American Quality Television

“Comedy is about timing, son”. È questa la battuta con cui un David Lynch particolarmente fuori dal tempo, nei panni dello stravagante producer televisivo Jack Dahl, tormenta il povero Louis C.K., alle prese con lo sforzo immane di “allenarsi” per la puntata pilota di un late night con cui potrebbe prendere il posto di David Letterman. Siamo tra l’agosto e il settembre 2012, e su FX va in onda, quasi alla fine della sua terza stagione, una trilogia di puntate di Louie che sembra quasi fantascienza.  [...]

This article examines the Game of Thrones (GoT) fan phenomena in the Arab world. Although I contextualize GoT as a commodity within HBO’s global ambitions to attract a global audience, I study GoT Arab fans as an organized interpretive online community. I examine the Arabic fan Facebook page “Game of Thrones‒Official Arabic Page” (GoT-OAP), which has over 240,000 followers, as a case study of cultural production and consumption by fans. Based on interviews with members of the administration staff of the GoT-OAP Facebook page, as well as textual analysis of the page’s posts, I ask: How is fan culture around GoT produced in the Arab world? How are the boundaries between being fans, media producers, and consumers negotiated? Are there connections between the themes of GoT and the current unrest across the Arab region? If so, how are they articulated? Through emotional realism and hybridity, I show that Arab fans find ways to negotiate their fandom of GoT with their local context and li...

RESUMEN
Las series de televisión norteamericanas del nuevo milenio se han convertido en un importante reflejo del reciente panorama social occidental. Se ha entrado en la llamada era hipertelevisiva, que ha propiciado el desarrollo de tramas y personajes de gran complejidad. La mujer en la ficción ha sido partícipe de este cambio, obteniendo a menudo el protagonismo de las series en terrenos que previamente eran exclusivamente masculinos. Dentro de los géneros televisivos, merece especial atención el papel femenino en los textos de ciencia ficción y fantasía, o lo que autores como Todorov llaman lo maravilloso, porque en la nueva televisión ellas son auténticas heroínas de acción. Esta comunicación ofrece un análisis de tres personajes femeninos televisivos desarrollados en la primera década del siglo XXI dentro del terreno de lo maravilloso: Buffy Summers, de Buffy, cazavampiros (Buffy, the vampire slayer, WB: 1997-2001; UPN: 2001-2003); Kara Thrace, de Galáctica: Estrella de Comabte (Battlestar Galactica, SciFi: 2004-2009); y Sookie Stackhouse, de Sangre Fresca (True Blood, HBO: 2008-). El objetivo de este trabajo es un análisis narrativo desde una perspectiva ideológica-cultural de los caracteres femeninos que tiene en cuenta distintos aspectos que conforman la estructura interna de cada personaje, el modelo de mujer que promocionan, y las cualidades que caracterizan a la heroína actual.

Foreign fictional TV production aimed at teenagers, i.e. teen TV, is currently strongly influenced by the desire of television stations to capture the attention of the lucrative audience of Millennials. One of the characteristics of this production is an emphasis on the diversity of characters that populate the fictional world of the TV series. This article deals with a specific type of characters; LGBT+ teenagers who have shifted, in terms of action and importance in the narrative, from a marginalised group to the centre of attention of the audience, both in terms of the narrative function and the transformation of character personalities from pure stereotypes and TV tropes to complex protagonists. The author deals with the interconnection of marketing focus on Millennials and the representation of such characters and argues that one of the main reasons why these characters are currently so narratively focused on is, more than the success of human rights activists, an effort on the part of marketing departments of TV stations to reach a specific demographic.

Set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising during the 1960s, a century after the earliest construction of vertical lifts in New York City, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men illustrates how central the elevator has become to the urban spatial imaginary, perpetuated in part through such cultural productions as Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment (a source of inspiration for Weiner). Like Wilder’s classic comedy, Mad Men stages several interpersonal encounters inside the cramped spaces of elevator cars, which are private zones of physical and verbal intimacy as well as public areas where individuals from different social classes come together, if only momentarily. Inspired by the work of Andreas Bernard (author of Lifted, which focuses on literary and cinematic representations of elevators), I explore the contradictory aspects of this prominent yet overlooked type of human conveyance, looking at the fleeting personal exchanges that take place inside vertical lifts on Mad Men as well as on other television programs. As Bernard states, because it combines ‘freedom of access while stopped and hermetically sealed impenetrability while in motion’, the elevator cab is ripe for interpretation as a means through which to tell the story of the modern metropolis and its demographically diverse inhabitants.

Since its 2012 debut Girls has received an extraordinary amount of attention and criticism from both academic circles and popular culture critics. It has been critiqued for its depiction of female nudity and its portrayal of female sexual subjecthood. At the center of these debates is how author–star Lena Dunham’s body is positioned and utilized aesthetically and politically. This essay examines the brand of body politics and mode of female sexual subjecthood that the series creates and performs. In order to track how Girls produces this body politics and female sexual subjecthood I position it in relation to earlier feminist television series and indie cinema. This essay argues that Girls’ particular brand of body politics and the mode of female sexual subjecthood it depicts is characterized by emotional intimacy, irony and reflexivity. Furthermore I contend that Girls’ gender politics is enabled by the series’ utilization of a low-key aesthetic and the “smart” tendency, more commonly discussed in relation to American indie cinema.

This is a pre-publication draft of my piece on NBC's Hannibal. The full version -- with page numbers and an additional epilogue that addresses the cancellation of the show after its third season -- can be found in Däwes, Ganser, & Poppenhagen, _Transgressive Television. Politics and Crime in 21st Century American TV Series_, Heidelberg: Winter, 2015.

The proliferation of networks using narrowcasting for their original drama serials in the United States proved that protagonist types different from conventional heroes can appeal to their target audiences. While this success of anti-hero narratives in television serials starting from late 1990s raises the question of “quality television”, developing audience measurement models of networks make alternative narratives based on anti-heroes become widespread on the U.S. television industry. This thesis examines the development of the anti-hero on the U.S. television by focusing on the protagonists of pay-cable serials The Sopranos (1999-2007) and Dexter (2006-2013), basic cable serials The Shield (2002-2008) and Mad Men (2007-2015), and video-on-demand serials House of Cards (2013- ) and Hand of God (2014- ). In brief, this thesis argues that the use of anti-hero narratives in television is directly related to the narrowcasting strategy of networks and their target audience groups, shaping a template for growing networks and newly formed distribution services to enhance the brand of their corporations. In return, the anti-hero narratives push the boundaries of conventional hero in television with the protagonists becoming morally less tolerable and more complex, introducing diversity to television serials and paving the way even for mainstream broadcast networks to develop serials based on such protagonists.

Keywords: Anti-hero, Quality Television, Narrowcasting, Cable Television, Video-on-Demand, Serial

This is a copy of my PhD thesis, completed in 2011 at the University of Exeter. It represents a new history of Home Box Office, and particularly considers the importance of analysing the early history of the company for understanding its later success as a quality programming brand.

As the thesis was researched and written between 2007 and 2011, its historical scope only goes up to 2007, with some mention of later series. It doesn't cover Game of Thrones or other recent HBO series, but I'm happy that certain trends identified in the thesis are still going strong.

Feel free to contact me for questions about the thesis.

Examining the Anglo-American critical reception of “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” (S05E06), the highly controversial episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-present) in which Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa Stark, this thesis argues that the paratextual framing of the episode served as a space to think through questions about televisual representations, adaptation and authorship, and broader cultural tensions surrounding sexual violence in film and television. Charting three key themes within the episode’s critical reception, this thesis examines the strict and discursively constituted moral parameters within which visual representations of violence, and sexual violence in particular, may justifiably operate. Within the context of HBO’s Game of Thrones, these parameters are structured by HBO’s masculine brand identity and history of courting controversy. Further, given Game of Thrones’ position as an adaption of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, these parameters are also complicated by questions of adaptation, fidelity, and authorship. Additionally, the paratextual framing of the episode was marked by performative displays of moral disgust that were tied, firstly, to the discomfort associated with the visual and emotional proximity of representations of sexual violence on-screen, and, secondly, to mechanisms of whiteness, class, and respectability. This thesis subsequently demonstrates how television critics’ emphatic and performative expressions of moral disgust in response to the episode were central to the paratextual framing of “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” as one of Game of Thrones’ most contentious episodes to date. More broadly, this thesis builds upon a body of work from feminist cultural studies, adaptation studies, and audience and reception studies to reveal how critical reviews function as sites of ideological struggle that can provide insight into the dominant systems of value in operation regarding sexual violence.

Tesi realizzata per il corso magistrale in Cinema, Televisione e Produzione Multimediale.

Tutte le storie parlano di controllo. Per questo amiamo le trame investigative, in cui uomini e donne che per lavoro operano tra legalità e illegalità, contro il Male esterno e interiore. Fin dalla sua nascita, la televisione americana si è strutturata attraverso il genere poliziesco: questa tesi vuole studiarne l'evoluzione usando il melodramma - inteso come modalità narrativa alla base di tutte le nostre narrazioni, non come genere o in maniera dispregiativa - come discriminante che ha segnato il passaggio alla Golden Age, da trame autoconclusive a storyline che si evolvono in più puntate.
Da Dragnet a The Wire, considerata la miglior serie tv di sempre.

In questo modo, si vuole

The notion of ‘quality television’ has undergone endless revisions over the last three decades. Given the technological, institutional, economic and aesthetic evolution of the medium, diverse scholars questioned and explored its forms of quality, especially focusing on the US scenario, notably a forerunner and leader in the development and international distribution of TV shows.
Applied to the American industry, this ever-evolving definition bears some recurrent fea- tures that make it a sort of ‘super-genre’, a label for TV series that share some ‘prestige’ specifici- ties. Focusing on the US scenario, where nowadays ‘quality’ tends to maily label cable series, this paper aims to identify those prestige specificities and to answer the question: is there such thing as a quality network television in a cable-dominated market?
After establishing a theoretical framework by tracing back the evolution of the notion of quality television, the article will focus on three contemporary case studies: CBS’ The Good Wife, The CW’s Jane the Virgin and FOX’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine. We will see how these three series share some aesthetic and narrative tropes that, making the best of broadcast television’s weaknesses and restrictions, aim to appeal to a certain upscale audience, resulting into critical acclaim and awards recognition.
In the end, we will argue that several characteristics of quality cable television can actually be applied to a wave of network television productions that, although based on the standard for- mats of broadcast storytelling, could be critically compared to more acclaimed shows, ultimately fitting into the prestige series super-genre.

In the last couple of years, Netflix and Amazon have set themeselves as true players in the U.S. television industry, either as further distribution channels, as well as competitors when it comes to original programming. While Netflix established its position through the launch of House of Cards in 2013, Amazon seemed to be struggling in the background to find its own brand-identity. But recently, the game-changers: the 2014 deal with HBO to stream the premium network's back-catalogue, along with the launch of the critical-acclaimed original series Transparent. This work aims to make sense of Amazon's strategic moves in the field of TV series by framing them into its system-thinking and multi-layered businnes strategies. After a contextual overview on the commercial evolution of Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video, I will analyse how licensing deals are shaping Amazon's role as an expansion of traditional television. Then I will explore how its original programming contribute to position the company into the " quality television " market, as it aims to create that high-production value that targets the " premium " audience willing to pay more for content. Finally, I will argue that these strategies are deeply connected to the hybrid nature of Amazon's business and aim to turn TV series into an add-on value of the overall Amazon Prime

THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION COPY; PLEASE DO NOT CITE -- CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION INSTEAD, WHICH CAN BE FOUND IN: _Poetics of Politics.Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture._ Eds. Sebastian M. Herrmann, Carolin Alice Hofmann, Katja Kanzler, Stefan Schubert, Frank Usbeck. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. MORE INFORMATION HERE: https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-7517-1/Herrmann_ea_Eds_Poetics_of_Politics_PDF/

This article suggests a perspective for the study of the formal politics of what Jason Mittell calls ‘narratively complex television series.’ To do so, it draws on recent conceptions of popular seriality that consider serial texts as constellations of interaction between producers, authors, media technologies, institutions, audiences, and the serial material itself. Within these concatenations of interaction, serial texts employ historically and medially specific formal strategies to bring audience practices in line with the commercial logics that undergird their production and circulation. In the case of narratively complex television series, this paper argues, such strategies of ‘audience management’—which structure and organize the reception practices of viewers and suggest a preferred way of watching television—come to the fore in moments of operational self-reflexivity, i.e., in scenes that thematize and demonstrate the logics of serial unfolding. The article finally discusses some instances of operational self-reflexivity in Fox’s Fringe (2008-2012) and Showtime’s Homeland (2011-) to suggest that their formal politics become manifest in the way in which these shows articulate demands for hyper-attentive, time-consuming, and textually productive reception practices that chime well with the economic logics of media convergence and the larger context of contemporary capitalism.

This article investigates the cycle of British performers in contemporary American television drama and what is at stake in their adoption of a US accent. British actors have been increasingly heralded for their ability to adopt credible foreign accents, marking a negotiation of ‘Britishness’ and assumed vocal ‘foreignness.’ By examining several pilot episodes of contemporary US dramas, this article poses the hybrid voice of the ‘accented American’ as a privileged and self-reflexive form of sonic spectacle. This is a voice narratively ‘othered’ to reinforce the screen presence of the British actor-as-American, soliciting spectators’ attention to their extra-textual identities as non-natives, whilst paradoxically consecrating ‘Britishness’ through the individual actor’s quality command of American language. The article then concludes by scrutinising the post-9/11 captive narrative of successful US drama Homeland (Showtime, 2011-). Through its themes of dubious patriotic allegiance, Homeland inscribes the cultural discourses surrounding Damian Lewis’s starring role and falsified Americanness. The series also operates as a valuable commentary upon the wider proliferation of British talent across US television, revealing the ways in which such small-screen dramas are helping to regenerate prior conceptions of British stardom.

This article examines the Game of Thrones (GoT) fan phenomena in the Arab world. Although I contextualize GoT as a commodity within HBO’s global ambitions to attract a global audience, I study GoT Arab fans as an organized interpretive online community. I examine the Arabic fan Facebook page “Game of Thrones‒Official Arabic Page” (GoT- OAP), which has over 240,000 followers, as a case study of cultural production and consumption by fans. Based on interviews with members of the administration staff of the GoT-OAP Facebook page, as well as textual analysis of the page’s posts, I ask: How is fan culture around GoT produced in the Arab world? How are the boundaries between being fans, media producers, and consumers negotiated? Are there connections between the themes of GoT and the current unrest across the Arab region? If so, how are they articulated? Through emotional realism and hybridity, I show that Arab fans find ways to negotiate their fandom of GoT with their local context and lived experiences.

The mafia has always fascinated filmmakers and television producers. Al Capone, Salvatore Giuliano, Lucky Luciano, Ciro Di Marzio, Roberto Saviano, Don Vito and Michael Corleone, and Tony Soprano are some of the historical and fictional figures that contribute to the myth of the Italian and Italian-American mafias perpetuated onscreen. This collection looks at mafia movies and television over time and across cultures, from the early classics to the Godfather trilogy and contemporary Italian films and television series. The only comprehensive collection of its type, Mafia Movies treats over fifty films and TV shows created since 1906, while introducing Italian and Italian-American mafia history and culture.


The second edition includes new original essays on essential films and TV shows that have emerged since the publication of the first edition, such as Boardwalk Empire and Mob Wives, as well as a new roundtable section on Italy’s “other” mafias in film and television, written as a collaborative essay by more than ten scholars. The edition also introduces a new section called “Double Takes” that elaborates on some of the most popular mafia films and TV shows (e.g. The Godfather and The Sopranos) organized around themes such as adaptation, gender and politics, urban spaces, and performance and stardom.

This paper examines a core tension in the political television serial The Wire (2002-2008). While several critics have argued that this show is both " bleak " and " systemic " in its portrayal of contemporary society, this paper argues that it is useful to understand these textual elements as building blocks in The Wire's attempt to create a coherent and consistent political argument. The paper argues that had The Wire been structured as a more uplifting and redeeming story, the systemic nature of its societal criticism would be undercut and the show would not embrace the logical consequence of the politics it espouses.

As  American  broadcaster  NBC’s  contribution  to  a  growing  corpus  of  cable  channel-produced  “Quality  TV,”  the  drama  Hannibal  (2013-15)  reflects  the  cinematic  aesthetic  of  such  work,  characterized  by  low-key  lighting,  widescreen  composition,  changing  focal  length,  and  so  on.  This  aesthetic,  argue  Michael  Newman  and  Elana  Levine  (2012),  typically  serves  a  legitimizing  function  by  visually  distancing  Quality  TV  from  such  feminine  genres  as  soap  opera;  one  that  is  echoed  in  its  rejection  or  containment  of  soap  opera’s  feminine  signifiers:  domesticity,  open-ended  narrative,  interpersonal  arcs,  romance.  In  the  case  of  Hannibal,  however,  I  argue  that  not  only  does  its  cinematic  style  foreground  intimacy  over  that  alienation  more  characteristic  of  Quality  TV,  but  it  does  so  within  the  narrative  confines  of  a  melodrama  that  embraces  those  feminine  signifiers.  In  this  sense,  Hannibal  shares  the  contradictory  ethos  of  filmmaker  Douglas  Sirk,  whoseBrechtian  politics  of  estrangement  was  realized  through  his  1950s  studio  melodramas,  using  visual  and  emotional  excesses  to  disrupt  narrative  identification.  Hannibal’s  excesses  –  visual  overdetermination,  emotional  hyperbole,  narrative  implausibility  –  also  disrupt  immersion  in  the  world  of  the  story,  but,  I  contend,  not  at  the  expense  of  identification.  Like  Quality  TV,  Sirk’s  scholarly  and  critical  legitimacy  rested  on  politically  distancing  himself  from  the  feminized  genre  in  which  he  worked.  In  contrast,  this  essay  argues  that  Hannibal’s  politics  are  grounded  in  viewer  identification,  aided  by  moments  of  excess  that,  in  the  context  of  the  show’s  emotional  realism,  heighten  rather  than  hinder  it.  While  no  cure-all  for  the  social  ills  that  plague  us,  in  a  era  defined  by  borders,  gates,  and  walls  intended  to  keep  people  apart,  as  well  as  intensifying  demonization  of  the  ‘different’,  I  argue  that  Hannibal’s  politics  of  identification  are  a  critical  media  corrective  to  hierarchies  of  masculinist  legitimization  that  reflect  broader  antipathy  to  feminized  expressions  of  pleasure,  identification,  and  affect.

This volume explores television’s key role in documenting, dramatizing and critiquing a presidency that has disturbed the political and cultural landscape both at home and abroad. Combining approaches from the historical, political and philosophical with film and television studies, an international group of scholars from a variety of academic disciplines explores television’s approaches to the Trump presidency from fictional drama and comedy, to late-night satire, to the committee hearings played out in Congress. The volume considers the alternative or essentially American nature of this media presidency, and addresses the impact of the Trump presidency for both American television and the nation’s politics.

Vortrag Atlantische Akademie / Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 17.11.2015
Zur Politik in Serie und zur Politik der Serialität: Erzählformen politischer Macht in US-TV-Dramen, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von 24, Battlestar Galactica, The West Wing und House of Cards.

Negli ultimi anni, i network free hanno ridefinito i loro modelli di business in funzione di nuove variabili, con conseguenze anche sulle narrazioni seriali. Ma se la pay TV ha da sempre tratto vantaggio da condizioni favorevoli per creare produzioni innovative e distintive, i network hanno dovuto districarsi fra restrizioni sui contenuti, necessità pubblicitarie, ecc. Per restare competitivi, stanno quindi facendo appello a strategie che fanno leva su valore culturale ed economie della reputazione.
In questo saggio ragioniamo su tali strategie, tenendo presente che il valore culturale emerge da complesse interazioni fra istituzioni, comunità interpretative e idiosincrasie individuali, la cui analisi necessita la combinazione di misure economiche e indicatori qualitativi. Caso emblematico, in questo senso, è quello di The CW, che ha trasformato la sua reputazione grazie a una strategia di rebranding fondata sulla qualità narrativa e la rilevanza socio-politica della sua nuova programmazione originale. In particolare, ci concentriamo su "Jane The Virgin" (2014-19) per vedere come una serie, oggi, possa essere considerata “di successo” anche attraverso indicatori diversi da quelli tradizionalmente associati alle hit televisive.

This essay is the first in a three-part series about ideology and space on AMC's lauded television show "Mad Men." See the attached link to "Flow"'s website, where the article was published, for embedded videos intended to be viewed alongside reading the essay.

Der Handel mit DVD und der Internetvertrieb von Filmen haben die Verwertungskette der audiovisuellen Branche auf den Kopf gestellt. Seither setzen US-amerikanische Fernsehsender immer weniger auf die Erstausstrahlung von Kinofilmen und immer mehr auf Eigenproduktionen. Zentral für die Publikumsbindung und das Image eines Senders sind die Fernsehserien. Und diese werden immer aufwändiger produziert und beworben. Nach den sexy Singles und den verzweifelten Hausfrauen machen nun auch die Chefermittler aus Miami ihren Dienst für die Quote.

The expansion of commercial gambling spaces and products that facilitate transnational money laundering and other crimes has occurred in tandem with government policies and academic research that focus on cultivating a greater sense of individual responsibility for problems related to gambling (Akçayır, et.al, 2021). While there are some parallels with other risky products and services (including tobacco, prostitution, and alcohol—as well as cannabis in some jurisdictions) gambling’s capacity to clean dirty money creates especially valuable flows of illegal substances, weapons, and money at local, national, and transnational scales. These flows are often obscured by gambling businesses through elaborately choreographed performances of community engagement and philanthropy. This chapter offers a close reading of the television series Ozark, which explores the transformation of a white suburban American family which becomes ensnared in a money laundering operation for a Mexican drug cartel. I argue that Ozark highlights gambling’s constitutive role in in American neoliberalism through processes that I call ‘finopower’.

The notion of “quality television” has been endlessly revised over the last three decades. Given the medium’s technological, institutional, economic and aesthetic evolution, various scholars have probed and explored its forms of quality, focusing especially on the US scenario, a notable forerunner and leader in the development and international distribution of TV shows. Applied to the American industry, this ever-evolving definition has some recurrent features that make it a sort of “super-genre”, a label for TV series that share some elements of “prestige”. Concentrating on the US scenario, where nowadays “quality” mainly tends to be a label for cable series, this paper aims to identify those prestige features and to answer the question: is there such a thing as quality network television in a cable-dominated market? After establishing a theoretical framework by tracing how the notion of quality television has evolved, the article focuses on three contemporary case studies: CBS’s T...

Trzecią i ostatnią część monografii pt. Seriale w kontekście kulturowym podzieliliśmy na trzy główne obszary tematyczne: gatunki, konwergencję i recepcję. Zależało nam na uchwyceniu specyficznego momentu, w jakim znajduje się obecnie telewizja. Postępującej hybrydyzacji seriali towarzyszą wszak coraz bardziej interaktywne formy recepcji, zintensyfikowane przez media społecznościowe i skrzętnie wykorzystywane przez producentów do tworzenia skuteczniejszych modeli komercyjnych oraz utrwalania nierównego układu sił między korporacjami i konsumentami. Chociaż autorzy tekstów w niniejszym tomie proponują rozmaite perspektywy badawcze w obrębie krańcowo odmiennych dyscyplin, od antropologii, psychologii i filmoznawstwa po językoznawstwo kognitywne, kulturoznawstwo czy studia nad komunikacją i fandomami, to niewątpliwie łączy ich przeświadczenie, że od kontekstu kulturowego, w którym funkcjonują dominujące i peryferyjne formy, narracje, ideologie i hierarchie wartości, nie ma ucieczki.