Core Post #5

Premium TV and Genre

            Jason Mittell’s, chapter, “Television Genres as Cultural Categories,” in his book, Genre and Television, grapples with numerous theories as how to best define genre and it asks whether categorizing various texts into genres is practical. Mittell turns to Noel Caroll, Foucault, Jane Feuer, Andrew Tudor, Rick Altman, and Tzvetan Todrov’s theories on genre to showcase that that everyone has their own definition of gene and thus, there is no clear definition. Moreover, the definition of television genre is opaquer than what it is for literature or film. Television genre theory is in infancy. According to Mittell we must theorize television genre before we turn to attempting to define genre television.

            Of course, it is essential to grapple with questions of genre in any medium. Mittell notes that for TV, many of the genres have been constructed through common sense and industry standards. Though even with these standards, people interpret genres different. For example, the soap has been interpreted as a patriarchal propaganda and as a feminine genre that is resistant to masculinity (Mittell, 5). Though there are interpretations of these genes, I think I follow Potter Stewart’s “common sense theory” (but probably a fallacy) that we know what a soap opera is upon seeing it.

            The soap has certainly become the dominant form of TV genre in that TV shows follow that format of serialization to convey the melodrama of the family or friend group in their quotidian struggle to coexist. Though, premium TV, or what Mittell later refers to in his career as “complex TV” (please see his 2015 book, Complex TV), transcends soap operas. TV can now do this because showrunners and creators figured out how to marry the soap with standard genres that have been more clearly defined in literature and film. For the rest of this post I will turn to an analysis of The Sopranos, and how HBO reconfigured TV via marrying the Mob genre with the soap opera.

            David Chase’s The Sopranos premiered in 1999 and revolutionized TV through revolutionizing the soap opera. It did this through the characters, who are involved in organized crime, learning how to be gangsters from classical Mafia films, such as Goodfellas and The Godfather. This is self-referential in describing how Chase came to rework TV. He learned how to construct characters who are a part of a family, the mob, and the “American family,” as two units that can coexist between two genres. The gangster canon and the soap canon. With this reformation, premium TV blurs the lines of what genre is or what it has been expected to be.

            R. Colin Tait proposes that HBO is able to marry genres through freedom of censorship. In this way, the soap opera can coexist within a foul-mouthed world that was evident in R rated films (Tait). Moreover, this serialization of TV allows for a longer trajectory of characters. We can see Tony Soprano’s uncensored antics unfold across 86 hours. It is exactly this length, this freedom from censorship, and this ability to marry genres that make the theory of genres meaningless in the era of premium TV. The question is not, can we define TV genre. Now the question is, can we define premium TV?