Core Response #3 - Emma

I find the discussion in many of the readings for this week about “quality television” to be particularly relevant as television formats have evolved. As I discussed a bit in my response to Kallan’s post this week, I think the transition from 24(ish)-episode seasons to shorter seasons consisting of 8-13 episodes an interesting one that coincides in my mind with this shift from a more episodic, less “quality” tv, to a more serialized, more “quality” tv. Michael Kackman’s piece, “Lost: Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity,” was eye-opening for me in the discussion of “quality tv,” which I have often found to be lacking in some previous discussions of it. Now I know that it was lacking this discussion of gendered forms of genre in "quality tv".

Kackman outlines something I have had trouble articulating about shows like Lost, and that is “operational aesthetic”—shows that invite (and in many cases, demand) the viewer to marvel at the complexity of the writing and the plotting, a spectacle and thus kind of show in itself. He argues that “the operational aesthetic doesn’t come simply from observing the workings of a finely crafted watch, but from a sense that the product of its machinery will be something more broadly meaningful—it tells us what time it is.” This is something I remember struggling with when talk of how “great” Westworld was when it first came out; shows like Westworld and Lost are built not necessarily on the narrative itself, but on the complexity of that narrative. (That usually isn’t enough for me.)

Additionally, Kackman brings into focus the melodrama of Lost, which I found complementary to Tara McPherson’s discussion of 24. Like McPherson’s analysis of 24 as a “remasculinization of serialized melodrama” (174), Lost deploys the soap opera in ways beyond what Kackman argues. Kackman describes the melodramatic “sentimentality and excess” of both Jack revealing his feelings to Kate and his hyper-masculine self-discovery. Kackman also says that Lost centers on patriarchal conflicts, which I would argue coincides with Feuer’s description of “the domestic melodrama’s oft-noted tendency to portray all ideological conflicts in terms of the family” (14).

I’d also like to consider the serialized format itself as a melodramatic format, intrinsic to the soap opera. Lost is known for its use of the extremely serialized format, with each episode beginning with a catch-up reel of what you missed—and not just what you missed on the last episode, but what you may have missed four seasons ago. I might even argue that Lost popularized this extreme seriality. However, this extremely serial format, as well as the consistently unresolved narrative, is from melodramatic, “feminized” television. Instead I'd argue that Lost seemed to bring this particular type of confusing, extremely long-form serial format to the genre of “quality drama” in particular, but poaching it from the soap opera itself.