Core Post — Week 3

I like Jessica’s take on “prestige TV” as it pertains to both aspects of cultural forum forwarded by Newcomb & Hirsch, as well as the hegemonic processes articulated by Gitlin. Indeed, “prestige TV” has been popularly lauded for those very types of negotiations of and around topics of public interest. Just what is it about Tony Soprano?

I wonder, though — to what extent we can or should look to an individual character, rather than something bigger. Newcomb and Hirsch, writing in 1983, predate the era of cable television and narrowcasting. Hendershot, in 2013, curiously seems to gloss over the prior three decades. While I agree that the proliferation of channels and streaming options has made it so, “that politically challenging series are easy to ignore,” I wonder if her foreclosure of the cultural forum model in the post-network era is a little heavy-handed (205). While her case study of Parks and Recreation is compelling, surely there must be more than “at least one program” that actively participates in a sort of cultural forum. However, in returning to the notion of “prestige TV”, I wonder how and to what significance we might locate the arena of cultural forum not in one particular show or character, but rather within a channel such as HBO.

Television in the broadcast era catered to the widest possible audience, and took up matters of general public interest, regardless of opinion, political or otherwise. Gitlin argues that the historical arc of this forum has moved from ignorance to domestication. In any event, “we were, to some extent, all on the same page” (Hendershot 204). I argue that HBO and other premium cable channels may be the site, then, of the most robust contemporary forum. While we can certainly identify similarities between antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Larry David, we should look to HBO and its characteristics to account for a modern cultural forum.

As a premium cable offering, HBO is liberated from many of the commercial obligations articulated by Gitlin (255). Freed from advertisers, the market in which HBO participates exclusively then is the content market — alongside Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. It is no surprise then, that the high-production-value programming from these producers is often considered obligatory viewing (see: Game of Thrones). Without commercials, some part of the hegemonic process is eschewed, and “cultural interpreters” are at greater liberty with regards to genre, form, and content. Consequently, we find shows like GoT and The Handmaid’s Tale at the forefront of popular programming, along with the wide swath of reactions, for example, for and against them by and even within Christian communities. Similarly, Curb Your Enthusiasm modernizes the “skewed demography of the world of television” by flattening the distinctions between rich, white, Hollywood elites like Larry David and his best friend Leon, played by J.B. Smoove, Mocha Joe, the local barista, mail carriers, valets, and so on. Still, these interactions across myriad identities hyper-localize the spots “in which we allow our monsters to come out and play”, often through the vicarious pleasures of shutting down society’s idiosyncratic nuisances, and HBO is at the forefront of modernizing the cultural forum for our increasingly complex world (H&N 564). Regarding genre, it may be worth investigating in the future how HBO’s “behind-the-scenes” shows like Curb or The Larry Sanders Show or The Comeback foreground literal “process” over “product” in their ultimate outputs, which emphasize, I argue, “discussion rather than indoctrination” (564).