TV Studies 2021

Having just blown through all of Criminal Minds and Law and Order: SVU, my fifteen-year-old self was hungry for a new crime tv show to binge. A quick Google search led me to Twin Peaks, marketed as a crime drama show about an FBI agent who goes to a small town in Washington to investigate the death of a teenage girl. This sounded right up my alley and so I began to watch the show, expecting something similar to the crime shows I was familiar with.

The show starts off with a fairly typical setup; a small, quirky town with more than a few secrets, some standard teenage melodrama, and an odd, but charming lead character. In the first few episodes of the show, you could certainly describe it as a crime drama, as the focus of the show is centered around Laura Palmer’s death, taking a “whodunnit” approach in unraveling the mystery. As the show progresses, it veers heavily from this course. The show takes on a dreamlike, abstract quality, with surreal, oftentimes disturbing visuals.

Trying to fit a show that sheds its aesthetic skin every couple of episodes into one genre is extremely difficult. In Mittel’s “Cultural Approach to TV Genre Theory”, he states that genres are not defined by one specific, uniform aspect of the show, and that it can be defined quite differently depending on the audience, and what criteria it is being judged on. Is Twin Peaks a teen drama, as many of the main characters are teenagers, and much of the plot revolves around their lives? Is it a thriller, with its intense chase scenes and suspenseful moments? Is it a horror show, as many of the later episodes deal with disturbing and uncomfortable imagery? Is it in fact, a crime show, as I once thought, as the show does in fact revolve around the murder of a young girl and the investigation surrounding it?

After viewing this show many times since I was fifteen, I have never been able to come up with a solid answer, and I think that is the point. Twin Peaks was and is unlike anything else on television, and it truly pushes the limits of what a television show can be. It contains elements of a plethora of genres and merges them in truly unpredictable ways. Should a show with themes and imagery as surreal and avant-garde as this be grouped into the same category as Law and Order? Some might object, but I for one, am forever thankful that David Lynch baited me in with a simple murder mystery and then exposed me to some of the most groundbreaking and genre-defying television out there.

I have finally joined the Doctor Who bandwagon. I watched, and enjoyed, the first few seasons in high school, but once the show was taken off Netflix, I quickly fell out of touch with it. Despite the “accessibility” of streaming services, it wasn’t until I was aimlessly scrolling through HBO Max the other night that I found Doctor Who listed and decided to jump back in. I first started watching Doctor Who because I love all things fantasy and sci-fi, and throughout the first few seasons (referring to the 2005 reboot), I received exactly that: a man travels through space and time facing new and exciting obstacles in each episode, all with his love interest by his side. 

Doctor Who, however, has one of the largest television fandoms and the opinions and desires of these fans have had a large impact on the show since its release 16 years ago. Within the past few seasons, the attempts by the show’s producers to adapt to their audience’s growing size and diversity has become more than apparent. Though there is still some work to be done in introducing minority characters in a natural way, there is undoubtedly more representation – both with gender and race – than there was in the earlier seasons.

This shift, as Jason Mittell discusses in “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory”, represents the shift in genre characteristics due to cultural changes. Fans play a major role in this process, as fan accounts and social media threads give them platforms to transform shows, rather than continue to affirm current storylines. Ultimately, these shifts result in a general genre hybridization, where all of the cultural elements fans express interest in merge into one.

The most recent episode of Doctor Who that I watched exemplifies this convergence. The episode has sci-fi, horror, humor, and romantic components all within the hour runtime, but the most modern message lies in Amy Pond’s agency. The Doctor refers to both Amy and her husband as Pond, which is her maiden name, putting Amy in the dominant position in their relationship. This is directly juxtaposed by Queen Nefertiti’s treatment by the episode’s antagonist. He constantly refers to her as a “possession” that “needs breaking in”. The Doctor and his companions ultimately rescue Nefertiti, but the overall female prominence in this episode defies the previously dominant masculine subculture of Doctor Who. Instead, the show’s female audience is acknowledged, an audience that comprises a large portion of the evolving culture surrounding the traditional sci-fi genre.

An ongoing story that I have been following quite closely as an independent animator trying to make it on the internet (you can see my stuff here if you wanna see lol: https://www.keanimation.com) is the success of an animator that goes by Vivziepop online. Though she had a few viral shorts that made their way around youtube (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKNuZovuSw), today she is most known for her two shows, Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss.

Both projects are animated adult comedies set in hell. In Hazbin Hotel the princess of hell sets up a hotel to rehabilitate the souls in her father’s kingdom. Helluva Boss is about a group of demons who offer the service of murdering people in the living world for a small fee. Both are raunchy stories that probably couldn’t have come to fruition under different circumstances.

After a failed partnership with an exploitative production company, Vivziepop decided to take her future projects into her own hands. So, she crowdfunded a 30 minute pilot for Hazbin Hotel, spent 2 years producing and animating it and released it on youtube. Soon after, she produced Helluva Boss and released it on youtube as well.

Both shows quickly developed a massive fanbase, but have since gone down different paths. Hazbin Hotel was picked up in 2020 by A24 for tv release, and episodes of Helluva Boss continue to be released every month or so.

It is easy to see how choosing youtube as the primary distributing platform for Helluva Boss has clear implications. It is easy to see how many views each episode gets, and the comments give a sense of how the audience receives it. Some dialogue is cleverly written to get around the strict guidelines (“commit die” is a phrase that comes to mind). The links in the description make it clear that Patreon and merch are the main ways the episodes make money. When Hazbin Hotel airs, it will be interesting to see the differences that the distribution method creates between the shows. Will the add breaks work differently? Will the raunchy nature of the show shift to make it more appropriate for tv? Whatever the case, the fact that two projects from the same creator, of the same genre, operating in the same universe, produced around the same time will each be distributed in different ways provides a rare opportunity to compare the flows of two popular methods of storytelling: traditional television, and self-directed youtube.

David Morley conducted a study on audiences to investigate different decodings and interpretations of television texts and how different interpretations of the same text relate to cultural factors. If given the opportunity, I would conduct a similar experiment with an episode from The Golden Girls called “72 Hours.”

In this episode, Rose gets a letter from the hospital where she received a blood transfusion that the blood given to her could possibly be infected by HIV/AIDS, and she needs to be tested. She gets tested, but has to wait 72 hours for the results. The audience watched Rose go through a series of emotions as her friends try to comfort and support her during this difficult time. The episode aired in 1990 during the AIDS crisis, and The Golden Girls producers took a huge risk to air this episode during such a sensitive time. Reviews praised the progressiveness of the episode, and how it taught us how AIDS can be transmitted, that it can happen to anyone, and understanding the disease is important. They quote Blanche’s infamous line, “AIDS is not a bad person’s disease, Rose. It is not God punishing people for their sins.”

Nevertheless, the episode was not perfect. One of the women, Sophia, refused to drink from the same mug as Rose and to use the bathroom after her. In the end, she learns how wrong she is and that she needs to support Rose during her time of fear and not add to it. She even drinks from Rose’s mug. Despite learning her lesson in the end, Sophia’s behavior is unacceptable and would not pass if the episode was made today.

If I conducted an experiment similar to Morley’s, I would investigate TV audiences of different age demographics and how they interpreted the message of the episode. Possibly, young adults who did not grow up with the show and only found it on Hulu recently, may understand how the show is progressive for its time, but thought the episode could have went with a different storyline for Sophia. They may have more of a negotiated or oppositional decoding. People who grew up with the show, like my parents, may see the dominant message of the episode, remember The Golden Girls for being ahead of its time, and see no faults with the episode. I would be interested to investigate how television episodes labeled as “progressive” and “ahead of their time” hold up today.

For my flow analysis assignment, I wrote about the planned flow of the CW network– in regards to the show All American specifically. Before you open your mouth to say I am obsessed with this show, I want you to understand that this is not just an ordinary show. It is a show created and handcrafted by God himself. It addresses important issues in this society while also breaking down the stereotype of different groups. Without promoting the show too much, I just want to give a small post appreciation to the writers and producers of the show–as well as the beautiful actors.

Nevertheless, I was able to zone my attention on the way that the network caters not only to the demographics of the network but also to the particular storyline when it comes to the commercials they presented. I analyzed 2 episodes of the show but in this post, I will only focus on only one episode. Through this analysis, I learned a lot about how a network can structure its ad choices in order to connect with the show. Moreover, I will talk about how the advertisements in episode nine go hand and hand with the memorable moments in that episode. Here is an overview of my flow notes:

Keys moments in Season 3 episode 9

All American – Season 3: Episode 9 : Testify

About 42 minutes each episode 

Commercials Before Start of the show

• Charmin (toilet tissue)

One of the most memorable scenes from episode 9 is when Olivia gets in a car accident with Spencer. This scene was the perfect segway for the insurance ads that came back to back. I realized that the targeted audience of this network is young adults– who usually have the highest rates for car insurance. This is a very smart way to advertise after we see it happen in the show because our minds will already be in a place where we feel for the characters. So, it is easy to feed off of that emotion and sell us an insurance brand that we can not forget about.

Next, it was the random advertisement about Strayer University that sealed the deal for me. Before the commercial break, Coup talks about wanting to drop out of school while her mom is convincing her that she is making a wrong choice. The ad about the university speaks to the scene in which they are trying to show us that signing up for school is the right choice. This observation further supports my claim that the content of the show is working together with the flow. Overall, it was interesting seeing how the CW brand coincides with the organized flow to cater to the demographics they reach, which is something that I can not unsee now after studying it.

After reading Mittell’s “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory”, which emphasizes the negotiation between specificity and generality with genre studies, I wanted to know how this concept would be applied to Community, one of my favorite TV shows. Community is often categorized as a sitcom (or at least a satire of one) and follows the main character, Jeff Winger, a lawyer who is disbarred for faking his undergraduate degree and must enroll in a “community college” in order to resume his career. He is surrounded by a motley crew of students, who fit into various narrative archetypes, ranging from the tense perfectionist to the arrogant athlete.

Despite being referred to by popular media outlets as a sitcom and/or comedy, the show incorporates various non-comedic genres, structuring the narrative around tropes and conventions from TV, movies, and pop culture in general. There is so much going on within Community that placing the show under the label of a singular genre would be an overgeneralization. In order to apply media genres to the show, I decided to follow Mittell’s idea of narrowing the analysis to focus on a “specific aspect of a genre’s definition, meaning, history, or cultural value”, which avoids the “problems of overgeneralization that have been typical of more traditional genre studies, as well as acknowledge that genres are too multifaceted and broad to be understood in their totality”(70). In particular, I think a significant component of genre analysis within Community is its use of cinematic language and cultural references. Not only is Community about the semiotics of the sitcom and the tropes of almost every single genre, but it touches on the shared culture that the audience brings to the show.

Since it would be challenging to pick up every single allusion to literature and pop culture, every viewer is able to find their own path through the series. Each episode is a unique riddle, which allows the audience to find personal significance in the content. By engaging the audience through various cultural references, Community reifies sitcom conventions and connects them to the lives of viewers themselves.

After having watched and analyzed the flow of NBC programming, I can’t help but make comparisons to what I see on Netflix and Hulu (my primary modes of entertainment). 

I watched The Voice on NBC. It was a spicy battle round with contestants and judges I do not care about–why is Blake Shelton the last judge remaining from my childhood days of watching this show? Still, the nostalgia hit, hard. I was taken back to the days when I’d come home from school and watch this with my parents. As such, it was weird when the commercial cuts happened. I went from being completely engrossed in the show, to shell shocked when the pandemic ads came on. I didn’t turn on the TV to be constantly reminded of reality. The thing about these commercials is that viewers can tell when they are coming. After 7-10 minutes, and right before something important happens on the show. I felt like I was oscillating between dread and anticipation: I felt dread when the commercial was about to come on, and was quite ready to get back to watching the show after the commercial. While the ads were taking place, I tried to go on my phone, but something about being on the phone while watching TV feels wrong.

This is a stark contrast from Hulu, in which the commercials show up randomly because of their fixed occurrences during the show. The annoying thing about that is sometimes a commercial would take place right in the middle of when things got important. Nonetheless, Hulu ads are kind of fun to watch: “Oh neat, I’m given a choice between which Chevy scenario I’d like to see” 

    When the Hulu ad doesn’t capture my attention, (or rather, when the algorithm is wrong about me) I admit that it’s a lot easier to go on my phone. I’ve caught myself tapping through twitter DURING whatever it is I was watching before. It’s concerning to reflect on how short my attention span has become now that I have the show and all the social media platforms in one place at my fingertips. I often wonder if I’m even truly getting the most of laptop TV/film, because of this constant detachment I feel that doesn’t exist when I’m watching TV. Oh well, back to my show that’s running in another tab while I write this blog.

I want to semi-address a concept introduced (at least to me) by the Roseanne reading: the idea that a piece shown with different surrounding commercials is not the same piece. The reason I say semi address is because I recognize that what I am about to talk about is not exactly along the same point as the reading. The reading was more focused on what a piece of television might mean to people concerning the differences in the content surrounding it. I instead what to look at commercials less as a meta device and more as a narrative aspect and rather than discuss how two different commercials might result in different readings of the same episode, I instead want to illustrate how an episode is affected simply by whether it has commercials or not. I first remember thinking about this as a kid who was way into Ben 10 and when I first watched a Ben 10 episode on dvd, which of course had no commercials, it was the first time I actually noticed the commercial break. At first, being a dumbass kid, it took me a little while to figure out “Wait why do they keep cutting to black and then showing me the same three seconds I just saw?” Nowadays with all the streaming services we have, their original shows don’t have to account for this but I’m willing to guess a lot more 0f us have noticed when we go to watch an older show made in the golden age of network television that of course still has its commercial breaks. I bring this up because I encourage you to notice how this contributes to where an episode of any show has to leave a cliffhanger, has to leave you with that feeling of What’s gonna happen? In Ben 10, they can’t guarantee that the very next episode in this time slot is gonna be another Ben 10, and even if it is what are the chances it’s the next episode chronologically, so the commercials throughout the episode mark where the cliffhangers are. I’d even argue as much as I hated commercials as a kid, that’s probably because the cliffhangers were very well timed. I hated the commercials because they always came on when something big was about to happen, but I do think that forcing me to wait had me more engaged than when I watched them on dvd and I would find out what would happen in like a second. Shows like the DC Universe’s Harley Quinn series (check it out btw, criminally overlooked) will more consistently place cliffhangers at the end of each episode so that you can just binge it all at once.

(tw: sexual assault) Bridgerton was an interesting watch. My mother and I watched it together in one sitting after she put on a random show to watch during a workout on her stationary bike (it was kind of weird when we reached the sexy stuff, but by then we were invested), and at the time it was lovely. The netfilx original served as a rollercoaster of an experience that was silly enough not to need deep thought while still be an entertaining escape from quarentine. My mom and I had a great time laughing at our theories about what would happen next, thirsting over the duke, and hoping the characters could solve their problems and get together already! For the most part the show was fun, but towards the end the need to keep the tone of the show light and something to escape to caused important moments, choices, and dynamics to be glossed over in away that takes very little thought to tinge that enjoyment with some disgust.

Though the unexplained race dynamics (is this a race-blind world or not?), the pattern of casting light skin characters as likable characters and dark skin actors as the villains, and skirting around the realities of privilege in the world of Bridgerton all come to mind, what is likely the most egregious example is how Daphne and Simon’s relationship is depicted after they get married – after (many scenes of) a very sexual honeymoon period, Daphne learns of the mechanics of conception. This causes her to realize that her new husband lied to her – he is not actually infertile but has been using the pullout method to prevent her from getting pregnant and Daphne didn’t know enough about sex before marrying him to know that’s what he was doing. What Daphne didn’t know was that when Simon said he could not have children, he was referring to a vow he made to his father, who mistreated him as a child, not a physical condition.

At this point, as an audience member, I was on Daphne’s side. It was a cathartic moment of the character finally realizing what the audience already knew, and I was on the edge of my seat to see how she reacted. I expected a new string of events that would finally allow Simon to resolve the backstory responsible for the character flaws that had plagued him so far. Instead, I was treated to a very sudden rape scene: Daphne marches into the master bedroom, engages Simon in more sexy time, and at the last second overpowers him to force him to complete the deed still inside her while he struggles against her.

For the sake of argument, there are a few reasons that this choice could be, well maybe not a good one but maybe an effective one. One possibility is the idea that it introduces an opportunity to examine the danger of inadequate sex education and how people who love each other can hurt each other when information not available. Another is that Daphne’s redemtion and the rehabilitation of relationship after this could be a compelling story. Unfortunately neither of these directions are followed.

Daphne is never held accountable for how she hurt Simon, nor is her choice ever acknowledged as rape, or even something wrong. Instead, only Simon is challenged, not even for lying to Daphne but for not wanting children to begin with. By including the rape scene very serious ideas were introduced to the show, Simon’s stance on children was not the thing that needed to be examined at the moment.

Not enought time was alloted to detangling the drama introduced by the scene. The second to last episode of an otherwise thoughtless show is not the time to introduce a complication this serious. There was no time for the characters to really understand where each other was coming from, for Simon to react to being violeted the way he was, for Daphne to recognize the harm she’s done, for growth to occur, for me to get back on board with this relationship. Instead, the show ignores the issues it introduces and tries to uphold the lighthearted drama vibe it had established earlier without resolving them. A happy childbirth scene in an epilogue scene a year later is not the satisfying conclusion this development demands.