Listen to Your Heart?

Bachelor Nation is coming out with a new spin-off called Listen to Your Heart this Spring and I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on it...
ABC describes it like this: "The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart unites two of the most emotionally powerful forces in human life: music and love, as 20 single men and women embark on an incredible journey to find love through music. Singing well-known songs, both individually and as couples, they will look to form attractions through the melodies, find and reveal their feelings and ultimately, fall in love." (Um... ok?)
Given that the current season of The Bachelor has gotten a lot of criticism on Twitter for it being too produced (sold to viewers as "the most dramatic season ever"), this new spin-off seems to come (very conveniently) at just the right time for some freshness in the nation. Do we think this franchise will ever end or will spin-offs work as a saving mechanism until who knows when?
In the meantime...

Week 3 links/clips

Busby Berkeley, Dancing Dames:

https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=10Mrmhz3f

Quantitative Studies/Effects Studies within popular media: 

https://www.aacap.org/aacap/families_and_youth/facts_for_families/FFF-Guide/Children-And-TV-Violence-013.aspx

http://www.thesuccessfulparent.com/categories/children-and-media/item/the-impact-of-tv-violence-on-children-and-adolescents#.WmdlWpM-c_U

https://seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/data/

Thorburn on TV Aesthetics:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295038709360123

Fans on Buffy tropes:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/BuffyTheVampireSlayer

Media Industries Journal: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/about

Horace Newcomb:  http://www.tvworthwatching.com/BlogPostDetails.aspx?postId=5284

Father Knows Best: Woman in the House

https://tubitv.com/tv-shows/237902/s02_e05_woman_in_the_house
5:23 :  the young independent woman
20 min in:  are you lonely?
25: ambiguous ending

Gitlin  http://toddgitlin.net/
Singapore Olympic coverage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHtVfjejaNQ

Roseanne:  2 clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIr1aZ0f4wA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXOVZzDaRcY

In Living Color:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXOyFHYwbgw

Parks

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/howtowatchTV/clips/parks-and-recreations-cultural-forum-1

FOR SCREENINGS:

Goldbergs: http://www.jltv.tv/videos.php?id=14&play=921

Burns + Allen:
https://archive.org/details/GracieAllen 

Core Response #1

As is clear from Heather Hendershot’s explication, her attempt to contemplate on the function of the television as a platform where we are able to examine collective concerns is an effort to think afresh the discussion of Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch’s influential concept of television as a cultural forum from the perspective of the contemporary settings. However, although Hendershot’s textual reading on the series of Parks and Recreation might be successful in clarifying the TV series’ emphasis on the values of a democratic society, I thought the argument might be strengthened if the discussion mainly concerning with the representational level would be combined with deeper consideration on the complexity of the medium and its platforms of delivery in the contemporary world. This is because, in the first place, the television’s stated possibilities as a cultural forum is inextricably intertwined with the certain technological stage where television was broadcast and considered to create a shared culture or sense of community. More specifically, as Hendershot touches upon in her article, Newcomb and Hirsch’s concept of television as a cultural forum was heavily dependent on the technological conditions of pre-cable era when “programs did generally seek out large group of viewers, not atomized constituencies” (204).

Considering the current situation, as the new media ecology emerged where we are exposed to multiple mediums simultaneously such as television, social media, and virtual reality, television’s medium specific characteristics have also transformed in its mediation and remediation of/through other mediums. Especially if we are to consider the civic function of television for the arena of negotiation and discussion, it would be beneficial to examine how the representational aspects of television has created an actual or virtual civic space (or its illusion). In order to look closely at the ways in which the television negotiate itself on the creation of “public thought,” I personally felt that we need to assess the possibility of the civic function of television by situating it in the complex medium ecology of contemporary world.

TV's (Post?)-Countercultural Participants

I was struck in Gitlin's essay by the quick attribution he made in passing of the progressive "slants" that appear in network programming to "media practitioners who have some roots in the rebellions of the Sixties" (262). I am familiar, for example, with the extent to which figures central to the video-driven media counterculture(s) of the late 60s and early 70s represented in the pages of Radical Software or the Raindance Corporation's Guerrilla Television project eventually came to be involved in mainstream film production. This history is explicated at length in David Joselit's 2007 text Feedback: Television against Democracy, which focuses in particular on Michael Shamberg's movement from quasi-leader of the Guerrilla TV movement to big-time Hollywood producer responsible for the likes of The Big Chill and Pulp Fiction. In such films, Joselit locates something of Shamberg's countercultural spirit and utopian media ethic – their slant, we might say – in spite of their popular appeal and mass distribution modeling. First acknowledging Shamberg's "rather startling nomination of the television character Archie Bunker as a working-class here" (101, a rather fortuitous mention in light of our course today), Joselit goes on to state the following on the shift from Shamberg's grassroots to mainstream media participation:

"The once democratizing potential of inexpensive video equipment has evaporated, like the student radicalism of the characters [in The Big Chill], leaving in its place the parlor games of the middle class. And the advice Shamberg had once offered to suburban commuters – to videotape and play back their own alienation – is here realized as a feature of Hollywood entertainment" (101).

Such histories around the incorporation of the critical avant-garde into mainstream media ecologies through the professionalization of historical participants fascinate me. I am wondering if anyone is aware of any concrete examples similar to the likes of Shamberg who made the jump from late 60s/early 70s counterculture to the major sites of TV production later in the decade, as Gitlin gestures towards?

Core Post # 1 - Emotions v. conclusion in Father Knows Best (Week 3)

It was very painful to watch the Father Knows Best episode in which Betty go from elated, engineering-minded high school student to date-goer who accepts to go out with a guy who spent his morning putting her down. She accepts the date while wearing the dress her mother ordered for her ­­–– so she can play the game of womanhood­­ which, according to her mother, is to wear the right dress to trap a man into buying you a lifetime supply of dresses. In other words, Betty went from aspirational to approvingly oppressed and consumeristic. Gitlin might describe this as an instance of  TV with “appeal to a kind of populism and rebelliousness, usually of a routine and vapid sort, but [which] then close off the possibilities of effective opposition” (262).

Yet this episode does contain the oppositional view. Newcomb and Hirsh contend that “television does not present firm ideological conclusions –– despite its formal conclusions–– so much as it comments on ideological problems” (566). Whether the viewer is a 2020 feminist or a 1956 traditionalist, the episode is designed for audiences to side with Betty emotionally. Given the emotional arc, maybe 1956 viewers were made uneasy by the conclusion? The question of the place of women in the professional world was a salient one in the post-WWII era when women were being wooed into domestic suburbia lifestyles, as dictated by the US’s ambitious, post-war consumerist economic policies. TV was a strong arm hard at work to propagate this idea with a positive outlook. This episode is an example of that with an unequivocal conclusion. Gitlin might qualify it as an example of cultural hegemony operating through solutions proposed via the main character, leaving the rest of society untouched, even though the plot problem at hand reflects a problem located deep within society (262).

If the role of TV is to “focus on our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas” (Newcomb and Hirsh 564), ­­then, as uncomfortable as this episode makes us 2020 viewers, it may in fact have created an opportunity for discussions of the question of women and the work place, setting tracks for new ideas to eventually be absorbed into “forms compatible with the core ideological structure” (Gitlin 263). 

Core Post: TV + Internet as Ritual

While the idea of the televisual cultural forum proposed by Newcomb and Hirsch is relevant and important within its context, reading about it felt dense and overly complicated at times. A part of me wondered if I struggled to be intrigued by the theory because it maybe it no longer exists in our current TV landscape or if it really could have just been more succinctly explained, like Hendershot does in the first few pages of her chapter on Parks and Recreation.

I agree with Hendershot that Newcomb’s and Hirsch’s television forum no longer exists in the same mainstream and universal way, but I was particularly interested in how traces of their ideas might still present in the TV-watching experience. Their idea of TV as a ritual of examining culture is something that still exists with TV, and perhaps it has been taken to a deeper level with the internet and the online 24h aftermath cycle of any new episode airing, with an overwhelming amount of tweets, comments, gifs and memefications of the episode. It augments the television ritual if we think about how Hirsch discusses how media creators seek and create “new meaning in the combination of cultural elements” (563). With the viewer now also being a potential creator, it elevates the ritual of examining society and opens up TV’s questions to bigger and more participatory conversations. It also becomes a lot of noise since it’s so much information all at once, but this online post-new-episode frenzy might be a space where more definitive and controversial opinions and answers live, if a show were to still function in the balanced debate proposed by Newcomb’s and Hirsch’s television forum theory. Also, how might we look at a user-creator that has enough of a following to have as big of an impact like a non-amateur creator, such as influencers and extremely popular meme pages?

Core Response: Week 3 Newcomb and Hirsch

Newcomb and Hirsch’s essay seems to mark an academic departure from anxiety over television as either replicator of dominant ideology or as aesthetic medium. Their intervention scorns the limits of either approach, insisting that television is a process, a ritual, a practice of rhetoric. Television as rhetoric seems intuitively to build upon communication analysis’ concern with persuasion and comprehension without discounting the role of the individual artist, or the rhetorician. I’m intrigued by their idea of the forum, as it puts me in mind of the classical Roman forum, which has multivalent uses and meanings as a public place, a place of entertainment, and military and political display. The various genres of TV seem to also contribute to this idea of a forum – like the open spaces (fora) with multiple purposes, television genres have different purposes expressed through their form. All taken together, in a flow strip, or strip of programming, a chunk of TV time functions like an open space through which there are different paths to traverse, giving a sense of freedom and freeplay, but bound together by the very same open space they are travelling.  In this sense, the diversity of content of TV programs notwithstanding, they are delineated by our awareness that they are televisual, fictional, even. At a remove from lived experience. Newcomb and Hirsch argue that this seeming disconnect allows TV to create a hermetically sealed world of representations that stand in for the real world and play around with those ad Infinitum, but I would argue that the individual viewer’s stake or standpoint in the forum affects the vitality of the televisual content to them. Television is classed: access to television, familiarity with its visual vocabulary, even scepticism towards television is informed by class and gender.  For audiences watching television content produced elsewhere (such as people across the world watching popular American shows, how are we to understand the discussion-oriented nature of tv? Are these views even staekholders? Are they addressed?

Newcomb and Hirsch’s piece seems to argue that progressive and conservative battles are inchoate, but are both present in a dialectical tension. Is this tension harmless, such as the token presentation of leftist or right-wing views only to be bashed in a show leaning heavily towards the opposite? Is it benevolent? The liminal pace of the cultural forum is ultimately arrested and given limits to by authority, yes? I very much enjoyed their essay, but found it provoking more questions than it answers.

core post 1 - newcomb + hirsh / "culture"+ liminality

My favorite essay from last week was the William’s piece. I appreciated the urgency of culture in his approach to TV rather than the more formalist/functionalist descriptions/narrativization of TV as such. Unsurprisingly, I felt similarly to Newcomb and Hirsh’s essay. However, “culture” operates slightly different in both of the essays.  Whereas the Williams essay deploys culture as a means to avoid the technologically deterministic/formalist definitions of TV, the pervasive insistence on claiming TV’s ontology, Newcomb and Hirsch argues that analyses of TV don’t account for culture enough, if at all. 

Newcomb and Hirsch insist that the dominant “models” of TV analysis, the “communication” approach and the “aesthetic approach, aren’t already culturally based, or based enough. For both, a cultural analysis of TV lie in between these methodologies. Therefore, “culture” operates epistemologically for Newcomb and Hirsch, whereas Williams was more concerned with untangling the ontological preoccupations of TV at the time. If culture as such avoids the determinism of a McLuhan-esque description of TV, then accounting for that culture also avoids a similarly totalizing approach towards analyzing TV. 

Neither TV as a medium of communication nor TV as an aesthetic object/medium account for TV’s political, economic, or social implications. For the authors, the former overdetermines TV as a structure whereby the specificity and variability of content is overlooked. They feel that this “communication” approach—I presume they feel similarly to approaches of TV’s political economy—presume correlations that affirm a certain relationship between TV and society, or TV’s audience. They suggest that this relationship only confirms the dominant “effect”, or symptom, of TV’s role within society, in which there are no alternative or oppositional modes of reception and viewpoints. On the other hand, they argue that approaching TV as an aesthetic object overlooks the “important questions of production and reception.” (562) Ultimately, they conclude “television does not present firm ideological conclusions—despite its formal conclusions—so much as it comments on ideological problems.” (566)

It is here where I find the most generative points from the essay: the author’s emphasis on cultural “liminality.” For the authors, liminality draws on Turner’s analysis of the liminal stage of TV’s ritualistic processes and practices in which TV neither determines, or is determined by, society. Rather, this liminality considers TV and society as mutually co-constitutive. TV and society are unequivocally integral towards each other’s development and implications. However, if TV’s liminality is the space in between society’s “shared beliefs” (aesthetic approach) and its modes of production and reception (communication approach), it also allows the authors to wedge a similar liminal space in between modes of analysis towards TV as text and structure. That is, the authors hinge on liminality, or the theme of "in-betweenness,” as that very “cultural basis” of TV analysis that they begin their essay with. 

However, it is in their particular descriptions of liminality and TV as cultural forum space where we can find the essay’s datedness and limitations. For both, TV means American TV. Whether that’s the content referenced or TV’s structure, mid-century “America” becomes the backdrop for the essay. Additionally, TV is linear TV insofar as the authors themselves reference William’s definition of TV flow as well as their own description of the “viewing strip.” Most of us will find our own texts that stretch the limits of the essay. Transnationally co-produced animation—usually involving Japanese animation—are those such texts for me. Given Japanese animation’s outsourcing of in-between animation labor for cheap production, usually in Southeast Asia or India, it’s still difficult to unwind the prevailing presumptions of an “anime aesthetic” or anime as such simply referring to Japanese animation. With recent transnational co-productions between “bigger” animation companies, I find Newcomb and Hirsh’s article still relevant. I worked on a recent project that explored Thunderbolt Fantasy and its production between Taiwan’s Pili International and Japan’s Nitroplus. The co-production alone lends itself to an analysis examining the circulation of capital and labor behind the series, but I also found it aesthetically intriguing—really intriguing. I analyze the series’ juxtaposition between its Japanese and Taiwanese dubbing, arguing that future anime scholarship necessitates examining the aural and material implications of voice-acting in order to avoid universalizing anime texts and animation industries in terms of a Japanese visual aesthetic and mode of production. Inspired by reading Newcomb and Hirsh, I sought to map the relations comprising Thunderbolt Fantasy materially and aesthetically, hoping to avoid an analysis where one overdetermines the other. However, after rereading the article I find myself wanting to consider the postcolonial histories between Taiwan and Japan as an added layer of analysis. I certainly owe a lot to the authors and their emphasis on liminality and space—whether space means discursive, epistemological space or material space. 

Core Post - Father Knows Best?

In “Television as a Cultural Forum,” Newcomb and Hirsch try to mediate between frameworks positioning television programming as either a unilateral communicative apparatus—one suited to the aims of the larger economic-industrial infrastructure subsuming it—or a multilateral aesthetic process—one ripe for a variety of negotiated and oppositional readings from scholars, critics, and viewers alike. The former domain, predominant in the social sciences’ approach to mass media, reduces a wider viewership to the delimitations of an ideal consumer of messages, which itself provides one arc of a vicious circle matched by hegemonic media’s creation of its own ideal viewing subject. From a certain perspective, one which I believe Newcomb and Hirsch share, this process can only reflect the politics that it captures in its analyses, without providing any means of intervention. The latter approach, on the other hand, sacrifices contextual understanding in the name of more general evaluations of excellence in creation or effect.

            The model of engagement Newcomb and Hirsch prescribe, that of the liminal ritual or forum, is an attempt to combine the social sciences’ focus on communication with the humanities’ eye for aesthetic form and production. In this context, the television producer is a bricoleur (563), the television itself takes up a “bardic function” (564), and televisual consumption becomes a site of social, cultural, and ideological negotiation. TV is not to be read as a unilateral communicator, as encoded and in need of decoding, but as a factory of codes of differing hues and timbres. It is in light of this approach that the authors reconsider what seem to be overtly antiquated sexual politics in the episode of Father Knows Best that we screened last week.

I agree with their assessment that “our emotional sympathy is with Betty throughout” and also that generally speaking the episode does not “instruct the viewer that her concerns are unnatural” (565). However, I balk at the notion that simply forwarding a driven female character as content is equal in importance to the aesthetic and cultural structures in which that content is embedded. Texts qua texts give us interpretive leeway, but only up to a point, and the episode’s (appropriately stunted, missing both a third act and a progressive viewpoint) structure certainly seems to make the argument that extra-domestic endeavors should ultimately be given up by the women who invest in them. A possible counterpoint, though, would be that I am erroneously treating the episode in much the same way as I would a stand-alone film. I can only pillory the episode’s missing third/final act (in which Betty would either use the date to her advantage or synthesize her career aspirations with her romantic interests) because I’m treating it as a closed domain of discourse, but the typical approach to television ontology would require a following-through on the possibility of serialized character and thematic development. Perhaps Betty’s genuine fulfillment comes in a later episode? . . .

Core Post 1 - Kobe Bryant & The Fault of Liveness

I was never the best athlete. Shit, I was never the best gym student. I grew tired very quickly, never really comprehended the rules and always questioned, “why are we even doing this?” Despite my athletic incompetence, there was always one ritual that I could partake in. That is taking a crumbled piece of paper and throwing, as if you are at the free throw line into a trash bin while simultaneously yelling, “KOBE!” Kobe Bryant was not only the cultural signifier for my non-existent hoop dreams, but Kobe was a Black man that other Black kids could see themselves as. He provided not only hoop dreams, but dreams period.  

That is why the news of his death, alongside his daughter and seven others in a helicopter accident is so damn tragic. What was even more tragic was the media coverage of the incident that made a lot of folk consider the faulty nature of “liveness.” From ABC misreporting that all of his children were onboard to a white news reporter “accidentally” referring to the Los Angeles Lakers as the n-word to the families of the victims not even knowing about this tragedy until TMZ (which needs to be eradicated) reported it, “liveness” failed us yesterday.

One example that deserves to be explored was the scheduled NBA games that were taking place. It was heartbreaking to see athletes on the sidelines and during the games cry so deeply over their idol. It was sickening to publicly watch these men grieve and still be required to perform. It is a fact that majority of the players in the league are Black. The social and structural dynamics between Black men and their display of grief have always been surrounded by a public viewing. A public look at the vulnerability of the Black body that is still expected to perform for a system that is bound by whiteness, capitalism and the expectation of “liveness.” I couldn’t help but to mourn even more deeply while watching those men exert their physical prowess and break down in emotion at the same damn time.

Although there was a strong demand for the NBA to cancel the games, they did not. Most of them opted for an elongated moment of silence. But that isn’t enough. The dynamics of their grief being seemingly ignored is all too often for the display of Black bodies on small screens. Blackness has always had to mourn publicly, never given the opportunity for a private healing. Moments like these always remind me that these structures, including broadcast television, not only profit off of the “spectacular-ness” of our bodies, but also off of the deep cries of our sorrow.

TV Nostalgia and ABC

This spring, ABC premiered a remake of All in the Family and The Jeffersons called Live in Front of a Studio Audience, which (as you may have guessed) aired live.  ABC has leaned pretty heavily into nostalgia programming since Trump's election (def trying to say this is correlated rather than causal), and I am curious about how remaking two of Lear's classics fits into this.  While many people understood the reboot of Roseanne to be a clear ploy for more conservative audiences (despite the politics of the original series), this sitcom special seems positioned to attract a different configuration of viewers.  Then last month, ABC did it again this time pairing All In the Family with Good Times.  I am curious about what folks think of this turn to special event nostalgia television.  I am also interested in the rationale for something like the Roseanne reboot and how it differs in important ways from the reboot of One Day At A Time.  

Slightly irrelevant, but here is the theme song to the new ODAAT, which as far as I'm concerned is in the god tier of television theme songs:

Impeachment Trial

How and when and where are folks watching the impeachment trial? I've been bouncing between CNN and C-SPAN, primarily, both supplemented heavily by the News App on my iPhone. What's interesting to me is how congress has dictated the terms and conditions of the audiovisual material access, and it's then up to networks to represent it (or not) as they wish. Quickly, C-SPAN seems disinterested in adding any additional material of their own. They have provided hotlines for people of varying political affiliations to call in during recesses and opine or ask questions equally; and, to that end, they seem to be using television as a cooler medium than say, any of the cable news networks who employ graphics akin to those we see during professional sports telecasts. Doubling down on that is endless, fervent punditry and opinion hawking. For better or worse, they seem to be cooking up the material from congress to make television news something of a hotter medium — more intense and directed, with less room or need to fill in the blanks. As I understand it, Fox News did not air the Democrats' opening arguments live. I'm curious to hear what other people have been observing...

A Cultural Forum? (Johnson Core Post Week 3)

The premiere of the last season for Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011-2019) coincided with the announcements or launches of several new streaming platforms.  GoT’s home HBO, Disney, NBCUniversal, and even Apple wanted to cash in on the streaming revolution.  As the season 8 premiere drew closer, television critics and ordinary viewers began to express trepidation about the new era of television, which many saw as the end of any form of American monoculture rooted in television (this view, of course, problematically forgets about sports and politics).  As Newcomb and Hirsch assert in their formative essay “Television as a Cultural Forum,” TV has been the dominant cultural forum/form in American life since the 1950s (563).  While the claim remains true (I think? maybe?), I doubt Newcomb and Hirsch could have predicted the proliferation of television and the changes wrought by the post-network era. Prior to the advent of cable, and decades before DVR and streaming would fundamentally change television consumption, Americans really only had three channels (CBS, NBC, and ABC) to get their television entertainment, meaning that viewers had a common corpus of shows to discuss.  When Game of Thrones, a global television blockbuster, ended, what the hell could we all talk about?     

Newcomb and Hirsch assert that by rejecting the limiting analytic frames put forth by mass communication theory and aesthetic television criticism, we can get at what makes television a unique medium (561).  They assert “almost any version of the television text functions as a forum in which important cultural topics may be considered” (565).  For the purposes of this post, I would like to explore whether or not the concept of television as a cultural forum still holds weight in the era of Peak TV.  As Heather Hendershot notes in her analysis of Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009-2015), industrial shifts have changed not only television content, but also what audiences seek out.  She argues, “narrowly targeted niche TV thus provides ‘self-confirmation,’ leaving little room for the old cultural forum ideal of ideas in conflict” (206).  While I am inclined to agree with Hendershot that industrial shifts, especially narrowcasting, have fundamentally altered television’s presentation of ideas, in re-reading Newcomb and Hirsch I found elements of their argument still applicable. Hendershot uses Parks and Recreation as an illustration of the places that the cultural forum model persists.  However, I believe it is important to note that the core of Newcomb and Hirsch’s argument was that “any emphasis on individual episodes, series, or even genres, misses the central point of the forum concept” (566).  Rather than look at individual series that perhaps exemplify the discussion of core issues, might we look at a “television strip” and extrapolate the core social concerns of our time?  When we look at the American television of the 2010s, what emerges as the dominant social concerns of the time?  I’d imagine we would see a variety of programming centrally concerned with questions of economic precarity and social alienation across a range of genres and networks (I’m thinking here of things like Atlanta (FX, 2016-), Insecure (HBO, 2016-), Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013), Superstore (NBC, 2015-), Broad City (Comedy Central, 2014-2019), Fleabag (BBC/Amazon, 2016-2019)).  How did the financial crash and the continued deterioration of old-school models of social inclusion make its way on-screen?  

I am letting this post get away from me, so I will close with this: I do not have a clear answer as to whether or not television at this current juncture primarily presents the topics for debate or provides audiences with definitive answers (there is too much content, and I wouldn’t know where to start).  However, (perhaps paradoxically), I do think that Newcomb and Hirsch are exactly right in arguing that given television’s dominance in American culture, we can determine the most prevalent ideological questions through an analysis of the medium at different points throughout history.   

Ray Kyooyung Ra – The 2020 Grammy Awards (Week 3)

A few people from our cohort and I met up to watch the 2020 Grammy Awards ceremony aired live on CBS last night. The Grammys celebrated Lizzo, Lil Nas X, and Tyler, the Creator--his performance, his inhaler, and all. The Grammys mourned Kobe Bryant. Billie Eilish conquered the categories. And Ariana Grande seemed a bit off her game that night.

Amongst the noticeable bustle from the ceremony’s last-minute changes in production at the wake of Kobe Bryant’s death as well as the scandal surrounding former Grammys CEO Deborah Dugan and her allegations that the ceremony is rigged (let’s pretend that we are all surprised by that), I couldn’t help but view the Grammys in the context of television’s nature of liveness. How we were able to watch the show aired from the Staples Center only several miles away in almost real-time, how the nature and perception of the ceremony was affected by the allegations of Dugan, how quickly the televised content could react to recent news, and such.

On that note, I am sharing on the blog a link to Tyler, the Creator’s ecstatic performance from that night. I was genuinely shocked by the presentation, not to the mention the camerawork. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyihlREUghk