Genre and Television Mittell, Jason
2004, 20040802, 2004-06-01, 20040618, 2004-08-02
eBook
Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of ...television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The
Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these ...shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound.
Complex TVoffers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, includingThe Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Menthe book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories,Complex TVargues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.
Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of ...television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The Simpsons , this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
Introduction: Genres that Matter 1. Television Genres as Cultural Categories 2. Before the Scandals: Genre Historiography and the Cultural History of the Quiz Show 3. From Saturday Morning to Around the Clock: The Industrial Practices of Television Cartoons 4. Audiences Talk Genres: Talk Shows and the Intersections of Taste and Identity 5. Policing Genres: Dragnet 's Texts and Generic Contexts 6. Making Fun of Genres-The Politics of Parody and Genre Mixing in Soap and The Simpsons Conclusion: Some Reflections on Reality Television Notes Appendices Index
"Mittell makes a strong case for a return to genre theory, history, and criticism within television studies as a means of understanding the production, distribution, and reception of television programs. Each of the case studies is compelling in its own terms, offering a deep picture of important trends in the history of American television." -- Henry Jenkins , MIT
" Genre and Television is an insightful, original, and well researched book and makes a significant and timely contribution to television studies." -- Annette Hill , University of Westminster, UK
"Jason Mittell re-energizes the field of genre study with this intriguing analysis of American television. From talk shows to cop shows to reality TV, Mittell eloquently demonstrates why genre still matters to TV creators, critics, and fans. Rigorously researched and theoretically-informed, Genre and Television makes a vital contribution to the field of cultural studies." -- Michael Curtin , University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Genres emerge from a dialectic of orthodoxy versus innovation, as the culture industries strive to blend predictability with surprise. By transcending the normal science of textual analysis and considering genres as industrial categories, Jason Mittell has done students of US television a considerable service." -- Toby Miller, Television & New Media
Jason Mittell is Assistant Professor of of American Civilization and Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. He has published essays in Cinema Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, Television and New Media, Film History, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and several anthologies. He lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
The rising prominence of transmedia storytelling in the digital era has helped to spur the intertwining of narrative and ludic media. In this presentation, I will discuss the way that gameplay and ...storytelling co-mingle in two very different franchises with both cult and mainstream appeal: the television series Lost and the game series Portal. While each privileges the typical form of their medium, with Lost emphasizing plot and Portal foregrounding play, looking at the cultural practices of each franchise’s “forensic fans” highlights how ludic and narrative pleasures are embedded within both media and their transmedia extensions. Contrasting the appeals encouraged by their transmedia extensions and the innovative practices embraced by fans highlights how both gameplay and storytelling can work together and potentially come into conflict within contemporary media environments.
Digital source materials such as films can be transformed in ways that suggest an innovative path for digital humanities research: computationally manipulating sounds and images to create new ...audiovisual artifacts whose insights might be revealed through their aesthetic power and transformative strangeness. Following upon the strain of digital humanities practice that Mark Sample terms the “deformed humanities,” this essay subjects a single film to a series of deformations: the classic musical Singin' in the Rain. Accompanying more than twenty original audiovisual deformations in still image, GIF, and video formats, the essay considers both what each new version reveals about the film (and cinema more broadly) and how we might engage with the emergent derivative aesthetic object created by algorithmic practice as a product of the deformed humanities.
This essay explores the award-winning fan site Lostpedia to examine how the wiki platform enables fan engagement, structures participation, and distinguishes between various forms of content, ...including canon, fanon, and parody. I write as a participant-observer, with extensive experience as a Lostpedia reader and editor. The article uses the "digital breadcrumbs" of wikis to trace the history of fan creativity, participation, game play, and debates within a shared site of community fan engagement. Using the Lostpedia site as a case study of fan praxis, the article highlights how issues like competing fandoms, copyright, and modes of discourse become manifest via the user-generated content of a fan wiki.
Few television programs both meditate on and rupture the concepts of reality and representation as much as The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s genre-bending docu-comedy that aired on HBO in the summer of ...2022. On the surface, the series purports to offer an odd variant of self-help reality TV: Nathan finds people looking to tackle challenging experiences, and stages a “rehearsal” for them to work through the situation in a low-stakes simulation before tackling it in real life. But as it plays out, the series is a deeply troubling work of media, dramatizing its own ethical failings in a way that invites us to experience both admiration and outrage at its manipulations. This video rehearses these ideas through an experimental format.
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