587 TV Theory Spring 2020: February 2020

Saturday, February 29, 2020

Self-regulation on YouTube an extension of reality TV?

Although I framed my title this way, I don't believe that models of self-regulation on YouTube are directly an extension of the models of governance covered by McCarthy's article. Nevertheless, I do think that YouTube, and in particular, lifestyle vlogs, fall into the same "neoliberal cultural logics of privatization" (17). While not overtly about the failures of a society's governance, many lifestyle vlogs are focused on a sense of self-improvement. Put simply, they show "average" people living in particular ways that then become almost like genre conventions. These "average" people also stock up on social capital and oftentimes become idealized for their adherence to these aesthetic genre conventions.

Some of them also reflect and comment on how their lives are being constructed by these conventions and that their sense of "to-be-looked-at-ness" is heightened whenever engaging in lifestyle practices they have learned from other vlogs. Rather than being construed as a negative thing, however, some vloggers have found a sense of purpose, satisfaction, and order from these conventions. In this way, these conventions become the ideal self-management tools, representing a way in which self-governance might actually work. Whereas reality TV seems to purport neoliberal ideals through failures and trauma, which the camera (and the production crew) is meant as a healing process, lifestyle vlogs demonstrate how turning the camera onto oneself can uphold self-governance in a positive way (by positive, I'm not arguing that the effects of this governance is good, but that these vlogs show a positive image of life and not failure).

I've often thought about whether lifestyle vlogs would work as a format for reality TV. Although there are self-improvement shows not focused on people in "need", they often feature a guru of some sort helping others, which adheres to what McCarthy describes as finding oneself in helping others. Whether the more proactive self-help shown in lifestyle vlogs can cross over to TV is a mystery, but I do think that they find similarities with the neoliberal ideals of reality TV.

Core Post (5)

Chad Raphael’s essay on the economic incentives to reality television programming, which he coins “Reali-TV” present the political economic justification for studying reality television seriously. Instead of the condemnation as a supposed “low-art”, Raphael takes us through the ways that reality TV stems from a history of FCC regulations, increased competition amongst broadcast and cable producers, rising production costs, changing federal tax laws amounting to smaller returns per show, and a preemptive response to a rise in striking Hollywood union-ized workers. As Raphael dipped into the format trading global television arena, I was reminded of Silvio Waisbord’s essay, “McTV: Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats”, where Waisbord includes and elaborates on the McDonalds-esque globalizing reality TV format: “Formats are a form of McTelevision. Shorthand for the McDonald’s fast-food chain, the prefix Mc stands for a business model characterized by efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control that caters products to specific local requirements, usually informed by cultural factors” (Waisbord 378). Waisbord goes on to claim that formats present the McDonalds standard of efficiency and predictability in recycling formats that are known to be successfully, but adding minor adjustments based on local tastes. Selling formats allows, let’s say Hollywood, to enter into foreign markets by selling formats and coproducing with local markets, expanding their global television dominance, while eliminating the fixed costs of dramatic productions. Waisboard also claims the success of format television is due to the fact that “[f]ormats are culturally specific but nationally neutral” (Waisbord 368). Format shows are easily customizable to whatever domestic market is using them.

Case study: Fox’s The Masked Singer. I hate this show, with a passion. Most likely because one of my favorite shows is the Korean King of the Mask Singer. Here is a striking example of the global spread of format TV. Fox supposedly greenlit The Masked Singer after Ryan Reynold’s appeared on the Korean original. The original is a much more sincere, modest singing completion where celebrities in less extravagant masks/costumes sing anonymously through several rounds. Each arc lasts two episodes and by the end, 8 celebrity singers are revealed in their attempt to de-throne the current king. It’s a sincere attempt, for many who go on the show, to display the genuine talent these artists have. The American show, on the other hand, is a postmodern wet-dream. It’s all about the spectacle as the contestants wear grand costumes to mask the fact that they are mostly unknown celebrities. The 4 panelists are there for guessing, but also for tonally awkward comedic plays. The sincerity of singing has been overrun by the performativity of the masks and extravagance of the costume. The entire season unfolds who the contestants are, instead of an entire episode. What’s remained is the mask. I wonder if this demonstrates a kind of customization to the domestic market? Perhaps it’s because FOX has a harder time bringing in A-list celebrities as the Korean version does most weeks. Or maybe American's prefer the prolonged suspense, and need the extra-ness of this version to sustain it. Regardless, this remains an example of how formats are recycled globally, but instilled with national sensibilities for local audiences.

Friday, February 28, 2020

Core Post #5

Reading Anna McCarthy’s “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” makes me think about different models of analyzing the institutions of modern subjects. Different from Ouellette and Hay, who focus on reality TV’s political rationalities in light of the concept of governmentality, McCarthy extends the discussion to an affective aspect that foregrounds the failure of self-government and tries to negotiate the seeming contradiction between the two frameworks. The excess of reality television, according to McCarthy, demonstrates a point of contact between the two analytical frames. It also offers a more nuanced conceptualization of neoliberal subject that considers not only the technocratic terms of citizen, but also the affect of natural human.

This subject McCarthy discusses, on a second thought, is different from the real audiences that audience studies would typically expect. Already encoded in the structure of the shows, the affective dimension that McCarthy focuses on stays in the realm of the dominant reading of imagined/ideal audience, rather than real people’s various responses. The latter, although highly valued by audience studies, is (perhaps rightly) ignored in this article because it is irrelevant to the point McCarthy tries to make. The inevitable contradiction between “reality” and abstraction is beyond the scope of this post, but Dr. Seiter’s article, in the reading two weeks ago, gives plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about audience studies and could potentially justify McCarthy’s choice.

Another point in McCarthy’s article that might be valuable for further thinking is the place of ethics in neoliberal form of governing. As McCarthy notes, Random 1 suggests that neoliberal citizenship is “an ethical-political position based in the acceptance of the irresolvable state” (between self-governing and the impossibility of governing the self) (31). The affective aspect of reality TV (suffering), then, not only showcases how a subject in neoliberal society negotiates the contradictions, but also provides a simple answer to the problem of everyday ethics: the right conduct for neoliberal citizens is to accept the irresolvable state. In this sense, ethics plays a more important role in neoliberal society in that it is complicit with the practice of pastoral power. It functions as the point of entry of the public into the private, the institutional into the individual, the intersubjective into subjective. What McCarthy does in her article, then, is not contradictory to Foucault’s concept of governmentality—the affective dimension of reality TV leads to an ethical judgment that, through forming a model for citizen subjects, facilitates neoliberal form of governing.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

TV + Race clips

TRUMP AD:
http://digg.com/video/trump-first-campaign-ad-tv

Kendrick Lamar: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/15/11004624/grammys-2016-watch-kendrick-lamar-perform-alright-the-blacker-the-berry

UCLA Report:

https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2018-2-27-18.pdf

Monday, February 24, 2020

Broad- v. Narrow-casting in a Globalizing World. -Core post # 4 - week 7

When I was a new immigrant to the United States from France, TV had two uses –– both mentioned in the article “Ethnic/Diasporic/Transnational: The Rise and Fall of ImaginAsian TV” by Benjamin Han. Most obviously, it seemed that TV would be the US national media apparatus that would help catch on with US culture. And sooner rather than later, TV turned out to also be a link back to my "motherland" and native culture. That’s where TV5 Monde comes in as my own experience of the ethnic, diasporic, transnational channel. At first I thought of it as the “French channel.” It was a French-language channel, but it wasn’t exactly a channel from France. The programming was “francophone” rather than “French.” A good part of it did come from France, but there were also programs from “French Africa” and from Quebec, each in their respective iterations of the French language and with their own local flavors. At some point I was really enjoying watching re-runs of a Canadian sitcom called Catherine. It was quite the discovery to see these characters live out a life that seemed halfway between France and California, both in terms of culture and language. Funniest of all: the French Canadian show was subtitled in “French French.” Those subtitles were very much needed, because the two languages are actually quite different.

I think the TV5Monde channel still exists but we are no longer subscribed to it. TV5Monde, with its francophone transnational programming, maybe wasn’t exactly providing the home fix that permanent emigrants could hope for. Maybe the channel has a better appeal with short term expats who see themselves as global envoys from the French epicenter. For actual emigrants, the flavors of the home country are more easily accessed via streaming services where there is now easy access to quality French films and TV series these days.

Linking back to Han article about why ImaginAsian TV was not sustainable, I believe that in a globalizing world where more and more people are in “unique” cultural/identity circmstances, it is increasingly difficult to measure the wants and needs of different populations, to lump them together and broadcast to them. Narrowcasting seems to be the way to reach people “where” they are, both physically and culturally.

Core Post — Week 7

“The recognition and engagement with blackness were not for a moment driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives in all phases of the industry. In large part they were driven, as most things are in network television, by economics.” (Gray 68)

This week’s readings, in particular the pieces by Herman Gray and Jennifer Esposito, brought to mind the 1989 article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” by Peggy McIntosh. Specifically, I contend that McIntosh’s conception of “White Privilege” is an informative undercurrent through the phenomena explored in each of the two other articles.

In examining our purported “color-blind” our “post-racial” America, Esposito calls for an interrogation of “whiteness” and its naturalized advantages in order to move towards a more socially just society. In citing Applebaum on page 533, she highlights, however, that false notions of meritocracy remain a preferable system for white when compared to such reflection, since it preserves the basis for anxieties around “reverse discrimination”. This binary focus is central to Esposito’s analysis of Ugly Betty, as she returns to a key argument that “the focus remained on Betty’s Latinaness, not on Marc’s whiteness. Marc’s whiteness remained at the center, as ‘normal,’ while Betty’s race was inscribed as different and other… discourses on race… ask that we pretend not to see differences even though they have become part of national policies.” (532).

In her essay, McIntosh rigorously conducts such an interrogation, and even composes a list articulating some concrete aspects of white privilege. Her thirty-fifth point corresponds neatly with the issue at stake in Ugly Betty — “I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.” Not only does this condition, one of many “daily effects” as McIntosh names them, highlight the central hurdle that Betty and other people of color must routinely face, but it — along with the others — also reflexively acknowledges a reliable privilege, a relative ease or convenience, that Marc refuses to acknowledge. It is worth noting, too, that different identities confer different types and degrees of advantage or disadvantage, as noted by McIntosh. What remains constant, though, is the tendency to normalize white masculinities especially in such a fashion that does not give rise to many, if any, concerns among white men towards the conferral of unearned power and strength associated with doing so.

In closing, I return to Gray’s article to investigate how white privilege seems to have played out in this slice of industrial history. Unsurprisingly, it seems to have done so passively, and by drawing on the unearned power and political strengths intrinsic to white privilege. A cursory google search reveals white men holding the highest offices in all of the four broadcasters throughout the period in question, and so we might surmise that Gray’s quotation at the start of this post remains true — there was no good faith, grassroots effort to give representation to more people. Instead, “television programmers at the networks pursued these images and representations more aggressively and consistently, incorporating them into a strategy that would do what television does best: generate profits by identifying and packaging our dominant social and cultural moods,” rather than interrogating the institutionalized foundations of that dominance (69).

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