I really enjoyed reading a triad this week - Feuer, McPherson and Kackman, because I could trace the contestations in the argument for rescuing melodrama from sexist neglect and scorn, while also course-correcting enough to not get lost in a gendered, hierarchical reimposition of "quality" over soapyness as the sole reason for valuing the serial form. Feuer's survey of film scholarship rightly points out that reading melodrama as two-track narratives always posits an authorial vision, and assumes a unilateral audience reception. Her conclusion is what I really liked - she does locate excess in melodrama, but not ironic visual excess, but an excess of affect. Prime-time melodrama like Dynasty indulges in overblown acting and reaction shots (something post 90s Indian TV has taken and run with, links coming soon) because that allows it to underscore the primacy of confrontation to the narrative. Confrontation is given space to breathe, to be broken down into action and reaction, forcing the viewer to slow down and inhabit the moment. They aren't simply the hurdles in the way of the plot, they are the plot, lurching from crisis to crisis.
McPherson 2007 piece on 24 picked up on what Jane Feuer briefly discusses - that "male-oriented" prime-time programming drew heavily from soap opera narrative conceits but located them against a backdrop of business and masculine power struggles - and expands greatly on it. I haven't seen much beyond an episode of 24, probably while switching channels, but it absolutely is a masculine melodrama. Just as Dallas and Dynasty present sociocultural anxieties without fully articulating a political agenda, 24 too tosses up questions of post-9/11 masculinity and fragility without ever asserting an alternative model. I don't know if the series' ambivalence reveals "the contours of a desire to challenge the relentless pace of life and create new circuits of meaning for masculinity that can navigate the demands of both home and family" (McPherson 186), but I certainly see that television studies grapples with why these shows feel progressive even when they aren't politically radical. Maybe it is capitalism selling us a narrative of volitional mobility after all.
Finally, Kackman's lovely insight into why narrative complexity and operational complexity even work on us might be the answer - that these easter eggs feel satisfying because they answer questions we deem culturally important. Americans care about queer PoC on TV because LGBT and civil rights activism have put them on the national agenda. Whether that "we" is a national, regional, gendered, or age-defined audience might vary, but I'm reminded of Hendershot's characterisation of TV as a "cultural forum" very strongly. With one revision when I apply it to the modern TV melodrama: the prime-time melodrama/serial might bring contradictory political ideas into collision with one another, but those ideas are very specific to a political era, with Betty Girl Engineer raising and troubling different questions than an episode of Lost. TV might feel more culturally complex and progressive now, especially with shows like One Day at a Time, but it is less an open declaration for the Left or the Right than a re-assertion every night, that American society is obsessed with these irresolvable questions.
McPherson 2007 piece on 24 picked up on what Jane Feuer briefly discusses - that "male-oriented" prime-time programming drew heavily from soap opera narrative conceits but located them against a backdrop of business and masculine power struggles - and expands greatly on it. I haven't seen much beyond an episode of 24, probably while switching channels, but it absolutely is a masculine melodrama. Just as Dallas and Dynasty present sociocultural anxieties without fully articulating a political agenda, 24 too tosses up questions of post-9/11 masculinity and fragility without ever asserting an alternative model. I don't know if the series' ambivalence reveals "the contours of a desire to challenge the relentless pace of life and create new circuits of meaning for masculinity that can navigate the demands of both home and family" (McPherson 186), but I certainly see that television studies grapples with why these shows feel progressive even when they aren't politically radical. Maybe it is capitalism selling us a narrative of volitional mobility after all.
Finally, Kackman's lovely insight into why narrative complexity and operational complexity even work on us might be the answer - that these easter eggs feel satisfying because they answer questions we deem culturally important. Americans care about queer PoC on TV because LGBT and civil rights activism have put them on the national agenda. Whether that "we" is a national, regional, gendered, or age-defined audience might vary, but I'm reminded of Hendershot's characterisation of TV as a "cultural forum" very strongly. With one revision when I apply it to the modern TV melodrama: the prime-time melodrama/serial might bring contradictory political ideas into collision with one another, but those ideas are very specific to a political era, with Betty Girl Engineer raising and troubling different questions than an episode of Lost. TV might feel more culturally complex and progressive now, especially with shows like One Day at a Time, but it is less an open declaration for the Left or the Right than a re-assertion every night, that American society is obsessed with these irresolvable questions.
Your post, and really the last line about American society's obsession, led me to wonder about what role class plays in this "obsession"? I'm thinking about this both in terms of audience, and in terms of the class signifiers that are attached to the spectacle of excess, of undecided social/political questions, of masculine duty. I have to think through a bit more why this seems important and maybe a bit absent in the texts we read...
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