Core Post: Producers as authors

I’m compelled by several aspects of Caldwell’s stab at a “critical industrial studies” version of television’s post-convergence forms. His scrutiny the ubiquitous term “content” to refer to media texts; the expansion of traditional textual analysis to account also for the industry ‘at large’; his granular look at the many ways in which production cultures affect televisual texts; Caldwell incorporates all of this and more in this chapter informed by what he refers to in passing as a Geertzian method. And it’s this invocation of anthropology that most interests me. Geertz is perhaps most well known for his contributions to interpretive anthropology and its emphasis on thick description, a particularly fine-grained mode of ethnography. Caldwell’s piece is clearly neither ethnography nor thick description – but it does suggest how such approaches might be put to work in media studies. 

This is most apparent in his (stellar, stimulating) discussion of specific aspects of the production process such as pitching and writers’ rooms. His discussion is compressed and cursory, distilling information gleaned from trade journals and tabloids into astute insights about the terms in which aesthetic decision-making gets done in a producorial capacity. The potential for an ethnographically richer appraisal of TV’s producer function is clear. Even in the compressed form of analysis that Caldwell offers, a number of refreshing gains are made towards the project of linking analysis of televisual form in actual “communities and cultures of production.” His discussion of pitching establishes the authorial function of producing that has so often been neglected. Anyone who was worked, however tangentially, in film/TV production knows that texts are made long before the first frame has been filmed. A continuous stream of discourse – in the form of script coverage, pitch meetings, the back and forth of drafts and rewrites – inserts the producer into the text, bestowing on them an authorial function, even though the trace of their presence will go unmarked in the final text that airs. Cultures of production, as Caldwell brilliantly notes, are not incidental to TV form; they are basic to it.