The Study of Television Forms and Meanings - Essay Example

... ... ... 18 April Why has the concept of genre been so central in the study of television forms and meanings? Television emerged as a new mass media phenomenon some 70 years ago and by the late 1960s the first television academic researchers had to rely on instruments of already existing fields of study such as film critics and literature studies. Inevitably, they inherited from this existing academic tradition the powerful tool of genre theory, which helped them not only to depict television as a phenomenon but also to deconstruct its forms and meanings. Most media texts could be arranged in categories or types (Casey et al. 16), namely “genres,” and the television follows, to some extent, models which could be best described by the means of genre theory, as early theorists discovered. Thus, initially, the concept of genre provided a tool to study television alone; however, in the field of television it underwent a serious transformation throughout its lifetime, yet it occupies a central place in television theories. Traditionally, the genre became a core concept in the study of television, although later theorists found out that it could incite controversies in the interdisciplinary area of television studies. The genre theory, apart from statistical and sociological research methods, studying television audience, like people metrics, rely on the core concept that the genre is a set of conventions and codes (Casey et al. 25), which are easily recognisable by creators, consumers and de-constructors of media texts, as well as TV critics. Thus, the concept of genre is able to depict various television programmes and shows and to orderly arrange them; to describe audience’s attitude and reactions toward a given genre; to explain how the inner mechanisms of producing television “texts” work from the perspective of the genre concept and even to provide an acceptable description of television itself. Therefore, genre theory was destined to play a core and central role in the study of television, its forms and the meanings. The genre debate involving television theorists is far from complete and it is hard to find a single fundamental research work, which, one way or another, does not enter into polemics about genre and its role in studying television. For categories of genre are the base on which scholars can study television, without the genre concept a researcher can hardly describe what his work is all about. Aristotle formulated the basics of the genre theory in the third century B.C. in his Poetics, distinguishing between “comedy” and “tragedy,” and from then on researchers got accustomed to use the genre theory to categorise texts, including media texts, since most of them can be categorised in a particular genre because they “have some generic identity” (Mittell xi). However, later researchers discovered that one of the weaknesses of the genre concept is its lack of “openness” toward outer categories like the “cultural realms of media industries, audiences, policy, critics, and historical contexts” (Mittell xii). Mittell was not the only one to discover that the genre concept has to be broadened to cover not only textual analysis and/or institutional analysis of television, and that this tendency to classify everything, as Michel Foucault observed, relates to the very human idea to collect all things into identities (Dowd et al. 11). Moreover, in his book Genre and Television: from Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Mittell questions whether film and literary critics, and their genre knowledge, possess enough instrumentation to dissect television and once again puts the genre at the centre of discourse about television and its forms. He admits that genre is a central category in the studies of television, but doubts that meanings and forms of television can be studied in their entirety in their “traditional” genre approach. As far as television criticism and theory evolved from literary and film theory, many theorists accept the concept of genre in television a priori in the sense that it is a truism and that the category of genre could be operated without much formulation. Some researchers, however, point to the fact that in the case of the television genre “what emerges is a notoriously contentious and hard to define concept” (Devereux 284), an observation which further underlines the significance of the genre problem in television studies, at least because an academic research in a given area must possess deep scientific roots and valid grounds. Television itself does not provide much help to researches for it is constantly developing hybrid forms of media texts, which are not only hard to define, but also do not fall into existing genre categories. Some researchers, like Mittell, try to solve this problem with putting the genre theory into the broader landscape of cultural contexts within which television, its forms and meanings, operate. It seems that most theorists agree that the “journalistic” model of analysing television, which heavily depends on descriptions and personalisation, is not applicable in studying television (Stadler and McWilliam 230), but after Horace Newcomb published its TV: The Most Popular Art in 1974 all researchers tend to rely on genre in their works. Newcomb was the first to study television genres and, ironically, the “journalistic” approach also always relies on genres not only to sound trustworthy, but also because it is impossible to depict television outside the genre canons. Otherwise, a brand new theory should be coined to embrace a whole new set of terms and categories. These various approaches introduce additional complexity in television studies, and their theoretical views differ depending “on whether [TV] has been approached, as, say, visual medium or cultural form, public broadcaster or domestic reception, institution of power or democratising force,” as observed by Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson in Television and Criticism (8). But all these approaches are unified by the simple fact that whatever approach is used and whatever theory the author supports, the genre looms into sight as a core concept. Even when questioned or doubted as a primary category in the study of media, and television in particular, no researcher can avoid the genre concept when theorising about media. Following Horace Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art in 1974 and edited by him Television: The Critical View in 1976, researchers took a more humanistic approach toward the study of television and to some extent broke with the established social science perspective in this field (Edgerton and Rose 2). On the other hand, the sociological approach cannot refrain from using the genre concept when it comes to television, too. Sociology, and its methods, can tell researchers that an individual in the UK watches on average three hours of television programmes a day (Casey et al. xviii), is able to measure when a particular group of people watch television, etc., but will fail to explain what lies behind the numbers – namely, what and why these people are watching. In other words, “[e]mpirical research falters when it must explain television’s meanings and it is also unable to explain how narrative and stylistic devices generate those meanings” (Butler 380). Thus, scholars have to turn to the well established genre concepts and categories to explain how and why television works. The genre theory provides a tool to explain these viewers’ preferences and to dig deeper into this “flow of full and partial texts” (Casey et al. xviii), while television studies tend not to be in search of “valuable” television programmes, as opposed to traditional criticism in literature and film. When analysing television as a text, media text, researchers have to approach television programmes in terms of “their narrative structures, their forms of characterisation, their meanings (including ideological ones) and their themes” (Casey et al. ix); hence, genre theory intervenes again as an important instrument of theorising. Most theorists agree that genre has some important characteristics and sets of codes, which proved very important in relation to both producers and consumers of television products, and analysts and critics, too. First of all, for producers of television programmes the genre concept and genre itself is “like a tool box” (Nicholas and Price 9), while genre recognition and knowledge allows a viewer to have the right expectations about a television programme of his choice. When Peter Debruge writes in Daily Variety that “[f]rom crime dramas to superhero fantasies, the majority of television programming depends on formulas as old as the medium itself,” he speaks in the categories of genres, too. There is no other way to “speak” about television. Thus, the genre concept occupies a central place in the television discourse, in the least because viewers cannot “think” of television outside the framework of genres. Anyone who can read, and even illiterates, who enjoy oral folklore traditions, can distinguish one genre from another and Paul Metz described this phenomenon in an article in University Wire entitled Reality TV Goes Too Far: “For instance, if you know that "Americas Next Top Model" is about a group of prissy underfed girls who are forced to live together and do asinine things in order to procure a modeling contract… you can pretty much hypothesise whats going to take place without ever having seen the show. There will be girls posing, followed by a round of cattiness, then crying, the decision of the big winner and an encore of crying.” (Metz) This seems so obvious and elementary, so familiar, that many critics, on the level of TV Guide, do not realise that they, to some extent, use the instrumentation of the genre concept to “talk” television. But to apply such an intuitive method to the theory of television is dangerous. This is the reason why Robert Allen differentiates between “contemporary vs. traditional criticism” (Allen 8). He speaks about the “fundamental departure” of contemporary criticism theory (theories) from traditional criticism, rooted in literary criticism. In this way, the term genre acquires new connotations, because, although there are similarities between television programmes and literary texts and theatrical works, as Allen mentioned, contemporary criticism deals more with contexts, while television represents a “flow” of texts, where no clear stop sign is evident between one programme and another. In a similar way, genre boundaries dilute and television studies have to deal with inter-textual genres and forms and to apply inter-disciplinary approaches to explain these phenomena. In this respect, “[g]enre definitions are no more natural than the texts they seem to categorise… and subject to ongoing change and redefinition” (Mittell 1). This makes the genre concept even more important in the field of television studies because it has to be constantly adapted to reflect practices, which other media do not know, like “scheduling decisions, commonplace serialisation, habitual viewing, and channel segmentation” (Mittel 1). Moreover, one of the innate and core characteristics of genre is its dynamism and flexibility and because a risk exists for the consumer of texts to get bored, “generic mutation is required to maintain a genre’s vitality” (Edwards 16). Hence, the genre concept is part of a constantly evolving process of dissecting television products, which is not self-sufficient, but rather self-fuelling and the genre concept has a guaranteed place in this process. The channel segmentations, mentioned by Mittell, sometimes take the form of genre segmentation and “genre channels extend particular genres to channel-length format, for example CNN (all news), and ESPN (all sports)” (Straubhaar and LaRose 243). Straubhaar and LaRose continue this segmentation list with the observation that the genre channels “diversify into subgenres” (243); however, their example is a perfect one in the sense of how the term “genre” is used in television criticism. They claim that the “news” genre is further sub-divided to regional news, local news, and international news, separating these genres on a geographical base, which sounds a bit strange because there is no division in the forms and meanings of these channels. This example only comes to prove that when a theorist has to deal with television, the genre concept appears to be a universal key to open all doors, a slippery approach. Whatever theoretical approach is used, genre issues occupy much of the time of representatives of both structuralism, which deconstructs texts to show how their underlying structures produce meanings, and scholars representing post-structuralism, which claims that no definitive meaning is possible and texts produce multiple interpretations, as described by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe in Analyzing Fictional Television Genres (Devereux 283). Both schools deal with genres as a central category, but Akass and McCabe conclude, based on Feuer’s works, that methodology applied by a theorist determines even the way he constructs a genre (Devereux 285), which introduces further uncertainties and forces the genre debate to play a central role in the television studies, past and present. The school of British cultural studies, for instance, helped shift the agenda of television studies “away from the text as a fixed site of meaning… to a polysemic one open to multiple interpretations” (Devereux 286). Thus, the text and its meaning are viewed in the broader context of “consuming” this text, while genre is dismantled to pieces in order to extract its properties. However, no school of criticism can boast that it de-constructed genre to such an extent as to be able to define it in an ultimate manner. Moreover, in television studies some genres are “defined by setting (like westerns), some by profession (like legal dramas), some by audience affect (like comedies), and some by narrative form (like mysteries)” (Mittell 8). But whichever approach is used, the final outcome is that a theorist has to rely on genre concepts to define his statements. “The field of mass communication research is changing rapidly,” as Allen observed in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism; however, this observation only underlines the healthy “traditional” approach of Dorothy Hobson who finds the roots of contemporary television soap operas and similar continuous series in: “oral literature, folk tale, the literary realist writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the serial novels of Charles Dickens and the domestic and personal detail of the novels of authors like Jane Austin or George Eliot” (Davin and Jackson 9). In her approach, Hobson uses literary theories to prove that the genre concept in television studies is still a viable and quite useful tool to dissect television programmes, their meanings and the form in which they are presented: a form based on a particular genre literature researchers are already familiar with. Horace Newcomb, the “founding father” of the television genre studies, began theorising using the genre concept under the tutelage of John Cawelti, who used the same approach in the study of popular fiction and film (Edgerton and Rose 2) and since then the genre concept is an integral part of scholar’s efforts in this field. On the other hand, in her farewell article “Can I finally turn the telly off now?” as a television critic with The Observer, Kathryn Flett wrote: “Strangely, nobody who can write a thesis entitled A Post-Structuralist Analysis of Themes in Lost ever seems to become a newspaper TV critic, because (unlike other forms of journalistic criticism) writers get given the job for no more compelling reason than that they can string a pleasant sentence together and, with a bit of luck, may also have watched some telly.” (Flett) However, Flett also borrows from genre theory not only to explain her approach to television and to “spot themes and threads” (Flett) but also to speak of “new genres” like reality television. A random pick of research articles under the search “television studies” in HighBeam or AllAcademic online research databases returns tonnes of published and unpublished texts related to television, in which authors speak of genres, theorise genres and base their statements on genre concepts to prove their thesis. As a matter of fact, the genre concept is not only a vital part of television theory and discourse, it is impossible to analyse television, its forms and meanings, outside genre theory with all its limitations and controversies. Works Cited Allen, Robert C. (Editor). Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Butler, Jeremy G. Television: Critical Methods and Applications. 2nd ed., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. Print. Casey, Bernadette (Editor), Casey, Neal (Editor), Calvert, Ben (Editor), French, Liam (Editor) and Lewis, Justin (Editor). Television Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed., New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Davin, Solange (Editor) and Jackson, Rhona (Editor). Television and Criticism. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008. Print. Debruge, Peter “No box can hold them: however familiar the genre, savvy series find new ways to break the mold. (V PLUS: ROAD TO THE EMMYS: DRAMA).” Daily Variety. Reed Business Information, Inc. (US). 2007. HighBeam Research. Web. 15 Apr. 2010. Devereux, Eoin (Editor) Media Studies: Case Issues & Debates. London: SAGE Publications, 2007. Print Dowd, Garin (Editor), Stevenson, Lesley (Editor) and Strong Jeremy (Editor). Genre Matters. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007. Print. Edwards, Mark Key Ideas in Media. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, 2003. Print. Edgerton, Gary R. (Editor) and Rose, Brian G. (Editor). Thinking outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Print. Flett, Kathryn. “Can I finally turn the telly off now?” Guardian.com. The Guardian, 20 Dec 2009. Web. 15 Apr. 2010 Metz, Paul “COLUMN: Reality TV goes too far.” University Wire. 2007. HighBeam Research. Web. 15 Apr. 2010 Mittell, Jason. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Nicholas, Joe and Price, John. Advanced Studies in Media. Cheltenham: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998. Print. Stadler, Jane and McWilliam, Kelly Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Print. Straubhaar, Joseph and LaRose, Robert. Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture, and Technology. 5th ed. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006. Print. Read More