 2008, the multicamera sitcom had not vanished from the scene. Indeed, the most commercially successful sitcoms on the networks, including CBS's Two and a Half Men (2003-) and The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006-), were shot in the multicam style. Hannah Montana (Disney Channel, 2006-) had recently launched an impressive tween brand using the multicamera sitcom as a base. But between the original premium cable shows like Entourage (HBO, 2004-) and Weeds (Showtime, 2005-), whose visual style is hard to distinguish from a prime-time drama, and the upscale, critics'-darling, single-camera network shows like 30 Rock, it was clear that the adult "quality TV" half-hour comedy had largely cast aside the cluster of conventions that had made mass-appeal hits of shows from I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951-57) to Friends (NBC, 1994-2004) in favor of something ostensibly more visually and narratively sophisticated.

It was Jezebel James's misfortune to attempt to fit into the old-style set of conventions that had worked so well for classics like Cheers (NBC, 1982-93), which Amy Sherman-Palladino named as an influence on the show. By 2008 these had become too familiar, especially after having seen them so effectively defamiliarized by a new generation of television comedies that eschewed theatricality. In many ways Jezebel James came across as aiming for aesthetic sophistication. It was a product of the same creators who had made the beloved screwball dramedy Gilmore Girls, renowned for its smarty-pants writing and engaging characters. Gilmore Girls had become many viewers' favorite, and expectations were thus high for its successor, which mimicked the Gilmore fast-paced, culturally literate verbal style. But as well, the casting of Lauren Ambrose, veteran of HBO's family melodrama Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001-05), and Parker Posey, identified so much with indie cinema, suggested that Jezebel James would be highbrow TV. The associations the creative team's previous work evoked would not seem to jibe with the conventions of the traditional sitcom, a genre wanting in cultural legitimacy.

With TV series, success and failure have so many dimensions. Shows start out weak in some respects and adjust over time. Audiences become familiar with characters and feel strong affection for them but rarely in the first few weeks of a show's airing. Pilots are notoriously unlike typical episodes, so we must be willing to stick with a show to figure out what it will really be like in the long run. Commercial and creative successes often are misaligned. After watching all seven episodes that will ever exist of Jezebel James, I found myself wishing there might have been more. I was just getting to like it. By the twelfth or fifteenth episode it might have been pretty good, and by then we would have become accustomed to its laugh track along with the rest of the show's quirks and mannerisms. Maybe eventually people would have felt as warmly toward it as they did eventually toward Cheers and Gilmore Girls. Not likely, but we will never know.

Work Cited:
Mills, Brett. Television Sitcom. London: BFI, 2005.

This is CNN

We were in Washington on Friday and an old friend who works as a producer at CNN's D.C. bureau, Adam Levine, gave us a tour. Photos and some thoughts are at my Flickr.

Damages

One of my favorite shows right now is Damages, on FX. It's funny that I like it because I find the plot really hard to follow. Sometimes at the end of an episode I have no idea what happened. The characters' motivations are often obscure. Characters seem totally central to the season's narrative, like the one played by William Hurt earlier on this year, only to completely disappear for weeks at a time, suggesting that the story has gone in some other direction and making us wonder what their purpose was to the larger narrative. There are frequent flashforwards to tantalizing moments two or three months away in story time, but no clues about how present and future will connect up. This pistol will fire at some point, but that's about all we can be sure of right now.



The writers like to feint and tease. For instance, we were led to believe that these FBI agents might not really be cops at all, but then they revealed that really they are FBI after all. And yet something still seems not quite right.



I love the actors, especially the ones playing lawyers and corporate types with their restrained performances and classy, professional attire. Like I said, I have trouble keeping straight what all these folks are up to, but they're still fascinating to watch. This gives the show a surrealistic appeal, like a cut-up, a bunch of scenes from a show that does make sense with some of the meaningful parts redacted. I enjoy the dramatic moments as dramatic moments without having a clear sense of what exactly makes them dramatic. For instance, Ted Danson as a white-haired scoundrel trying to mend his ways, adopting an Eastern spiritual path but still having trouble managing his anger. That's just awesome.



Tate Donovan, Jimmy Cooper from The O.C., plays a lawyer who dresses really sharp. He almost makes me want to go to law school so that one day I might wear suits like his.





The main character, Ellen, played by Rose Byrne, is a sort of empty vessel. She has suffered a lot, and harbors deep grudges, but she has few scenes where she expresses strong feelings because her subordinate and investigative roles require that she keep things inside. The actress is good at giving meaningfully neutral looks that express depths of emotion.







Two actors from The Wire, Clark Peters and John Doman, play energy company no-goodniks. It's very strange that these two are in cahoots on this show. Knowing them so well from that other show makes me invest less of my emotion in the narrative. But I appreciate them so much as actors.



Glenn Close is a powerhouse. She looks out over those glasses an awful lot, always oozing intelligence and calculating judgment. Patty Hewes scares the pants off of me.







Every once in awhile Close shows us an intense, almost horrified face. You can sense her eyes starting to water up as she is seized with despair. Which we fear might drive her to God knows what acts of rank inhumanity.





The most fearsome villain is this dirty cop with ginormous glasses played by David Costabile, another veteran of The Wire (also a goofy T-Mobile commercial). The specs and beard make the performance. In this scene he tells Wes, who under false pretenses has wormed his way into our heroine Ellen's life, earning her trust and going to bed with her, that his next task is to take her out. He's not talking about a date.



More: Ken Tucker in the NYT on the appeal of the show's acting ensemble.

Dollhouse

Fox hopes the lad mag demo will put down the PS3 and pick up the TV remote Friday nights for Dollhouse starring Eliza Dushku armed and/or naked.

Of the TV shows that have begun since the season's debut in September, I am most excited about Dollhouse. I haven't read that many reviews for fear of excessive spoilage, but I'm puzzled by the general lack of buzz. (The one positive one I read was Troy Patterson's in Slate.)

I've only seen the first two episodes (pro critics got access to three or more), but they have established a fascinating narrative premise with lots of promising opportunities for development and payoff, not to mention eye candy of the usual televisual varieties; a number of vivid characters, with slowly unfolding backstories and plenty of mystery; and a distinctive visual style, contrasting the stylized interiors of the dollhouse with its saturated colors with a more naturalistic and conventional approach for exteriors where Echo's missions are set. Eliza Dushku doesn't have great range as an actress (that I have seen). She does sexy, ass-kicking, and vulnerable. She can do smart, though it's not her biggest strength. But like Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy, she combines power and femininity in a way that invites admiration and even awe.

One thing Dollhouse lacks is Joss Whedon's characteristic comic sensibility. No one will write about book about Dollhouse's use of language (see Slayer Slang, which I highly recommend) or come out with a volume of quotations from the show (like The Quotable Slayer). Joss is risking a lot adopting this different, more straightforwardly dramatic tone. It's a bit audacious. Maybe part of this shift is a function of commercial constraint: to have a show like this make it on Fox, it might have to appeal more widely than any show did on on a 1990s netlet. Good for him if he can make it work.

All of these images are from episode 2, "The Target."



This groovy tilt-shift shot from the title sequence offers a view of human beings as miniatures. There's no context for this shot, so it seems to be going for symbolism. All of these strangers off in the distance are leading their ordinary lives not knowing that some of us are like Echo, a slate wiped clean and then imprinted, by a geeky Frankenstein, with customized personality.



Where the dolls sleep. Grand overhead angle, with its geometric abstraction, to emphasize the interchangeability of persons and the machine-like efficiency with which human beings are routinely transformed. Busby Berkeley gone sci-fi and post-human.



Yoga keeps dolls in shape. The second story offers a view for the staff to keep an eye on their charges. Lots of bright, warm colors in here. It looks a bit unreal, and uncomfortably comfortable.



Lots of flesh on display, especially compared with Buffy. It's 2009 now, it's a different kind of story, and it's a Fox show with a target audience of young adult males, not a WB show with a target audience of teenage girls.



Soon this weapon will be turned on her but for now she's in charge.



That's our heroine in the crosshairs. The most interesting thing about the show thematically is that it presents a woman as object in many senses, and then starts to complicate things. We know enough about Joss to trust that there will be a feminist undercurrent. But unlike Buffy, Echo has no special powers, so presumably we will fear for her more, and it will be more of a challenge to have her assert her agency.



A girl and a gun. You knew the long sleeves would have to come off.



Joss does better act-outs than anyone. This one at the close of Act I is a jaw-dropper, as we realize along with Echo what's at stake in this episode: she is to be hunted.



You see Echo's shoulders as often as possible in Dollhouse. This frighteningly thin physique is your basic hot chick look in American pop culture today. In Echo it might work to convey her vulnerability, but mostly it just makes me think the actress needs a sandwich.



Reed Diamond will forever be Kellerman from Homicide to me. He plays good nasty. His close-set eyes are always up to something.



An airborne arrow is a nice bit of over-the-top action. Dollhouse is Genre to the core.


Wallpaper courtesy of the Dollhouse on Fox site (which might just as well be called Fox on Dollhouse).