Genre and WGN America's Underground (Core Post 5)

I found this week’s batch of readings to be really generative and I felt like each chapter or article we read was productively in conversation with the others.  Mittell’s intervention into genre studies is really thoughtfully framed, and I especially found his application of Foucault’s work on discourse to be especially valuable.  In my own work, it has become increasingly clear that genres are not static and that I need to spend more time thinking about how these designations come to be and how their formations play out in fields of power.  I thought that Mittell’s analysis of music videos and early MTV was such a good example.

All of the readings reminded me of a blog post TV scholar Al Martin wrote for the LA Review of Books about the WGN America series Underground (2016-2017).  As Martin outlines in his work, the label of quality has elided many Black-cast dramas.  When WGN America decided to move from a superstation largely known for its rights to the Chicago Cubs games to a producer of original quality program they hired Matt Cherniss who previously helped develop series like Nip/Tuck (2003-2010) and Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014) for FX.  Under Cherniss’s leadership, WGN America began production on quality original programming like Salem (2014-2017), Manhattan (2014-2016), Outsiders (2016-2017), and finally Underground (2016-2017).  In the LA Review of Books, Martin details that “quality” can be hard to properly define, what is clear, however, is that quality television is largely white.  Through a discourse analysis of the promotional paratexts released before the show’s premiere, Martin’s illustrates the ways, both subtle and overt, WGN America sought to position Underground as quality programming.  Despite these efforts, however, some critics labeled Underground, a soap opera.  Martin states, 

 “I think that by connecting Underground to the soap opera, Genzlinger [a critic] attempts to not only make the series decidedly not a quality series, but to racialize the series, because black-cast series are rarely, if ever, considered within such discourses. In this way, then, Underground mimicked the look of a quality series, but in its inclusion of moments that Genzlinger reads as melodramatic, it, for him, ceded its claim to quality television.”

Martin’s work, which is full of key insights, helps texture the readings for this week by using race as a critical analytic frame to understand genre.  I wrote my MA thesis on Underground and throughout my research immersed myself in the series’ paratexts.  My analysis of critics reviews, viewers’ live-tweets, official promotional materials, the social media production of those affiliated with the series, and finally the text itself made quite clear Mittell’s argument that generic distinction are historically and culturally constructed, and also critically unstable.  At once, “quality” drama, soap opera, heist thriller, superhero narrative, historical fiction, and more Underground is a unique site to understand the contradictions, hierarchies, and subtleties inherent in generic distinctions.