Book Proposal

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Narrative
A proposal for a multiplatform book by Jason Mittell

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2

In the past 15 years, the storytelling possibilities and practices of fictional television have undergone drastic shifts. What was once a risky innovative device, like subjective narration or jumbled chronology, is now almost cliché. Where the lines between serial and episode narratives used to be firmly drawn, today such boundaries are blurred. Expectations for how viewers watch television, how producers create stories, and how series are distributed have all shifted, leading to a new mode of television storytelling. This book is the first sustained analysis of the poetics of contemporary television narrative, exploring the cultural form that many critics feel is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 2 One reason why television’s formal narrative properties have been so ignored stems from the assumption that television storytelling is simplistic. Accounts of the medium’s narrative tendencies focus on the centrality of genre formulas, repetitive situations, redundant exposition suited for surfing viewers, and structural constraints based around commercial breaks and rigid schedules. While many contemporary television programs follow such patterns, albeit with more nuance and subtlety than dismissive critiques admit, new developments over the past two decades have led to the rise of a particular model of narrative complexity on mainstream commercial American television, one that is unique to the medium and thus must be examined on its own terms. The purpose of this book is to outline the features of narrative complexity featured on contemporary primetime fictional television, tracing its emergence through institutional, technological, and artistic practices, and explore the mode of spectatorship that this narrative mode encourages.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 3 Television’s narrative complexity is marked by a number of formal features. Serialized plotting has become mainstream, as long-term story and character arcs are featured across genres, from sitcoms to cop shows. These recent developments connect to the structures typical of daytime soap operas by highlighting the tension between relationships and narrative events, arcs and self-contained episodes, although the relationship between primetime and daytime serials is more complicated than typically acknowledged. In telling complex stories, contemporary television has embraced a high degree of experimentation concerning narrative pacing, selectivity, perspective, and chronology, all variables that were traditionally controlled and limited to strict genre conventions. Television has embraced genre mixing as a way to highlight complex thematic and formal attributes, as well as mixing the gendered appeals that are typically mapped onto genres; for instance, family melodrama and espionage action merge in the innovative narrative structure and complex cultural politics of Alias. Authorial presence and voice has been brought to the foreground, as the stylistic idiosyncrasies of producers like Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, or Larry David overtake the more interchangeable and low-profile producers more typical of earlier television. As narrative complexity has become more commonplace, programs have embraced a level of reflexivity, acknowledging the audience’s abilities to decode sophisticated long-term narrative worlds by offering inside jokes and revelations to viewers who learn the cues of narrative complexity. Through a detailed analysis of dozens of television programs and series that mark the emergence of this storytelling form, including Twin Peaks, Wiseguy, Seinfeld, Homicide: Life on the Street, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, The Sopranos, Angel, Alias, 24, Scrubs, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Lost, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development, How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, The Office, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Pushing Daisies, and 30 Rock (as well as many other shorter-lived series), this book will draw upon narratological theories of literature and film to argue that these recent developments cannot be explained by simply adapting literary and cinematic norms, pointing to the maturation of television as a distinct and unique creative form.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 This project focuses its attention on the poetics of television’s narrative form, drawing upon neo-formal analysis developed in film and literary studies; however, my approach is derived from cultural studies, which posits that meaning is not embedded in cultural texts, but rather is formed through the practices of both encoding and decoding texts. I view television through a model of cultural circulation, in which practices of the television industry, audiences, critics, and creators all work to shape the construction of narrative form. Thus to understand narrative complexity in television, this project will explore how the television industry and creative personnel adopt and shape particular conceptions of storytelling. Until the late-1970s, television networks assumed that viewers would not commit to watching the same program week after week, and thus offered an episodic model of television narrative suited for casual viewers. The success of more serialized programs like Dallas, Hill St. Blues, Soap, and Cheers in the early-1980s changed this assumption, opening the door for a string of narrative experiments that have coalesced into a model of contemporary narrative complexity. Likewise, television has become less stigmatized as a devalued cultural object, as many creators from the film industry have turned to television as a way to experiment with different forms of storytelling, led by David Lynch and Barry Levinson in the 1990s. Through interviews with television producers and writers, I will explore how changes in the television industrial structure (notably the rise of cable channels and new networks), audience viewing practices, technologies of distribution and consumption, and the cultural value of the medium all worked to alter the model of television narrative by encouraging contemporary complexity.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Just as shifts in industrial and creative practices have altered the ways that television tells stories, how viewers relate to television have changed narrative form as well. To understand how viewers experience television narrative, I draw upon theoretical models using cognitive psychology to explain narrative comprehension within film and literature. But instead of using cognitive models to propose hypothetical viewer practices, as such analyses typically do, I look at a range of actual audience voices, drawn from fan websites, chat rooms, published commentary, and audience surveys; these cultural practices all point toward specific models and schema that audiences use to process narrative complexity. Through this analysis, we can see how audiences become aware of narrative form, engaging with their knowledge of television’s creative and industrial practices to create a multi-level process of complex comprehension. Rather than simply enjoying the nuances of a sophisticated story world, viewers of television’s narrative complexity also take pleasure in the ways that contemporary television plays with the norms and assumptions of typical television, creating a more reflexive mode of comprehension that belies assumptions of the medium’s passive audience.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 2 Another key site of television innovation that impacts narrative in subtle ways is technology. Traditionally, the technological model of the television medium offered one way of distributing television narratives: broadcasting. Most of the norms of episodic narrative form were predicated on the assumption that the television industry offered segmented access to stories, in weekly installments per a centralized schedule. With the rise of home video recorders, both VCRs and DVRs, viewers have been able to alter their relationship to the television schedule through time-shifting. Likewise the growing market of home video recordings of television series on tapes and DVDs has led to a new mode of narrative engagement beyond the weekly schedule model. Both home video recording and packaging have altered the viewer’s temporal relationship to television narratives, giving more control to audiences in ways that resist the restrictions of the regimented television schedule. These shifts in temporal technologies have impacted the narrative strategies of television, as creators now tell stories that can be experienced in a range of more flexible and collectable formats, encouraging a more invested and engaged form of spectatorship than typically assumed for earlier television. New media forms like videogames and websites also allow viewers to enter into the narrative worlds of television programs, encouraging a degree of fan engagement and transmedia immersion greater than with any other pre-digital medium. These technological developments have all encouraged narrative complexity as a highly pleasurable and marketable technique in contemporary media.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 By exploring the multifaceted ways in which television’s narrative complexity operates at the levels of form, industry, viewing practice, and technology, we can gain new understanding and appreciation of the sophistication of this central facet of American culture. This project argues that contemporary developments in television narrative have led to the emergence of a medium-specific mode of storytelling, moving beyond its cinematic, literary, and theatrical origins. Exploring television narrative is a natural outgrowth of this media development, applying the rigorous framework of narratology to our most ubiquitous yet least understood medium of storytelling. The project also models a form of interdisciplinary scholarship blending the formal precision of narratology with the contextualization and historical grounding of media studies. By applying the model of historical poetics developed within film studies to the cultural site of television, this book will posit of model of media scholarship that will bridge numerous divides within these related fields.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 3 This project is a natural continuation of my scholarship on American television. My first book, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), explores how genre categories operate within a range of cultural spheres, especially television industries and audiences. In that work, I explored the rise of serial narratives in primetime television in the late-1970s and genre mixing in the 1990s, highlighting trends that need further exploration. This new project extends my approach to understanding television’s core properties into the realm of narrative, combining a cultural studies theoretical model with careful historical research and formal analysis. My second book, Television & American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009), offers an overview of the current state of the television medium, with an emphasis on the interrelations between industry, technology, form, viewers, and cultural contexts. In that book, I briefly touch on a number of the programs and concepts that this project will explore in more depth.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 I have published and presented many fragments of this project over the past seven years, and I believe my ideas are now ready to assemble into a larger book. The most central article from this project, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” (published in The Velvet Light Trap in 2006), has been influential to the field, cited in dozens of other works and taught in numerous courses. I have since published six book chapters, two journal articles, numerous blog posts, and over ten different public lectures on topics connected to this project. While none of these writings will be precisely duplicated in this book, they all have served both to establish my reputation as an active researcher on the topic of television narrative and to allow me to work through my ideas in a public setting. Based on the reception of my work, I feel confident that there is an audience for a book on this topic and that readers will be receptive to my arguments.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 1 The audience for this book is multi-faceted. The most traditional group are media scholars, as questions of narrative form are emerging as central focus of teaching and research within media studies. I know of advanced undergraduate courses focused on television narrative at University of Wisconsin – Madison, Ohio State University, Dartmouth College, University of Notre Dame, Pomona College, as well as my own course at Middlebury College – this book would be an ideal adoption for those courses which already use essays of mine in their syllabi. It would also be appropriate for general courses in television studies at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The book will also speak directly to scholars of narrative across media. I have been active in publishing within anthologies pitched at narratologists, especially in the growing field of cross-media narrative analysis. There are few scholars who have actively connected the theoretical framework of narratology to television studies, and there seems to be significant interest among narrative scholars for such work. I will write the book to specifically engage such scholars in the conversation about television, hoping that it could be adopted in literary studies courses with a focus on narrative theory.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Finally, the book will appeal to general readers interested in a sophisticated take on television fiction. Alongside the development of contemporary television narrative complexity, a robust sphere of online television criticism has emerged over the past decade, with active readership and commentary focused on thinking carefully and deeply about television series. Although I will write the book with a deep scholarly engagement, I pride myself on being able to write in an accessible voice that will invite non-specialist readers. In reaching out to these online critics, I hope to connect my book to their writing and create some bridges between the academic and non-specialist critical communities. To explore such connections, I am planning on creating this book in multiple formats.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 At one level, this will be a traditional academic print monograph, appropriate for libraries and course adoption. However, I also intend to create digital iterations of the book as well, making NYU Press the ideal partner given its track record for openness to such innovative projects. The first “beta” version will be part of the pre-publication review process. In conjunction with MediaCommons (whose editorial board I am on), I hope to release a serialized version of the book during late Fall 2011 through Spring 2012 within CommentPress. Every two weeks, I will publish a chapter for peer-to-peer review to generate a conversation around the book’s content. After releasing the entire project, I will revise it per the relevant feedback and submit the manuscript to NYU Press for peer review and editorial approval. I will be on sabbatical during the 2011-12 academic year and on a fellowship in Germany with full concentration on writing and editing this project.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 5 While the book is in-press for print publication, I will be developing a digital version to publish simultaneously. This version, probably designed as an app for iPad and Android systems, will take advantage of the digital form in a number of ways. It will contain embedded video to illustrate the examples discussed in the text (which should be usable per fair use guidelines). It will contain two levels of text – one will be a shorter version written for a more general readership, with the option to “dive deeper” into extended sections that focus on more academic and theoretical matters (that will closely mirror the print version). It will also contain a space for networked commentary to make the book less of a fixed product than an ongoing site of conversation. I have spoken with people from MediaCommons and Institute for the Future of the Book for ideas to help develop this version, and I have faith that we can devise an effective and innovative digital book that will be noteworthy and influential in both form and content.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 The print version of the book will be approximately 120,000 words, making it comparable in length to my first book. Both versions of the book will contain numerous illustrations in the form of frame-grabs from television series and websites, in keeping with fair use guidelines. I feel confident that with my upcoming sabbatical, I should have a full manuscript available for review in late Spring 2012 that has already been publicly discussed at MediaCommons.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 There are a number of books that focus on contemporary serial television, but I believe that none speaks to the particular approach and scope that mine will. Serial Television by Glen Creeber (BFI, 2004) tackles some of the same issues, but is structured around a series of individual series analyses and thus lacks the scope and structure that my book will offer. Storytelling in Film & Television by Kristin Thompson (Harvard UP, 2003) applies narrative theory to television in a series of published lectures, but lacks the range of issues and examples as my book. The other comparative books are primarily edited anthologies lacking a unified through-line or books on single series that do not offer the scope or theoretical focus of my project. There are other new books that focus on questions of television form and aesthetics, such as Jeremy Butler’s Television Style (Routledge, 2010) and Greg Smith’s Beautiful TV (U Texas Press, 2007), but none that offer in-depth analysis of narrative structure and form. Thus I believe this book will offer something distinct and needed to the body of media scholarship.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Book Structure and Chapter Outline
The book is organized topically, integrating dozens of examples throughout the chapters. After the introduction and first core chapter, the specific thematic chapters can be read independently and in any order. In the digital version, these can be navigated via hyperlinks and variable paths; in the print version (and this proposal), they will appear in alphabetical order, with a clear invitation to read them in any order.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Introduction: Discovering Complexity
In the opening section of the book, I will introduce the project’s key concerns involving narrative theory, historical poetics, and cultural analysis. I will write it as a personal account of how I came to the topic, tracing a number of examples I encountered as a television viewer starting in 1999, including The Sopranos, The West Wing, 24, and Alias. In exploring how media studies scholarship is inadequate to explain the phenomena I observed ten years ago, I argue that the scholarly silos between television studies, narratology, and formal film studies need to be traversed to account for the rise of television’s narrative complexity. In writing in a personal voice, I will foreground the experiential dimension of narrative consumption, and highlight my own relationship to such programs as a fan and scholar. The introduction makes the case for merging a historical poetics approach with television cultural studies model, and outlines the rest of the project.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Complexity in Context
This core chapter provides the definition of narrative complexity that will be explored throughout the rest of the book, focusing on forms of storytelling structure and viewing practice. It introduces the important concepts of the operational aesthetic, a degree of formal self-consciousness that invites viewers to simultaneously marvel at a show’s narrative mechanics and emotionally engaging story, and the narrative special effect, the use of “show-off” storytelling techniques that ground spectacle within the narration rather than alongside it. The chapter also highlights the key contextual developments in the past two decades within the television industry and technologies that ground narrative complexity within our historical moment. This connection between form and context pervades the subsequent thematic chapters, with this chapter providing the core theoretical framework and approaches for the project.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 6 Authorship
The first of the independent thematic chapters explores how contemporary television has fostered a unique form of creative authorship. The chapter discusses the technologically-enabled paratexts of podcasts, making-of documentaries, DVD commentaries, Twitter feeds and blogs that have enabled television creators to speak directly to viewers. Such paratexts have helped constitute a new model of the star showrunner like Buffy’s Joss Whedon, Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore, Lost’s team of Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse, and Larry David as both star and creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm. In exploring the textual and paratextual presence of showrunners, I read the discursive practices of television creators through the lens of narratological theories of implied authorship, to propose a hybrid model of the implied author function as embodied in contemporary television serials.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Beginnings
Although long-form television serials are notably marked by their potentially eternal narrative middles, they all must start somewhere. This chapter explores how serials are launched with television pilots, considering the core functions of pilots as setting up the direction of a serial’s narrative thrust and teaching viewers how to watch the ongoing narrative. The chapter uses a detailed case study of the Veronica Mars pilot to demonstrate how serials establish intrinsic norms for ongoing narratives, with shorter references to the strategies found in pilots of How I Met Your Mother, Alias, Pushing Daisies, Lost, and Breaking Bad. This chapter will also consider the practice of rebooting serials with new scenarios, characters, and narrative norms, looking at Alias and Angel as examples of shows that reset their narratives mid-series, and how beginnings of episodes and seasons, such as in The Wire, similarly establish thematic and narrative patterns.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Character
Many complex serials have embraced anti-heroes as lead characters, using the long-form narrative structure to layer psychological traits and key elements of backstory. This chapter uses the case studies of Dexter and Breaking Bad to explore how serial dramas construct characters with different approaches to relationships, flashbacks, repetitions, memory, narration, and performance. Through these examples, the chapter considers how serials foreground shifting character/viewer relationships over the course of a series, and how such shifts in sympathy and appeal can both sustain and derail an ongoing serial.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 1 Comprehension
One of the challenges of a long-form serial narrative is maintaining viewer comprehension throughout a variety of viewing practices, whether it is weekly and seasonal installments through broadcast schedules, or the more variable patterns afforded by DVDs, online viewing, and DVRs. This chapter considers how television serials have created methods to both maximize comprehension and play with knowledge differentials between characters and viewers, building on cognitive theories of narrative comprehension. I focus on issues of viewer memory as addressed both within the core narrative text and associated paratexts (like recaps and DVD extras), considering the varying ways programs trigger memories and exploit viewer’s fading memories to create unusual surprises in programs like Battlestar Galactica and Lost. The chapter also analyzes different approaches to suspense, surprise, anticipation, and curiosity that have developed for the form of long-form serial television.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Endings
American commercial television differs from the rest of the world in how it privileges a model where a successful series never ends, with a series ending as either a sign of commercial failure and/or creative exhaustion, and often shows end by abrupt cancellation more than planned conclusion. In the last decade, more series have planned their conclusions, creating a set of precedents for serial endings that variously embrace ambiguity, circularity, reflexivity, and finality. This chapter will look at the concluding seasons and episodes of Lost, The Wire, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under, and The Shield as exemplars of both narrative strategies and the divergent viewer and critic reactions triggered by various finales. It will also discuss open-ended season finales that offer both closure and the possibility of continuance, as with Terriers and Scrubs.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 3 Evaluation
Television studies, as forged by the influence of populist cultural studies, has been loath to include critical evaluation in its toolbox, as television’s own spot on the receiving end of numerous aesthetic condemnations has pushed evaluative criticism off the field’s agenda. In this chapter, I explore a model of contextualized evaluation that does not recreate universal aesthetic values, but rather looks at how a series can define its own terms and parameters of evaluation, and how television scholars might productively engage with questions of value. One facet of narrative complexity is that it appeals to many traditional markers of aesthetic value from other media, and this chapter will both acknowledge such tendencies and problematize the relevance of adopting evaluative criteria across media. Using the examples of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Wire, The Sopranos, Lost, Arrested Development, and Mad Men – all of which have been hailed by critics as among the greatest television series in the medium’s history – I discuss how we can enter into medium-specific debates over value without recreating a canon or exclusionary critical practice.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 Genre
Many complex series embrace a mode of genre mixing, ranging from the overt fusion of Buffy’s teen drama/horror, to The Wire’s revisionist and expansive shift from cop show to urban drama, to the hodgepodge of Lost’s genre stew. This chapter explores the role of genre within contemporary serial narratives, starting with the debatable influence that the soap opera may or may not have had on this mode of storytelling. By separating out the narrative norms of soap operas from the emotional appeals of melodrama, I argue that soap’s storytelling form is less vital to primetime serials than the discursive history that has linked seriality to the soap genre for decades. Instead, I consider how the emotional responses triggered by specific genres like soap operas, comedies, mysteries, and science-fiction play into the mixed-gender appeal of narratively complex series. I explore how shows like Alias, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, and The Good Wife play with such conventions in innovative ways that complicate well-established assumptions about various genre categories and their gendered appeals, pointing to the vital links between genre and narrative consumption.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 6 History
Although narrative complexity has emerged as a coherent storytelling mode in recent years, it has numerous important historical precedents dating back to the early years of American television. This chapter traces back the history of primetime television’s narrative form, looking at the key precedents of the two-parter, the recap, and the cliffhanger as they developed within the earlier programs and the critical reactions they triggered. Through reconsiderations of landmark programs like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gunsmoke, Peyton Place, Dallas, Hill Street Blues, Cheers, Wiseguy, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Seinfeld, I will show the gradual development of television’s complex narrative strategies, and posit some explanations for why the 2000s saw such an acceleration of storytelling innovation.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 Time
The defining feature of serial form involves time, with a long, drawn-out narrative segmented into discrete installments with built-in gaps; for television, these segmented episodes have been further temporally delimited by weekly and season schedules, as well as ad breaks sectioning off individual episodes. This chapter will explore the temporal dimension of television narrative, considering the different types of seriality found within contemporary programming, including character and relationship arcs, mysteries, and story arcs, and examining how such serial strategies co-exist with episodic norms and structures. The chapter will also look at the ways that temporal gimmicks, like flashbacks, flashforwards, ellipses, jumbled chronology, time travel, and real-time storytelling have become part of the storytelling vocabulary of series like 24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, How I Met Your Mother, and Pushing Daisies.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 Transmedia
As television series have become more complex in their narrative strategies, television itself has expanded its scope across a number of screens and platforms, complicating notions of medium-specificity at the very same time that television seems to have a clearer sense of distinct narrative form. This chapter will explore how television narratives are expanded and complicated through transmedia extensions, including video games, novelizations, websites, online video, and alternate reality games. With specific analyses of transmedia strategies for Alias, Buffy, Lost, and Breaking Bad, I will consider how television’s transmedia storytelling is grappling with issues of canonicity and audience segmentation, and how transmedia reframes viewer expectations for the core television serial. This chapter will also consider fan-generated transmedia properties, from fan wikis to vids to self-designed games, exploring what fans can teach the television industry about the possibilities of transmedia storytelling.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 3 Viewing Practices
Along with shifts in the television industry and technologies, viewer practices have adapted to the digital era with new developments in how people consume narrative television. This chapter explores the range of viewing practices that impact how television tells stories and complicate straightforward models of narrative comprehension, including spoiler fans, ludic puzzle-solvers, and rewatchers. Through detailed accounts of viewer practices around shows like Lost, The Wire, 24, and Buffy, I will suggest the necessity for doing empirical reception research in dialogue with theoretically-inflected narrative analysis to best understand the complexity of how people watch television, and foreground the undertheorized importance of “play” as as a dominant mode of television spectatorship.

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Comments

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Jason Mittell May 19, 2012 at 11:56 am

It’s unlikely to be ready by SCSMI, but you might want to look at my essay (which will be folded into the chapter) “Previously On,” about serial TV & memory (and originally presented at SCSMI). The blog version is online, or it’s in this book.

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2 Comments on paragraph 1

Kevin C. Neece March 6, 2011 at 10:57 am

I would recommend rethinking the title, only because you use the word “Television” twice between the title and subtitle. Even using “TV” would make it less redundant. My suggestion would be to try a play on words. Keep the subtitle as-is, but change the title to “TV Complex”. This would also be a more eye-grabbing title: a simple, large-font phrase that will provoke curiosity.

Reply to Kevin C. Neece
1. Jason Mittell March 19, 2011 at 1:42 pm
  
  The title is a placeholder until the manuscript is done, as such things typically get worked over with the press. I’m reluctant to use “TV” for some reason – it feels somehow diminutive!
  
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Rachel Thorburn March 2, 2011 at 2:28 am

If you want this book to have appeal to non-academics, you must unpack the prose. Although I realize this is a book proposal and therefore density makes sense, if you want to draw readers in more, it is essential that you give examples to illustrate the terms you use and to give more time and space for each phase or concept to be parsed.

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Jason Mittell March 2, 2011 at 7:30 am

Agreed 100%! The proposal needs to present lots of content quickly. The book will focus a lot more on telling the story & engaging readers. Thanks for commenting!

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2 Comments on paragraph 4

Katherine Rowe March 22, 2011 at 6:59 pm

“structural constraints based around commercial breaks and rigid schedules”
One of the crucial opportunities this book stakes out is the opportunity to dismantle what most creative artists would see as a false premise. Constraints enable creativity — not the opposite. Think of the sonnet sequence as a case in point: there’s hardly a form more formulaic, repetitive, rigid, and periodic. All of which may produce brilliantly complex art.

Reply to Katherine Rowe
1. Jason Mittell March 23, 2011 at 1:51 pm
  
  Agreed – and I’d point to Sean O’Sullivan’s work arguing that the 13-episode season functions like a sonnet in terms of the macro-structure of the series. And the moments in which the rigidity of routine & structure is violated creates moments of expressive possibilities that seem unavailable in more free-form artistic forms. Thanks for the comments!
  
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3 Comments on paragraph 5

Kevin C. Neece March 6, 2011 at 11:15 am

This paragraph might be a bit long. Shorter paragraphs tend to help you hold a reader’s interest and the proposal format is one that is seeking to keep the attention of someone who has a lot of these to go through. Try cutting it at places that present new ideas, like “Television has embraced genre mixing”. By the way, that should be hyphenated: “genre-mixing.”
On the sentence regarding daytime television structures, make the last clause the first: “Though the relationship between primetime and daytime serials is more complicated than is typically acknowledged, these recent developments…” At present, the last clause is like a tail on the end of the sentence and makes the sentence feel long. If you put it up front, it sets up the main idea of the sentence and allows it to have more prominence in the reader’s mind. It also makes this clause feel less like an afterthought.
Notice that in the above example, I changed “although” to “Though” and added an “is” between “than” and “typically.”
Okay, I’m not sure if you’re wanting the feedback to be this detailed. So, I’m going to stop making notes before I edit the whole proposal! Let me know if this is what you’re looking for.
Good concept, by the way. As a media and pop culture writer, I’d say this is definitely a subject worth discussing!

Reply to Kevin C. Neece
1. Jason Mittell March 19, 2011 at 1:46 pm
  
  I’m not sure if copy editing is that useful at this stage (and I fear what a peer-sourced copy edit would look like), but thanks for reading & commenting!
  
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Kevin C. Neece March 6, 2011 at 11:18 am

Speaking of long paragraphs, this formatting hid some of my paragraph breaks. Didn’t want to look like a hypocrite! 😉

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Chad Harriss March 14, 2011 at 11:59 pm

Don’t forget technological innovation and its impact at the production level.

Reply to Chad Harriss
1. Jason Mittell March 20, 2011 at 1:12 pm
  
  Chad – what specifically are you thinking of in terms of production technology? Certainly the rise of HD matters in terms of visual style & cultural value, but do you see related shifts in narrative form? Thanks for commenting!
  
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Chad Harriss March 20, 2011 at 6:41 pm

I was thinking specifically of Jeremy Butler’s work regarding the shift toward zero degree style in the sitcom. It also strikes me that the timeframe when you began to notice increasing levels of complexity also seems to coincide with the rise of computer editing, which makes me wonder how much the increase in editorial choices has altered narrative form. I can certainly recall examples where an acknowledgement of these choices made their way into episodes.
For example, I might point to the Scrubs episode “My Life in Four Cameras” the viewer is treated to half of the ep shot in multi-camera mode and half in single-camera mode. Of course, this shift in production mode is also paired with the high degree of reflexivity that marks that show. This shift in production mode complicates the episode for viewers by asking them to recognize the creative processes–a level of understanding that presumably will extend to the viewing of all episodes of the program. Other programs, like iCarly, also intertwine production and distribution technologies into the stories that they tell.
Of course another way to view technology and narrative would be through a transmedia lens. In particular, blogs and Twitter accounts maintained by fictional characters might be of interest. Or, recognizing the ways that HIMYM extends beyond the program through Robyn Sparkles’ MySpace and music videos to Barney Stinson’s authoring of a best selling book might prove fertile grounds for technological exploration. There is also a great scene from the “Kept a Guy Locked in a Trunk” episode of My Name is Earl where a character directly references TVWithoutPity.com and makes a meta-level joke about meta-level jokes.
I hope that clarifies my comment a bit.

Reply to Chad Harriss
1. Jason Mittell March 21, 2011 at 9:57 am
  
  Definitely clearer! I’ll certainly be talking about the transmedia technologies in the Transmedia chapter. And the rise of self-consciousness in production form is part of the operational aesthetic, like the mockumentary style, the Scrubs ep, etc. The first point about digital editing is a really interesting idea, but I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that it’s been an influence in narrative complexity – perhaps the rise of digital editing has encouraged a more streamlined production process, which has enabled more time to be spent on visuals & staging? But I don’t know for sure.
  I do know that the ease of video editing seems not to have made much of a difference in the writers room. For instance, Lost obviously had a massive task in maintaining continuity, but Gregg Nations (the continuity guru) didn’t use video clips in his records – instead the continuity database was just a bunch of MS Word files. So the opportunity to use the easier technology seemed not to matter in that instance. But I’ll keep looking for connections…
  
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Chad Harriss March 20, 2011 at 6:42 pm

Sorry about that formatting. It looks like spaces exist between graphs until you press enter.

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1 Comment on paragraph 12

Katherine Rowe March 22, 2011 at 6:24 pm

I’ll add a voice in support of a growing audience in traditional literature courses — noting that televisual texts are now sometimes integrated with conventional material (particularly in studies of serial literature), though the courses themselves may not be marked out as “television studies” courses.

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Ted Friedman March 4, 2011 at 2:45 am

I love the idea of an iPad version with embedded video! Re: the two-level model, I recommend, if you haven’t seen it, The Exploit by Alex Gallaway & Eugene Thacker.

Reply to Ted Friedman
Katherine Rowe March 22, 2011 at 7:10 pm

Two related issues to address in this paragraph:

Fair use: I’m curious how convinced potential publishers are that video quotations constitute fair use?

Platform: one of the things I think we (scholars) badly need from born-digital monographs is some degree of standardization, so we can find out how to make multimedia arguments well and build audiences for them. I very much like the idea of scholarship that sits closer to — and works within — vernacular communication forms. With those two issues in mind I’d eschew the standalone app model and explore a format already being tested (which might entail rethinking the press of choice…) by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/) and/or Critical Commons (http://criticalcommons.org/).

Reply to Katherine Rowe
1. Jason Mittell March 23, 2011 at 1:58 pm
  
  In terms of fair use, I’m confident that we can use the video clips as fair use, following the guidelines of the SCMS policy paper from last year. NYU Press seems supportive, but if they back down, we could release the digital version through MediaCommons (which has an agressive fair use policy).
  As for the platform, I agree that establishing standards & easily replicable models is key. I’m looking into Scalar (which I’ve been told might be app-able), and if it ever crosses the development threshhold, Sophie is another model. The reason I’m leaning toward an app is that I fear the web-based model of publishing is not well-suited to long-form reading – it seems like many people would rather printout a PDF or webpage than read it on their computer. But the app model seems to growing as a way for many people to read via a mobile device, and would force a digital reader to stay in the platform where multimedia possibilites are active. However, I recognize that everything could change in 6 months, so my mind remains open…
  
  Reply to Jason Mittell
Katherine Rowe March 24, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Long-form argument is clearly a key value here.
For this monograph, the real question I have is how much of it should unfold — advance — through multimedia modes and how much via conventional text, as here. I am persuaded by video essays by Laurence Lessig and Michael Wesch that multimedia forms work well for much longer arcs of analysis than we are used to. I found the video essay by your student Michael Suen, on “Storytelling in the Wire“, quite compelling and I’d be very open to a monograph that unfolds in whole or in part in this mixed-media way. It would put the evidence much closer to the argument.

Reply to Katherine Rowe
1. Jason Mittell March 25, 2011 at 9:29 am
  
  This is a key issue – can I use the video & interface possibilities to strengthen the argument, rather than just using video illustrations (which are certainly valuable but don’t tap the full possibilities of the format)? I’m inspired by work like Michael’s and my colleague Christian Keathley (and his students creating multimedia essays), but am not sure that I have the editing skills to convey ideas that effectively. But it will definitely be something I’ll try during the gap between finishing the manuscript and publishing the digital format.
  
  Reply to Jason Mittell

Tommaso Tocci March 1, 2011 at 1:32 pm

In looking at the ways in which the author casts its shadow onto the text, David Simon and Kurt Sutter are the two most recent elements of interest, I would say.

Simon because of the energy and drive he employs in trying to pre-define its work and claim ‘auctoritas’, both in terms of models and inspirations; he is certainly not an elusive author, and his real life assertive and intense personality almost manages to ‘kill’ the implied author of his work by overtaking our perception of it. This is also due to the unusual nature of his most important work (The Wire), so intellectually charged and carrying almost from its inception the burden of being ‘the best show ever’. The Wire’s reception has always been structured in a heavy ‘top-down’ pattern, even more than other HBO shows; it’s so embedded in the series’ DNA that such a strong connection with its primary form of authorship is easily understandable.

Sutter, on the other hand, might be the first author to provide a meta-narrative evolution of his own role. We always note how the last decade (with a bit of help from the 90s) has brought to prominence the anti-hero figure, and Sutter has taken this to a whole new meta-level positioning himself as the first equivalent of the anti-hero at the level of authorship. An agent who not only assumes the new perception of authors but builds on it, giving a narrative connotation to his presence that results in what we know very well in the Twitter-sphere and with his blog.
I believe these two case studies constitute an evolution in the study of televisual authorship. Whedon’s authorship is probably still a product of the 90’s, Moore’s is heavily shaped by the genre element, while Cuse&Lindelof are a full-blown mass market phenomenon of the 2000’s (crucial but also crossing over to other fields).

Reply to Tommaso Tocci
1. Jason Mittell March 1, 2011 at 10:14 pm
  
  I agree that both Simon & Sutter are great examples of these issues. Simon enters into the public conversation via traditional media (op-eds, interviews, lectures) but creates a bold persona that almost denies his status of TV writer, while Sutter is all about self-defining through his own media presence & performing an exaggerated identity. I think especially concerning season 5 of The Wire, Simon’s personal story became so linked to the story that it colored many critics’ opinions.
  Thanks for the comment!
  
  Reply to Jason Mittell
Bryan Alexander March 1, 2011 at 5:48 pm

This might be a good place to mention Babylon-5’s creator. On the one hand the show features a very strong writer model, given that jms not only created a broad world, but also wrote so many episodes. On the other hand, there’s the active fan world, both in resource creation (Lurker’s Guide) and active discussion with jms (email, Usenet).

Reply to Bryan Alexander
Jason Mittell March 1, 2011 at 10:23 pm

JMS is a great prototype for this, using old “new media” to engage fans directly, as well as having a publicly known “5-year plan” for the narrative. Incidentally, I think back on how the concept of having such a plan for a TV series seemed ridiculous back in the 90s, while in recent years the assumption is that any hyper-serialized show should be planned out. Thanks for helping to start the conversation!

Reply to Jason Mittell
Tommaso Tocci March 2, 2011 at 5:10 am

Oh, the planning. They evolved, they rebelled… and they have a plan! Yes, the shift in perception has been huge. Now there is almost a stigma for those who do not have a master plan set out from the start. It is the mark of authorship, I suppose. The one exception in the past few years has been 24. We regard it as one of these ‘new’ texts of the age of narrative complexity (which does not automatically translate into quality, as you have pointed out in the past), and it was indeed cutting-edge, unique televisual storytelling, but it was run basically like a old-school soap opera, making it up as they went along. That’s the core contradiction of 24, and what makes it fascinating (because – for a while – it worked).
On a similar subject, it would be interesting to look at how this new exposed form of authorship deals with ‘intermittence’, or the unfortunate circumstance in which the author leaves before the show’s end. That’s the flipside of the authorship coin – think Aaron Sorkin (one of, if not the most unique and recognizable single voice in American contemporary visual storytelling) with The West Wing, and how it changed the show immensely.
Or even the curious case of Shawn Ryan, who is certainly a primary force in recent years’ serial landscape, but is not the classical author that we have in mind when we think of his ‘classical’ role in The Shield. He switches back and forth from network to cable, he’s the showrunner for a year over there, then he’s over here assisting with this other thing… what does that say about his own fluid, intermittent authorship?

Reply to Tommaso Tocci
Jason Mittell March 2, 2011 at 9:12 am

Great points! I definitely plan on talking about Sorkin & his departure, which caused changes in the show & in the paratextual discourse.
I think Shawn Ryan is an interesting case – he’s regarded less as a singular creative voice, like Whedon or Sorkin, and more as a supremely effective manager of a writing room. In part because he’s a super nice guy (he’s a Middlebury alum so I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with him a few times) & doesn’t place himself in the center of attention with either his writing style or public persona. So he was asked to help David Mamet run The Unit, brought in to rehab Lie to Me, and partnered with Ted Griffin on Terriers (which Ryan says is written in Griffin’s voice). Ryan is more in the mold of the old-school TV producer rather than the contemporary auteur, but some of his shows are marked as more “authored” than others.

Reply to Jason Mittell

Karen Pearlman May 19, 2012 at 11:36 am

I am particularly interested in this chapter on Comprehension as I am presenting a paper at the upcoming SCSMI conference inquiring into an aspect of memory and serial TV. Is it likely to be available online soon? I would be very pleased to be able to reference it!

Reply to Karen Pearlman

0 Comments on paragraph 26

3 Comments on paragraph 27

Ted Friedman March 4, 2011 at 3:12 am

What about critiques of complexity for complexity’s sake? I’m thinking here of examples such as the punk attack on prog rock as bloated and inauthentic, and celebration of “simple” 3-chord song structures and blunt lyrics for their directness, energy, clarity, and accessibility for both artists and fans. Does the book presume that complexity per se is inherently a good thing, and that “complex TV” is better than “simple TV”? If so, why? If not, how can you avoid having the implications of the term (sophistication, artistic ambition, cultural capital) naturalize a hierarchical valuation of “complex TV” over “simple TV”? Is there room in your discussion for shows that are complex yet aesthetic failures (Flash Forward?), and shows that are simple yet aesthetic successes (maybe an intentionally primitivist show like Lucky Louie?)

Reply to Ted Friedman
1. Jason Mittell March 4, 2011 at 2:00 pm
  
  I totally agree with your last point – in an earlier piece about evaluation, I use the examples of 24 and Everybody Loves Raymond – I much prefer the effective simplicity of the latter to the inelegant complexity of the former. I’m not sure that we’re at the stage where there’s a punk backlash – to extend the music analogy, we’re still in the late ’60s (as I’ve compared The Wire to Astral Weeks and Lost to Sgt. Pepper). I don’t think we’ve seen the too-ornate-for-its-own-good equivalent of ELP yet…
  Thanks for the comments!
  
  Reply to Jason Mittell
Katherine Rowe March 22, 2011 at 6:51 pm

I had a similar set of questions, in part because of the potential circularity of starting with the terms of value established by these works themselves, which circulate within the same discourse field as television studies (i.e., TV does/does not have aesthetic value). Is there a way to get around the problem that the shows in question market specifically to discriminating consumers (which would certainly include how we TV-loving-academics see ourselves)? They do this by differentiating themselves from “conventional TV” on many of these same markers of cultural value — auteurism, aesthetic complexity, highbrow citations, genre play, etc…

Reply to Katherine Rowe

0 Comments on paragraph 28

6 Comments on paragraph 29

Hollis Griffin March 2, 2011 at 10:57 am

I’m not sure how you plan on laying out the chapters, but as a reader and as a scholar, I’d want this historical context sooner. Because up until now, this argument was striking me as rather presentist. I would want this info upfront: how does the formal and narrative paradigm you’re talking about differ from other historical moments, what are the points of continuity, how do other modes of narration exist alongside the one you’re talking about, etc. This is to say — the kind of narrative practice you’re laying out isn’t the only kind of television textuality at work in the medium at the moment. I think it needs some more context, even briefly.

Reply to Hollis Griffin
Jason Mittell March 2, 2011 at 11:24 am

The plan is to have the chapters arranged as listed here, alphabetical beyond the Intro & Complexity in Context chapters. In the Complexity chapter, there will be some history, mostly on the rise of complex experiments in the 1990s, but this is the place for the deeper history of things like the two-parter. For someone looking for more history earlier, they could certainly read this chapter first, but I would imagine that many readers would also rather skip the history. The goal of this structure is to allow & encourage different reading strategies.
Thanks for joining the conversation!

Reply to Jason Mittell
Steven Rubio March 4, 2011 at 1:59 am

It is understandable that you would avoid spending much time on radio in a project about television, but the History section might benefit from a brief explanation of how the narrative forms of radio shows were transferred to television. Gunsmoke was “Gunsmoke” before it hit TV, and Dragnet the TV series was essentially the radio show with pictures. It could be said that the development of complex narrative strategies in TV marked a shift, not merely from the early years of American television, but from the early days of network radio, when the idea of series (and the sponsors that came with them) took hold.

Reply to Steven Rubio
1. Jason Mittell March 4, 2011 at 2:01 pm
  
  I agree, and will definitely discuss radio narrative precedents for soap operas & primetime series (like thatAmos n Andy was explicitly framed as a serial). I’ve written enough about Dragnet in my first book, but the norms of the episodic procedural clearly predated TV. Thanks for commenting!
  
  Reply to Jason Mittell
Bryan Alexander March 4, 2011 at 10:40 am

I’d be interested in a radio background as well. There’s a large body of sf and horror radio, which influence writers in those genres across multiple media, inc. tv.

Reply to Bryan Alexander
Lynn Reed March 31, 2011 at 9:20 am

For the Peyton Place section, I would love to see if you could get an interview with Michael Gleason. He was a staff writer there, did rather traditional series writing in the ’70s, and then wound up at MTM as co-creator and showrunner of Remington Steele — which had a largely serialized character and relationship storyline within a traditional mystery structure where the cases were solved at the end of the episode.
It’s curious to me that he was the only executive producer at MTM at the time of Hill Street and St. Elsewhere who had experience writing serialized drama. I wonder what those dynamics were like at MTM, and whether Gleason’s previous experience on Peyton Place was considered valuable as the serialized form was being developed.

Reply to Lynn Reed

Ted Friedman March 4, 2011 at 2:49 am

Re: play, you may find my Flow piece “The Play Paradigm: What Media Studies Can Learn from Game Studies” helpful: http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-play-paradigm-what-media-studies-can-learn-from-game-studies-ted-friedman-georgia-state-university/

Reply to Ted Friedman
1. Jason Mittell March 4, 2011 at 2:07 pm
  
  Thanks for this link – I read it a couple of years ago, but forgot about it. Definitely speaks directly to the point I’m trying to explore here.
  
  Reply to Jason Mittell
Bourdaa Mélanie March 18, 2011 at 4:01 pm

Dear Jason, this paragraph is of great interest for me (as the rest of the book proposal of course). I wrote an article recently on the use of cyberethnography to analyze viewers’ practices. I studied the TV practices of BSG’s fans. If you are interested in reading it, I can send it to you.

Reply to Bourdaa Mélanie

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What digital humanities teaches publishing. Or vice versa. « We Who Are About To Die September 20, 2011 at 10:25 am

[…] book project, Complex Television, to be published by NYU Press. There is a section on the book proposal, with comments and feedback discussion on just about every paragraph. This is what I think some of […]