As is typical for me at the end of the school year, my to-do list has a pile of publishing projects that I’ve put off to the last minute. So I’ve spent the last month knocking things off the list with general success – I revised an essay on Lostpedia that will be coming out in the next issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, and contributed a short piece to a roundtable on genre for Mediascape.

But my main writing has been focused on an essay for an anthology called Intermediality & Storytelling co-edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Marina Grishakova. I proposed to adapt my presentation given at last summer’s Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image conference; as I blogged last year, my presentation explored how American prime time television copes with the challenges of cuing viewers’ long-term memories, which often catalog years of story material. Alas my presentation was oral/slide only, so I spent the past couple of weeks converting it to essay form.

Beneath the fold I’ve included the entire essay, and would appreciate any comments, as I’ll have a chance to revise before publication. I’m particularly interested if my examples, which include moments from Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under, Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, The Wire, and many more shows, make any sense to readers who haven’t seen the relevant programs. And as it’s written for an international anthology not primarily focused on television, I’ve included a bit of industrial and technological context that will might be fairly redundant for anyone reading a blog called Just TV.

[And a technical note for software geeks: OpenOffice drags & drops formatted text directly into WordPress! I've never had an easier time migrating a long document into this blog - OO FTW!]

Thanks in advance for any comments, and must note that unlike the rest of this blog’s CreativeCommons license, this post is ©2009 by Jason Mittell.

Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory

In recent years, American television has embraced a model of narrative complexity that has proven to be both artistically innovative and financially lucrative. Dozens of series across genres, from comedies like Seinfeld and Arrested Development to dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 24, have explored serialized forms and non-conventional storytelling strategies such as intertwined flashbacks and shifting narrative perspectives that had previously been quite rare within mainstream American television. Serialized television has emerged as a vibrant artistic form that many critics suggest rival previous models of long-form narrative, such as 19^th century novels.

Television’s poetics of narrative complexity are wide ranging. Series embrace a balance between episodic and serial form, allowing for partial closure within episodes while maintaining broad narrative arcs across episodes and even seasons. Such programs also embrace more elaborate storytelling techniques, such as temporal play, shifting perspectives and focalization, repetition, and overt experimentation with genre and narrative norms. Many contemporary programs are more reflexive in their narration, embracing an operational aesthetic encouraging viewers to pay attention to the level of narrative discourse as well as the storyworld. In all of these instances, narratively complex television programs both demand that viewers pay attention more closely than typical for the medium, and allow for viewers to experience more confusion in their process of narrative comprehension. In short, television has become more difficult to understand, requiring viewers to engage more fully as attentive viewers (see Mittell 2006).

In this essay, I want to explore how complex serials strategically trigger, confound, and play with viewers’ memories, considering how television storytelling strategies fit with our understanding of the cognitive mechanics of memory and highlighting the poetic techniques that programs use to engage viewers and enable long-term comprehension. The television medium employs specific strategies distinct from other narrative media. For instance, cinematic narratives typically engage a viewer’s short-term memory, cuing and obscuring moments from within the controlled unfolding of a two-hour feature film, while literature designs its stories to be consumed at the reader’s own pace and control, allowing for an on-demand return to previous pages as needed. The typical model of television consumption, divided into weekly episodes and annual seasons, constrains producers interested in telling stories that transcend individual installments, as any viewer’s memory of previous episodes is quite variable, with a significant number of viewers having missed numerous episodes altogether. These constraints have helped lead to a specific set of storytelling conventions and poetic possibilities that distinguish television as a narrative medium.

Before exploring television’s mechanics of memory, it is important to understand the numerous reasons why it has taken 50 years for television to broadly adopt such complex poetic possibilities. The commercial television industry in the United States avoids risks in search of economic stability, embracing a strategy of imitation and formula that often results in a model of “least objectionable content.” For decades, the commercial television industry was immensely profitable producing programming with minimal formal variety outside the conventional genre norms of sitcoms and procedural dramas. Serial narratives were primarily confined to the lowbrow arena of daytime soap operas, with more prestigious primetime offerings avoiding continuing storylines in lieu of episodic closure and limited continuity.

Economic strategies privileged the episodic form―in large part, serialized content posed problems for the production industry’s cash cow, syndication. Reruns distributed by syndicators could be aired in any order, making complex continuing storylines an obstacle to the lucrative aftermarket. Additionally, network research departments believed that even the biggest hit series could be guaranteed a consistent carryover audience of no more than 1/3 from week-to-week, meaning that the majority of viewers would not be sufficiently aware of a series’s backstory to follow continuing storylines. Coupled with the general risk-averse attitude of networks and the ongoing success of episodic programming, there was little economic rationale for television producers to undertake the risks necessary to embark on experiments in more serialized and complex storytelling.

These industrial conditions have changed over the last twenty years, with the much-reported erosion of broadcast networks’ audience size, and increased competition from cable, satellite, online video, and other media. In the wake of decreased audience shares, the industry found itself in a situation where programming risks could be justified as an attempt to discover a new model of popular programming―audience shares that would once be considered fringe or cult now qualify as mainstream hits. Cable channels could find a lucrative dedicated audience by creating programming that demanded regular viewing, and in the case of HBO and Showtime, help justify monthly subscription fees. Additionally, new technologies of recording and playback, from DVDs to DVRs to online streaming, all allow viewers more opportunities to catch-up on missed episodes. Thus the underlying contexts of television programming have transformed sufficiently to allow a mode of narrative complexity to flourish since the late-1990s (see Lotz, 2007).

As with any popular narrative mode, specific formal strategies have emerged to manage audience comprehension. These strategies have been formed through a mixture of industrial conventions and norms, and creative innovations that have shifted dominant practices. Even though the rise of cable and decline in network domination has resulted in greater risk-taking and innovation, there are still crucial assumptions that shape television storytelling. The industry still adheres to the view that viewers are rarely dedicated enough to consistently watch every episode in sequence. Thus producers are encouraged to develop strategies to fill-in narrative gaps and catch up erratic viewers. Additionally, the television industry is understandably reluctant to program a series whose narrative is so densely constructed that it is impossible for new viewers to leap in mid-series.

Along with this industrial conventional wisdom, viewers bring their own assumptions as to what they expect from narrative television. Even though other sites of evidence suggests that viewers are more likely to watch a series consistently than the industry assumes, most viewers still want to be able to miss an episode or start a series midway through a season without being alienated or confused. They also assume that there will be some means available to them to catch-up on necessary backstory, whether within the show itself or through some external site. Finally, they come to complex narratives with the expectation that mysteries and enigmas created within a series will eventually be revealed, hopefully with a satisfying resolution.

Television’s mechanisms of storytelling also provide some important constraints on how stories can be told. More than almost any other medium, commercial television has a highly-restrictive structured delivery system: weekly episodes of prescribed lengths, often with required breaks for advertisements. A given season will have a specific number of episodes, with variable scheduling for how long breaks between episodes might be―often producers cannot plan on precisely when a series will be aired or even in some extreme cases, in what order episodes might appear. Additionally, the series is consumed as it is still being produced, meaning that adjustments are often made midstream due to unexpected circumstances. Such adjustments can be due to casting constraints, as in an actor’s pregnancy, illness, or death, or feedback from networks, sponsors, or audience in reaction to an emerging storyline. Constraints like these make television storytelling distinct from nearly every other medium—a parallel would be if literature demanded the exact same page count for every chapter of every novel, regardless of genre, style or author.

Finally, a successful television series typically lacks a crucial element that has long been hailed as of supreme importance for a well-told story: an ending. Unlike nearly every other narrative medium, American commercial television operates on what might be termed the “infinite model” of storytelling―a series is deemed a success only as long as it keeps going. While other national television systems might end a successful series after a year or two, American series generally keep running as long as they are generating decent ratings. This becomes a significant issue for storytellers, who must design narrative worlds that are able to sustain themselves for years rather than closed narratives plans created for a specific run. Not surprisingly, this need to accommodate an infinite run privileges episodic content with little continuity and long-term story development, with recyclable characters and interchanging situations typical of police dramas and sitcoms.

Despite all of these constraints and norms, American television has developed a new mode of narrative complexity that pushes back against many of these limitations. One of the specific challenges that this mode has faced, with its emphasis on storyworld continuity and non-linear narration, is managing the memories of viewers. If the characters and events in the storyworld have internal coherence and continuity, then viewers need to follow along with the expansive narrative universe. When it concerns a series that is told over a period of months and years, this becomes a challenge for the mechanics of memory.

These challenges pull storytellers in a number of directions. Even though technologies and distribution systems have made it more possible to catch up on missed episodes, television producers still need to provide opportunities to fill-in gaps for viewers who may have missed an episode or two. However, they cannot be so redundant as to bore or annoy diehard fans who watch every episode, or DVD viewers who might be watching an entire season in a marathon binge. Likewise on some complex shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, dedicated fans might fill-in gaps between weekly episodes by reading online recaps and commentaries, keeping the events of previous weeks fresh in their minds. Thus writers need to balance between the needs of erratic and dedicated viewers.

Similarly, individual episodes need to manage the short-term memory of events that roll out over the course of the episode along with the longer term serialized recall from weeks, months, or even years beforehand. While the stereotype of the distracted television glance is less relevant today, especially concerning demanding narratives like The Wire or Mad Men, producers still need to create programs for a domestic environment that is more prone to split attention and accommodate viewers multitasking than for other media. Over the course of an episode, television narratives embed minor redundancies that remind viewers of key story information, ranging from establishing visuals locating a scene’s setting to subtle repetition of characters’ names and relationships. The entire process of narration in a television series needs to constantly reinforce story information and remind viewers of what they need to know to comprehend the next event.

Television producers have always erred toward redundancy and repetition in their narrative strategies, a tendency that was established in earlier modes of serial narrative. Before the last two decades, the primary model of serial television in America was the daytime soap opera, which developed its own conventions and norms for managing memory. As Robert Allen has explored, soaps embrace a poetics of redundancy―instead of treating repetition into a necessary evil, soaps raise it to an art form. Allen suggests that soap operas, which were designed both for dedicated fans as well as distracted and erratic viewers, derive their narrative pleasures less from the forward-moving plot of new events and developments, but more from the ripple effects of an event across the community of relationships within the drama (Allen, 1985).

The redundant narration of soap operas depends on a device that both facilitates viewer recall and the pleasures of watching character reactions to past events: diegetic retelling. Typically, a soap opera might portray a key event on-screen, although if it is a spectacle that would require a high-budget production like a car accident or disaster, it might occur off-screen. The event itself becomes less narratively important in its initial portrayal than in the chain of on-screen conversations about the event. Thus any single event might be retold through the dialogue-heavy conventions of the genre, as each character reacts to the news of hearing about the event and we witness the impact each moment of retelling has upon the characters and their web of relationships. Through this convention of recall, we are both repeatedly reminded of what happened with our attention focused on the characters and their emotional lives, making redundancy an active pleasure of the genre.

Soap operas use diegetic retelling within particular episodic structures. Typically an episode features between four and six separate storylines intercut throughout the hour, selecting between dozens of potential ongoing stories on a series. At the beginning of the episode, each storyline gets one scene to set up that day’s conversation, typically with the characters talking about some recent event and revealing some new information about how that event impacts their relationship or situation. These initial scenes are highly focused on retelling, reminding and catching viewers up about every element in the scene―previous events, relationships, settings, and even character names. As the episode progresses, the process of retelling continues, especially to remind viewers as each scene cycles back from a commercial break, but advances the plot by highlighting the new story elements rippling out from past events. At end of the episode, each scene concludes with a moment of uncertainty to prompt a series of retellings when the next episode featuring that storyline airs. While a viewer closely focused on every episode may find the level of repetition frustrating, more erratic, casual, and distracted viewers learn to use the redundancy as both a means of following the plot and enjoying the relationship-driven storytelling.

Prime time serials are far less dependent on the dialogue-based practice of diegetic retelling as a core narrative pleasure than daytime soaps, but still frequently use this traditional technique. Characters call each other by name and reference their relationships more frequently than in everyday life, using dialogue as a way to keep crucial character information active in our minds. Often past events are retold to new characters both to update them on the status of a situation and to remind us of what we have already seen. For a typical instance, early in Lost’s fourth season episode “Cabin Fever,” a scene shows mercenary leader Keamy arriving via helicopter on a freighter with an injured man. The ship’s doctor asks, “What did this to him?” Keamy replies, “A black pillar of smoke threw him 50 feet in the air… ripped his guts out,” retelling an event spectacularly portrayed two episodes earlier (“The Shape of Things to Come”). While anyone who saw the previous episode was unlikely to have forgotten the source of the injury, this diegetic retelling reminds us of the events via naturalistic dialogue and reinforces what we have already previously seen.

This example points to an important concept in the way that viewers make sense of ongoing serials. At this point in Lost’s run, a dedicated viewer will have watched 79 episodes over the course of four years, creating a vast array of narrative information to retain and recall. Even the most attentive and intent viewer could not possibly have all of that narrative information active in her operative working memory―most of the story information she has retained would be archived in long-term memory. When a character’s dialogue uses diegetic retelling, the viewer activates that bit of story information into working memory, making it part of her immediate narrative comprehension.¹ While certainly some viewers might have been actively thinking about the smoke monster’s attack from two weeks earlier when starting “Cabin Fever,” this diegetic retelling ensures that everyone has this context active in working memory while watching the rest of the episode, as subsequent events build upon this past event to motivate Keamy’s actions to find his betrayer and return to the island.

The use of dialog to recall previous events does not have to necessary be motivated toward clarity; diegetic retelling can also work to purposefully create a sense of confusion or curiosity. As a series, The Wire tends to avoid redundancy, favoring a naturalistic mode of long-term storytelling in which viewers are often confused as to who is who and how it everything fits together. Eventually over the course of a season, the characters, roles, and systems become clear, making the process of discovery part of the show’s narrative pleasure. However, some elements are left perpetually vague; for instance, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels is introduced in the first season as an upright, career-driven police officer. This perception is undercut when an FBI officer tells Detective McNulty that there’s some dirt in Daniels’s past, and that the police department covered it up. This information is never directly addressed or fully clarified in the first season, serving as backstory on the otherwise ethical Daniels. In the fourth season, Daniels is promoted up the ranks by the new mayor with possibilities of rising to Commissioner, prompting current Commissioner Burrell to mention to his confidants, “I happen to know he’s less the saint than he pretends to be.” This casual mention is the only direct reference to the scandal until the fifth season, when Daniels’s still-vague past crimes prevent him from taking the Commissioner job. For Wire fans, the casual reference to the dirt on Daniels rewards our long-term memories from years before, but prompts the continued curiosity into the character’s enigmatic past that is never fully revealed in detail.

Diegetic retelling typically uses dialogue as a means to activate past events into working memory, but more subtle cues can also serve a similar function. As television is both an audio and visual medium, visual cues can serve the function to activate long-term memories. For instance, in the third season Battlestar Galactica episode “Maelstrom,” pilot Kara Thrace gives Admiral William Adama a figurine of a goddess to use as a masthead for his model ship; at the end of that episode, Adama destroys the model out of grief when Thrace’s ship appears to be destroyed in a fatal crash. In the next season’s episode “Six of One,” Adama is shown rebuilding the model after Thrace has seemingly returned from the grave. Lingering shots of the figurine and ship activate memories of the earlier episode, adding resonance to these character’s relationship and the mysterious circumstances of Thrace’s survival, but without the explicit expository function of dialog. Typically, visual cues are more subtle than dialog, functioning less to catch-up viewers who might have missed an episode than integrating more directly into a naturalistic style of moving image storytelling.

Producers of long-form stories constantly need to balance the needs of forward narrative momentum with the ability to keep audience’s memories activated for relevant story information from previous episodes. While diegetic strategies of dialog and visual cues are a primary means for activating viewer memories, many programs use non-naturalistic techniques to trigger recall. The use of voiceover is a common way to convey story information via a more self-conscious mode of narration. While many writers condemn voiceover as overly literary and a lazy tool for film and television, it can be used effectively in certain genres like detective shows, serving to both guide viewers within the narrative world and offer a distinctive personality to the storytelling.

The film noir infused teen drama Veronica Mars uses often sarcastic first-person voiceover narration by the titular character to both keep viewers on track with the complex story and convey the character’s perspective on narrative events. For instance, in the first season episode “Silence of the Lamb,” Veronica is helping her friend Mac grapple with the discovery that she was switched at birth with another baby. Veronica’s voiceover narration intones, “I could tell Mac I know how she feels, but the truth is, I don’t. When I had the opportunity to learn my paternity, I chose blissful ignorance with a side of gnawing doubt.” This reference to Veronica’s paternity refers to an event from two episodes earlier, as Veronica discovered that her mother had been unfaithful and she ordered a kit to test her father’s DNA, but decided not to go through with the test. While Veronica’s mysterious parentage does not become a significant plot point until later in the season, recalling this previous event helps viewers draw parallels between Mac and Veronica, and colors with way that Veronica and her father interact later in the episode.

Less commonly for television, voiceover narration can resemble the more literary model of third-person omniscient storytellers. Such narrators typically act only to frame a story, as in Rod Serling’s opening and closing narration on The Twilight Zone, but some recent series have played with third-person voiceover narration as a self-conscious device. Pushing Daisies uses the voice of Jim Dale, recognizable as the reader of the Harry Potter audiobooks, as an omniscient narrator to both present new story information and remind us of past events. In episode seven, “Smell of Success,” the narrator comments, “Chuck continued to keep the secret ingredient of her pies secret. Not even Olive Snook knew the baked secret she delivered contained homeopathic mood-enhancers meant to pry Chuck’s aunts out of their funk.” This voiceover reminds us of a plot development introduced four episodes earlier and that continued to run through the season; the reminder helps viewers remember both what is happening and who knows what about the secret pie ingredient. Given Pushing Daisies‘ highly elaborate narrative mechanics and fanciful storyworld, the omniscient narrator’s storybook style, reinforced by the intertextual link to Harry Potter, functions both to manage memories and promote a self-conscious playful tone.

An even more farcical use of third-person voiceover can be found in the sitcom Arrested Development, where producer Ron Howard narrates the action about a dysfunctional wealthy family as if he is providing deadpan commentary within a nature documentary (see Thompson, 2007). Howard’s narration constantly fills in gaps and moves the story forward, allowing the fast-paced show to cover an astounding amount of story ground in a half-hour. The narrator frequently provides a clarifying reference to a previous episode―in the second season episode, “The One Where They Build a House,” Tobias appears with blue paint on his ear, leading Howard to clarify, “Tobias had recently auditioned as an understudy for the silent performance-art trio, the Blue Man Group,” an event that occurred in the previous episode. Howard’s deadpan narration often serves to humorously undercut or comment on the character’s action, providing narrative momentum, clarifying recall, and comedic density.

Arrested Development’s narration highlights how moving image media rely on more than just language to convey meaning―often the narrator’s comments are accompanied by images and scenes to further trigger memories and move the narrative forward. Following the comment on Tobias and the Blue Man Group, the scene shifts to a flashback of Tobias auditioning for the part. While this references an event that happened over the course of the previous episode, this scene was never shown, making it a flashback within the storyworld but adding new narrative information beyond just triggering recall. Arrested Development uses more than flashback scenes to retell past events, relying on a number of pseudo-documentary techniques for comedic effect. Later in the same episode, Michael and his son are talking about how he is no longer in charge of the family company. Howard reminds us of another event from the previous episode: “In fact, since Michael’s father escaped from prison, his brother G.O.B. had been made president.” The visuals cut to a shot of a newspaper reporting both the prison escape (complete with still photo taken from the previous episode) and the leadership succession. The scene then shifts to a conversation between Michael and G.O.B., in which they recount the events that led to G.O.B.’s presidency and the accompanying criminal investigation, all framed with the running gag of Michael disingenuously saying, “I have no problem with that,” which is even quoted in the newspaper. The effect of these narrative strategies is to combine a range of ways to prompt viewer recall while maintaining a humorous tone and self-conscious style.

Since narration is not necessarily verbal in moving image media like film and television, other techniques can be used to retell information aside from voiceover. Flashbacks are a more common technique than voiceover to incorporate previous events into an episode, and like voiceover, they can follow first or third-person focalization. A first-person subjective flashback is more common, presenting a character’s memories as cued by suggestive close-ups, subjective visuals, and special effects. For instance, in the season four Battlestar Galactica episode, “Guess What’s Coming To Dinner,” Cylon leader Natalie tells a group of humans that being rescued by Kara Thrace was their destiny. Kara watches the speech as the image begins to blur and break-up, leading into a subjective flashback of Kara being told that she is the “harbinger of death” in the previous episode. While this was an important prophecy that viewers are likely to recall, the explicit flashback both activates the memory and highlights its importance to Kara in imagining her own role in the battle between humans and Cylons. Reinforcing this line by re-showing the scene via flashback makes it more prominent in the show’s long-term mythology, which proves to be a central narrative concern in the show’s final season. Such glimpses of character’s memories via flashbacks are a common cue to trigger a viewer’s own memories, promote empathy with a main character, and frame our comprehension of an upcoming set of events.

Flashbacks can be paired with voiceover narration as a way of visualizing a narrator’s memories. Veronica Mars frequently uses this device, as we see bits from Veronica’s memories and clues about a lengthy mystery, often that we witness multiple times throughout a season. Comedies can use a similar technique, such as on My Name Is Earl, where Earl will reference a minor character we’ve met previously, and narrate a flashback comprised of earlier appearances and footage. In these instances, the voiceover typically serves as a determining thread of knowledge, framing previous scenes and cuing the relevant memories of earlier events and relationships as needed to advance the ongoing story.

Flashbacks presented from a more objective third-person perspective, or what we might call replays, are more commonly used as a way to fill in backstory rather than triggering memories―series like Lost, Jack and Bobby, and Boomtown use atemporal storytelling to craft their complex narratives, but flashbacks are rarely used to trigger memories rather than present new narrative material on such programs. Flashbacks of previously-seen events that are not framed as character memories are quite uncommon. Crime shows like C.S.I. often use replays in the context of retelling the previously-seen crime scene, but present new narrative information in the retelling, making the flashback less about memory than gap-filling. Damages and The Nine both use complex atemporal structures, portraying previous events repeatedly throughout the season and adding more information each time to string together a new storythread―again, this model of repetition is more about filling in gaps in multiple timelines rather than reminding us what we might have forgotten. Matt Hills discusses such objective flashbacks in the most recent version of the British show Doctor Who, but suggests that they function more to invite new viewers into the complex narrative rather refresh the memories of long-term fans (Hills, 2009).

A more common place to see such replays is reality television. Subjective flashbacks are a rarity, but it is quite common for a reality show replay earlier scenes and moments to refresh our memories of previous events. This technique is more consistent with the documentary style of reality television, as a subjective flashback would feel out-of-place, and the replays can be motivated as coming from the more omniscient documentary gaze. Reality television also uses more short-term replays, often returning from a commercial break by repeating the final few moments from the previous segment, or similarly starting a new episode with the final scene of the last. Scripted television sometimes adopts this technique between weeks as well, starting the new episode by replaying an earlier cliffhanger moment a bit to regain momentum and refresh viewers’ memories.

The most common examples of objective replays triggering memories within American narrative television might be within comedies. One recent trend has been the rise of the cutaway aside as a comedic technique, commonly found in animated series like Family Guy or single-camera sitcoms like Scrubs. Such asides frequently cut from the main action to an often random vignette to offset or comment on whatever just happened in the story. These asides can be fantasy sequences, unknown moments from a character’s past, or replays from past episodes. An example of the latter comes from “Kidney Now,” a third season episode of 30 Rock. Tracy tells Kenneth that he never cries, which cuts away to a montage of six moments from previous episodes showing Tracy crying. The sequence is certainly functions as a comedic aside, but builds upon our memories of Tracy’s frequent crying jags that counters Tracy’s own statement. However, the paucity of relevant examples suggests that replays are a comparatively less utilized strategy to promote memory recall.

Thus far, the strategies of triggering memories I have discussed all occur within the diegetic narration of serial television. However, television has also adopted a number of strategies outside of the core storytelling text to help manage memories. Most notably, most contemporary serials air a one-to-two-minute recap before each episode to summarize key events “previously on” the series. These recaps are generally crafted by producers, choosing key moments that they believe vital to refresh viewers’ memories for upcoming storylines and to enable new viewers to get on board with the series. While they are designed for the weekly original airings, recaps often do get included on DVDs, with some series offering the option of viewing each episode with or without recaps, while others leave them integrated into the core episode. The presence or absence of recaps can drastically change the way episodes are consumed and comprehended.

Most recaps highlight the most pertinent narrative information for the upcoming episode. For instance, the Veronica Mars episode “Silence of the Lamb,” replays three brief scenes in the recap, drawing from three different episodes, ranging back over nine weeks. The scenes capture highly expository moments―first is a two-line exchange between Veronica’s father and former sheriff Keith Mars and his successor Lamb, discussing the controversial murder case of Lily Kane, the basis of the main season-long arc. Next is the scene where Veronica and Mac meet, setting up Mac’s role in this episode’s primary plot. Finally, shots of Veronica investigating her mother’s past are overlaid with a voice-over explaining the contested paternity, which sets up the secondary plot of this episode. In just 30 seconds, the show triggers which long-term plotlines need to be activated into working memory to comprehend this episode’s developments. However, these clips would mean almost nothing to someone who had not seen most of the previous episodes, as the snippets are far too minimal to actually provide adequate exposition for new viewers. Just as notable is what the recap omits, with no reference to major characters Logan and Duncan—these characters do not appear in this episode, and thus can stay archived in long-term memory.

Recaps can serve more expository roles, especially early in a series run. The second episode of Dexter features a two-minute recap, culled exclusively from the 52-minute pilot. This recap functions as a true summary of the pilot, providing glimpses of each main character, highlighting the core narrative scenario, and establishing the ongoing arc of Dexter’s ludic pursuit of another serial killer. While it might be a bit confusing, it would certainly be possible to watch the series without viewing the pilot, filling in narrative gaps solely from this recap and other internal redundancies. For viewers who had seen the pilot, the recap seems quite redundant, offering little to cue memories aside from character names―the core narrative situation of a serial killer working as a forensic investigator is sufficiently memorable as to not need refreshing, as simply thinking about the name of the show would likely activate that basic narrative memory.

The recap from Dexter’s first season finale is much more in keeping with the memory-refreshing role typically found later in a season. The 1:45 recap contains clips from many of the previous 11 episodes, and presents them in such quick succession that they would be incomprehensible to a new viewer. For ongoing viewers, however, the flashes of clues remind us of how far Dexter had gotten in his pursuit of the Ice Truck Killer, and the final shots of his sister in peril refreshes the cliffhanger from the previous episode. The recap also focuses on the stabbing of police office Angel from episode 10, which becomes a major plot point in the finale. More than anything, recaps like this one serve to filter the vast amount of story information that an ongoing viewer accrues, activating the most crucial bits of narrative into working memory while allowing other moments that will not become relevant in the upcoming episode to continue to reside in the archives of long-term memory.

Recaps can often trigger long dormant memories which might work to foreshadow upcoming narrative events. For instance, the recap before the fourth season Battlestar Galactica episode “Escape Velocity,” includes a scene from the third season episode “Exodus (part II)” featuring the death of Ellen Tigh. The gap between the original airdates of these episodes was over 18 months, marking this scene’s presence in the recap as unusual―at the time I first saw it, I hypothesized that the inclusion of Ellen’s death in the recap must mean that she’ll reappear in some fashion in the episode. That prediction proved correct, as Sol Tigh begins to hallucinate visions of Ellen, a connection that proves to be even more significant in the series mythology later in the season. The recap effectively reminded me about Ellen, who had certainly receded from my active memory, but also made her reappearance more predictable than it would have been within the diegetic narrative without the recap. Viewers watching the series on DVD or DVR might choose to fast-forward through the recaps, which might make Ellen’s reappearance prompt confusion or surprise, two reactions mitigated by her presence in the recap.

The strategies of recall prompted by recaps can run counter to one of the core narrative pleasures of most genres of storytelling: surprise. Within many complex long-term narratives, the deep mythology of the storyworld can be confusing and hard-to-follow without recaps to active working memories and remind us of deep-seated backstory. However, seeing a character or event in a recap can effectively “spoil” a surprise appearance or twist, undercutting the narrative effects that creators might have been hoping to produce. Clearly recaps need to balance between the dual demands of activating memories for comprehension and avoiding foreshadowing to allow for surprise to register for viewers without being confusing. Creators have devised a number of strategies for avoiding such recap spoilers.

One option is the use of diegetic flashbacks to serve as embedded recaps for viewers in the moment of the surprise itself. “Daybreak,” the series finale of Battlestar Galactica offers a good (if convoluted) example. Five characters agree to share in a complicated technological process that will share their memories with each other to facilitate a peace agreement between the warring Cyclons and humans. Prior to the procedure, Tory mentions that they may discover things that are shameful in their pasts, a protest that another character brushes aside. During the procedure, we glimpse memories in the form of flashbacks of some key moments from each character. Among these events, we see Tory confronting Cally, the late wife of Galen, another character in the memory exchange. Galen starts to focus on these memories, and we see Tory’s murder of Cally, prompting him to break from the procedure and strangle Tory. The flashbacks are to another season four episode, “The Ties That Bind,” which had originally aired 11 months before “Daybreak.”

Producer Ron Moore stated in his podcast that they intentionally “buried” the storyline of Cally’s murder, waiting for the climactic moment to payoff Galen’s revenge with high narrative stakes in the finale.² Notably, the recap for “Daybreak” contains no reference to Cally or the murder, allowing the viewer to experience the memory along with Galen’s realization. While a dedicated viewer certainly could have recalled that Tory had murdered Cally without getting caught, it was far from active memory after 11 months and many subsequent plot machinations. For me and other viewers I spoke with, the revelation prompted a gradual surprising realization that Galen will witness his wife’s murder and the shock of his reaction. Had the recap reminded us about the murder, we would have been better able to anticipate the result of the memory meld, defusing a moment of high drama. The effect of such revelations might be called surprise memory, or the moment of being surprised by story information that you already know, but don’t have within working memory.

Surprise memory does not need to be triggered by a flashback. In the fourth season episode of Lost, “Cabin Fever,” which notably aired without a “previously on Lost” recap, Claire awakens in the jungle to discover that her infant son is not with her. She looks around for him, and we see Christian Shephard holding him. Claire looks at him with confusion and says, “Dad?” right before we cut to commercial. It had been revealed that Christian, who was introduced as Jack’s father in the first season, was also Claire’s father in the third season episode “Par Avion,” but that relationship had not been actively referenced for over 10 months. While it is surprising enough to see Christian in the woods (especially given that he is dead and previously had only appeared as an apparition for Jack), the average viewer would not likely have the relationship of him as Claire’s father in working memory until she calls him Dad and prompts this moment of surprise memory.

The practice of surprise memory highlights the importance of working memory for storytelling practice. When a long-term viewer has accrued a large amount of story information, a storyteller can guide emotional reactions based on what is in working memory―a show might highlight particular relationships and connections within working memory, or prompt surprise or suspense via elements buried in long-term memory. The feeling of being surprised through the act of remembering is quite pleasurable, rewarding the long-term viewer’s knowledge base while provoking the flood of recognition stemming from the activation of such memories. Such pleasures are hard to imagine working in non-serialized formats, as the shorter-term forms of cinema or novels do not allow sufficient time over the course of narrative consumption to enable the process of archiving and activation needed to create surprise memory.

One additional source of memory within television episodes can be the credit sequence. While such sequences vary greatly, from just a brief title card as on Lost or Breaking Bad, to a 2-minute sequence as on Deadwood or Veronica Mars. Some title sequences use footage outside the narrative, as with Tony’s drive from New York to his house on The Sopranos, with the sequence working to emphasize the setting and milieu of the show, or Dexter’s visually stylized images of the title character preparing to go to work, highlighting the theme of finding the gruesome within the mundane. Many longer title sequences include images from the series itself, which for both episodic and serialized shows can evoke fond character moments, as with Friends or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

One series whose credit sequence adds to mechanics of memory is The Wire. Each season offers a new montage of images of Baltimore and from narrative moments of the series, most of which have little explicit resonance within story. But some images do trigger particular memories. For instance, season four’s credits includes a brief close-up of a man putting a lollypop into his pocket. For the first four episodes, this image bears no real meaning, and seems out of place next to images of criminals, cops, and kids on the street. In the season’s fourth episode, “Refugees,” we see the image in context, as crime boss Marlo pickpockets the lollypop in an act of petty crime aimed to openly mock a security guard, who is later killed for daring to challenge Marlo. For the rest of the season, this repeated image in the credits serves as a reminder of Marlo’s arrogance and cold-blooded lust for power, highlighting how he might do anything to climb the ranks of Baltimore’s drug game and build his reputation. Through this repetition and constant reminder, we keep this minor action in working memory, consistently shading Marlo’s character.

The process of consuming television narratives plays out in a broader context than the television text itself. The television industry has devised a number of extra-textual means of helping manage viewer memory. One long-standing tradition that has been declining are reruns—for decades, networks typically played each episode of a season twice throughout the year, filling in off-times with earlier episodes. These network reruns have become less common in the 2000s, especially with DVD, DVR, and online video as methods for viewers to rewatch or catch-up on missed episodes. For instance, Lost aired with reruns over the summer and during breaks from new episodes in its first two seasons, but ABC ceased this practice in later seasons. Instead, Lost and other network shows have taken a page from cable channels, showing the same episode multiple times throughout the week, a scheduling practice that allows viewers to refresh their memories or take a closer look at an episode during the week’s gap, or catch-up on missed material.

Lost has take advantage of these multiple airings by offering what they call “enhanced versions” of episodes after the initial airing—these versions add caption annotations to the action, clarifying references and previous events. For instance, in “Something Nice Back Home” when Claire encounters Christian, the captions read: “Christian Shepard is also Claire’s father, making Jack and Claire half-brother and sister, though neither one of them know it.” Such comments certainly help refresh memories for viewers, but most diehard fans report dissatisfaction with the “enhanced” experience for being too obvious and literal in its annotations.

More commonly, serialized programs have created stand-alone texts designed to refresh memories and initiate new viewers. Lost has aired twelve hour-long compilation shows over the course of its first five seasons, with each show replaying key moments from the series along with voice-over narration retelling the narrative. Similar recap compilation shows have been used by Battlestar Galactica and The Wire, among others, often airing before the start of a new season to refresh viewer memories and invite new viewers. Compilation shows, like recaps, are quite strategic in their summaries, selecting plot threads with continued relevancy while ignoring storylines that have been resolved and made dormant within the ongoing narrative.

The rise of online video has enabled a number of other strategies for recapping. Some networks, channels, and programs have created “mini-sodes” briefly summing up previous episodes, such as NBC’s online-only “2 Minute Replays” or Rescue Me’s “3 Minute Replays” that can be seen both online and on cable channel FX. Such replays probably function more to allow viewers who missed episodes to fill gaps, but they could also serve as memory refreshers like pre-show recaps; however, such replays are more designed to retell the entire episode rather than strategically present key story information for the upcoming episode.

More notably, a trend emerged online in 2007 with the popular YouTube video “The Seven Minute Sopranos.”³ A highly rapid recap of the previous five and a half seasons in advance of the final episodes, the humorous but affectionate fan-created video garnered over a million views and successfully promoted the final season. Producers took note of the success, and enlisted marketers to create similarly glib online recaps, such as “Lost in 8:15” and “What the frak is going on?” for Battlestar Galactica. These humorous recaps are designed for long-term fans as affectionate parodies, but they also function to effectively remind viewers of key events and highlight patterns and repetitions across the series, such as the numerous times that Carmela Soprano “gets pissed” at Tony, captured by the repeated visual of her throwing his luggage at him down the stairs.

Online recaps can be written as well presented as edited video. Network websites typically provide episode summaries for many series, but fan-created sites can serve as encyclopedic repositories of information for a complex long-form narrative. The fan-generated wiki Lostpedia is best known, but nearly every television series has a wiki where fans compile summaries and catalog events and characters, as well as using broader platforms such as Wikipedia and IMDB. The effect of this array of online media is that nearly any question a fan might have about a serialized television program can be answered by a quick Google search or perusing the show’s most active fansites, making these long-form storyworlds effectively searchable and highly documented (see Mittell, 2009).

While the primary aspect of narrative memory involves the events and characters within the storyworld, television fictions also rely on and play with viewer memory for how stories are told. As I have discussed elsewhere, narratively complex television plays with storytelling form in a range of ways, prompting an “operational aesthetic” in which viewers are simultaneously concerned with the storyworld and its telling, or in narratological terms, both story and discourse (Mittell, 2006). For viewers attending to the storytelling patterns that a series uses to convey their narrative worlds, formal memory helps frame the intrinsic norms that a series follows, and establishes storytelling expectations that can be relied upon or thwarted by creators.

One facet of formal memory involves the use stylistic cues. While television has been much more aesthetically adventurous in narrative than visual style, some series do use particular stylistic strategies as part of a show’s long-term reservoir of memory. Battlestar Galactica offers one such usage in the third season—for the first time in the series, we are taken inside a Cylon basestar as human Gaius Baltar is taken in custody by the Cylons. The scenes inside the basestar are edited with layered dissolves between shots, creating a dreamy and unreal quality to the setting. Across numerous episodes, the use of this formal pattern triggers memories of the setting and its previous events, serving as a means to create both a distinct sense of place and reinforce longer narrative arcs about the Cylon’s home.

A prime example of an intrinsic storytelling norm being used to play with viewer memories and expectations is Lost’s use of flashbacks. Over the first three seasons, nearly every episode features a series of flashbacks focused on a single character (or couple, in the case of Sun and Jin), offering glimpses into lives before arriving on the island. These flashbacks are cued by a number of formal norms: typically starting with a close-up of the key character, followed by a “whooosh” sound and a straight-cut to the flashback. While these are not framed as character memories explicitly, they function as subjective narrative, providing story information that only one character on the island knows. As David Bordwell explores for film narration, learned intrinsic norms or schemas of a text help viewers make hypothesis, fill-in gaps, and anticipate actions, drawing upon earlier experiences to make sense of an ongoing narrative (Bordwell, 1985). For an ongoing serial, intrinsic norms are more long-term, requiring active engagement with memory. Thus when Lost viewers see and hear these cues, we draw upon our formal memories to comprehend the upcoming sequence as a flashback.

In “Through the Looking Glass,” the third season finale, Lost strategically plays with our memories to invite viewers to make a faulty assumption and prompt a spectacular surprise. The episode cues its off-island storyline as a flashback for the heroic character Jack, portraying him as drug-addled and despondent in Los Angeles. The formal devices used to present these sequences follow the norms we expect for flashbacks, leading viewers to assume that this is set in Jack’s pre-island past by activating the well-established formal memories of how Lost tells its stories. But in the episode’s final scene, we see Jack converse with fellow crash-survivor Kate about possibly returning to the island, establishing that what we’ve been seeing was actually a flash-forward. The only reason why this “narrative special effect” (Mittell, 2006) works is because of our activated memories of the show’s intrinsic norms, established over dozens of episodes throughout three seasons, highlighting the important role that formal memory plays within serial narrative.

Another more elaborated example of the role of formal memory can be found throughout the series Six Feet Under. The opening of every SFU episode portrays a death, typically of a previously-unknown character, who will be treated by family-run funeral home around which the series is centered. The first season typically portrays these deaths fairly straightforwardly, introducing the victim and showing the context of their demise. By the second season, the producers took a more baroque approach to the weekly deaths—knowing that viewers would remember the formal pattern of each episode, the show played with our expectations by delaying and feinting the deaths. For instance, the second season premiere, “In the Game,” starts with a young woman undressing in her bedroom seemingly preparing for a romantic evening, but is interrupted by a masked knife-wielding maniac breaking into her home. The scene then cuts to a movie theater, revealing that the previous actions were on-screen during a horror film premiere. We then follow the actress playing the film’s victim, as she binges on cocaine and dies of an overdose in the bathroom of the post-premiere party. Our memories of previous episodes set the expectation that this character will die, and the producers play with the “how” in spite of our learned norms.

Other episodes play on our expectations for who will die. In season two’s “Out, Out, Brief Candle,” the opening scene shows a college football practice in blistering heat, with one character collapsing from heatstroke. While the team attends to him, another player collapses and dies, confounding our narrative expectations. An even more baroque example is from season four’s “In Case of Rapture,” as a pair of young men fill inflatable sex dolls with helium to deliver to a porn awards party. Their truck almost hits a kid on a skateboard, causing the payload to come loose and rise into the air. We cut to a middle-aged woman driving a car with a bumper sticker, reading “I Brake for the Rapture”—when she sees the dolls floating up to the heavens, she exits her car and runs into traffic, yelling “I’m ready Jesus!” only to be hit by a car. The show can also offer minimalistic deaths to counter our heightened memories of previous ornate openings; season four’s “Coming and Going” starts with an old man driving his car to the funeral home, parking in the driveway, and dying simply. The broad range of variations on the show’s established formal pattern builds on established norms and offers a set of playful pleasures that depend on the long-term commitments and memories of viewers unique to serialized storytelling.

Clearly, prime time serials use a range of narrative strategies to trigger and play with viewer memories. The significance of this poetic catalog of techniques is to highlight the importance of underlying cognitive processes in the seemingly simple act of narrative comprehension. Managing a multi-year narrative universe is difficult enough for television writers, but they also face significant challenges to ensure that viewers can follow the action without falling into either confusion or boredom from redundancy. As serialized television as evolved into a robust and unique art form over the past decade, producing some of this century’s most compelling stories regardless of medium, it is vital that we recognize television’s unique narrative techniques and highlight the innovative strategies it employs that help make it a distinctive and aesthetically valid medium. If we want to understand the potential ways that long-form narratives can be constructed and consumed, we need to remember how television has offered compelling solutions for mastering the mechanics of memory.

Works Cited:

Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

David Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce,” in Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 135-150.

Matt Hills, “Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variation on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005-2008) as Cult/Mainstream Television,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 333-342.

Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

Jason Mittell, ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 58 (2006): 29-40.

Jason Mittell, “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia,” Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (forthcoming Fall 2009), http://journal.transformativeworks.org.

Henry L. Roediger, Yadin Dudai, and Susan M. Fitzpatrick, eds., Science of Memory: Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Ethan Thompson, “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 60 (Fall 2007): 63-72.

One of the challenges of researching contemporary television narrative is time – it simply takes too much of it to watch everything that should be watched. Coupled with my day-to-day responsibilities of teaching, chairing, fathering, reading the internets, and having a life, watching TV can often fall low on the to-do list. (I know I’m garnering tremendous sympathy about this…) And thus my attempt to grapple with the trend of narrative complexity in television storytelling has some blindspots, shows that I know I should watch but haven’t yet.

One of those major texts is Deadwood, the Western that most critics put in the holy trinity of HBO David-helemed masterpieces along with The Wire and The Sopranos. My colleague Chris Keathley taught the first season as a serialized text in this spring’s intro Aesthetics of the Moving Image course, reporting that students were truly enamored of the show. And two of my favorite online TV bloggers are writing about the show this summer: Myles McNutt after watching for the first time, and Todd VanDerWerff as a return to his favorite series. So with all of that inspiration, I’ve tackled the first season of the show over the past few weeks – spoilery commentary beneath the fold.

First let me contextualize my criticisms with the caveat that Deadwood is certainly a great show, in the upper echelon of everything on television or in the cinema in the past decade. But within that rarified realm, I must admit some disappointment. In large part this is due to my own contexts, taste, and immediate comparisons.

I generally have been watching the show late at night, after my wife & kids are asleep; thus my attention is dulled and it is too easy to lull me into a doze without a compelling narrative to hook me. And as Myles notes, Deadwood is almost plotless at times, and many of the plots are sufficiently predictable as to not generate suspense or intrigue – for instance, I saw Bullock’s fate to be both in Alma’s bed and wearing a badge as inevitable. So a few times, the slow pacing and texture produced fatigue that distracted me from the series – in this way, the show that most resembles Deadwood is Mad Men, another deliberate period piece that I found too mannered to get into.

The period aspect is also a drawback for me – the Western is a genre that I generally care little about, aside from a few standout films that I love (My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, and Unforgiven pop to mind). So while the premise of a serialized revisionist Western is intriguing, the way it tweaks the genre and plays with actual history has little appeal to me.

Finally, I spend the spring revisiting The Wire with my class (more on that soon!), so the comparisons between these two series are hard to avoid. And they certainly bear some similarities – both are sprawling ensemble pieces more about a place than a character, portraying the gray areas between law and crime, and reveling in dialogue that straddles realism and profane poetry (wouldn’t you love to hear a dialogue between Al Swearingen and Jay Landesman?). But The Wire’s world and genre are both more compelling to me, and I find the show’s plotting to present the perfect balance between a measured pace and engaging forward momentum – I wouldn’t say that The Wire produces suspense per se, but I find myself tremendously invested in what will happen next in a way that Deadwood never generated.

With all that being said, I found Deadwood to be alternately compelling and disengaging. When the show focused on the attempts toward and resistance to civilizing the town, I found myself drawn in to the emerging political and commercial systems. But when it did try to tell a more conventional plotline, I found the show less engaging – the Kristen Bell arc seemed completely designed to drive a wedge between Cy and Joannie rather than actually convey something about the world or create an interesting new character, and likewise the drug fiend plot seemed more mechanical than organic. The show could never really get a momentum going, as I kept feeling things kick into gear, and then drift away into semi-enjoyable but ultimately disengaging diversions into the town’s texture.

I would have been even more harsh before watching the finale last night – while the result of Bullock’s arc was not a suprise, I found the intensity of his decisions to sleep with Alma and become sheriff quite compelling. Similarly, Swearingen’s dual murders out of mercy and self-protection worked more for the effect of the performance than plot. I still find Swearingen’s charismatic anti-hero a bit troubling, especially in how abusive he is to the women of Deadwood, and fear that Milch’s brand of troubled masculinty that turned me off from NYPD Blue will dominate.

While it’s difficult to pull apart different elements of a program’s creative process, I’ve come away from the series feeling much more impressed with the acting and directing than the writing, even though David Milch gets all the credit for Deadwood’s greatness. I find the visual style outstanding, especially in the way it binds together the community through shots that connect different spheres and relationships. And nearly every performance is excellent, with Ian McShane as the obvious standout but William Sanderson’s E.B. Farnum and Brad Dourif’s Doc as somewhat more impressive given that they have less to work with. While the dialogue can be fun, and obviously the writing enables the performances and style, the inconsistency of plotting and pacing knocks Milch down a peg in my book.

Another comparison with The Wire that I find lacking involves the two series’s modes of meaning-making. The Wire is clearly a show with great social relevance, and it’s not hard to notice the arguments it makes toward understanding the state of the world. Deadwood also seems to traffic in social commentary, but it offers it more through symbolism and allegory. In part, that’s simply due to genre and period, as anything a Western has to say about today’s world needs to be expressed via indirect representation. But Milch’s tone seems to demand interpretation, with every character functioning as a symbol of something greater.

Todd sees this as a great strength, writing “Deadwood uses its microcosm as a symbol for the whole universe better than any other series.” Again it might be a matter of taste, but I much prefer my fiction to to be more literal than symbolic, with the greater resonances emerging within the storyworld rather than in reference to something outside of it. I find the internal parallels between characters and institutions of The Wire to be much more rich in significance and resonance than the more overt symbolic aims of Deadwood and The Sopranos. (Sure, Simon can be allegorical in The Wire, but it’s less weighty and portentous to comment on the Iraq War than the meaning of life, God, etc.) Ultimately the characters in Deadwood seem to work more as figures than people – compelling and entertaining figures, no doubt, but even though many are based on real people, they seem more designed than alive.

I find this comparison continues today between Breaking Bad and Mad Men – the former seems cut from The Wire’s cloth (albeit with a much tighter emotional and character focus), with the show focused on the micro-procedures of a budding criminal empire and the complex humanity of flawed people dealing with the day-to-day burdens of their lives. Mad Men (which I admit I have not seen much of) works more like Deadwood, looking backward at another era to Say Something Important about the world of today. And as I’ve made clear, the former is much more appealing to me.

So given all that, I’m torn whether to dedicate another 24 hours of viewing to the rest of Deadwood. I’ve heard some people say that season 2 is even better, but how is it better? Does it solve some of the plotting problems that troubled me? Or is it better in its symbolic weight? Any experience viewers want to weigh in, or argue with my take on the show?

I’ve got a few random thoughts that have been piling up without sufficient mass to justify a full post. So here’s a compilation of stuff passing through my mind, Larry King style.

- I’ve not tried to do a full account or analysis of the network upfronts or planned 2009-10 season. But in reading about the shows and plans, the one thing that struck me and gave me hope was a seeming embrace of the short season. More than any thematic, tonal, or narrative development from the rising success of cable drama/comedy series, I think the most important lesson for networks to embrace is that 20+ episodes is simply too much expect sufficient quality from a new show, especially one that aims to be innovative. So more shows (both new and returning) are being picked up for shorter runs, which bodes well for their creative success. And with the aftermarket of DVD boxes, it could be an economically wise move as well to help build and sustain a series for the long haul.

- Breaking Bad’s second season was as good as anything I’ve seen on TV short of The Wire. The first season was a good show surrounding Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance, but getting cut short by the writer’s strike was the best thing that could have happened – based on comments on the excellent producer podcast for the series, they’d planned to make the final episodes of the first season highly explosive, escalating the stakes in more sensational ways. Once they came back to plot out season 2, they embraced a lower-key approach to charting the minute details of the characters’ lives, a tactic that has made the series leap into the upper echelon of televisual excellence.

This season broadened the depth of the rest of the cast – Cranston still shines brightest, but the other actors and performances are now almost as good, especially Aaron Paul’s Jesse. Individual episodes were little etudes of emotional intensity, especially the ones with Tuco in the desert, Jesse in the house-of-meth, and the mind-blowing final two episodes of the season. The show consistently manages to confound my expectations, deliver on its own promises, and create truly powerful emotional moments that I can’t shake for weeks. If you haven’t watched it, dive in before you fall too far behind.

- The other show I’ve recently completed is In Treatment’s second season. I missed the first season, in large part due to the daunting scheduling – even with a TiVo, 2.5 hours a week is a lot of TV to keep up with. After reading a bit of advance buzz, we signed on for season 2. The scheduling was certainly a challenge, as we ended up falling behind and finishing a couple weeks late. But we were glad that we did – the show is all about the performances, with Gabriel Byrne carrying the series on top of a number of excellent supporting performances, especially Hope Davis and Alison Pill. At times the show becomes a bit too painful to watch, as characters having emotional breakdowns or self-destructing can become tough to take; likewise, the show’s stylistic and temporal realism sometimes runs counter to the clearly compressed pace of therapy portrayed over 7 weeks. But the show was sufficiently compelling as to suggest a true innovation in how to program and schedule a series, one that it would be interesting to see other shows mimic.

- I haven’t yet watched tonight’s inadvertent finale for Pushing Daisies, but watching the previous two episodes from ABC’s summer burnoff created wistful glee – utter joy from the show, tempered by outrage from the injust way that ABC treated my beloved pie hole. Kristen Chenowith singing Lionel Ritchie was simply too beautiful to live…

- I see almost no films in theaters anymore, but my daughter and I both adored Up. Like Wall-E, it starts stronger than it finishes – for once, can Pixar make a film without a climactic chase/battle? But the photo album montage sequence is simply perfect. And I’m glad that another generation has the opportunity to appreciate Ed Asner.

- I’ve been on Twitter for about a month. Haven’t quite figured out how I’d most like to use it, but I feel obliged to be familiar with trending technologies. It’s best use for me has been during conferences, where a group of people document and discuss an ongoing event, bleeding the boundaries of the conference into a larger community. But more often than not, it’s just another drain on my attention.

That’s all for now. I’m still working on a larger post wrapping up my course on The Wire, but it’s taking too long to become articulate.

I spent part of last week on a quick, tiring, but exciting trip to Zurich. I was an invited presenter at University of Zurich’s conference on Serial Forms, a small but well-focused 3-day conference focused on serial narratives across a range of media.

My own presentation was called “Serial Boxes: The Cultural Value of Long-Form American Television.” While I don’t expect any revelations for anyone who reads my blog, I’ve shared my paper below via a narrated slideshow – I didn’t write it out in publishable form (yet), so I apologize for the awkwardness of trying to recreate my presentation while talking to my computer in my office:

More interesting than my own presentation, I had the opportunity to meet a number of researchers whom I’ve not read or seen, especially given the linguistic and practical boundaries that often divide European and American scholars. Alas a number of presentations were in German, so I took the opportunity to wander the city rather than sit in my monolingual confusion for hours. But here are a few notes on English presentations that stuck with me beneath the fold:

Margrethe Bruun Vaage from Norway, whom I’d met briefly at the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image conference in Madison last year, gave a great presentation on the complexity of character sympathy as embodied in Omar on The Wire. She argued persuasively that our sympathy for Omar, despite his violent and questionably-moral actions, stems both from seeing his emotional bonds with other characters like Brandon, and by his more mannered and stylized presentation versus the more realist tone of the rest of the series. Margrethe pointed out that in season 5, Omar becomes more realistic and less of a superhero in direct counterpoint to how the season takes a more reflexive and unreal turn in its plotting – an insight quite useful for an essay I’m writing on reflexivity in The Wire.

Another one of the American visitors was Jennifer Bean from University of Washington, presenting on silent American serial film of the 1910s, especially starring Pearl White of Perils of Pauline fame. What struck me about this presentation, given that I’m generally pretty ignorant of this aspect of film history, is how the marketing and textual form of silent serials embraced a ludic quality, framing the series as a game to be played by the audience. I’ve always thought that the dominant assumption about silent serials was that the audience were naïve spectators who returned each week to see if the heroine could escape her cliffhanging fate; Jennifer’s presentation spoke to how the films were framed more as narrative variations rather than outright suspense, with embedded contests, participatory options, and reflexive awareness of their own conventionality – all evidence that the operative aesthetic I’ve explored in television narration was present in this earlier form as well.

Glen Creeber, whom I’ve emailed with in conjunction with him editing my contribution for the second edition of The Television Genre Book but never met, spoke about online drama as a form of seriality, tracing back from EmoKid21 and Lonelygirl15 to some more recent examples. He argued that the computer screen is better suited to the intimacy and privacy that have typified serial melodramas, with the large-screen television serving the cultural function of more big-budget spectacular pleasures via DVD as mainstream television grows more cinematic.

My old friend Greg Smith presented a rich poetic vocabulary of how television narratives balance serial and episodic impulses, focusing on tradeoffs and pressures forced by the industrial constraints of broadcasting. He highlighted devices such as the characters of “dummies” and “assholes” as consistent presences designed to create humor and conflict respectively, despite any impulse toward serialized character growth; additionally, he noted that often a character’s goals and growth can make sense for an individual character, but be disruptive to the broader serialized dynamic, highlighting the need for writers to trade-out character functions and relationships. My notes are a list of key terms that I would mangle in trying to reproduce here – we’ll have to wait until Greg publishes this excellent piece of television poetics to get it straight.

Some other presentations from some emerging European researchers highlighted the contrasts between American and non-American production and distribution. Chrian Junklewitz highlighted how American cinema in the 1950s-1960s turned away from series production (which comprised 20% of output in the studio era) in favor of one-off event blockbusters, while Europe embraced the opposite strategy by favoring series as a mode of cost-savings and routine. Ursula Ganz-Blaettler discussed the cumulative narrative strategies of Magnum P.I., showing a great slide showing the near-random order that German television aired the series, thereby disrupting serial continuity. Seraina Rohrer discussed the cultural life of the Mexican film character La India Maria, a lowbrow Lucy-style physical comedienne whose actress gained authorial control as a writer and director later in the series, injecting a political edge missing earlier in the series.

In all, it was quite a nice conference both to expand academic circles and frames of reference. Definitely worth the jet-lagginess that remains three days later…

The internets have been blazing over the last two days about the reported feature film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that would not involve Joss Whedon. While I try to not to place this blog in the maelstrom of rumor mongering and fan panic, I’m inspired to take a break from grading to share this simple message:

Relax.

First off, I’m willing to take zero-money wagers that this film never gets released. The reports suggest potential development deals, but in the world of the film industry, that’s quite far from actual filmmaking. Look at the principals involved: Roy Lee and Vertigo Entertainment is leading the development, but he has over 30 other titles listed in development at the moment. Lee is quite effective in getting his projects produced, mostly by remaking Asian genre pictures on the cheap, but only a small portion of the projects he starts moving will actually get made.

On the other side, Fran Rubel Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui, who own the rights to the original Buffy film, have pretty much done nothing notable in film and television since the 1992 film – they’ve happily cashed checks from the success of the TV series and its multi-media spin-offs. My faith in them actually ushering a new film through the development process is pretty low.

So looking at the track records of the people attached to this project suggests that the odds are low that the film gets made. And perhaps the reaction amongst Whedonites who’ve made the title appear like a bankable project will make Lee pause on pursuing the project too aggressively.

And even if it does get made, who cares? There’s a lot of mediocre material in the Buffy-verse, from the original film to weak tie-in games and books. The idea that a “Feature Film” is the pinnacle of a media franchise’s value has long since dissapated, in large part due to the successes of boxed set television like Buffy. If the film comes out, it will probably be a fairly low-profile genre release like most of Vertigo’s projects – Buffy fans often imagine that their favorite show is a lot higher profile than it actually is, so don’t expect a Batman level tentpole summer blockbuster.

Even though I’m skeptical that it will get made, I’m a bit curious to see how it turns out – it will certainly be different than Whedon’s version, probably by turning up the horror and lowering the snarky wit. Does the inherent concept allow for this genre jiggling? I’m doubtful, as I view the success of the show as less about the concept and more from the characters – and a 2-hour genre film can’t offer much characterization beyond shorthand stock characters and simple oppositions. The best we might hope for would be a standard entertaining vampire film whose heroine happens to be named Buffy, probably more inspired by Twilight than BtVS.

And for the Whedon die-hards, stop worrying about “tarnishing” the franchise – if the film is decent, it will reflect well on the original vision; if it sucks, it will affirm Joss’s authorial power. So relax, and focus on seeing if Dollhouse can take advantage of its second season to turn into the show whose promise was just starting to shine through.

Just a quick pointer to a podcast: I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Tim Anderson for his series The Lion’s Share. The series is a great project, opening up the hood on media scholars’ processes of writing, teaching, and thinking about media. Tim & I talked about the impact of the economy on higher ed, my course on The Wire, and my research on TV narrative. I haven’t listened to it yet, in part due to time constraints and also just because listening to my own voice for an hour is a bit icky. But hopefully you, dear reader, will find it interesting and less icky.

There’s no transcript, but see the tags below for a preview of what content might be covered. And since a podcast doesn’t allow comments (yet), feel free to post responses, questions, accusations and the like in this thread. Enjoy!

Gotta take a break from grading to write about Lost’s rollicking season finale, and season 5 in general. Spoilery goodness beneath the fold.

One of the things that has long fascinated me about Lost is that it is simultaneously a “genre show,” but has often been quite opaque as to what genre(s) it is embracing. By “genre show,” I mean that it lives in the lower cultural hierarchy like “genre fiction” vs. the more aspirational realm of “literary fiction.” All television is genre television, of course, but some shows present themselves as transcending simple categorization – the HBO premium series are the best example here, as The Sopranos and The Wire are not interested in simply being great gangster or cop shows, and ask to be judged on the higher criteria of what we might consider “literary television.”

This distinction is all about fairly arbitrary hierarchies and setting up expectations for viewers. You go into a sci-fi show expecting particular pleasures and frames of reference – your judgment of the show is tied into how well it both delivers and transcends those expectations. Most shows are content to work within their genres, making television a comfortable medium of clear expectations and classifiable content. Some shows aspire to genre revisionism and mixing, highlighting how they are doing more than expected of the medium, and highlighting how combination and revision can raise the bar for what a program can do – from Twin Peaks to The Simpsons to X-Files to Buffy to Arrested Development to Dexter, the past two decades of televisual excellence has typically inhabited this space of genre revisionism and recombination.

And then there’s Lost. While it often uses a set of highbrow cultural references to signal greater aspirations, the show has always had a pulpy core – like all of the productions under J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot label, the goal seems to always be to entertain first. Compared to revisionist shows like Battlestar Galactica or Deadwood, Lost is primarily interested in keeping us wanting more – we are invited to drill inward to its storyword, rather than reflecting outward about what it means in a broader context. This is what I mean by “genre television.”

The unusual accomplishment that Lost has achieved is to signal a clear “genre television” tone, while burying the specific genre categories. For the first two seasons, it denied sci-fi more than it embraced it, and nodded to many genres, from horror to adventure to melodrama to comedy to religious passion play – yet it never seemed like a truly “literary” show that was interested in transcending its genre roots. Even as it toyed with Big Ideas like science vs. faith, fate vs. free will, it was at its core an action-adventure more interested in thrill than theme.

Now with season 5 in the books, Lost has found its genre groove in full-swing, embracing its pulpiness to offer a show whose narrative mode is best decribed as “rollicking.” It’s all about the fun, from the playful early-season time jumps to the DHARMA dance parties – I found this season to be consistently entertaining and surprising unlike nearly any other show on the air. It doesn’t have the thematic or character richness of “deeper” shows, but it is so effective at hitting its pleasurable beats that I find it more enjoyable than anything else I’m watching these days. It still offers a hodgepodge of genre references that muddle the minds of genre purists – yes, if you want everything to be scientifically feasible, you’re going to be pissed – but the show has created its own melange of science, spirit, and intertextual references that feels true and coherent.

The finale pays off so many threads that have been lingering for years in a way that (to me, at least) seems to rebut most of the “making it up as they go” accusations. As I’ve written before, it’s less about actually having a master plan than feeling like there is a sense of unity and purpose. The episode gives answers to questions that I’d forgotten mattered – like how did Locke survive the fall from the window, or why Hurley got on the plane – and others that had been on my mind – the fate of Rose, Bernard & Vincent, how Chang’s arm got injured, the deal with the statue. It references long simmering themes and motifs – the black/white imagery of Jacob and his rival, the creation of Wizard of Oz-like artifices for leaders, the permanence of destiny and fate along with the desire to create loopholes. It feels like these revelations have been in the works for years, and thus the episode delivers on its promises of revelations and coherence.

And then it nukes everything. I fully expected that the last shot of the season would be a nuclear blast, but I didn’t realize how transformative that would actually be following the other revelations. Ben and BadLocke killed Jacob (man on fire FTW!), a larger battle for island supremacy seems to be waging at levels far beyond Ben and Widmore, and our heroes are mere pawns in a larger game.

But how much of that actually happened? We have two competing loopholes happening simultaneously (and 30 years apart!), and have no way of knowing which is more important. Did Juliet’s dying blast trump Jacob’s death? Does the 2007 escape from the cycle of war over the island’s leadership break away from the nuclear reboot? I have no frakking idea what’s going to happen next – and that may be the greatest pleasure of genre fiction at its finest.

A few odds & ends:

- I loved the Rose & Bernard scene, with our wise old couple (whom I bet will become the Adam & Eve corpses in some version of reality, if that ever happens/happened!) offering a pre-critique of the inevitable gunfight still to come. I’m with them – the shoot-outs are getting old.

- I’m glad that Miles got to voice the seemingly obvious question as to whether the bomb will cause “the incident” rather than prevent it. And it fits that the rest of the gang hasn’t really thought about it and refuses to engage.

- Jack has become so annoying to me that I was glad to see him shown to be shallow (he wants to blow up the island to have a second chance at Kate?!), maybe fail to prevent anything (as far as we know), and get kicked in the nuts by Sawyer!

- Season 5 was a mirror of season 2, with shared focus on DHARMA, heroes searching for meaning and purpose, and twisty revelations of concealed motivations and identities. So it was beautifully fitting that both ended with electromagnetic implosions and heroic triggerings of game-changing bomblike devices.

- I’m bummed that Locke is really dead, as I do so love the character and want more of the real deal rather than a Bad Twin (hmmm….). However, who knows what season 6 might bring post-nuke – we could get a reboot of 2004 with all of our heroes (including the deceased) making it to LA.

- Likewise, I loved Juliet, but knew she was a goner from internet news of Elizabeth Mitchell being cast in another show. But please don’t let Juliet’s elimination make the Kate love triangle retake center stage in season 6!

- Great cameos by objects: Charlie’s ring, Kate’s toy plane, an Apollo Bar.

- Here’s a crazy theory: what if the off-island time-hopping Jacob visiting the Losties we saw in “The Incident” was not part of the timethread that we’ve experienced in the first 5 seasons, but rather a post-nuke reboot effort of Jabob to reassemble the Oceanic 815ers to come to the island, and thus those sequences were actually a flash-forward (in the past) to season 6? Does your head hurt yet?

- My take on the mythological war: Jacob’s rival (whom the internets are calling Esau for obvious reasons, though I prefer Bert just because it sounds more menacingly mundane) is on the team of the smoke monster, and may even be an incarnation of smoky himself. Various forces we’ve attributed to Jacob, like Christian and the cabin, are actually allied with Bert and the dark forces. Jacob, his minions, and his loom are all about keeping the dark side in check via “good powers” like healing, immortality, and list-making. The time-loop demands that nobody ever wins – but Bert finds a loophole through Locke and Ben. Of course what each side really wants and what the stakes of the battle are must wait for another year…

And finally, a few links to other things you should read if you’re obsessing: Todd at House Next Door embracing the awesome; Maureen “The Watcher” Ryan on parallels with BSG; Alan Sepinwall complaining about Jack’s romantic motives as the only real flaw (agreed); James Poniewozik calling Jacob’s rival Fred instead of Bert; and Myles McNutt winning the war of the word counts. Enjoy!

I stumbled across this article via Google Alerts discussing the varying practices within Wikipedia. I discovered it because one of the examples it uses is… my Wikipedia entry:

Jason Mittell’s case is similar. His biography concludes with some quotes from a New York Times article in which he defended Wikipedia against the charge that it represented a threat to traditional knowledge: “I see it [Wikipedia] as an opportunity. What does that mean for traditional scholarship? Does [it] lose value?” While Mittell is a productive academic, he does not appear to have made a “significant impact” on the field or met any of the other notability criteria for academics outlined in Wikipedia. Mittell himself agrees with this assessment and attempted to have his page deleted, as “not notable enough” (he was not successful). He observes that notability is “much less absolute than Wikipedia claims: it’s more dependent on an editor’s opinion and judgment, especially for fringe pages like my own”. It seems some decisions about inclusion lie in the eye of the beholder and may also be determined by self-serving criteria.

I have been uncomfortable with my Wikipedia entry for awhile, partly because it’s sparse and unattended, but more because it seems to exist solely because I was quoted in the press about Wikipedia. Like the other case referenced of Alex Halavais (who self-blogged it as well), Wikipedians seem to have noticed us not for any scholarly notability, but because we’ve gone on the record defending Wikipedia. This is one of the key problems with Wikipedia: it reflects its own self-interests (and thus the interests of its active editors) much more than any seemingly “objective” measure of cultural importance. Thus people who talk about Wikipedia seem to qualify for some meta-notability.

While Alex’s entry has been labelled an “orphan” for its lack of connections to other entries, mine has been tagged for deletion – in large part because I asked it to be deleted two years ago! The discussion on my page is interesting, as the article about my Wikipedia entry has become a source to justify my inclusion on Wikipedia! I weighed in only to clarify my position on my own deletion, but this is obviously something for other people to debate and decide. So if you read my blog and care about Wikipedia, go on over to weigh in – and I’d be fine with you calling me non-notable! I just want to avoid being trapped in this nether world of being notable on Wikipedia for a very non-notable role in a debate over Wikipedia use at Middlebury.

First off, I just wanted to mention that I’ll be at Media in Transition 6 this weekend, so if you’re in Cambridge, say hi! I’m a respondant on a panel about using moving images as a rhetorical mode of film & media criticism on Sunday morning – it should be an interesting discussion.

In the past, I’ve noted how talking with the press can be both gratifying and frustrating, as often quotes are decontextualized, cut-off, or otherwise misconstrued. So to give credit where it is due, I want to point to Amy Rosenberg’s piece on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in The Philadelphia Inquirer for capturing our conversation effectively in a compelling article. Let me elaborate beyond the quotes here:

I’ve mostly been mystified by the online spread of Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent, watching dozens of Facebook friends link to the video, celebrate it in their status updates, and join her fan page. I watched the video, and didn’t make it through the whole thing once I got the point (note: I hate Les Miz, so the song does nothing for me). As quoted in the article, I didn’t quite understand why the crowd, judges, and online fans all assumed that Boyle’s appearance would indicate anything about her singing, so the surprise seemed unwarranted.

In fact, anyone who knows BGT or its previous spreading video of Paul Potts should have expected Boyle’s performance. Potts was a similiarly unassuming working-class, middle-aged singer with an impressive voice who wowed the crowd and judges, going on to win the first season of BGT. I remember seeing Potts on YouTube, and being surprised by his performance – less because an unattractive person was singing well, but because his working-class demeanor didn’t fit with his preferred musical genre of opera. Potts established the narrative hook for BGT that distinguished it from the Idol franchise: highlight people based on talent instead of celebrity/stardom potential, and craft feel-good narratives of people who seem truly commonplace with exceptional abilities.

Boyle fits with this narrative too well – so well that the surprise on the judges’ faces seemed disingenous. Certainly Simon Cowell, who is a producer of the show, would know better than to be truly surprised by Boyle fulfilling the perfectly cast role of diamond in the rough. But everyone played their parts: Boyle seeming out-of-place on stage until she started to sing, the crowd voicing skepticism based on her appearance only to immediately transform into a cheering throng upon hearing her voice, and the judges melting their cynicism on demand. It is a perfect example of how reality television can be both unscripted and completely plotted – through casting and genre conventions, the show offers surprise exactly as we might expect it to.

What I don’t understand is why so many people have embraced this as a marker of the triumph of the human spirit. For me, it’s a confirmation of how the media creates untenable beauty norms and ideals – the judges and crowd’s dismissive tone toward Boyle before she sang confirmed the ridiculous assumed linkage between conventional beauty and talent. Their shift in attitude was not Boyle’s triumph, but an indictment of this assumption – which will certainly last no longer than Boyle’s run on the show. Boyle herself is irrelevant to this narrative – it’s not about her talent (which, to be honest, is fine but not truly exceptional) or her story, but rather she is just a vehicle to make us feel good about how open minded we can be about frumpy people.

One last point: BGT is now in a bind. Boyle clearly has to win the competition, or her swelling fanbase will rebel (and the Cowell led record contract will suffer). But after Potts and Boyle, the formula will be laid so bare as to make the presumption of “unscripted” untenable. Obviously the economic gains of Boyle’s success is all that counts in the short-term, but the genre conventions cannot be made so obvious and predictable that the premise of the show suffers in the long-term. At least until next year’s token ugly singer “surprises” everyone yet again.

Back in January, I wrote about my disappointment in the third season of Friday Night Lights. After a wonderful first season, I found the second season more palatable than most fans did, but found the missteps more glaring in the third season, despite the consensus praise for the season as a return to form. Now that the season has ended (and I’ve caught up), I’m sorry to say that I haven’t improved my opinion on the show and where it’s going – I still find it overall a good show, but I’m frequently annoyed by how much better it could be based on what worked so well in the first season.

The show’s main appeal for me in the first season was its sense of texture – you got a feel for both the place of Dillon, Texas, and the relationships between the characters. The way they spoke to each other, the way they spent their days – this felt both dramatically engaging and new for television. Season 2’s flaws seemed to be with the directions the writers took the stories – they added new characters to disrupt relationships, and they created the unrealistic murder plotline. But, and I know I’m in the minority here, the show still worked because the feeling of place and characters still felt true – the texture between the Taylors, the conflicts over fitting in versus getting out of Dillon, the multifaceted dimensions of the town (including the new dimensions of the church culture and Santiago’s Latino neighborhood). And even thought some of the plots might have been unreal, the way they were told felt true to Dillon – the murder wasn’t about the crime, but how it mattered to Landry and Tyra’s characters.

Season 3 played to the show’s weaknesses instead of its strengths. The worst part of the show for me has always been the way it portrays the football games – contrived plays and scenarios to maximize artificial drama, a skewed sense of focus that makes it seem as if the team has no defensive or special team players (have we ever seen a kick or punt?), and an inability to offer a sense of what type of team the Panthers are, aside from a tendency toward improbable come-from-behind victories. I can generally overlook this, as the games are usually a small part of the episodes and the surrounding character drama is more relevant. But unlike the rest of the show, the football games lack a sense of texture.

Season 3 seemed to construct nearly all of its plotlines like its football games: maximized contrivances for exaggerated drama, last minute twists and reversals, inconsistency in tone and style, and rushing through moments that lack overt drama in favor of the sensational plays. As I wrote before, the entire Tami as principal scenario felt completely forced and unreal – and how it enabled the finale’s twist of Coach Taylor’s firing and switch to East Dillon was even more unearned as a plot development. The McCoy’s came in as caricatured villains, setting up obvious conflicts that were played for their extreme drama rather than nuance. And instead of portraying the potentially intriguing portrait of how McCoy’s money and influence poisoned the town’s attitude toward the extremely successful tenure of Coach Taylor, we fast-forwarded to the final minutes of the game to see the contrived twist that felt overly forced and unearned. In essence, season 3 sacrificed the texture of storytelling to emphasize narrative events – while that’s typical of much television, it’s not what makes FNL distinct or enjoyable.

For me, the dual emotional centers of the show are Tami Taylor and Matt Saracen, characters with rich depth that are often put in situations with conflicting priorities. In season 2, Tami’s portrayal of a mother grappling with an infant, teenager, absent husband, and career goals was one of the most satisfying and nuanced portraits of contemporary parenting I’ve seen on TV. In season 3, all that disappeared (including Baby Gracie), with Tami’s function shifting to a plot contrivance to facilitate other people’s stories – Tyra’s attempts to get into college, Buddy’s quest for the Jumbotron, the McCoy’s entree into Dillon, Julie’s teenage rebellions, etc. Connie Britton’s still great, but Tami’s character is a shadow of what she’d been in the first two seasons.

Matt seemingly had more to do this season, what with dealing with his grandmother’s decline, the return of his mother, being benched as QB1, and his reconnection with Julie. But some of his decisions were unrelated to his emotional motivations than conveniences of plotting – for instance, I never got a sense of what he wanted out of college, just that he needed to sacrifice something to stay with his grandmother. (I will say his attempts to switch to receiver was a high-point for the season.) The micromoments between Matt and Julie are golden, and his relationship with Coach Taylor continues to be a complex tangle of emotions on both ends; but Matt was too often buffeted by the plotting needs of the series to create conflicts.

Another aspect of season 3 that really disappointed me was the whitening of Dillon. The first two seasons presented interesting intersections between race and class, highlighting how the town was divided along a number of axes and the potentials (and limits) of football to enable cross-cultural dialogue. But with the conclusion of Smash’s storyline and the disappearance of Santiago and Carlotta, season 3 presented an all-white vision of Dillon, personified by the new additions of the McCoys. Perhaps the East Dillon plotline next year will rectify this, as it appears that the East side is the “wrong” side of the tracks in town, but it also seems that NBC’s strategy for the show is to create teen heartthrobs to draw in an audience, who are assumed to be white in the logic of commercial television.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear from some of the defenders who weighed in on my last FNL post, as I’m pretty burnt on the series. I’m on the fence as to whether I should return to Dillon for season 4, as I increasingly gripe at the TV more than getting swept away into its world. What am I missing here?

Just a couple of quick links & promotions before I carve out the time for a real blog post:

I had the pleasure and honor of doing an interview with Henry Jenkins about my new book, Television & American Culture. Today, Henry published the first part of the interview, with a very flattering introduction. I assume my readers also read Henry’s more prolific and interesting blog, but just in case you don’t, get on it! [Update: part 2 is up now...]

I also want to point people toward Planet Foward, an interesting web/TV hybrid that I’ve been tangentially involved in. The website aggregates user-generated videos about global warming and energy issues, and then PBS will air a special this Wednesday (4/15, 8pm in Vermont, but check your local listings…) that brings together ideas and people from the website and beyond.

The project is being spearheaded by Frank Sesno, a former CNN producer/anchor and current professor at George Washington University. Frank is a Middlebury alum, parent, and former trustee, and invited us to be involved in the project’s launch. I reached out to our students to create short videos for the site, with the potential that they might end up on national television. Two projects that my students developed are featured on the show: Leslie Stonebraker’s profile of Middlebury’s new biomass energy plant, and a collaborative animation about the potential disaster that global warming might have on Bangladesh, which turned out to be the site’s most popular video. One of the animators, Farhan Ahmed, even appears on the program on a panel with President Obama’s Energy Czar, Carol Browner! It’s a great tribute to what our students are doing here. So tune in!

I’ve been asked by my friend/colleague/Dean/Provost Tim Spears to contribute to his blog, One Dean’s View, offering a post on a few digital tools that I find essential for navigating my digital life. Here’s what I had to say, reblogged:

I am known as one of the more technologically engaged/addicted faculty members at Middlebury. Luckily, it ties directly into what I teach: media studies, focused on contemporary popular culture, television, and digital media. So the hours I spend on my MacBook Pro are mostly part of my broader “field research,” whether it’s Facebook social networking, writing on my blog, or reading articles from dozens of sources I regularly monitor.

Everyone has different technological preferences and tendencies – while I’m always on my laptop, I never carry a cell phone except for travelling out of town, and I have no interest in having a Blackberry or other mobile device (except as a way to play audio and video on the fly). So when Tim asked me to offer some tips for his readers for some essential technology tools, it should be noted that these are potentially more appropriate for laptop or desktop computers than for mobile browsing.

My two core tools are the Firefox browser and Google suite of applications. Firefox is my browser of choice both because of its open-source core and its suite of extensions. My personal favorite Firefox add-ons are AdBlockPlus to eliminate flashing banners and annoying pop-ups, Download Helper to save YouTube videos to my computer, Interclue to preview links, and Tab Mix Plus to manage tabs (and I usually have at least 6 tabs open in my browser).

I’m a convert to the Google platform of tools – I use Gmail as an interface for all my email, have iGoogle as my homepage, plan my days through Google Calendar, and obviously search via Google. One tool I’ve found a lot of Google users don’t know about is Google Reader, an RSS reader. In brief, RSS is a way to subscribe to websites that frequently update, such as blogs and periodicals; an RSS reader allows you to manage feeds from as many sites as you want, sort them by date, tag, topic, etc. Google Reader is the slickest RSS reader I’ve found, with the excellent feature to share items with friends, and even publish your shared items to your own blog or your Facebook profile. (My own shared feed is here.)

Another key tool I use is delicious, a “social bookmarking” site. When I find a website that I want to bookmark, I save it to my delicious profile (via a Firefox extension, of course), where I can tag it with relevant categories and notes. I can also share my bookmarks with friends, follow other people’s bookmarks, browse similar links via tags, and publish my links to my blog or Facebook profile. Essentially, delicious turns the private act of collecting links into a public shared resource of collective web-surfing wisdom – not to mention helps avoid the trauma of a crashed hard drive erasing your bookmarks!

Sometimes a bookmark isn’t enough – if I find a site that I want to use for my research, whether it’s an article from an online newspaper, a PDF of a scholarly journal, or a particularly interesting blog entry, Zotero helps me catalog it. Zotero is an open source bibliographic tool that runs as a Firefox add-on. When you find a site you want to cite, Zotero saves the content and stores the bibliographic information; you can then use Zotero to output bibliographies or citations directly into a word processor. It’s essentially a browser-based version of EndNote or RefWorks, but free and more useful for online research.

When it comes time to write with all that “research,” I’m still searching for the right application. I’ve used MS Office for years, but have grown frustrated with it, as it really is ill-suited for Macs. I’ve tried GoogleDocs, which is great for collaborative writing and sharing, but lacks the formatting flexibility I need (such as footnotes and handling longer documents). I love Keynote, Apple’s far superior-to-PowerPoint slideshow application that’s part of iWork, but was disappointed with some of the limitations of Pages and Numbers. I’m currently using OpenOffice, which is powerful but I’m still getting used to its quirks and bugs. I will use Scrivener to help organize my next book, but it’s not the right tool for everyday writing. If anyone has anyone has tips for the best Mac-friendly alternative to MS Office, I’d love to hear it!

Today Vermont had an opportunity to lead the nation in the fight for equality and justice by becoming the first state to legislate marriage equality without a mandate from the courts. Today, Governor Jim Douglas stood on the wrong side of history and vetoed the bill that had overwhelming support from the legislature. There is a decent chance that the veto will be overridden, but either way, Douglas has sealed his fate in history’s eyes.

Douglas is a graduate of Middlebury College and a resident of Middlebury. I wanted to take the opportunity to share the letter I wrote to him last week, which clearly made no impact on his attempt to impose his own beliefs upon his neighbors. Let’s hope Vermont can field a strong competitor to unseat him in 2010.

March 30, 2009

Dear Governor Jim Douglas,

I write with great disappointment regarding your proclaimed intention to veto the Marriage Equality bill working its way through the Vermont Legislature. As one of your neighbors in Middlebury, I can assure you that your position on the issue does not accurately represent the will of the people of Addison County. With a single signature, you stand to disempower the voices of the 300 people that gathered on Sunday, March 29, at the Middlebury town green to support marriage equality, and thousands of other supporters of equal rights around the state.

As a faculty member at your alma mater, I hope I can appeal to your sense of history that was forged at Middlebury College. I teach American media history, and regularly show footage from the Civil Rights demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s. A striking image from this era is of Governor George Wallace, standing on the steps of the University of Alabama in an effort to block integration. It was clear even then that Governor Wallace was fighting a losing battle, and today he is best remembered for being on the wrong side of history. I sincerely hope that in decades to come, I will not be showing similar footage of you as this generation’s Governor Wallace standing in the way of today’s battle for civil rights.

You have an opportunity to be on the right side of history. Your personal beliefs about the meaning of marriage should not stand in the way of progress toward equality and justice. If you personally choose to oppose the bill, please leave it unsigned, allowing overwhelming legislative intent to move forward without you standing on the steps to block the civil rights of thousands of Vermonters. I hope that your sense of history and justice will win out over bigotry and political grandstanding, and ensure you will not be the Governor Wallace of the 21st century.

Sincerely,

Jason Mittell
East Middlebury

Since I moved to Vermont in 2002, I have been on the board of Middlebury Community Television, our local public access channel. Yesterday, the board sponsored a community media forum, where we invited members of our community to come together to discuss the role of a small public access channel in a small town today – for a frame of reference, the population of Middlebury is only 8,000, and the subscriber base for cable is even smaller than that.

As Middlebury’s resident television expert, I gave an opening talk at the forum that outlined the context of PEG (Public / Educational / Governmental) channels, the role they served in the 20th century, and the threats to that role in the new media landscape. My presentation slides are below, which should be fairly self-explanatory.

I share them here to invite a broader conversation about the potential future of PEG channels. As I see it, the transformation away from the old television model, in which the distribution bottleneck meant that the only opportunities for individuals to contribute to television as a producer were going through a PEG channel or working through the complex world of the commercial or public television industries, is good thing overall. Certainly the rise of online video, nearly ubiquitous access to the tools of production, and a multiplication of distribution avenues is a net boon for democracy and creativity.

However, PEGs traditionally have served as community media centers, local anchors in a media system that has skewed toward national and global models. While online distribution certainly allows for localism, it does not privilege that model. Additionally, the digitial divide persists, especially in a state like Vermont with one of the oldest and most rural populations, so organizations like MCTV reach citizens who will never find their way to YouTube. (For instance, I was one of the youngest people in the room yesterday and one of the few who’d ever been to Hulu, YouTube, etc…)

PEG has more competition today from other ways for consumers to become producers, making the exclusive access to the tools of production that public access used to provide less essential for many – again, this is a net gain for democracy, but a tough hit for PEG channels. Additionally, as Jonathan Nichols-Pethick discussed in his recent Flow column, regulatory and corporate shifts threaten to undermine the legal and financial basis of PEG channels.

So I pose the question: what should be the future path that PEG channels take to sustain themselves? Or is this simply an example of a business model that has outlived its necessity, suggesting that those of us involved in community media should repurpose our energies into different models and structures? Are there national/global answers here, or is it all locally-specific?

I’m eager to hear what people might have to say…