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).)

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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.