Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV (original) (raw)
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All Tha t Heaven Allows medium or its famili al base. Instead, the consol idated fam ily, with T V as its to ol, seemed to tr iumph over critical melod ram as. Mu lvey concludes th at th e swi ng to politi cal conservat ism and the reposi tioning of wo men in the home gave ord er to th e oppos itions public/private, production/ reproduction, and inside/outside whose tensi ons had propelled melodrama an d allowe d it a political dimension. Th e birth of television thu s displaced, an d seemingly even resolved, th e genre's animati ng for ce. As TV brou ght popular enterta inment into the home, nat ion al consensus tri umphed over .a potent ially opposition al melodrama. But has melodrama died ? Or ha s it been subsumed into television, engulfing the med ium as it engulfs its spectato rs and precluding its locat ion as a sepa rate category? Th is poss ibility is strikingly figured in A ll Tha t Heaven Allows as the T V screen tak es over th e cinema tic frame , enclosing Cary and the enti re melodram atic mise en scene in a haze of consumerism, impotent specta rorship, and hyperr eality associa ted with television. These are the term s of postm odern America n culture in which history, subjectivity, and reality itself flattens out into a TV image and we are left searching for signs of mean ing within an endless flow of images-a situatio n lead ing to nostalgia for past trad itions and wha t may be a backlash aga inst women's social and politi cal gains.:' In this historical scena rio, television dr aws us all, women and men, into a shared bond of consumer over presence a nd pow erless specta to rship as melodram a becomes the pr eferr ed form for TV, Camera Obscura
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What makes eleven essays by eleven different authors cohere in a way that makes sense to present them together as a book? Whatever that is, I do not quite find it in this collection. The editors assert that the various contributions function as an organic whole and indeed they strive arduously to make connections in a general introduction, section introductions and an afterword. Nevertheless, I am left with a sense of irreducible bittiness.
Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives
2005
What makes eleven essays by eleven different authors cohere in a way that makes sense to present them together as a book? Whatever that is, I do not quite find it in this collection. The editors assert that the various contributions function as an organic whole and indeed they strive arduously to make connections in a general introduction, section introductions and an afterword. Nevertheless, I am left with a sense of irreducible bittiness. There is a section on situation comedy, which includes Barry Langford on The Office and Robin Nelson on Dad's Army. There are several essays on children's programmes, such as Maire Messenger Davies on The Demon Headmaster and Jonathan Bignell on Doctor Who. Another section deals with programmes considered somehow 'other', for example, Mark Bould on The Prisoner and Peter Billingham on Queer as Folk.
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At a time when television studies was still an emerging subject, the soap opera attracted a number of high-profile studies, largely conducted by feminists, that also set the agenda for television studies as a whole. While the soap opera no longer finds the same level of attention, the scholarship of that time remains important to the work of feminist television researchers of different generations. In this dossier, five researchers, three of them emerging, two of them mid-career, reflect on the importance of the scholarship to their own work and careers, how their own work expands on it and what it tells us about problems that feminist television scholarship might encounter tomorrow.
Routledge eBooks, 2021
Lisa Cholodenko's 2014 series Olive Kitteridge remains something of an outlier in the recent wave of female-led quality TV drama. Its outlier status is not only because of its unlikely protagonista difficult and at times unlikeable older woman, nor is it simply a result of the confined temporal throw of its four episode structure. One of the key things that sets Olive Kitteridge apart from both other female-led series with "difficult women" protagonists and from other recent quality TV dramas is that its narrative concern with disappointment and other forms of negative affect is tied to the ways the series occupies and articulates television (viewing) time. This essay argues that Olive Kitteridge constructs a sense of domestic confinement and dissatisfaction that spills from narrative into form and address. Olive Kitteridge does not simply offer a different form of difficult and disappointed woman in its central protagonist to that more commonly found in the recent wave of female-led quality television. It also unsettles the consumption of female disappointment in and as quality television drama.