I Started Watching Mozart in the Jungle (Non-Core Post)

My roommate, her girlfriend, and I have recently started re-watching The O.C. (with a drinking game attached with it that would surely make hardcore players die of alcohol poisoning). However, the other night, I was home alone, craving some good Sandy Cohen paternal advice as Peter Gallagher's eyebrows plot world domination. Rather than being a terrible human and continuing to watch it without my roommate, I started watching Mozart in the Jungle.

I will admit that I only started watching it because Gael Garcia Bernal is incredibly easy on the eyes and I really enjoy 85% of Jason Schwartzman's creative pursuits. I thought it would be interesting to see his work behind the camera versus in front of it that didn't involve his musical talent. So, I watched the first two episodes and another one last night.

Here are my initial thoughts: 

• Do all Kirke sisters have a lisp? 
• It's an easy binge show - it's not too intense, it's light, but the plot progresses at an even pace
• However, the plots are a bit too constructed/predictable which can make watching it a bit annoying I think. It relies a bit on a lot of tropes in terms of plot and character. 
• The humor is a bit outdated? Or perhaps it's written for an older sense of humor. It's not that I don't find the show "funny", I recognize the humor and acknowledge it, but it doesn't elicit a strong reaction from me. 
• Gael Garcia Bernal is easy on the eyes 

Anywho, if any of you guys have watched it, or plan to start, I'd be interested to get your thoughts or reactions to it. I know I'm a few seasons behind but I think I already know what central plot is going to be dragged out and then gratified (much to my chagrin). 

Jenkins - Core Post 5

This is my first time reading Henry Jenkins, and it’s been an interesting experience! In “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” Jenkins lays out the polarized response of how media critics have identified, characterized, and evaluated contemporary trends within the American media environment: those who take up “new media technologies” as allowing greater access, greater diversity of content, greater liberatory potential; and those who worry about the continued production of new and old forms of exclusion, monoculturalism, media ownership monopoly/oligopoly, etc. Jenkins takes up the task of identifying and parsing these tensions, and re-casting the role of cultural and (new) media studies to serve a public function as these tensions are worked out and calcified into certain forms—part of thinking “[c]onvergence [as] a process, but not an endpoint” (34). 

I think there’s a lot to say about this article, and I imagine others will take up problematics laid out by this article and how this article relates to contemporary issues of “collective intelligence.” I’d like to take up just one part, at the final paragraph of page 37; Jenkins writes

Convergence is also a risk for creative industries because it requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it means to consume media—assumptions that shape both programming and marketing decisions. If old consumers were assumed to be passive, the new consumer is active. If old consumers were predictable and stationary, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or even media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If old consumers were seen as compliant, then new consumers are resistant, taking media into their own hands. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, they are now noisy and public. Much of this is old news to those of us who have been following debates in cultural studies over the past few decades. But, as John Hartley and Toby Miller suggest in this issue, with varying degrees of pessimism, the idea of the active and critical consumer is gaining new currency within media industries, creating new opportunities for academic intervention in the policy debates that will shape the next decade of media change." (37-38)

As I struggled to understand McRobbie on her stances, I struggle to situate Jenkins'. Does Jenkins believe these epochal shifts are 'real' and hard breaks, and/or are these breaks also about certain kinds of interpellation into 'active consumers' produced against their now-constructed-asformer subjectivities as 'passive consumers'? Perhaps the difference isn't stark, and perhaps Jenkins holds them together. When Jenkins notes that this is 'old news,' is that to say that scholars within cultural studies and writers in popular criticism have 'seen this coming' and have long identified it as an essential constitutive element of the 'coming of new media,' or is he drawing a greater genealogy that smooths out epochal shifts?

 

Big Little Lies - noncore post

Over the weekend, I finally finished Big Little Lies, which reminded me of the articles on genre and melodrama we read this week (It also reminds me of Morse's article on ontologies of distraction, partially because the characters spend so much time in the car). The show is a melodrama that slowly incorporates elements of a police drama over the course of the season.

I think the show aligns with Krystle's observation that "without the pressure of appealing to a broad, network audience, shows [like Big Little Lies] are relieved from tapping into an overall zeitgeist and encouraged to filter particular generic conventions that promote a unique aesthetic." Perhaps though, melodrama is the zeitgeist, since its form has proliferated throughout television. It's hard not to read the show as a commentary on the social networks of affluent women and the hope that women might be allies instead of enemies.

Maybe the show avoids the stigma of melodrama by a) being a prestige drama on HBO and b) hiring an all-star cast of Hollywood women who have had successful film careers (Meryl Streep has signed on for the second season) whose shift to TV is no longer read as failure. Perhaps the show takes melodrama seriously by elevating it to a prestige aesthetic form.

Non-Core 10

In reading Feuer's article "Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today," I was struck by the fact that critics across the board seem to agree that "daytime and prime-time serials share a narrative form consisting of multiple plot lines and a continuing narrative (no closure)" (4). Indeed, Feuer seems to suggest that the multiple plot structure is perhaps a shared quality of all American television (5). This observation made me wonder about "debates" around "television vs. film"—which is better, which is of a higher quality, which is more ideologically engaged (or engaged with ideology), which is an art, etc.

I started to think about when and where "multiple plot structure" is seen as an asset, and what is has been seen as faulty. I had read a pretty un-compelling article by Andrew deWaard called "The Global Social Problem Film" that considered the multilinear, web-of-life (what deWaard will eventually call a Deleuzian/rhizomatic) plot line as a particularly privileged form to think across a planetary scale, to think the unusual intimacies and connections brought about by globalization, and is a form to think self-reflexively. The films deWaard cites are Syriana, Babel, Crash, Fast Food Nation, and Traffic—films I would characterize as high school-stoner-philosophy-bro fetishes (I'm tbh shocked that Requiem for a Dream isn't shoehorned in that article!). Are television shows ever given this benefit of the doubt? What makes certain multiple plot lines exciting and novel (Sense8 smdh) and others a sign of weakness, distraction, or "doing too much"?

deWaard, Andrew. "The Global Social Problem Film." Cinephile 3, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 12-18.

Non-Core post: Roseanne returns...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/arts/television/roseanne-reboot-review.html

In case anyone's interested, the Roseanne reboot starts tomorrow. I don't suspect it will be complex, "quality" television, but I do think it will be interesting and relevant to much of what we've been discussing in class.

non-core - Telenovela!

 

This not a “try not to laugh” video, but almost. The clip I’m attaching here is part of a telenovela, called Rosalinda, that aired pretty much everywhere in Latam. In fact, Wikipedia says that it is the “all-time most exported and most watched single telenovela in the world” because it aired in 180 countries worldwide and was seen by 2 billion people by 2000. The overall plot couldn’t be more cliché: Rosalinda is a poor but beautiful girl who sells flowers and, one day, meets a rich man with whom she gets married and has a kid. Of course, the plot thickens because the man gets tricked by his own mother and abandons Rosalinda (because “happy marriages don’t make for interesting plot complications”), who loses her marbles and is put in a mental hospital (the kid is also kidnapped by the wealthy grandmother). When the place catches fire, she’s able to escape but everybody thinks she’s dead and, because of her amnesia, she becomes a new person – a famous singer – and falls in love with her talent agent. Eventually, her memory comes back (after a car accident, of course) and she fights back to get her child and (original) man back.

All the elements that Feuer describes are here, namely “acting, editing, musical underscoring and the use of the zoom lens” which are all striving to enhance the (melo)drama. Also, just like Dynasty was an expensive soap opera to make because of the opulent sets and dazzling fashions, Rosalinda also remains in history as the most expensive television production in Mexico.

Genres on Film vs TV

During Spring Break I watched the Spanish Netflix series, La casa de papel (Money Heist in English) and I was struck by how much the plot and narrative follows that of Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006). The plot is nearly identical except for the fact that the group of robbers goes into the National Mint instead of a private bank. Many of the same tropes of both heist/robbery movies are employed in the series, and by the middle of the season I questioned how much more of this I wanted to see. While thinking about genre this week, I found myself thinking about this series and whether or not movie genres are better or worse suited for television. Are there some genres that are better done in ~90 minutes? Or in ~13 episodes? Or does it just depend on the creators ability to avoid repetition of genre conventions and thus boredom from the audience?

Core Post, Week 12

I find Kackman’s argument about the apparent inclusion of melodrama in ‘quality’ television an interesting approach in analyzing the landscape today. While the idea of a more legitimate medium came at a time when quality serials were on the rise, the notion is much more prevalent and has peaked since the article debut. Network television has since embraced its overt reliance on melodrama as a formal structure with shows like This Is Us, The Good Doctor and the still strong Shondaland serials. Then there are the more popular franchises like Game of Thrones that hybridize fantasy and melodrama to concoct a widely embraced form that privileges outrageous storytelling in what Neil Harris terms “operational aesthetic.” What’s surprising is how successful the show has been in its conscious reproduction of worthwhile narrative spectacle. For Game of Thrones in particular, its melodramatic underpinning is really what fans go crazy for; shrewdly hidden under the guise of fantasy and fandom, the show is able to attract mass audiences, regardless of gender, ardently invested in the more ‘fantastical’ elements. Illegitimate children, incestual relationships and heavy familial crises plague the narrative to reveal the actual appeal is a genre that long predates both book and series. Kackman’s mention of gendered representation in Lost can be applied here as well, as the narrative generously features strong thematics of violence and war, an easy facet to hide melodramatic structure while attracting fanboys.

What’s worth examining is the role streaming has come to play in the narrative structure of shows today. How has the structure of original content on platforms like Netflix and Amazon differed from traditional network serials in relation to genre? More so, what can we infer of the cultural affordances taken from such narratives? A show like The Crown is highly melodramatic in tone but far from the stigma of any sort of aesthetic that resembles the genre. In fact, it’s the more melodramatic moments that are the most pleasurable parts of the series, so how has the cultural attitude toward the form changed? What seems to be the case is the shift in structuring television for niche audiences. Without the pressure of appealing to a broad, network audience, shows are relieved from tapping into an overall zeitgeist and encouraged to filter particular generic conventions that promote a unique aesthetic.

Core Post #5

I found this week’s readings incredibly engaging and particularly useful for my future research. I was specifically drawn to the Mittell and McPherson readings. Mittell’s goal is to “arrive at a clearer understanding of how genres work to shape our media experiences and how media work to shape our social realities” (Mittell, p.28). Reading this statement has convinced my I needed to add this book to my shelf yesterday, as this is one of the reasons I am interested in studying crime drama television. Mittell states that, “examining genres as cultural categories, constituted by clusters of discursive processes operative within texts, audiences, industries, and cultural contexts – attempts to place genre analysis back onto the agenda of critical media studies” (Mittell, p. 27). It is impossible to avoid genre hierarchies because as a society we have prescribed to this kind of categorization. Much of this work banters with Bourdieu’s Distinction, as discussed in Mittell (2004). Culture – and by extension television genres - whether good, bad, mass, mid, pop, low, or high are matters of taste, which can be attributed to class hierarchies.  However, Horkhiemer and Adorno express their distrust for popular media in general. They state, “films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimate the trash they intentionally produce” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944, p.94).  They are resistant to the notion that culture can be entertainment, or that entertainment can be a form of culture equivalent to true art. I shudder to think where they would place television genre on their “trash” scale.

But beyond the cultural hierarchies delineated within genre television, there is clearly a level of gender politics in play as well. This notion is explored through McPherson’s (2007) analysis of 24. As someone who was immersed into 24 culture, both through family and friends, I found myself relating to her analysis of the hyper-masculine separating itself from the uncannily similar, femininity of soap. How is it that when a masculine following is “addicted” to serial drama, it can be categorized as quality TV? This is actually one of the reasons I like to study gender in crime drama television. I am interested in how women present gender in a stereotypically masculine space. Crime dramas more accurately depict society than any other television genre (Snauffer, 2006). In American television, crime dramas reflect how society views morals, politics, and behavioral norms. The audience judges the crimes committed, and a moral standard is set by the detectives, agents, technical analysts, and lawyers who bring the criminals to justice. Even if crime drama television is classified as scripted entertainment, it still holds significant weight because media entertainment informs and mirrors society. Therefore, it is interesting to see how gender is performed under these considerations. I think looking at the character of Chloe O’Brian in 24 is an interesting case study. Chloe’s character possesses eccentricities manifesting in a dry and sardonic monotone of annoyance. Yet, her persona and appearance is devoid of overt femininity. She is sharp, and rarely encounters a problem she cannot hack, she falls into what Williams (2007) describes as “the literate sidekick” category. The literate sidekick acts as the brain behind daring situations, and, in the background, supports the hero who ultimately uses physical, brute force to save the day (Williams, 2007). Chloe is a master of her domain on the show, a domain often perceived as a male space. However, Chloe reports to Jack Bauer, supplying this alpha male with all the information he need in order to physically take down the suspects.

So is it Bauer’s masculinity that helps position 24 as quality TV? Does Chloe’s wit and skill mollify the more “cringe-worthy” female characters (McPherson, 2007)?  Personally, I am resistant to the notion of genre hierarchies, because I believe in choice, agency, and dash of phenomenology. I can only know my lived experience and with what types of television I choose to engage and participate. Everyone is going to have a different set of lived experiences that shape the kind of entertainment they choose to embrace.

Quality & Genre [Core Post 3, Laurel]

I find Michael Kackman’s pinpointing of the rhetorical strategies used to align “quality television” with the cinematic particularly interesting in terms of, as we’ve been talking about all term and as Katrina notes in her blog post for this week, the way streaming services are eliding the seemingly inherent differences between the mediums of television and film. It’s interesting to see the ways in which the discourse around a medium borrows from other mediums that have successfully legitimized. However, as Kackman reminds us, the complexity that we laud in “quality television” was first identified and explored in seemingly “low” genre forms (i.e., melodrama). It harkens back to Jane Feuer’s summary of the development of critical interest in the double levels of meaning in Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic films (5-6),¹ and how that lead to an understanding of the melodramatic form itself as “[containing] the potential for exposing contradictions in the dominant ideology and for readings ‘against the grain’” (6). I appreciate the way that Kackman reminds us that this ability to double-read was initially applied to, and layers of meaning most often come to the fore in, “low” and popular genres and forms.
Inspired by Megan, I too returned to my response to the “genre” question on the first week survey, and found that I had buried the genre I probably engage with most, scifi/fantasy, at the end of a sentence. After listing “detective shows and some sitcoms that I watch with my parents, [and] soapy dramas with my mom,” I casually dropped that I tend to watch scifi/fantasy “on my own.” What is it about this genre that leads me to downplay my interest in it, while at the same time being unabashed about the fact that my mom and I watch shows like A Place to Call Home and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which revel in their genres, their camp and melodrama?²
This brings me to Mittell’s chapter, which leads me to consider that the discourses around these genres that I have identified my own engagement with influence the ways that I discuss my interest in them. Am I more comfortable admitting to watching sitcoms when I qualify that I watch them in my home with my family? Perhaps I am able to cop to watching soapy melodramas with my mom because, as a bonding ritual between two women, this is an acceptable “guilty pleasure.” On the other hand, scifi is still popularly configured as a male space, the provision of the geeky/nerdy fanboy. From here, Mittell’s formulation of genre as a “textual component” rather than a “textual category” (7) feels like a useful way to shift popular discourse around genre.
It also enables a consideration of many current shows that play with genre in ways that both depend on generic shorthands for narrative or thematic purposes and also combine genres in ways that question and even undermine genres in themselves. (I’m thinking, for example, of the one episode of Westworld that I’ve seen—I know, it’s on my list and I’ll get to it!—and its combination of the Western and science fiction, which, along with much else, reminds us of the similarities between the two genres in ways that undermine common techno-utopian celebrations of science fiction as “individualistic, progressive, technically and aesthetically innovative, scientifically secular, potent, humanist, democratic—even egalitarian: . . . the quintessential American Dream” (Johnson-Smith 2).)

-----
1. A move which in itself harkens all the way back to Augustine, Aquinas, and other early Biblical scholars who essentially developed the “multiple levels of meaning”/sign-based hermeneutic strategies that has dominated literary theory ever since, and thus influenced film, television, and other media studies as well.

2. Perhaps another question to ask—why are Australian shows so good?


Johnson-Smith, Jan. American Science Fiction TV: Star Trek, Stargate and Beyond. I. B. Taurus, 2004.

Still thinking about Post-feminism

I had mentioned this in a previous post, but given our reading and discussion of Post-feminism this past week, I wanted to talk a little more about Woke Charlotte in a non-core piece. Woke Charlotte is a series of memes from Sex and the City where Charlotte calls out her friends and others for their ignorance and micro-agressions. I think this is an excellent example of post-feminism V. current-feminism. Post-feminist Charlotte, like the other characters, took feminism into account only to ignore and dismiss it. These memes show how highly problematic this perspective can be, and the writer behind them (not Darren Starr) seems to be trying to rectify/ draw attention to this.

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?

Apple TV is now going to be a content producer? (obviously non-core)

Ok, so Apple is now getting into the content production game, and according to this NY Times article, is close to rivaling Netflix's $8 billion budget and will spend more on production than Amazon, YouTube, and all of the television networks. Despite the fact that getting everything up and running is going slowly, which is to be expected, Apple stepping into this space with multi-billion dollar investments in production indicates, to me at least, that we have reached a tipping point in the demise of cable and broadcast television. I really can't see them lasting on the old commercial-advertising model much longer, and I am interested to see where the industry heads next. Hopefully these changes spell the end for 24-hour cable news as well, but I am not holding my breath quite yet.

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.

Why They Should NOT Reboot Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In 1995 two channels launched within a week of each other because of the repeal of the 'fin-syn' allowed for studios to produce and distribute their own content on television--it's a lot more complex than that but this is surface-value background info. The two channels were the WB and UPN who were created by Warner Brothers and Paramount respectively. Both channels went through their faze of targeting African American audiences before they decided that young women were the demo that was their niche. The WB found this out before UPN with shows such as Dawson's Creek and a mid-series pick-up in 1997 Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
After the debacle that was the film adaptation of Joss Whedon's screenplay, this was his second chance to have his blond cheerleader defying the stereotype of her role in traditional horror films to be brought into the light. This time on his terms. The show was something different. In the Post-Network Era narrowcasting was something networks and broadcasters were still trying to understand and Buffy helped put the WB on the map. Buffy ran on both the WB and UPN for a combined 7 years defining the network that they both would eventually merge to become, the CW.
The importance this show has played in the evolution of these networks and television targeted to young women is the reason that this show should not be rebooted by Fox. In the age of streaming and on demand content, shows never die. We see continuations of shows like Gilmore Girls, Full House, X-Files and on and on. The problem with Buffy is that due to the nature of the show--dealing with immortal beings, vampires--it cannot be continued like these other shows. Fox wants to reboot it because they have been shown recently due to the show's 20th anniversary that fans are still invested in the show. Rebooting the show will undo everything innovative that the show did in the first place. Not only by having a strong female teenager as the main character, Buffy is imitated every time a show has a musical episode.  You still see the influence of Buffy on the CW through shows like The Vampire Diaries, and Riverdale just to name a few. The show that would be created today would not allow for the creativity that Joss was afforded before the first time Fox produced the show. Shows rarely get an order for 22 episodes anymore which means there is less time to experiment with format or have filler episodes. So episodes like Hush which has barely any spoken dialogue would most likely never see the light of day.
Another reason why Fox should just let it go is that Joss has moved on. He is able to work on pretty much anything he wants at this point. Why would he want to go back to showrunning something that he's already moved past. Yes he is involved in the comics that the show has continued through, but it's more of a side-project he oversees. Leave Buffy in the comics where we don't have to worry about characters that have changed people's lives being rebooted in a way that is not for the people who have loved the show for years. 

Non-core post - native peoples from where?

Just after finishing the readings for this week I (re)watched an X-files episode that totally relates to SBW's article. The episode (season 3, e 18) is about the uncovering of an artifact in the "Ecuadorian Highlands" that is then brought to Boston despite the plight of the native people who claim that it represents the spirit of a female shaman and don't want it to go. The plot of the episode is somewhat conflicting in the sense that while it raises the issue of appropriation of native culture, it does so in the most cliched way (the principal scientist is the whitest American called Dr. Roosevelt) and the aftertaste of the episode is but a reinforcement of the stereotype of the "mystical" native people.
The reason why it reminded me of SBW analysis of Dora is because here too there is a collapsing of  everything that seems Latin American ("pan-Latin"). Firstly, the episode is called "Teso dos Bichos" which is in Portuguese but this language is not spoken in Ecuador (in fact, it is only spoken in Brazil) - not to mention that it snows during the initial scenes and it very rarely snows in Ecuador. Secondly, the "secona people" as they call it in the episode do not in fact exist, they are called the Secoya people and inhabit the tropical region of Ecuador, not the cold highlands. Thirdly, the "brown characters" they depict as the "Secona" are an example of race "not rendered invisible, but [...] also not presented as specific and particular" because they are all dressed differently and exhibit markers from different native peoples and none too specific. Not to mention that the music used in the episode for the ritual scenes is music from the North American native Indians, not the kind you would associate with natives in South America.

Core Post #4

My first impression of Banet-Weiser’s essay was that there is something troubling about her general approach to charting a shift in media representation during what she calls the beginning of postracial and postfeminist discourse. In the second half of her argument, she settles on a rather questionable example to support her claims that representation in TV has followed the transition from the niche-centric market structure towards a global postracial/postfeminist audience. By comparing Nickelodeon’s Dora the Explorer (a show is targeted to preschoolers) to The Cosby Show and a greater history of ethnic TV of the 80s and 90s, she shifts her focus away from a broad demographic to an audience made up entirely of children ages 2-5. Thus, by choosing a network of such a comparatively smaller niche market, she struggles to validate her claim that TV may become less reliant on the niche structure. She merely shifts from one niche to another and provides no evidence for similar modes of representation occurring in other age groups (she even mentions that kid’s TV has “typically been more diverse than prime-time television” [218]). Furthermore, by using this example, her attempt to say something broader about the evolution of the market and “consumer citizenship” is troubled by the fact that Dora’s actual audience is hardly participating in its own market, at least compared to the adult audiences that watched The Cosby Show. The difference is between programs that are chosen as forms of entertainment, as in the latter case, and content that is imposed by parents or producers, as with Dora, which, although it may not be all that different in the end, is still something to consider.

  

Aside from these questions, I am thinking about today’s television, in which there certainly still are niche programs, as well as more universal products, which can exemplify both the ambivalent and the specific categories of identity that Banet-Weiser talks about. She, like the other scholars for this week, is concerned that images of empowerment have replaced the need for feminist and racial discourses. In the postfeminist and urban TV program, the ethnic and the feminine traits are positive, universally accepted, and “cool.” She argues that the diverse world of Dora acts ignorant of persistent racism and sexism, and that it frames “dominant stereotypes” in a way that is “made palatable for a media audience” of both whites and Latinos alike (222). I’m not sure what the alternative would be for a program like Dora, considering that the complexity of social concepts relevant to a preschooler is severely limited, but perhaps in a better example, one could begin to accept her argument. Today, the theme of “empowerment“—driven by consumer culture—certainly continues to wash over platforms that could have the potential for more specific forms of representation. For example, two of the recent superhero blockbusters—Black Panther and Wonder Woman­­—are in a sense guilty of just that. But on the same terrain, a film like Get Out does the opposite by addressing historical struggles of race without any concern for isolating a white audience.