Core Post #3 Kimberly

    In his article, "Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity," Michael Kackman invokes (and blurs) the gendered and often oppositional line between melodrama and "quality TV" in a way that brings to mind Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic." Kackman cites Neil Harris's term  of "operational aesthetic" as closely tied with the rise of TV's narratively complex "second golden age," then he problematizes the concept's sterile rationality.  Even the phrase "operational aesthetic" rings with tones that Lorde would attribute to patriarchal masculinity. The notion implies that what makes TV "quality" lies in its "operation," its mechanics-- or as Jason Mittel would put it, what's "under the hood" (Mittel 3). But Kackman argues that narrative complexity is ultimately hollow without the emotional labor brought by viewers, their erotic investment, which is inspired as much by a televisual text's cultural complexity as by its narrative complexity. 

     This binary gendered opposition that I read into Kackman's piece (perhaps a product of the gender politics of Lorde's time or more likely my own socialization to read TV in masculine/feminine terms) leaves me feeling like there is more to say. As I've discovered the shows/movies I had always perceived as "For Boys Only," the gendered opposition between melodrama and Quality TV has broken down a bit. Most recently, I (like Zoe Kravitz on High Fidelity) discovered The Sopranos and was shocked to learn how central the theme of mental health is to the mobster show. Obviously, it can't have been a secret, and certainly people must have written about it, but I never detected a hint of it in the cultural cloud surrounding The Sopranos. I think this is a manifestation of the phenomenon Kackman calls out in his piece. Quality TV is not inherently masculine, however, the discourse surrounding it is deeply invested in stripping the quasi-genre of its erotic power.