By saying that we need to reinvoke melodrama as the constitutive force behind much of what we call quality television, it’s not just to remind critics of the culturally low form that embodies much of what they like about current tv. That is not, in itself, much of a point – and I suspect that most of the scholars embracing the narrative complexity of quality tv would be quick to point out that its antecedents lie in soaps and other “low” serial forms (Mittell certainly does). More importantly, though, I’d like to suggest that our ability even to identify narrative complexity and see it as a marker of quality television is itself an act not of aesthetic, but cultural, recognition. Complexity isn’t just something we find in a text; it’s something we bring to a text – and our recognition of certain characters as meaningfully conflicted, their narrative and moral dilemmas agonizingly or beguilingly puzzling, is a cultural identification. I’d like to see us talk more about melodrama and contemporary quality television not just as an ameliorative, cathartic symbolic resolution of social anxieties, but as a mechanism for the registering of political dreams....
Lost has become an idealized ur-text of television’s aesthetic possibilities, with a complex mythology interwoven with a serialized character drama, all embraced by a knowing, literate fan community. We might productively read the gendered politics of television scholarship against the show’s central narrative preoccupation with paternity, patriarchy, and masculinity....
While much recent television scholarship has seemingly moved beyond the field’s roots in feminist media criticism, it often does so by re-embracing the gendered hierarchies that made the medium an object of critical and popular scorn. And while “quality television” is a complicated aggregation of industry discourses, aesthetic norms, audience practices and politics, it’s also, at least historically, a political demand – a kind of Jamesonian hermeneutic dream of being… different. I’d like to urge some skepticism about celebrating television’s new golden age of aesthetic quality. By becoming “legitimate,” we risk eliding our field’s history of politically and culturally invested scholarship. And as the characters of Lost might yet one day learn, the search for legitimacy entails great cost, while illegitimacy has intriguing rewards.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in here. I was thinking about how LJ/DW-based media fandom is one arena which seems to have largely resisted the last decade's embrace of the new "quality television" canon of complex serialized narratives, with the exception of Battlestar Galactica (at least, for U.S. media/television studies). Of course, part of that is due to less overlap with SFF (unlike the '90s, where The X-Files and Buffy had feet firmly planted in both the quality tv & genre camps).
But I'm still surprised how few posts I've seen about the last season of LOST, and wonder about how the gendering of LJ/DW media fandom intersects with Kackman's argument about the risk that the aesthetic turn pushes television studies away from its feminist foundations.
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chasethestars
chasethestars
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As for Lost, well, I personally don't consider it quality TV since S1 and media fandom (that I saw) posted a LOT about it in S1 but during S2 generally dwindled down to few besides a core group of fans. And BSG is very lucky it stayed consistently good for so long and was so heavily SFF focused as that kept people watching during the lesser S3/S4 seasons as shows like it and like Heroes can fall apart very quickly. Also the above shows lack a major slash pairing which is never helpful for a decent amount of people in getting popularity in media fandom.
The other thing is it's not about narrative complexity to me in what makes a good show but good, high quality writing no matter how simple or complex the show is. I definitely hate the overemphasis on patriarchy/men in both shows and the amount of male writers (obviously helping each other) and really really hope that gets better in the coming years. But I see no reason not to celebrate high quality shows (as well as point out flaws) while embracing the entertaining/breakthrough areas of shows that may not obtain that level of quality as well as continuing with feminist (and any other) media criticism.
As someone whose fannish tastes tends to straddle the high and the low, but gets bored or dissatisfied quickly in the middle, I'm not crazy about the term 'quality television' either, especially in its recent formulations centered around 'quality men's business.'
and i don't see tv critique in academia losing its feminist roots.
but i do wish more garden variety newspaper and tv critics and film reviewers would GROW some feminist roots! rarely have I seen a bigger disconnect between what the academy does and what goes on in the mass media when it talks about itself.
I get the sense that the audience for mainstream tv & film criticism is eroding -- or at least that stuff is less influential than it used to be. At least there are plenty of feminist perspectives on media available online now.
We might, if we were able to give a shit about Jack's boring, boring manpain.
(Lost's basic problem, for me, was lack of story-momentum. There can be only so many WTF-y reveals before it's like, Okay, now turn these reveals into a plot! That never happened. I occasionally tune in for this the final season, but am consistently baffled and just waiting around till somebody I like comes back onto the screen.)
In terms of non-SFF narratives that have gotten fannish attention, I can think of many in the last 10 years: CSI had a healthy fanfic following (I don't know its current status), and I read one or two stories about ER. White Collar is all over popular, to name a recent example. One thing to think about is access; the last decade has seen "quality" television of all genres migrate to non-network and even premium cable, while it's only recently become easy to find online. That's a big gap, that tends to decrease the fannish scrum; no amount of enthusiasm can overcome "I have to torrent this myself??" among the less technically-inclined. (*cough* yours truly *cough*)
I do see quite a bit of talk about it on my flist, though, so I'm surprised you don't, as I thought we had a good overlap.