Core Response 5: Genre & Netflix

This week’s readings seek to trouble certain tendencies in generic approaches to television, primarily focusing on the subordination of melodrama to “quality” television as a constitutive category encompassing critically venerated narrative serials. Feuer, Kackman, and Professor McPherson examine the repressed resonances with melodrama evident in “quality” programming (or in Feuer’s case, prime-time serials), and how narrative and visual excess operate in similar ways across the two categories. I’m avoiding the word “genre,” as Mittell’s piece has deterred me from casually throwing around the term without careful prior consideration. His approach – “cultural television genre analysis” – prioritizes discursive over textual practices as the material of television genre analysis, and thus positions genre as a means of understanding how cultural value systems operate on and around television.

I found Mittell’s engagement with TV genre to be quite helpful in grasping the thorniness of “quality” television. I have described myself as a fan of “quality” television, and if “anyone who uses generic terms is participating in the constitution of genre categories,” then I have helped propagate the term as a generic classification, and participated in the reductive work that Kackman suggests discourses of “quality” perform (Mittell 13). I looked back at my response to “What are your genres?” from the Week 1 survey, and, of course, the first entry on my list was “prestige drama (HBO, Showtime, Netflix).” Perhaps someone would disagree, but I’d assert that “prestige drama” is either synonymous with “quality” television, or that the former is a sub-genre of the latter, though this week’s readings push us to move away from conceiving of “quality” television as a genre at all. Instead, I should have written “premium cable and streaming service melodrama” as my preferred genre.

In encouraging TV genre theorists to “take a broad look at the various sites of genre operation,” Mittell inspired me to explore the relationship between genre and canon as mutually-reinforcing producers of cultural value (25). The “quality” television label helps explain and facilitate the preponderance of “Best TV Shows of All Time” lists that rank The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The Wire in the number one spot; if these shows were designated and interpreted as male melodrama, in line with Professor McPherson’s conception of 24, would they hold the same critical esteem? Netflix is one of the richer sites of genre operation, and its genre categories certainly “have a direct material impact on viewer practices” (Mittell 26). I will not delve too deeply into how genre operates on Netflix, as it deserves more substantial consideration than I can offer here (I’m sure Mittell could follow up Genre and Television with Genre and Netflix). Netflix depends on generic designations to promote content to its users. Genre loses some of its value as a browsing feature when each category is primarily composed of Netflix original series, but I have used their genre drop-down feature (pictured below) as a means of discovering content. I could have sworn that Netflix used to have a subgenre feature, but it seems that now we must rely on their strange, targeted adjective stacking to subdivide each genre (Binge-worthy British TV Shows, Ominous Supernatural TV Shows, Soapy Teen TV Shows). I’m interested in how Netflix’s genre practices (thoroughly customized according to its progressively terrifying algorithm) can be implicated in the creation of “hierarchies of cultural value” (Mittell 27). I can browse “True Bromance” within both TV Comedies and British TV, but female friendship does not warrant a generic designation. Has anyone else been frustrated by the narrow/canonical generic formulations on content platforms?