1 TV is complicated. This can mean many different things. Sometimes the text itself is formulaic, yet its pleasures are complicated. Other times, the narrative of a TV program doesn’t present a clear plot, yet attempting to puzzle out the story is a fundamental pleasure. Sometimes where a program comes from is complicated—the question of who created and is responsible for it can, for example, be less than straightforward. Or perhaps the meanings expressed by a show are complicated, presenting contradictions and diverse perspectives than can be interpreted. The bottom line is that television criticism seeks to understand and explain TV, no matter how simple or complex it might seem at first glance.
2 To understand TV, you need to watch TV. This might seem obvious, but there is a tradition of critics writing about television (usually to condemn it) without actually taking the time to watch much of it, or even to specify what TV texts they are criticizing. Judgments like these tend to be common amongst politicians, pundits, and anyone else looking to use television as a convenient “bad object” to make a point. Understanding TV requires more, though—and more than just watching TV, too. That is, some types of television require particular viewing practices to really understand them, such as the long-term viewing of serials and series, or the contextualized viewing of remakes or historically nostalgic programming.
3 Nobody watches the same TV. We watch a wide variety of programs, and even in those cases when we watch the same programs, we often watch them in vastly different contexts. Television is still a mass medium experienced by millions, but the specific experience of watching television is far from universal. While television in a previous generation was more shared, with events like the moon landing or the finale of M*A*S*H drawing the attention of a majority of Americans, even then our experiences of watching television were diverse, as viewers often think quite differently about the same texts.
4 Criticism is not the same as evaluation. You don’t have to like (or dislike) a particular television program to think and write critically about it, and our goal is not to issue a thumb up or down. However, evaluative reactions to a text can be a useful way to get started thinking critically about television, as you attempt to figure out what you are reacting to (or against). Many of these essays foreground their authors’ own evaluative reactions to programs that they love or hate (or even feel ambivalent about), but in every case, the critic finds his or her particular program interesting. Exploring what makes it so is a worthy goal for television criticism.
What follows in this book is a set of critical analyses that model how we might watch a particular television program that we find interesting. The programs represented are widely diverse and even eclectic, including undisputed classics, contemporary hits, and a few that you might not have heard of before. They cover a range of genres, from cooking shows to cartoons, sports to soap operas, and they span the medium’s entire history. Even so, we do not claim to be comprehensive—there are countless other programs that might be the subject of such works of television criticism. We have focused primarily on American television, or in a few cases how non-American programming is seen in an American context, although given the pervasive reach of American television throughout the globe, we hope that international readers will find these critical works helpful as well. The authors are media scholars with a range of expertise, experiences, and backgrounds, offering a wide range of viewpoints that might highlight different ways of watching TV. Each essay starts with a brief overview of its content, and ends with some suggestions for further reading to delve deeper into the relevant topic and approach.
Each of these critical essays can be read on its own, in any order. We encourage readers to go straight to a particular program or approach that interests them. However, we have organized the book into five major areas to assist readers looking for essays that speak to particular issues or approaches, as well as instructors seeking to assign essays in relation to particular topics. Essays in the first section, “TV Form,” consider aesthetics, analyzing visual and sound style, production techniques, and narrative structure, and showing how television style is crucial to understanding television content. The essays in “TV Representations” focus on television as a site of cultural representation of different groups and identities, including race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Although many essays in the book are politically concerned, those in the “TV Politics” section look more explicitly at public affairs, government, and national and global boundaries in both fiction and factual programs. In “TV Industry,” essays focus on economics, production, and regulation in historical and contemporary television culture. Those in “TV Practices” consider television in the context of everyday life, and the ways in which engagement with television texts carries across media and technologies. In the contemporary digital convergence era, it is increasingly important to think beyond a single television screen into a multiplication of media and devices.
Finally, while most owners’ manuals get filed away and forgotten or thrown in the recycling bin unread, we hope this one will enjoy a more enduring presence. This book, the essays inside it, and the critical methods the authors employ, all seek to expand the ways you think about television. If the book itself doesn’t earn a spot next to your remote control, we have no doubt that some essay inside it will form a lasting impression. Perhaps it will provoke you to think differently about a program you love (or hate), or it will make you a fan of a program you had never seen or even heard of before. Better yet, we hope How to Watch Television will prompt you to think critically and apply the methods you’ve read about in your own original way, while discussing or writing about a program of your own choosing. That is how this owners’ manual can prove to be more permanent than others: as you flip through the channels, and especially when you stop to view a particular program, we hope that you cannot help but think critically about the television that you watch.
FURTHER READING
Butler, Jeremy G. Television: Visual Storytelling and Screen Culture. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Gray, Jonathan, and Amanda D. Lotz. Television Studies. 2nd ed. Boston: Polity, 2019.
Mittell, Jason. Television and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
I
TV Form
Aesthetics and Style
1
Better Call Saul
The Prestige Spinoff
JASON MITTELL
Abstract: Few aspects of television more typify the American commercial medium than the spinoff, a new program that emerges out of a successful series to sustain its brand past the original’s shelf life. However, contemporary television is marked by the rise of prestige drama, a mode of storytelling hailed as culturally legitimate and artistically groundbreaking that seems to refute the imitative logic of spinoffs. This essay analyzes spinoff Better Call Saul’s pilot episode to understand how the series managed to do the seemingly impossible: re-create the popular, critical, and creative successes of Breaking Bad by straddling the line between prestigious originality and commercial copying.
In the late 1940s, when television was still in its infancy, the acerbic radio comedian Fred Allen offered a quip that captured a widespread skepticism toward the medium: “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”1 Allen was highlighting how most critics perceived the emerging medium: a commercial industry driven to create derivative programming, rather than innovative, original works. Such dismissive attitudes are still widespread, as many people note how television programming is so frequently imitative of previous hits, derives from preexisting properties, or combines two successful works to create the illusion of something new. The spinoff is one prominent form of imitation driven by economic incentives, taking characters from one popular series and creating a new program around them.
However, contemporary American television has been marked by a shift in the medium’s cultural legitimacy—more than ever before, television is regarded as a place where innovative storytelling