Last week, as you probably noticed, I attended the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (you can see some of my thoughts, and the thoughts of many others, about the conference by clicking here). I tweeted, I socialized (as much as is possible for me!), I became sick, I attended panels, I showed a colleague the wonders of TV studies, and I also presented, which was a pretty big deal for me.
The panel I presented on was titled: “Theorizing Medium Specificity and Its Disruption: TV Aesthetics and Temporality.” We were chaired by Rebecca Burditt (University of Rochester), and my fellow presenters included:
- Zachary Campbell (Northwestern University) who presented on The Twilight Zone‘s use of recording 6 episodes on video in the middle of its second season.
- Kyra Hunting (University of Wisconsin, Madison) who presented in how domesticoms (sitcoms that focus on families) interrogate not only their cultural past, but the United States’ past (specifically the 1950s) and providing a taxonomy of sorts on how and for what purpose they do so.
- Janani Subramanian (University of Southern California) who presented on Nurse Jackie, and how the show (along with the rest of Showtime’s half-hour dramas that are pitched as comedies) create a new sense of TV time.
My paper dealt with How I Met Your Mother as a form of middlebrow art TV (PDF). A little bit is missing since I hand-wrote some general notes about the conclusion dealing with the show’s syndication ratings, but the bulk of the paper is there for you to read.
I’ll note that in the Q&A, Myles McNutt asked me to “weaponize” the argument, which is fairly easy to do: the term quality TV one that I do not like, and thus by applying many of these ideas to a 4-camera sitcom that uses pre-recorded laughter, I hope to make the term far more problematic in its use, more specific in its use (aesthetics? narrative? industrial?), and maybe get rid of it all together.
Filed under: Conferences Tagged: | scms11, tv series
Thanks for this, Noel, really useful for those of us who couldn’t make it!
I’m currently working through an idea that may end up as a paper somewhere problematising the term quality tv myself. I like what it describes – I think that if you start from the RJT description, there is a very useful term, but I think that the value-judgement nature of the term “quality tv”, and the sort of othering it creates, reduces its usefulness. I’m not going to try to suggest a replacement, but I am working through problematising the term.
I will read through your presentation in more detail over the next couple of days, and might get in touch to talk it through with you further…
I’m not a fan of the term period, I wish it would go away. It allows for, as you point out, a sort of “othering” or, as I said during the Q&A, it allows for a type of ghetto-ization of programming (“quality children’s programming” or “quality animation” or, and I didn’t say this but thought it later since it’s true, “quality reality TV”) which is problematic.
Interested to hear your thoughts. Realized I didn’t supply a works cited. I’ll add one when I get home.
[...] guy named Noel Kirkpatrick wrote a paper on HIMYM and its position as an “art TV” sitcom – art is a less HBO orientated way of saying quality. there is a lot of information [...]