“The catalyst for pro football’s breakthrough in the latter half of the 1950s and 1960s was the new medium of television”
The catalyst for pro football’s breakthrough in the latter half of the 1950s and...
Category Archives: Television
“…’The Sopranos’ and ‘Mad Men’ heralded the end of male authority; we’ve also witnessed the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form…”
Not only have shows like “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” heralded the end of...
“TV characters are among the allegorical figures of our age, giving individual human shape to our collective anxieties and aspirations…”
TV characters are among the allegorical figures of our age, giving individual human shape...
“The success of “24” was just one innovation of the 2000s that helped change the TV landscape”
…the success of “24.” In order for us, the viewers, to get onboard with...
A problem with measuring TV ratings based off of Twitter
Last year, Nielsen created a TV-ratings metric based on Twitter. Seemingly overnight, more and...
“DVRs made recording shows easy for even technophobes; so easy that some of us might have forgotten where and when they were shown (making the concept of “airing” increasingly archaic)”
VCRs allowed TV audiences to time-shift their viewing for years, but programming them could...
“The fantasy world of television and movies…have become a simulacrum of the real world”
The fantasy world of television and movies that emanate from a giant screen, TV...
“No one seems to remember that television networks are corporations to begin with”
When people talk about the corporatization of network news, they mean that something that...
Historically, there’s something suspect about a story told as a cliffhanger, but there’s something to celebrate about it
Cliffhangers are the point when the audience decides to keep buying—when, as the cinema-studies scholar Scott Higgins puts it, “curiosity is converted into a commercial transaction.” They are sensational, in every sense of the word. Historically, there’s something suspect about a story told in this manner, the way it tugs the customer to the next ledge. Nobody likes needy.
But there is also something to celebrate about the cliffhanger, which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling. They expose the intimacy between writer’s room and fan base, auteur and recapper—a relationship that can take seasons to develop, years marked by incidents of betrayal, contentment, and, occasionally, by a kind of ecstasy.
That’s not despite but because cliffhangers are fake-outs. They reveal that a story is artificial, then dare you to keep believing. If you trust the creator, you take that dare, and keep going.
Emily Nussbaum, “Tune in Next Week”, The New Yorker (30 July 2012), 70.
In the late nineties, television took a great leap forward
In the late nineties, television took a great leap forward. This story could be told in many ways: by focussing on the quality cable dramas, starting with “The Sopranos”; by emphasizing luminous genre myths like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; or by highlighting experimental sitcoms, such as the British version of “The Office,” themselves a reaction to the advent of reality television. Pugnacious auteurs emerged, resistant to TV formulas. The result was one innovation after another: juggled chronologies, the rise of antiheroes, and a new breed of challenging, tangled, ambitious serial narrative. Dramas often combined a plot of the week with longer arcs, a technique pioneered by “The X-Files,” allowing for subtler levels of irresolution. Some ambitious comedies incorporated serial elements, while others, like “Arrested Development,” satirized cliffhangers in much the way that “Soap” had.
Emily Nussbaum, “Tune in Next Week”, The New Yorker (30 July 2012), 74.