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Dive into the evolution of television narratives from witty sitcoms to complex series, exploring the intellectual engagement demanded from viewers.
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ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery
Survey of Popular Culture Johnson Talks Everything: With Colbert | In Helsinki
Survey of Popular Culture Where good ideas come from: Steven Johnson on TED.com.
Survey of Popular Culture The Sleeper Curve
Survey of Popular Culture xxxxxx Dallas
Survey of Popular Culture xxxxxx 24
Survey of Popular Culture ”To follow the narrative” of a contemporary television series, Johnson argues, “you aren't just asked to remember. You're asked to analyze. This is the difference between intelligent shows, and shows that force you to be intelligent.”
Survey of Popular Culture With many television classics that we associate with "quality" entertainment—Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, Frasier—the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters onscreen. They say witty things to each other, and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clichés, and we smile along in our living room, enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences they're saying—few of which are rocket science, mind you, or any kind of science, for that matter—there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. There's no filling in, because the intellectual achievement exists entirely on the other side of the screen. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching Monday Night Football. The intellectual work is happening onscreen, not off. (64)
Survey of Popular Culture Now “another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise, demanding the same kind of “mental faculties normally associated with reading: “attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads.” (64)
Survey of Popular Culture Flashing Arrows
Survey of Popular Culture Multi-Threading
Survey of Popular Culture The clarity of Hill Street comes from the show's subtle integration of flashing arrows, while West Wing's murkiness comes from Sorkin's cunning refusal to supply them. The roll call sequence that began every Hill Street episode is most famous for the catchphrase "Hey, let's be careful out there." But that opening address from Sergeant Esterhaus (and in later seasons, Sergeant Jablonski) performed a crucial function, introducing some of the primary threads and providing helpful contextual explanations for them. Critics at the time remarked on the disorienting, documentary-style handheld camerawork used in the opening sequence, but the roll call was ultimately a comforting device for the show, training wheels for the new complexity of multithreading. (77)
Survey of Popular Culture Viewers of The West Wing or Lost or The Sopranos no longer require those training wheels, because twenty-five years of increasingly complex television has honed their analytic skills. Like those video games that force you to learn the rules while playing, part of the pleasure in these modern television narratives comes from the cognitive labor you're forced to do filling in the details. If the writers suddenly dropped a hoard of flashing arrows onto the set, the show would seem plodding and simplistic. The extra information would take the fun out of watching (Johnson 77).
Survey of Popular Culture “But film has historically confronted a ceiling that has reined in its complexity, because its narratives are limited to two to three hours. The television dramas we examined tell stories that unfold over multiple seasons, each with more than a dozen episodes. The temporal scale for a successful television drama can be more than a hundred hours, which gives the storylines time to complexify, and gives the audience time to become familiar with the many characters and their multiple interactions. Similarly, the average video game takes about forty hours to play, the complexity of the puzzles and objectives growing steadily over time as the game progresses. By this standard, "our average two-hour Hollywood film is the equivalent of a television pilot or the opening training sequence of a video game: there are only so many threads and subtleties you can introduce in that time frame. It's no accident that the most complex blockbuster of our era--the Lord of the Rings trilogy-lasts more than ten hours in its uncut DVD yersion. In the recipe for the Sleeper Curve, the most crucial ingredient is also the simplest one: time” (Johnson 131)
“U. S. television has devoted increased attention in the past two decades to crafting and maintaining ever more complex narratives, a form of ‘world building’ that has allowed for wholly new modes of narration and that suggests new forms of audience engagement.” Survey of Popular Culture “Paradoxically, the very serial elements that have been so long reviled in soaps, pulps, and other ‘low’ genres are now used to increase connotations of ‘quality’ . . . In television drama.” From Jeff Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries”
Survey of Popular Culture Jason Mittell detects evidence in the sort of narrative moves Lost makes—he speaks of “narrative pyrotechnics” and “the narrative special effect”—of a growing tendency to “push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality in which we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis” (Mittell 35).
Survey of Popular Culture Certainly, chief among Lost’s pleasures is the show’s ability to create sincere emotional connections to characters who are immersed in an outlandish situation that, as of this writing, is unclassifiable as science fiction, paranormal mystery, or religious allegory, all constructed by an elaborate narrational structure far more complex than anything seen before in American television. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”
