4/23 Supplemental Response #5_Ann

 *It’s been such a fun time reading everyone’s posts and taking this class. What a great series of interconnected readings and wonderful discussions! I will truly miss all of you :)

The readings this week, especially the Lisa Parks reading, feel like they are in conversation with a lot of what we talked about in this class. As my favorite reading this week, I think Parks’s 2004 article is still extremely relevant today. I really enjoyed her theorization of the “microcasting” of television at the convergence of traditional TV and the internet. Her emphasis on how the internet creates space for women’s programs and extremely niche audience are prevalent in the mediascape today. One of the things that I really liked is how Parks thinks of this new age of television/internet convergence using evolution as an analogy where she writes: “If we were to add yet another chapter to account for the contemporary moment, it might be called something like ‘Mutants’” (133). A chapter titled “Mutants” might seem jarring at first, but with some interesting examples, this term not only fairly accurately describes the US television/internet media climate, but also some global phenomenons happening elsewhere. 

So in this last post of the semester, I would like to talk a little bit about some interesting phenomenons happening in Chinese television (and Post-Television) while also recommending a recent series I liked. Word of Honor, a 2021 Chinese Wuxia series focusing on two male protagonists and their intertwined fates, just hit 50 million views on YouTube today. Produced by Chinese streaming platform YouKu, Word of Honor is adapted from a “Danmei” (耽美)—or “Boy’s Love” in Japanese terms—book published a couple of years ago. YouKu, as one of the premium streaming companies in China, did not have great confidence in the show succeeding. However, the show not only gained sweeping good reviews but also a much wider audience overseas than the producers originally thought it would gain. Amazon Prime also just bought the right of the show in March and it is not streaming on Prime in the US and in Canada. The success of the show is mostly due to its new takes on Wuxia stories, good screenwriting, and a solid fan base of the book. I personally really enjoyed the story and would highly recommend the show to anyone who is interested, but the success of the show is not what I want to focus on today. What interests me is the model of distribution and the availability of additional content on YouKu about Word of Honor. YouKu’s distribution model is similar to streaming platforms like Netflix, but it is also highly different because it is not subscription-based but VIP-based. By purchasing VIP status on YouKu for a certain period of time, the viewers gain access to the newest episodes before non-VIP viewers. For example, the last three episodes of Word of Honor are still only available to VIP viewers, which means if one wants to see the finale of the show they will have to pay for VIP status. This model of distribution is very common on Chinese streaming platforms where VIP users usually get to be ahead of the schedule than non-VIP users. This is, of course, a highly effective way to gain subscribers and audience, but I sometimes do doubt the ethics behind it. 

What Word of Honor and YouKu’s producing team did on top of this VIP model is that they released “for purchase” (付费) additional content and behind the scene videos on a daily basis after the season finale. These short videos, usually five to ten minutes long, are compilations of funny moments on set and scenes that were cut out from the original show due to either censorship or plot reasons. The platform charges one RMB per video and the fans happily pay the money. What’s interesting to me and relates to Parks’s discussion of a TV “mutant”, is the fact that none of the Chinese streaming platforms have done the same thing before Word of Honor. The behind-the-scenes is usually released while the show is streaming and they are usually released to the audience for free. What YouKu is doing essentially extends the topicality of the show for another month after the show has ended, and they gained additional profit from content that was considered free and unprofitable. Of course, there are many people who re-upload and re-circulate these “for purchase” content on different social media and platforms, but YouKu has opened pandora’s box where they redefined the saying “everything is content”. I cannot predict if this model will be used in other series or not because Word of Honor’s popularity is unprecedented in recent years. However, this tendency from the producers and streaming companies to try to profit from everything is exactly what a convergence of television and the internet could bring. Granted the Chinese television industry has a completely different history than its US counterpart; it is still very interesting to see the quickened convergence of Chinese internet series and how they change the media climate on a daily basis. This discussion also somewhat relates to my final project which also looks at the post-TV idol competitions in China where media practices simply become “mutants” and evolve into something different every day. I really don’t know how to end this post after all this rambling, but I wonder what Raymond Williams might say about the flow of television if he experiences what we consider television today. 

The link to the show on Amazon can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/EP-4/dp/B08ZDV1FFM/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=word+of+honor&qid=1619170753&sr=8-1

Supplemental Post #5 - Lilla

 This week’s focus on global TV reminded me of a discussion we were having in my reader class CTCS 467 this week about dubbing. The consensus was that dubbing these days is pretty much unheard of, unless it’s animation. This got me thinking about the US vs. international TV landscape, and how different my TV experience was growing up in Europe. In the US, all shows I see on TV are American (or occasionally British) shows, and I don’t see people watching any shows in other languages, unless it’s anime (which I am not familiar enough with to discuss). At the same time, growing up in Hungary, most TV shows I watched were also American. There were two competing Hungarian soap operas running on the two competing basic cable channels, but that was it. Everything else on TV was dubbed American TV shows — and dubbing, in fact, has a huge culture in Hungary.  There is a select group of famous voice actors whose voices everybody recognizes, as it is this same group of people who dubs every show. And subtitles are not even available.

Every Monday to Friday, on both major cable channels, a 20-minute episode of one of the Hungarian soaps follows the evening news, after which an episode of an American police procedural airs. Premium cable channels only featured dubbed American shows. Kids channels feature dubbed American cartoons. So it’s interesting to think about how certain countries don’t have a major TV industry, and do rely on US output to fill their TV time. I’m sure this isn’t true for the majority of Europe and is just my experience, but it always surprises people when they learn that I grew up watching the exact same shows that they did, even though I was on a different continent.

Supplemental Post #4 - Andrea

I've been haunted at the thought of Cherries Wild, a Pepsi TV game show on Fox (yes, Pepsi has a TV game show now), ever since I watched youtube comedian Drew Gooden's critique of the show (link to Drew's video). I long for the days when I didn't know this existed, but I haven't known what to make of the show in regards to our class. I've come to realize that the Henry Jenkins text this week, "The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence," helped me think through just some of the reasons the existence of this show is simultaneously baffling and unsurprising. 

The show itself is a glorified 30-minute ad for Pepsi, a company notoriously trying to keep up and failing the marketing game in recent years (hello Kendall Jenner), and Drew reveals that the game show premise itself is rigged and false by the end of his commentary video. The show's small text reveals that the slot machine game itself is a prerecorded/cgi video and the results are rigged, making the marketing scheme that much more transparent. As Drew discusses in his video, the audience members are mostly recorded and/or seem to be filmed in a COVID environment, and the fake audience only adds to the unnaturalness of the show. Additionally, there is an added "audience participation" aspect to the show, in which audience members are encouraged to play along and basically gamble via the Cherries Wild app (which apparently almost never works and never awards people their prizes for playing along). 

Cherries Wild seems to fail at key aspects of media convergence as outlined in Jenkin's article, namely the idea that "convergence is both a top-down corporate-driven process and bottom-up consumer-driven process" (37). The show makes the corporate-driven processes transparent in an embarrassing fashion while failing to provide adequate consumer-driven engagement. Cherries Wild is an embarrassing attempt at meeting the standards of contemporary media convergence; it's a pathetic "hey kids" thrown at younger consumers engaged 24/7 in an Internet/smartphone-driven world, and a boring ad masquerading as a game show for older audiences attuned to the traditions and tenets of average game shows. 

Supplemental Post #4 - Lilla

Jenkins mentions blogging and The Truman Show in his article, claiming that “[i]t never occurs to anyone that Truman might stay on the air, generating his own content and delivering his own message” (37). I found this idea of “bloggers rewriting the ending” interesting and was wondering how it could be applied to modern-day vlogging and YouTubers. 

Is YouTube vlogging a new form of reality TV, I wonder? While I don’t watch a lot of television, I do admit to watching vlogs, which are similarly serialized, at times dramatized accounts of people’s lives. They even feature ad breaks But what I enjoy about vlogs is how authentic, personal, and relatable they feel — at least initially. Their personal, non-dramatized nature forms their appeal. 

But what is interesting to me is how many of these vloggers attempt to cross into mainstream media and fail. YouTuber Lilly Singh was one of the first people to translate her online fame to a late night show to NBC, which was met with low ratings, and called into question how easy it is to move in-between media. And many British vloggers who initially started on YouTube went on to seek careers in film or acting, only to find little success. Interestingly, many of these people also denounced their former YouTube career, reinforcing this idea of a hierarchy between media. 

While many YouTubers have a huge following and get millions of views — more than they would on TV, they are still ashamed of YouTube as a platform and see it as less than traditional media.

Supplemental Response #4_Ann

 *Spoiler alert; I’m briefly mentioning WandaVision in this post but I will try avoiding the plot. However, if you don’t want to know anything from the show then please skip paragraph 3.

I really enjoyed this week’s readings since they brought together many ideas we have discussed in the past weeks. Genre, to me, is something that is ever-present and always in the background when talking about media, and this week’s readings (especially Jason Mittell’s piece) really made clear that genre is also something that’s both influencing and defined by contemporary culture(s). What’s more, melodrama, as argued by almost all the authors this week, is extremely important in understanding the television genre. 

I started with Jane Feuer's “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today” among the readings and I really enjoyed her theorization of the “excess” melodrama creates. She writes: “Despite the changing theoretical stances, all see the excess not merely as aesthetic but as ideological, opening up a textual space which may be read against the seemingly hegemonic surface” (8). She continues to talk about the excess in set design, acting as well as the television form, and provides alternative readings against the dominant ideology. What this discussion reminds me of is Newcomb and Hirsch’s idea of “culture forum” (I know, I reference them a lot but I really like that week’s readings), which considers television as a medium—albeit in its very early form—as the key to a multi-faceted and subversive cultural discussion. While I still think this idea is a little naive, my opinion changed a bit after reading Feur’s article on melodrama. The way she finds excess in both melodrama’s aesthetics and in its ideologies makes me rethink the validity of culture forum as something that may actually exist when the audience is in conversation with the genre. This also echoes Michael Kackman’s brief mentioning of “quality audience” in his piece where I think—if such a demographic of audience exists—genre-conscious is one of their defining qualities. 

I also think Feur’s analysis on melodrama is in conversation with Michael Kackman’s “Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity” very well. Both of them (as well as Tara’s piece) recognize melodrama as something indispensable in analyzing television, especially recent ones. This brings me to my discursive thoughts today: what about the Marvel universe—or maybe I should call it the new Marvel television empire—and its relationship to genre, culture, and melodrama? Now I understand this is too big of a project to take on while writing a blog post, but I really want to talk a bit about Marvel’s new WandaVision because it is such an interesting intersection of quality television, cinema, and melodrama (also because I loved the show). First of all, we need to recognize that Marvel is still primarily understood as a theatrical film studio where their most prominent media are superhero films, with decent but not great performance in television shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel's Agent Carter. However, their recent television plan—including WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki—on Disney Plus does signal a monumental turn in the studio’s approach to both television and film. In some ways, Marvel is intentionally bridging the gap between television and film by, using Kackman’s words, “place[ing] it [television] in its ‘true’ aesthetic context – that of cinema”. However, aesthetics is not the only reason that Marvel, or specifically WandaVision, was successful. Rather, WandaVision stays very true to the serial form of television and it includes a lot of classic melodrama characteristics. The show, while it is still about superheroes, focuses more on recognizable melodramatic elements like the romance between Wanda and Vision, the grief Wanda is experiencing after the Blip, marriage problems, and the nuclear family as the stage where everything unfolds. In fact, all the actions, militaries, superhero abilities, and high-tech side characters—which are not often seen in melodramatic television—are in support of our understanding of Wanda and Vision’s romance and her struggle with her grief. Not only that, the show is eager to tell the audience that it categorizes itself as television: the 1950s TV frame ratio, the black and white photography (in some episodes), the tv-related episode titles, and the sudden insertion of nostalgic television ads all scream “you are watching television”. What’s interesting here is that these hyper-visible television characteristics actually help elevate WandaVision into the category of “quality television”. Because these elements are so obvious, the audience is propelled into reconstructing their understanding of the show; in turn—using Rick Altman who was briefly mentioned by Mittell— creates a new syntax unique to WandaVision. Mittell mentions briefly author Rick Altman and his theory of semantics/syntax in his article, and I want to point to the fact that the semantics of WandaVision is a complex mixture of sci-fi, horror, melodrama, and comedy (Altman, 12), thus having a stable syntax is crucial in constructing the show. 

This has been an absolute ramble on WandaVision and Marvel. In a way, WandaVision is extremely smart in recognizing itself as a television program while drawing its syntax from Marvel’s cinematic universe as well as melodrama. I want to end with a question on the relationship between cinema and television under today’s media climate. What Marvel has done is that it created a collection of films that are serialized with easter eggs, character crossovers, and complex plot developments. In a way, the MCU is a serialized television program with notable television "flow" as theorized by Raymond Williams. Now that Marvel is actually tapping into television, it is fascinating to think of how that may change both the genre definition of TV and cinema.

Work cited: Altman, Rick, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre”, Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 3, 1984, p. 6-18.

Supplemental Post #3 - Lilla

 Both the Gray and the Han readings talk about narrowcasting and niche audiences, practices that on a surface level, I would normally find counterintuitive. Why focus on a specific demographic that only constitutes a fraction of your viewership? At the same time, the Han reading also points out the issue with choosing a niche audience that isn't niche enough, and how the attempt to cater to a pan-Asian American audience led to disjointed programming that interested very few.

This got me thinking about ensemble shows with multiracial casts. Are these written for a white audience by default? How often are they white savior narratives? How often do non-white characters embody a select few, that don't represent the average experience of those communities? How often, even in true ensemble shows, are BIPOC relegated to sidekicks and secondary characters? And is it possible to truly create an ensemble show that caters to people from all racial backgrounds?

Admittedly, I'm not a TV person, so the only show I could think of off the top of my head was This Is Us. I only watched the first season of the show, and it was around the time it came out in 2016, but I do remember discourse around show centering on how This Is Us would finally unite Black and White viewers alike. Again, only having seen the first season, it somewhat felt like a white savior show that reduced its Black protagonist's storyline to a clichéd sob story (admitted, the entire show is a clichéd sob story). The show is intended to be about average people, but nothing about it felt average. It felt contrived, overtly aware of its aim to unite. 

And I think contrived is the key word here. It was an issue with ImaginAsian, and it is an issue with shows that aim to check all racial boxes. When you try to get everyone, you get no one, and that highlights the importance of narrowcasting to me.

Supplemental Post 2 - Lilla

As I was reading the Jenkins article, I made the jarring realization that I, too, judge fandoms. Especially ones that I am part of. I think the sentiment stems from exclusivity and group thinking that in the past have made fandoms seem intimidating, exclusive and elitist to me — everything the Newsweek article Jenkins cites describes them as. When talking about fan fiction, Jenkins describes fans as “loyalists,” insistent on “rescuing essential elements of the primary text” (473). This reminded me of an experience I have had with a fandom I am a part of. I am a huge, huge fan of the 2006 UK teen drama series Skins. I have seen the show countless times in the past ten years and could probably quote the entire first two seasons back to back. Skins divided the show into so-called ‘generations,’ where they replaced the entire cast with new characters every two seasons. There were a total of six seasons and three generations (there was also a seventh season, featuring standalone episodes and returning characters, but for the purpose of this post, that doesn’t count). Of course, with three generations, there emerged a group of Skins ‘purists,’ who claimed that you’re only a true fan of the show if you acknowledge that the first generation is superior to the rest. Some of them have even refused to watch latter seasons out of principle, and have bullied actors from later generations on social media. They even turned against the creators of the show, arguing that they compromised quality and ‘Americanized’ it for global audiences, and increased the stakes to the extent that the shows core tenet of relatability was no longer recognizable.

It is fairly common for TV shows to decrease in quality in latter season (and I also happen to agree that the first two seasons of the show are the best) but I found the animosity purists have towards fans of the latter seasons is incredibly alienating. Of course, this show is by no means unique to this phenomenon — there are technology purists, Star Wars purists, purists for pretty much anything. But it was the first experience I had where I felt alienated from a fandom that I was part of because they created a hierarchy where not everybody is welcome. If fandoms are supposed to be places for “marginalized subcultural groups” (472), why does there have to be further marginalization? Why are you ‘not a real fan’ if you like a different season better, of if you can’t quote all the episodes back to back, or don’t have the theme song of the show as your ring tone (which I did in high school)? And who creates these arbitrary rules? Why do people in fandoms have to compete to one-up each other? To me, fandoms have become more of an alienating space than a welcoming community.

Supplemental Post (Kallan)

For me this week, Jenkins’s analysis of fan writing and textual poaching spoke to the long-standing impossible dilemma of how to—or whether we should—separate a work of art from its artist when that artist is a monster. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as others in our class seem to <3!) and am thus suffering through the repeated gut-punches of reports of Whedon’s misogyny and cruelty, as detailed most recently in this article from today: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/arts/television/joss-whedon-charisma-carpenter.html. The contradiction between Whedon’s enactment of gendered power dynamics and the way he writes gender into the series offers an opportunity for fans to align themselves with the show and not its creator and to “seize televisual property only to protect it against abuse by those who created it” (Jenkins, 490), in this case the “abuse” being quite literal. As Jenkins writes “consensus within the fan community itself” (487) is key, and it seems—at least based on this NYT article and my own anecdotal experiences—that Buffy fans are in agreement that Whedon’s behavior does not “ruin” the show or negate its role as a “lifeline” for so many. 

Anyways, this connection is probably obvious to those more steeped in fan studies, but for me, it was a nice coincidence to come across this NYT article just before reading Jenkins’s piece. The article offered a useful example of the possibilities for fan-reclamation beyond rewriting and expanding a show’s narrative universe; as someone quoted in the article said: “It’s the fandom claiming it back…I don’t think that anyone would think that Buffy Summers belongs to any one person.”

Supplemental Post #1 - Andrea

The readings this week have made me think back to one of the few older shows I watched as a kid, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and particularly the politics surrounding the show's lead female star, Mary Tyler Moore. In the Mellencamp reading, the author pits the two main female characters under analysis - Gracie and Lucy - against Mary Tyler Moore's character, Laura Petrie. Gracie and Lucy are defined as "humorous rebel or well-dressed, wise-cracking, naive dissenter who wanted or had a paid job," whereas Moore's character is oppositionally defined as the "contented, if not blissfully happy, understanding homebody." 

While I can't remember why exactly I enjoyed the show (I think the fact that I could share in my mother's nostalgia from her childhood definitely played a large role), this characterization of Laurie shocked me. On one hand, I felt ignorant and manipulated for liking a character described almost as an empty vessel filled with domestic bliss (I was pretty young when I watched the show, so I don't feel that guilty. Also Moore and Van Dyke were very attractive people, and she even popularized trousers!). On the other, I know vaguely of Moore's "feminist" legacy in regards to her own show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was confused with how this gap between Laura Petrie and Mary Richards could be possible - how did Moore get her own show in which she played a largely independent, "modern" woman when Laura Petrie has been described as a retrograde housewife. This lead me down a little rabbit hole into Mary Tyler Moore's own political affiliations, and what I found out about Moore was equally as confusing as her shift in star image. 

After reading a few articles online, I found that while The Mary Tyler Moore Show carries with it a feminist legacy that has inspired multiple celebrities and influential personalities (even Michelle Obama), Moore herself refused the labels of feminist or liberal. While Moore's eponymous show aimed to portray the "real" lives of working women, women with ambitions outside the home, Moore herself believed that women shouldn't prioritize career over family or reject the home for the working world. Perhaps increased conservatism in her older age is to blame for this cognitive dissonance, or perhaps we (namely I) have conflated Moore's character in TMTMS with her own image, but I find it interesting that Moore herself has come to represent such different archetypes of women in sitcoms. Perhaps Moore did possess both Laura Petrie's content domesticity and Mary Richards desire for independence, or perhaps she was just a talented actress who pretended to be women completely different from herself in every way.

Articles: 

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/feminist-legacy-mary-tyler-moore-show

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/the-real-feminist-impact-of-i-the-mary-tyler-moore-show-i-was-behind-the-scenes/275875/

https://www.thoughtco.com/mary-tyler-moore-show-3529017

https://www.dailysignal.com/2017/01/25/why-mary-tyler-moore-refused-to-join-the-feminist-movement/