Supplemental Post #3-Tiana Williams

(Disclaimer: Below is a ramble about topics that have been on my mind all week, in which this week’s readings helped bring out; also a possible direction I might go for my final paper)

    I found this week’s exploration of TV and genre quite fascinating as it brought together many thoughts I have been having all week about genre as a vehicle to represent and relay the Black experience. What brought these specific thoughts up (for context) was the recent Twitter critiques of the upcoming Amazon series Them produced by Lena Waithe and written by Little Marvin. The series’ trailer shows a Black family moving into an all-white neighborhood in the 1950s as they begin to experience “malevolent” and supernatural forces, along with intense racism. When I first watched the trailer, I personally thought that the show seemed interesting and I was excited to watch another series that might fit into the genre that Jordan Peele coined as a social thriller, but a lot of folks on Twitter felt otherwise. Twitter users called the show a “LoveCraft Country rip-off” and criticized Lena Waithe for “copying” Jordan Peele’s film Us. 

    These misunderstandings, or rather disagreements, about this type of content within the horror/thriller genre are always interesting to me—especially the assertion that any replications of similar storylines within this mode equates “rip-off.” Similar to McPherson’s discussion of 24 as a “re-masculinisation of serialised melodramas'' that have been historically feminized and associated with the soap opera, I feel that in the same token, it is also difficult for folks to characterize/categorize innovative shows such as LoveCraft Country (and even Them) due to the series’ reimagination of terror, horror and racism within the Black experience, and ultimately, a sort of experimentation with a genre that is dominated by whiteness (and quite often, very similar, recycled storylines). These works have clearly given Black creators a space to utilize conventions of the overarching horror genre to move us into abstract terrain relating to racism, an endeavor that for some reason, draws in much criticism as well as a defensive affect from certain audiences. As noted in Jason Mittell’s article, “one of the great lessons of poststructuralism is to question the categories that seem to be natural and assumed,” (1) and Jordan Peele was able to do just that by experimenting and sort of breaking the mold with works Get Out, Us, (and in some ways the Twilight Zone?). It’s just interesting to see how Jordan Peele is credited as the innovator of this social thriller category, yet works that follow in this novel genre walk a fine line of receiving heavy criticism for thievery of content and actually being praised.  

    Jason Mittell’s article that problematizes categorizing genre through “aesthetic paradigms and definitional approaches” versus “examining how texts function within larger cultural contexts,” sparked more thoughts for me relating to this sticky place of genre exploration. The reception and categorization of a show like LoveCraft Country, two very different points of examination as Mittell points out, is a topic that I think I may want to explore for my final paper. Mostly because I am constantly trying to figure out why my Mom (one of THE biggest horror/thriller/Sci-fi movie goers I think I’ve ever met) doesn’t enjoy LoveCraft Country in the least, and also doesn’t identify it as Sci-fi or horror, but instead as simply “weird,” and a show with “too much going on.” But anyway, with that said, I very much appreciated Mittell’s breakdown of each mode of genre analysis as well as their limitations, and in thinking about how I might aim to tackle the subject I laid out earlier relating to genre and LoveCraft Country, Mittell’s analysis proved to not only be crucial for my own understanding of genre in TV studies and the tensions that often arise within television genre exploration, but it also brought to mind many cultural texts that I tend to bring into this reading of LoveCraft Country and how it is received. Mittell’s assertion that we should “look at the meanings people make in interactions with media genres to understand the genre’s meanings” (5) partly illuminates why there is much confusion for folks in categorizing LoveCraft Country, and I’m excited to learn more about this and to investigate why claims of thievery arise with certain works, but not with others as well as the hesitant nature of folks to categorize LoveCraft. Anyway, I feel myself continuing to ramble on, so I will end here in just emphasizing that I felt this week’s round of readings were all quite illuminating and insightful and that the Mittell reading’s focus on the “cultural operation of genres” was extremely fascinating and an interesting lens in which I may seek to situate LoveCraft Country and my discussion of genre for my (potential) final paper topic. 

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.

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?  

Core Post #5 - Lilla

What do we mean when we call something a melodrama? Do we mean it’s serialized? That it’s daytime TV? That it’s a soap? That it’s meant for a female audience? That it’s not ‘quality?’ What terms do we use it interchangeably with? In Techno-Soap, Tara McPherson writes about the “generalized diffusion of melodrama” (175). Quoting Joyrich, she argues that “melodrama is the preferred form for television, spreading across the televisual landscape in a diverse array of forms and genres” (175). Indeed, melodrama is often treated as a singular genre, or a derogatory umbrella term, when in fact in current television, most serialized television genres borrow elements from the traditional female melodrama series, to the extent that I would no longer call it its own genre.

Tara writes that 24 is “more than simply melodramatic.” (175) It has the structure of a soap opera, yet refuses to be labelled a melodrama and is defended as “quality,” as if the two terms were in direct contradiction to one another. So I guess my argument is twofold. Firstly, I argue that calling all serialized shows involving the domestic sphere and interpersonal conflicts melodramas dilutes the meaning of the world. The elements of a melodrama do not comprise a whole. 

Secondly, I also feel like the word melodrama is no longer used as a genre, but simply a derogatory word to refer to female-oriented serialized shows that don’t require ‘complexity’ to interpret (Kackman). Feuer argues that both daytime and prime-time serials “concentrate on the domestic sphere,” but only one is considered a melodrama (4). She continues that “male-oriented genres […] did not problematize the reader in the same way as melodrama” (Feuer 7). Using the word ‘melodrama’ implies an audience that does not possess cultural complexity, which is ironic, as, in the words of Kackman, “melodrama’s simultaneous invocation of, and inability to resolve, social tensions, that makes it such a ripe form for serial narrativization, and which makes it a central, and maybe even necessary, component of quality television.” 

tl;dr we should stop using the word melodrama

Georgina Gonsalves- Core Post #4- Genre

 In reference to Feuer and Kackman, melodrama is closely dissected by the determining characteristics of the genre. Both bring into question what determines “quality television”. Personally I was drawn to Jason Mitchell’s opinion in Kackman’s reading- a complex narrative that blends episodic and serial narrative techniques, an operational aesthetic. I agree with his words, quality television “embraces a dream of a more complex world” that audiences crave and find more intellectually stimulating and exciting to have complexity in narrative, especially collision with cultural and gender politics, as he explained.

 Key characteristics of melodrama are narrative that the audience follows and the use of intensification. A tendency in soap operas, (and no other genre in the same way) is the magnification of emotion and intensity consistently throughout the soap. All elements of the production are dramaticized. The camera work makes use of dramatic zooms, log pauses to build emotion and temporary closure between scenes, intense music, and of course, acting that “transgresses the norms of “realistic” TV acting. 

Something I found particularly interesting and present in both readings was the ever-lasting battle of the “moral universe” and the “indefinitely expandable middle”. The lack of closure present in soap operas is also present in the analysis of Lost by Kackman. In soap operas, the good and evil are constantly at war, as Feuer puts it, “the good never receive what they are due or deserve, while the evil never fully triumph.” This creates a continuous back and forth of wins and losses for both the good and the evil, never bringing closure or a happy ending, or an ending at all. This “indefinitely expandable middle” and lack of closure in the case of Lost, is different in context, however, the audience views it structurally similar. The evil being the inner demons the characters face that hold them back from triumph that they may or may not overcome, and the anxiety it brings its viewers not knowing if the characters will prevail or not. Both leave the viewers longing for a sense of peace and closure that may or may not come, or may be short-lived.

Quick supplemental post on genre and quality - Kallan

This week’s readings on genre and concerning questions of quality reminded me of this article from a few months ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/business/media/most-streamed-shows-nielsen.html?smid=url-share. It’s not totally surprising, but it is good to remember that the most popular shows (according to this measure) on streaming services last year were still network dramas, comedies, and procedurals, even though it seemed like the only show I heard/read about for a few months was The Queen’s Gambit. It’s also hard not to wonder what effect the pandemic had on 2020 viewing—I personally found myself drawn to episodic, monster-of-the-week type network shows that were released on a weekly basis like Buffy but also Alias and, from more recent network history, Evil. It’s satisfying in this time of uncertain and unending chaos to watch manageable narratives where you know that each episode will raise and then resolve a problem related to that week's monster/mission/medical mystery/case/demon possession etc. While the ongoing seriality of soaps and the related narrative complexity of "quality" dramas have their appeal, lately I've been drawn to closure. I couldn't stick with The Queen's Gambit, or The Crown, or I Know This Much is True...but I did watch The Mandalorian and Wanda Vision in real time/each week. Then again, I did binge Bridgerton, so I don't have a perfectly clear take-away about my own pandemic-viewing psychology, but it was interesting to see this article and think about my own return to shows like Alias. Anyways, those are my my supplemental thoughts for this week :). 

Core Post 5 - Charlotte

  I was very compelled by Kackman’s introduction to quality versus complex television, as I think I have tended to conflate the two for the most part. Between the Kackman and Mittel pieces, I am left questioning whether complexity and quality count as genre categories. HBO feels like the easiest network to “look beyond the text itself” (Mittel 3) and consider the influence of cultural context, as perhaps more than any other the network connotes a designation of quality television. Anecdotally, last fall as the miniseries The Undoing was being released by HBO Max, a friend asked if I liked the show. I told him that I thought it was fine, to which he responded that fine for HBO means good anywhere else. I, too, associate HBO with quality television, as the shows produced almost all have a certain level of aesthetic and narrative complexity, regardless of whether or not I enjoy the content. This is likely tied in with Feuer’s analysis of the inclusion of the melodramatic mode in much of contemporary television. The mise-en-scene of HBO series is almost always perfectly curated to further express narrative development. I notice this most frequently in interior settings, particularly bedrooms, where the set conveys a great deal of information about the occupant. Other series - I’m thinking specifically here about Criminal Minds - frequently show a mis-match between setting and location. While the sets that appear in each episode of the series (and this is a highly episodic series) are specific and personal, the locations once they leave are represented as relatively homogenous. The exterior shots of cases set in Pittsburgh are nearly identical to those set in Phoenix. I think this may also feed a bit into our earlier discussions of soap operas, wherein television is viewed as a more ambient or auditory medium than cinema. The self-contained episode of a crime show follows a relatively predictable format, making it easier to multitask while watching and thus drawing attention away from mise-en-scene. While other popular streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime tend to produce a mixture of ‘high’ and ‘low’ quality content. For instance, Netflix has produced a number of quality series like The Queen’s Gambit and The Crown, in addition to ‘lower’ forms like reality television and true crime series. Is this how HBO maintains its cultural representation as being the ultimate hub of quality television? Or is this differentiation equally based in the network’s history as the forerunner of quality television production?