Core response (Genre Week)

I echo Michael Kackman’s critical challenge of the termed genre, “Quality TV”, and its wide currency among audience, in industry as well as academia since the late 90s. In the 2010 column, first of all, he astutely points out an elitist connotation underlying the term, which attempts to elevate the medium in cultural hierarchies but departs from earlier feminist take on what was usually deemed as culturally low form. Another significant step he takes is to problematize the equation of narrative complexity to “quality” and, furthermore, to propose the question that is often taken for granted: “what kinds of characters, settings, dilemmas, can be seen as cleverly complex, deserving of the “quality” label”? At the end, through an analysis of Lost and the gendered hierarchies embodied, he cautions against a tendency to overemphasize an aesthetic quality of tv while dispensing with a cultural and political investment in scholarship.

But what confuses me most is a certain sort of embrace of the term and Lost by the author as he goes on to discuss how to reconfigure the quality criteria, which seems to me somewhat contradicts his anti-elitist intervention at the very beginning. Particularly, I consider the way he poses the “label” question as an indication of such a celebration, since all he delineates are textual elements (character, settings, dilemmas) and excludes non-fictional programming. What I consider as more crucial would be a cultural approach to the genre, as conceived by Jason Mittell in the essay on television genres.

Mittell carefully reminds us how genre, as a kind of category, has nothing intrinsic about itself and, instead, is culturally constructed within multiple spheres of discursive practices and discourses that posit definition, interpretation, and evaluation. In this light, Quality TV does not emerge from any textual features the way Mittell interprets the two scenes from Lost. I find the weakness of his way to categorize Quality TV precisely consists in overlooking other dimensions of discourses aside from the primary text itself. He mentions the HBO slogan but does not further explicate how industry practices reinforce or reconfigure the category. Likewise, it remains undiscussed about how audience discourses are built into this categorizing process of Quality TV. As stressed by Mittell, “we need to ask what a genre means for specific groups in a particular cultural instance”. Therefore, Kackman’s intention to figure out a better sets of criteria to define the genre is not enough: the criteria have been constantly changing over the past decades since the genre was invented.