Genres and Internet-TV (Core Post #4)

While doing this week’s readings, I kept thinking about where new TV, specifically as it relates to digital and new media, might fit in this discussion of genre. Contemporary television is already playing so much with mixing genres – e.g. Black Mirror, Watchmen, The Politician, Elite –, so it gets more complicated to think about definitions and meanings of television genre if we cross the line between traditional-looking television and online based serialized content that is closer to television’s form than film, which maybe we can call kind-of-TV. How is the internet subverting or changing television genres? Or perhaps how is it altering our ideas of what genres are when it comes to television.

Kackman writes about how “[…] it was […] noteworthy that the ultimate mark of distinction for [The Wire] was to detach it fully from its medium of origin, and place it in its ‘true’ aesthetic context – that of cinema.” This feels very appropriate for so many contemporary television shows, but is this the only progressive trajectory TV is taking in its new golden age? Serialized online content doesn’t seem to be this linear when borrowing aesthetics, so it could be more interesting to subvert this process of analysis and take a top-down approach opposite to bottom-up to see what else is going on with contemporary content. Kackman also writes that the serialized prime-time drama has found more “maturity” in the resurgence of auteurism and formalist narrative analysis. But that is already starting to feel overrated and not so new, so recently I’ve been interested in a similar approach to that of the feminist television scholars that Kackman mentions. For them “many of the medium’s most compelling possibilities lay not in its aesthetic sophistication, but precisely in its low status.” I think that’s where we’ll get the most out of analyzing innovative and sometimes weird kind-of-TV content.

On one hand, thinking about the “openness” of TV that Feuer discusses (p. 15), I think the internet has allowed streaming content to close more and be more explicit and clearer with its stances or the readings it desires from the audience. On the other hand, platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram have opened genres in a way that it blows up the concept of genre by mixing it all together and exposing its manufacturability and/or restrictions. One example of this is the remixed recaps I’ve mentioned here in a previous post, but recently I also found out that E! uploads popular segments from Keeping Up With The Kardashians to their YouTube channel, but re-edited in soap opera style. They call it KUWTK Telenovelas. It exposes both genres at play (reality and telenovelas) and creates its own kind of experience. Perhaps it’s just camp, and it seems like the internet is doing way more of that, while traditional television keeps getting more and more serious…

Maybe it’s because the world feels extra intense and dark right now or because I’m getting tired of all new TV shows being so serious (or maybe both?), but I’ve just been finding more pleasure and new value in these lower forms of television than high quality TV at the moment.