While the serial form of prestige television was mined by both Mittell and Kackman, it was Feuer’s discussion of daytime/primetime melodrama that brought me to a question of the television miniseries as form. For all of the formal distinctions between cinema and television mined by these authors, aesthetic of otherwise, I am curious how the form of TV miniseries might disrupt some of our understandings or approaches to genre. Approaching the question of excess as an operant textual/narrative/structural feature of the TV melodrama, how might we equally come to see the formal structure of the miniseries, both televisual and filmic in its production qualities, narrative structures, character worlds, duration, and frequent casting of major stars, contribute to formal qualities of excess discussed by Feuer. Thinking of Todd Haynes’s foray into TV with Mildred Pierce, is the operant melodrama of the miniseries made more excessive in its cultural “event”-ness, its world of detail, and its appearance and reception as neither strictly TV nor cinema? Can we so neatly argue, as Feuer does, that it is “form, even more than visual conventions, which most distinguishes he contemporary television melodrama from its cinematic predecessors” (p. 12)? What kinds of televisual form appear to us as certain genres more than others? I think there is something contradictory and unresolved – terms appreciated by Feuer – in Haynes’s casting of a film star such as Kate Winslet in a made-for-TV melodrama.
To this point, I appreciated Mittell’s cultural approach to genre and found his case study of early MTV to be useful. In face of Kackman’s sometimes confusing relationship to “quality TV” as label (is he spurning or holding on to its utility in his discussion of Lost?), Mittell’s attention to the very cultural/discursive structures that allow genre to persist for us rang true for me. His taking into account the role that communal meaning-making, “strategically articulated by socially-situated groups” (14), plays in genre as a “cultural operation” was compelling to me, especially in the desire to approach genre as a non-static category. Haynes’s Mildred Pierce, surely, could only have been so celebrated and anticipated as event due to enveloping senses of melodrama’s filmic distinction, the cultural value of the television “event,” and the prestige value of the miniseries in its formal relation to cinema (and literature for that matter).
Thank you for this very thoughtful post, Anastasia! I would add to your point about miniseries by considering its own set of forms, visual and narrative elements, and audience expectations. Thinking about recent miniseries like Chernobyl (2019) and Unbelievable (2019), I realise miniseries tend to be much less “serial” than the melodramas Feuer mentions in her article. Often, miniseries has a clear ending (if not necessarily a resolution) within limited number of episodes, which is very different from long-lived television series such as the 14 seasons of Dallas. Also, many miniseries are adapted from novels, such as numerous BBC productions based on books written by writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Sarah Waters. Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce, as you mentioned, is also adapted from James M. Cain's 1941 novel of the same name.
ReplyDeleteThe point I want to make is that miniseries might be a totally different realm compared to TV melodrama in the 1980s. And I agree with your account of Mittell’s cultural approach. As Mittell claims, “genres are always partial and contingent, emerging out of specific cultural relations, rather than abstract textual ideals” (23). In this sense, Feuer’s article appears limited to the specific kind of melodrama she focuses on (although this is no reason to undermine the brilliant distinction she made between melodramas in films and in TV).