Core Response Week 3

In one way or another, all of this week’s authors present television as a medium that depends on ambiguity as part of its governing logic, and they all seem to agree that understanding this ambiguity is key to positing television’s role in shaping ideology. They diverge, however, in their outlook on the social potential of this ambiguity, as well as in their understanding of the televisual “text” as it pertains to their areas of inquiry. While Newcomb and Hirsch, as well as Hendershot in reanimating their essay thirty years later, render ambiguity in television as formative of a cultural forum in which the representation of a multiplicity of viewpoints contributes to productive discussion, Gitlin assumes a more shrewd perspective, conceiving of televisual ambiguity as part of the “hegemonic commercial cultural system” (Gitlin 251). Ana Paula points to several reasons to doubt Hendershot’s optimistic reading of Parks and Recreation, and I believe Gitlin’s take on ambiguity can also call into question some of the contentions made by Newcomb and Hirsch.

Within his discussion of “solution” as a form through which hegemony operates on television, Gitlin points to several programs (including All in the Family) and films in which individual action cannot neatly solve a social problem, and that these messy endings can fragment audience responses. He points to the potential commercial value of these endings: “In this situation, commercial culture succeeds with diverse interest groups, as well as with the baffled and ambivalent, precisely by propounding ambiguous or even self-contradictory situations and solutions” (263). The examples that he cites, despite deviating from the conventional, neat solutions and returns to normalcy, can be incorporated into the hegemonic system via their ability to speak to, if not cater to, viewers of diverse political and moral interests. To test out Gitlin’s understanding of ambiguity on “Betty, Girl Engineer,” I imagine he’d agree with Newcomb and Hirsch’s reading of the episode as raising questions of gender identity and discrimination, and that these questions are not completely subordinated by the apparent “answer” offered by the ending. But while Newcomb and Hirsch use this episode as evidence of their slightly utopian notion that “the rhetoric of television drama is a rhetoric of discussion,” Gitlin might interpret the episode’s ambiguous, contradictory messaging as a marketing strategy, or “responses to the restiveness and boredom of the mass audience, or the emergence of new potential audiences” (Newcomb & Hirsch 566, Gitlin 257).

Here, I am committing the error that Newcomb and Hirsch signal – that “any emphasis on individual episodes, series, or even genres, misses the central point of the forum concept” (566). They point to Raymond Williams’ concept of “flow” as an antecedent to their notion of the forum as the definitive televisual text. Gitlin likewise prioritizes structures and patterns over individual programs and content. In focusing on one series, and largely on two episodes within the series, Hendershot does not fully realize the potential of Newcomb and Hirsch’s framework. Would her analysis of Parks and Recreation as cultural forum change if she read the show in relation to NBC programming overall, or to other thirty-minute comedies, or (to fully deploy Williams’ conception of “flow”) to an entire block of broadcasting, commercials and all? Perhaps her emphasis on the “atomized constituencies” of today’s TV audiences justifies her decontextualized analysis of the show, but I cannot help but wonder how her contentions might refract if her scope of analysis were to flow a bit more loosely.