How would genre scholars classify a "TV Movie"? (core post 4)

Just the other day, I read an article that detailed Steven Spielberg's slightly condescending and elitist indexical conception of films released by TV streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) as being, due to the inherent ontology of the distributor/exhibitor, television. Therefore, as existing in the lowly category of TV, Spielberg maintains that these "TV movies" (a bit of an oxymoronic classification that destabilizes the classifications of "TV" and "movie") should not be considered for Oscars, the preeminent end-all-be-all institution that determines and rewards quality cinema. However, certainly, these TV movies can be considered for Emmys (read in: a tone of subtextual denigration). In light of this week's readings which tackle generic discourses and their mutability, TV's own status as an unstable locus of traditional lit/film genre analysis, and the omnipresent debate of "quality TV" in which notions of quality are determined by the televisual program's closeness and relation to the cinematic, I thought this article provided an apt entry point to perhaps discuss and apply this week's readings to TV movies.

So, my question is this: how do we apply a genre to TV movies, a limbo category that both obscures and bridges two seemingly diametrically opposed mediums? Can TV movies be its own category of genre, one that encompasses several iterations with distinctive properties aside from their commonality being a feature film format produced to be aired specifically for television? What discursive practices create the TV movie as something typically dismissed by film elites and even, nowadays, television elites? How are digital streaming television services refocusing this discourse and shifting the category of TV movie as a cinematic product independent of its primary mode of delivery to the masses? Below, I attempt to wrestle with these questions. I'd also enjoy your take on it as well. 

Certainly, in some instances, I can agree with Spielberg on his assertion about TV movies. TV movies have, more often than not, been terrible dilutions of cinema or, simply, quality content. However, there's one specific form of the TV movie that I'd like to consider. Take the endless Hallmark Channel movies starring Candace Cameron Bure that my mother unironically (read as: worryingly) binge watches on a daily basis. Their plots are, to use a term my students include on every essay, "cookie-cutter": a good-natured divorcee with a son or a woman soon to be married to the wrong man meets a strange man and their initial encounter is abrasive. They really hate each other. However, if there is a young child present, the young child always sees that their parent is truly in love with this new stranger. Then some antics ensue to bring them together against their will, but through these antics they realize their true compatibility (for example, perhaps they are stuck in an elevator together). They plot to escape one of their troubled relationships, succeed, the son urges mom to kiss his so desperately wished for father figure, then we flash forward to a beautiful wedding. Happy end. Repeat on a mind-numbingly endless loop.

Can this type of TV movie be considered a soap opera a la Feuer? As a product distinctly created through and for the televisual form, there are some similarities and differences. Let's consider some reasons why they may be up for the genre classification. These films are found on channels targeting middle-class middle-aged (and older) women at home to watch these feedback loops that elicit passive spectatorship (i.e., these women can complete house chores, take care of youngsters, or, much like my mother, take a nap). These Hallmark films typically boast low production value with highly stylized acting and reliable plot structure. These films are clearly relishing in a feminized narrative, form, and execution, and much like daytime soaps, can be considered a "manifestations of women's culture" (5). In these films, there is a centrality on the domestic, as the romance typically shakes up previously stable domestic spheres (such as disapproving parents who now bemoan their daughter's new love choice, a poor sloppy second to the fiancee she may leave at the altar) (4). However, through the form of a film, these films preclude a serialization unique to the soap opera that allows for continuing narratives with little closure that starkly contrasts the the neatly contrived "love triumphs all" endings of Hallmark movies (4). Furthermore, the aesthetic rigidity of a film format would render formal qualities of the soap opera (intense zooms, excess of mise-en-scene, the lingering reaction) difficult to adopt (8-11). We accept these practices when we watched Dynasty because we recognized that it was a soap opera, and by that very nature, a soap opera calls for such dramatized form and content. As we watch a TV movie primarily with the "movie" form emphasized and the TV understood as the technology that delivers the film, such formal technique would be incredibly jarring as it would draw attention to filmmaking versus making the production seamless, as most Hollywood films seek to do.

But... does the formal tropes of a soap opera define/constitute the soap opera genre?

So, in terms of understanding these films as soaps, perhaps we adopt the critical methodology posited by Jason Mittel. In ways many don't understand, I'd enjoy a class in which the word "Foucault" never appears, but, alas, I am doomed. Mittel pinpoints some shortcomings of traditional scholarship surrounding genre studies. What he specifically criticizes is the treatment of text as genre which usually leads to circular affirmations of genre, its characteristics, and its relation to larger processes at large. He instead proposes studying genre through discourses and how these discourses create genre (13). Mittel asserts "the discourses surrounding and running through a given genre are themselves constitutive of that generic category; they are the practices that define genres and delimit their meanings, not the media texts themselves" (13). I bring this up because, simply, I do not know all of the discourses surrounding Hallmark TV movies other than my own bemoaning of their existence and their female-centric audiences. As something made for TV, in the cultural discourse that devalues televisual programming, we can assume that these films are innately terrible. TV movies are a product whose mode of delivery outweighs its aesthetic form. Furthermore, due to Hallmark's status as a channel for the middle-aged housewife it is thus a product of women's culture. As we've learned, typical iterations of women's visual culture were ostentatious daytime soaps (read as: lacking "quality"). So, it would be natural to link a TV movie produced and exhibited by a "women's" channel with soap operatic properties. To be honest, I've never sat through an entire Hallmark movie because the few minutes I have to be exposed to them seem to last several lifetimes. I leave the room as quickly as possible, but I enter that room with the notion that these films are inherently awful and would have to be persuaded by the second-coming to think otherwise. I pre-judge going into the texts. Rather than using the text as a locus of genre determination, I conceive of its genre due to the discourse surrounding it.