Core Post #5- Michael Feinstein

    In Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Jason Mittell argues that “to understand televisual texts…we need to first understand how television genre categories work to form a set of assumptions which individual programs draw upon and respond to” (19). To Mittell, genre is not intrinsic to any one piece of text and thus should be understood less through a textual lens and more through an understanding of discourses— cultural, political, industrial— surrounding and forming the genre at a specific moment in time. Furthermore, he believes genre analysis “should account for the particular attributes of the medium” (23) and that the structures in which we analyze film genres cannot be superimposed onto television.

While Mittell admits that “we cannot regard “medium” as an absolute fixed category any more than genre” (23) I still wonder where Mittell would come down in the argument of whether Netflix, Prime, HBOMax, and the other streaming sites are television or not and whether he would use the same approach in analysis for the two. Much of his proposed approach towards televisual genre analysis relies on a certain level of specificity (including on an industrial level) that would lead me to believe that Mittell might see a television show produced by NBC as belonging to an entirely different genre (and, in an extension, medium) than one made by Netflix. Many of the “specific industry and audience practices unique to television” (such as channel segmentation and commercial advertising) that Mittell believes prevents the importation of “genre theories from other media” (1) onto television studies have no relevance to streaming. Additionally, industrially, Netflix is run very different than a broadcast network and the decisions of what shows to produce and when come about through entirely different processes. The fact that streaming sites like Netflix have many more producers with the ability to greenlight a project than any broadcast or cable network ever has leads me to believe that the “categorical clusters of discursive processes” would take on an entirely different form. Furthermore, the amount of data that Netflix and other streamers have on their viewers and their viewing habits— data which informs their decision-making process in a much more complex and nuanced way than the Nielsen ratings which Networks are still forced to rely on— means that the interactions between industry and audiences that make up these categorical clusters are vastly different (or at least more substantial and in-depth) than television. For these reasons I seem to think that, using Mittell’s medium specific, discursive approach to genre analysis, we wouldn’t put Netflix’s Grace and Frankie and CBS’s Mom in the same genre even though they are both comedies about white mothers that were released in the last decade.

    Still, I keep coming back to the idea that genre isn’t intrinsic to any text and thus texts are incredibly flexible in their classification. With this in mind and an understanding that streaming and television are two different mediums, what then do we make of shows like Friends and The Office that were produced by television networks and its’ specific discursive processes only to find a new home and audience— and ultimately create a new discourse— on a streaming site. Is the Friends that I watched on NBC in the 90s a different genre than the one my little sister watches on her iPad through Netflix?