Geraghty AestheticsTVDrama

International Journal of Cultural Studies http://ics.sagepub.
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Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama

Christine Geraghty International Journal of Cultural Studies 2003 6: 25 DOI: 10.1177/1367877903006001002 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/6/1/25
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ARTICLE
INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies

Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Volume 6(1): 2545 [1367-8779(200303)6:1; 2545; 031101]
Aesthetics and quality in popular television drama
Christine Geraghty
University of Glasgow, Scotland
ABSTRACT
This article seeks to extend the debate about evaluating television by focusing specically on television drama. It reviews some of the reasons why such evaluation has been difcult in cultural studies but suggests that by refusing evaluation in relation to television cultural studies academics are opting out of a key debate in broadcasting and failing students who in their own viewing and practical work are making evaluative judgements. The article suggests that rather than looking for one set of television aesthetics, as Williams, Ellis and others have done, a more precise approach might attend to particular television categories, in this case television drama. The article compares the position in lm and in television, suggesting that one of the problems is that television lacks a critical culture in which evaluation is openly discussed. It offers a framework for assessing individual programmes and, through an analysis of some textbooks on teaching television, indicates how this tactic would open up the rather narrow approaches to evaluation that currently concentrate mainly on ideological questions of representation.
KEYWORDS
aesthetics
evaluation media education teaching television drama television studies quality
television
Sunday night is drama night on British television and one evening in May 2002 I was faced with a dilemma at 9pm: BBC1 was showing Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, an updated comedy drama based on a previously successful series; ITV, the main commercial channel, was showing a new version of
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I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)
the classic The Forsyte Saga and Channel 4 had an episode of NBCs The West Wing. This set me thinking not only about how to juggle viewing and video to best effect on the night but also about issues of quality on television. All three programmes by a variety of indicators could be judged as quality television on the basis of their provenance, their production source, their relations to other programmes and possibly their politics. But could I choose what to watch on the basis of their aesthetics and, if so, could I articulate that? The question of quality and aesthetics in television drama still persists, as the special issue of this journal recently indicated (Volume 4, number 4), and it remains an important indicator for public broadcasting systems and others affected by regulatory standards. Yet denitions of what counts as quality television remain as elusive as ever in cultural studies. In this article, I want to suggest that quality is an important issue not only in terms of the study of television but also in terms of how it is taught. John Hartley (1999) has argued that television itself is a pedagogic medium but in much teaching of television in higher education questions of aesthetics are being neglected in ways that can only be detrimental to future programming and audiences. In cultural studies, it has been argued that televisions main functions lie elsewhere: in the use audiences make of television as a leisure activity, a domestic weapon and a means of cultural formation. Nevertheless, while agreeing that evaluation is not the only issue, it would seem that the content of television still matters to viewers (hence the common complaint that there is nothing worth watching) and that the quality of content is an important factor in debates about policy and provision in which television professionals are engaged. Television studies academics should be part of the public process in which television programming is discussed, particularly as we are teaching current audiences and future makers. Instead, questions of evaluation are handled through concepts of representation and ideology even in teaching situations in which aesthetic criteria are being applied and assessed in practice courses elsewhere on the curriculum. I am seeking therefore to develop a grounded approach to a discussion of aesthetics, in this case in television drama, which would work within broader discussions of televisions cultural and economic role. While this discussion is based on British television, debates about the concept of quality in a particular context are part of a wider set of concerns about how television works internationally and how we teach about it in television or cultural studies. This article is based on two questions. First, how can we articulate judgements about the aesthetics of television drama? I should stress that I am not seeking to develop standards to be imposed but a framework that offers the possibility of a debate about what is good and what is bad in television drama. While recognizing the social dimensions of any discussion of evaluation, I want to argue the importance of a textual dimension to this question. Second, I want to ask how debates about evaluation of television
Geraghty Aesthetics and quality
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content might be generated in order to have an effect on what audiences might demand of television drama. I approach it in this way because of the difculty of addressing aesthetic evaluations through regulation; hence my emphasis on the critical context as a means of keeping aesthetic quality as an issue for public scrutiny. It is this emphasis that leads me into questions about how television drama is taught and how academics, as teachers as well as researchers, develop skills of evaluation in debates about it.
Television, quality and taste Although quality and how one evaluates it is a difcult issue, it has not been entirely neglected in academic work on television. Regulatory debates often hinge on the quality element of both public service provision and commercial licences. In this context, quality is often a regulatory criterion but it tends to be judged by indicators that are not directly aesthetic. Such indicators include the range of programmes screened, the place of certain kinds of programmes in the schedules, the address to and access for minority groups, and the question of national origin, particularly in relation to US programmes. Such debates tend to be nationally orientated and two British examples would be the intensive arguments that accompanied the legislation that created Channel 4 as a second commercial channel in 1982 and the response to the publication of the Conservative governments Broadcasting White Paper in 1988, which proposed opening up the British television market. Both debates involved a wide range of people, including but not exclusively academics, and produced a body of work on quality and television that should not be forgotten. Geoff Mulgan and Charlotte Brunsdons contributions in the early 1990s are examples of work on quality television that have not been sufciently built on. Indeed, in my discussion of aesthetic judgements, I am taking for granted certain criteria that Mulgan (1990) proposed, such as the importance, for instance, of diversity of programming and audience access. Elsewhere, important contributions by, for instance, Jostein Gripsrud (1995) and Kim Schroder (1992) have suggested approaches that have not been systematically taken up. There are a number of reasons why making judgements about aesthetics has proved to be a difcult task in television studies and in the broader areas of media or cultural studies. They would include the impact of semiotics on the genesis of media studies with its pseudo-scientic claims about objectivity; the impact of postmodernism with its emphasis on diversity, decentring and play; the need to establish popular culture and television, in particular, as worthy of study that involved refusing the traditional modes of judgement; the impact of feminist work, with its demand that certain kinds of denigrated ctions should be treated seriously; the notion, coming rather differently from Foucault and Bourdieu, that to make aesthetic
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judgements was to impose the cultural norms of the powerful. We might also include, if Simon Frith (2000) is right, a lack of condence about television studies as a dening and working discipline. In this framework, television is placed at the popular end of the high/low binary that has underpinned much cultural studies work, and judgements are then made on the basis of ideological readings. Somewhat tautologically, programmes that aspire to a different kind of cultural value, such as a classic serial or some arts or history programmes, are criticized for precisely that. Indeed, I would suggest that middlebrow programmes, which actually characterize quite a lot of television, have been difcult to deal with in media studies which, following Fiske among others, has been more comfortable with the popular appeal of quiz shows and soaps. Graeme Turner has indeed suggested that in recent discussions of television there has been a growing silence about the content of television (2001: 377). Certainly, as he suggests, quality is proving to be a thorn in the side (2001: 379) and is a word that is frequently used with scare quotes in academic writing. It is not an accident that a recent textbook, Television Studies: The Key Concepts (Casey et al., 2002), has no entry for quality but an extensive one for taste. The entry draws on Bourdieu and Fiske to suggest that a postmodern cultural aesthetic has blurred distinctions about the value of different texts; citing MTV, with its mix of aesthetic techniques and varied ow of programming (2002: 242), as a benecial product of a widening range of channels and lighter regulation, the authors conclude that
it is much harder to condently categorise texts in terms of value and quality . . . or to discriminate between different social groups in terms of their taste or lack of it. Given the social inequalities that have traditionally been legitimated by distinctions of taste, we might see this as a thoroughly welcome change. (2423)
This apparent refusal to make a judgment, while privileging a certain kind of aesthetics embodied in this case in MTV, is a highly problematic position which actually cuts students off from contributing to debates about contemporary television. Such an approach, written into a textbook, ignores the persistent call for the possibility of evaluation from a number of television scholars. More recent interventions include John Caughie (2000) in his discussion of serious drama and Simon Frith who, among other things, asks the aesthetic question; what is good television? (2000: 124). There has also been some recognition that textual work could contribute to work on aesthetics, although this is still debatable. Nick Couldry, for instance, recognizes that his emphasis on the sociological context to explain textual pleasures has something left over which sociology on its own has difculty explaining: the realm of aesthetics but believes that this has to be left on one side in order to clarify what else has to be in place before textual
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analysis and questions of value and aesthetics can be pursued on a satisfactory basis (2000: 87). To continue to leave the question to one side, though, means that important audience concerns about quality go unacknowledged and make our contribution to public debate more difcult. Where television aesthetics have been of concern is in relation to the medium itself. Denitive work in the eld has addressed the topic with a particular emphasis on modes of viewing. The approach, however, has been to try to develop an aesthetic that would cover a ragbag (Frith, 2000: 110) medium and there has been a problem in trying to construct an aesthetic that would cover the whole extraordinary range of programmes on television from cooking to football, from soap opera to quiz shows, as well as the intervening adverts and continuity announcements. Examples of this kind of work are well known and would include Williams highly inuential insights into television ow, subsequently reworked by, for instance, Ellis (1982) and Gripsrud (1998); Ellis in Visible Fictions (1982) with his notion of the distracted viewers glance in opposition to the lm spectators gaze; and, more recently, Ellis Seeing Things (2000) with its account of television as form of working through, providing a relatively safe area in which uncertainty can be entertained, and can be entertaining (2000: 82). More narrowly, Caldwells account of the development of televisuality (1995) in a digital age covers a range of programmes including advertisements and reality programmes. These grand narrative accounts of television are both valuable and necessary but they are trying to construct aesthetics out of a very unwieldy object and nd a specicity that actually may not be helpful. I would like to think more broadly about aesthetics, in particular making connections between lm and television rather than dening them against each other, and also to think more narrowly about the object we are trying to analyse, to think about television drama without trying to t quiz shows and sport, for instance, into a single account. In this, however, I would want to consider the whole range of drama, not just what might be deemed examples of quality drama such as the single play or the classic serial. This seems an important task because of the sheer quantity of drama that still persists on television. Raymond Williams point about television enabling drama to be a habitual experience (1989: 4) is still valid; or, as David Hare, a leading British playwright, put it more recently, the daily manufacture of ctionalised versions of our lives has unnoticeably become the essential background against which we conduct our own (2002: 3)
Critical contexts in lm and television studies Work on television developed in the broader context of media and cultural studies. In the process, the rather different trajectory of lm studies was set
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aside as the development of a methodology appropriate for a different form or, more polemically, was seen as an awful warning. Although cinematic and television drama clearly exist in different cultural contexts, it is nevertheless worthwhile making comparisons between them on the question of how evaluation is approached. Examining more closely this context in each case is helpful in establishing why it is much more possible to have a debate about aesthetic judgements in dealing with lm. Film culture is marked by, for instance:
1. the notion of a canon that often involves the endless drawing up of lists of best lms but that also provides the context for a debate about which lms, directors or lm movements stand out as examples of ne lm-making that those who claim to know about cinema should see; a critical forum for debate about current lms on radio and in the press (though, rather typically, less so on television); publishers that dene/help to create the canon by producing small books for general use about particular lms. An example of this would be the BFI Film Classics and Modern Film Classics series in which the author gives a personal account of an engagement with a lm already pre-dened as being worthy of that attention, a model that has been adopted by other publishers; a framework for describing and evaluating visual style editing, shot movement and composition, special effects, mise-en-scne which is well established in teaching about lm but not conned there; a sense within and outside the industry of cinema and its history as being important. Examples of this would be the knowledge and reexivity of the movie brat generation and more recent directors such as Tarantino, the enthusiasm of genre acionados and the use of Hollywood classics in contemporary modern art; the passionate desire to make lms among young students, many of whom are doing courses in cultural or media studies.
2. 3.
4.
5.
6.
Through these means, lm has a cultural context marked by both the means of making aesthetic judgements and a forum in which it is possible to debate doing so. If we compare that with the treatment of television, we see something rather different. Television is marked by:
1. the lack of an agreed canon about what is good television. We can see glimpses of one here and there but it is treated differently in public debates and academic study and is very prone to emphasize the contemporary. Television itself uses repeats in terms of cheap availability while academic study tends to privilege programmes associated with certain debates Days of Hope for the McCabe/McArthur controversy about realism, Boys from the Blackstuff for television in the Thatcher years, Absolutely Fabulous or Roseanne for feminist accounts of transgression;
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2.
3. 4.
5.
no established critical reviewing of television. Raymond Williams days of working out a television aesthetic through reviewing are long gone, and television reviewing is generally a matter of humour and condescension. Associated with this is much less commitment, even from specialist publishers, to produce serious books on specic television programmes; no basis for judging television aesthetics in terms beyond the sociological discussions of taste; televisions tendency to treat its own history as camp nostalgia, using its archive as a source of programmes on the top 100 television moments or the top 10 soap queens; a passionate desire among young people to be on television or in television rather than to make good television.
Of course, the kind of lm culture that exists is not unproblematic or neutral; it is often underpinned by an exaggerated respect for authorship, for instance, and perhaps popular Hollywood is still treated more dismissively than it deserves. Certainly many academics in lm studies nd this evaluative context problematic and are distrustful of what is produced in and for that general lm culture. But I would still argue that this context is important for lm studies and that the lack of a general public television culture to which academics make a contribution makes it more difcult to develop an argument for good-quality television hence my interest in media education, which I will develop at the end of the article.
Evaluating television drama But rst to the central point where I want to suggest what we might use to form the basis of an aesthetics to judge television drama. I want to start with an example, a very honourable example, of how I dont think it can be done Robin Nelson (1997) and Our Friends in the North. Nelson is writing out of drama studies and hence is perhaps more willing to take on evaluative questions. His book TV Drama in Transition gives an account of recent television drama largely in a postmodern framework, but in the nal chapters he pulls back to argue that as a matter of practical politics and ethics (1997: 219) it is necessary to make evaluative judgements. Nelson carefully argues that such judgements should be based on the possibilities of communication, on our commonality of being in the world (1997: 228) and on the role that drama can play in bridging the gap between subjectivities . . . on the contested ground of what it means to be human (1997: 229). Nelsons key criterion is that drama should encourage audiences to think more reectively and feel more profoundly about human life and drama (1997: 230). This leads him away from the popular serials and series he has been discussing to a realist drama, Our Friends in the
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North (BBC, 1997). There is not space to go into the detailed reasons he gives for that but it seems to me not accidental that, by using criteria that are largely rational and political but not aesthetic, he has indeed ended up with a version of the difcult, male-orientated, naturalist drama of an earlier television studies. His criteria, then, have not helped him to take into account the range of drama on television except by being worried that more popular formats are pushing out the drama he really values.1 I suggest that a different approach is needed which can propose judgements about quality through a clear evaluative method. This would involve a number of processes to build up an analytic description that would in turn provide the basis for a discussion about evaluative judgements.2 The rst step in this would be to establish categories inside the broad generic distinctions. Otherwise, quality is only associated with and indeed demanded of certain genres, as Brunsdon has suggested in her argument that the generic diversity of television must be taken into account in discussions of quality, but not in ways which make quality genre-specic, creating certain sink or trash genres of which demands are not made (1997: 134). Noel Carroll (2000), writing about lm, offers an interesting instance here of the condence with which some lm scholars operate in this area. Carroll suggests that differences in evaluation can be adjudicated rationally if the disputed lm is allocated to the correct specic category. Thus, he proposes that questions of quality are really questions of generic denition; rather than comparing all lms with each other in the grand category of narrative lm, he argues that the process of assigning a lm to a more limited category in which like is compared with like will solve the problem. I have some sympathy with this logic but if it works it is only because of lms underlying condence about having aesthetic and other tools for making that like with like comparison. In television studies, as I have suggested, we need to do further work in order to be able to make aesthetic judgements within categories. But it is helpful, I think, to have a discussion in which EastEnders is not automatically put up against Our Friends in the North or indeed where the criteria used for drama are not the same as those for quiz shows or sport. In addition, further analysis is needed of the two major modes that still shape much television drama melodrama and realism. One of the crucial questions relates to melodrama and what to do about it in terms of aesthetics. At the moment, the term melodrama tends to be used more pejoratively in television studies than in lm studies; thus, Gripsrud is critical of Dynasty and other soaps because in such drama melodramatic devices are reduced to pure instruments for stirring up emotions (1995: 248). But condemning melodramatic aesthetics in an evaluative process would rule out much of popular television drama. It is surely preferable to accept that melodrama has a place in popular culture, as has happened in lm study and as various theorists have argued in relation to television, and
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to ascribe value to certain kinds of acting, visual style, writing style or narrative formulations which can broadly be dened as melodramatic. An academic reassessment of soaps has recognized their importance as a narrative space in which emotion nds expression. But the discussion of how that is done does not as yet allow us to make ner distinctions between different uses of melodramatic conventions. Such distinctions would allow for more nuanced accounts of the problems of melodrama the over-sensationalism of soap storylines, for instance, or the didactic qualities of many US series as well as of its dramatic possibilities. The aesthetics of naturalism and realism pose a rather different problem in relation to television drama. Here, debate has been extensive, drawing on the contributions of some practitioners as well as the founding work of Williams. However, the textual tradition in television studies for dealing with realism was to a marked extent formed by Colin McCabes arguments in Screen in the 1970s about the classic realist text (see, for example, Pawling and Perkins (1992) article on realism and popular television drama), although Angs (1985) concept of emotional realism arising out of her Dallas work has provided a useful, if sometimes confusing, counterpoint. Categorization may again be a helpful way of unpicking a notoriously difcult term. Thus, we can consider the complex ways in which realism is drawn on, which would include generic realism, in the sense of plausibility to the traditions and expectations of particular genres; realism as a mode of pushing against boundaries of what has been done, an approach particularly pertinent to police and hospital genres such as Cops and ER; and realism as way of introducing the world to the text as Nelson and others want, what Gripsrud calls the delivery of strong, many-sided, meaningful experiential relations to [viewers] own lives and conditions (1995: 104). An approach that categorized programmes in this way would mean that realism can be retained as a term that is used by makers and viewers alike but is not set up as a test of quality which certain kinds of programmes almost automatically fail. It is clear therefore that there are formal dimensions that need to be examined more systematically. Most textual analysis of television pays attention to narrative as an organizing system but devotes less space to other elements such as the audio and visual organization. Televisions audio/visual pleasures are often deemed to be limited by size of screen and poor-quality image. At various points, critics have argued that televisions visual resources are too limited for aesthetic pleasures. It is not necessary to accept Caldwells particular denition of televisuality to recognize that there are numerous examples of television dramas that use sound and image in complex and demanding ways, and even soaps, with their relentless production schedules, try to incorporate expressive or interesting images. Traditionally, analysis of visual organization and the relationship between image and sound has been conned to certain genres such as the single play
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and the classic serial whereas others such as soaps are deemed to be dominated by narrative. It seems to me that all categories of television can be interrogated in this area. Jason Jacobs, for instance, has offered an illuminating comparison between the opening credit sequences of ER and Casualty in order to show how the expressive dimensions of television can be discussed in relation to even the apparently incidental aspects of television drama (2001: 453). It is not clear to me why he protests that this is not intended to generate aesthetic criteria or a ranking of good or bad title sequences (2001: 453) since his judgement seems clear from the account. Nevertheless, the work stands as a clear example of how work on the audio/visual text can be used effectively to tease out evaluation criteria. In this context, relatively little attention has been paid to writing and dialogue. Authorship in television drama is traditionally associated with the single play and in British television studies with attention to the playwright. But it is surprising in a medium that is strongly associated in a variety of ways with talk, with overheard conversations (Mepham, 1990: 66), that the tone and delivery of dialogue is often overlooked in favour of narrative progression. Again there are different modes to be assessed the wide range of dialogue use in soaps, for instance, taking into account the use of regional accents, demotic references, emotional explosions and expository narrative statements. In addition, individual writers could be recognized and their work analysed even when it is obscured by the serial/series format. British examples would include Caroline Aherne, Paul Abbott, Tony Jordan, Debbie Horseld and Kay Mellor. Such analysis could help to support such writers in the face of the industry demands being put on them and could also make for more precise discussion of differences in national practices around writing for television. A further element to be laid out in an analytic description would be performance and characterization. Television is often deemed to be character driven and acting is a traditional indicator of quality for audiences, and yet little work has been done on what good acting for television might look like. Frith has commented on the role of key television performers in raising audiences expectations about drama. Analysis would need to look, for instance, at different modes of acting for particular categories, the use of star performers and the transfer of soap performers into other forms of drama. In terms of characterization, the range and type of characters, the relationship between characters and storylines, the possibilities (taken or not) for character development and the sacrice of character plausibility for storylines or issues might all be addressed. Finally, given televisions propensity for repetition, perhaps we do need to seek out and praise innovation. Certainly, the way in which a drama tries to t a genre but also to present itself as interestingly different from its competitors should be brought into the analysis, and this criterion is as readily applicable to the soaps and series that form the basis of television
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drama as to the one-off play or lm, although again the different categories of drama would need to be taken into account. There are a number of points to be made about this approach. First, it may seem that these categories are drawn entirely from traditional modes of analysis associated with lm studies (and ultimately, in a British context, English literature). That is obviously partly true. Nevertheless, the kind of analytic description generated by such accounts would also serve to enable us to talk better about what television audiences (on limited evidence) seem to value. Frith, drawing on Morrison (1986), describes television viewers as making judgements in terms of the technical (good acting, sets, camera work), the believable, the interesting, the spectacular, the satisfying terms that echo but dont exactly match the professional concern for originality, authenticity and innovation (Frith, 2000: 126); the approaches I have described here would be a way of incorporating and exploring these criteria. Much work on audiences has indeed underestimated the aesthetic valuejudgements being made in television viewing in favour of more macro accounts of television in its social context. In addition, research on audience preferences has tended to focus on how audiences use television in identity work, as a recent article exploring childrens television tastes puts it; thus, childrens expressions of their tastes and preferences are analysed as selfevidently social acts in relation to their preferred social identities (Davies et al., 2000). Although undoubtedly pertinent to the topic of that research, such conclusions about taste and identity do not necessarily help us to think about how television is best evaluated aesthetically. It could be argued, as Schroder does, that it would be better if criteria for evaluation were generated by audience research. While I would welcome such work, there are problems in relying solely on such an approach. Morrison commented on the difculty that audience members have in articulating why a programme is enjoyable or of good quality and, in reaching for words to describe what they value, they are of course themselves drawing on the contested terms of the high/popular culture debate. Part of our task as academics in this eld should be to help to articulate terms beyond this paradigm. It may also be that what is proposed here is deemed too formalist, not engaging early enough with the ethics or politics of aesthetic judgement (Mepham, 1990; Street, 2000). I am not arguing for the establishment of xed norms against which all drama is tested but for a way of providing a basis for evaluative discussion. Textual analysis that systematically incorporated the kind of areas I have indicated above could provide such a broad description, recognizable as the terrain on which the programme(s) was working. There are then further sets of judgements involved in the process of evaluation relating to what counts as innovation or plausibility, what counts as good acting, writing or visual organization. What is most important here is to be transparent in the questions being asked of a programme
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or a category of programmes. My questions relate to Schroders criteria for the rather different task of assessing audience readings. In this case, I would ask of the different elements of the text: are they used appropriately for the category, are they used expressively in terms of meaning, are they used pleasurably in terms of form? The answer would not be denitive and yes would not be the only correct answer! Textual work used in this way is not simply a question of interpretation, a matter for the individual reader, but a way of entering into policy debates about why television matters in a culture. Such accounts could also make specic links with work on production and with audiences while retaining its attention to aesthetic detail as a contribution to a debate about making qualitative judgements. Working on an analytic description and engaging in a subsequent systematic discussion about evaluation would allow us to judge the claims to high quality made on behalf of series such as The West Wing or The Sopranos or to articulate why something as quirky and problematic in terms of its representation of its working-class characters as The Royle Family is nevertheless a breakthrough in terms of situation comedy. It is worth noting that such work does already exist in television studies, so this is not an entirely theoretical proposal. Examples of such use of textual detail in an evaluative context can be found, for instance, in Gripsruds work on Dynasty, Brunsdons on British television crime ction (1998) and Jacobs quoted above on hospital drama. One small example illustrates what this kind of textual work can bring to the study of television. In an Open University book on representation (which is produced in part for a course, Culture, Media, Identities) Christine Gledhill provides a comprehensive and considered section on soap opera. Tucked away in an illustrative box in the Fiction as entertainment section is an analysis of an episode of EastEnders. Gledhill comments on the strong elements of farce being drawn on in the episode and then comments:
Suddenly, the farcical tone shifts, as a series of tight reverse-shots focus an exchange of intense looks between the two brothers, for a moment lifting the story into a different register altogether. . . . Everything else that has been going on in this episode has been comically predictable. . . . But for this moment we encounter the unexpected as camera and dialogue switch. . . . (Gledhill, 1997: 342)
In some ways, Gledhill here has also done something unexpected in television studies by commenting precisely on a single shot set-up in a soap and making us feel the nature of the pleasure generated by this shift in tone. As with Jacobs though, the evaluation involved in this account is understated. A further outcome of shifting the emphasis somewhat in our work on television drama is that it would be possible to enter more fully into debates about quality that are conducted outside the academy. Gripsrud has given an interesting account of media interest in his research into Dynasty. Like
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him, I have found that being a soap opera expert leads to calls from journalists when things happen in the world of television soaps. I have found it difcult to develop an approach that is not framed by the high culture/low culture binary and I am liable therefore to nd myself being defensive of soaps and their viewers. The more nuanced approach developed here could be properly critical and demanding of individual programmes without condemning the genre.
Teach Yourself critical evaluation as a pedagogic issue More important, though, is generating work on evaluation with our own students. The interest in media studies in higher education and elsewhere is an opportunity to encourage a critical audience that might demand quality television in whatever its forms. So I turn nally to the question of how television drama is taught in media and cultural studies. In this, I am again in line with Brunsdon, whose concerns in her paper Problems with Quality3 she described as mainly pedagogic (1997: 109). It seems particularly important to do such work with our students since consumer choice is driving programme production in public service television as well as in more frankly commercial systems. One of the signs of the expansion of media studies in education is the current emphasis that publishers put on textbooks and the explosion of such books aimed at post-16 education, including the rst year of an undergraduate degree. A study of some of these indicates how the parameters of teaching television drama are being laid down. An illuminating contrast is provided by a comparison of three Teach Yourself books, all from the same publisher and in a series that addresses the self-driven learner as well as the formal student. I have chosen to look at these books because they allow for some direct comparison across their different topics Film Studies, Media Studies and Cultural Studies. It is of course signicant, in terms of the cultural context I discussed earlier, that there is no Teach Yourself Television Studies. The rst point to note is the different address to potential readers indicated by the blurb on the back cover. Teach Yourself Media Studies seems to be the most rmly tied to the student in education. It provides a clear introduction for those embarking on a course of study and then, second, for those who wish to have an overview of current debates about the media. The wide teaching experience of the authors is stressed and they are described as currently producing educational material in a variety of media. With a rather different nuance, Teach Yourself Cultural Studies points to the academic position of the author, Will Brooker (currently researching and teaching at the University of Wales), but again the value of the book in formal education is stressed in that it is suitable for both
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beginners and rst-level students. By contrast, the promotion on the Film Studies book gives more detail of the academic status of author Warren Buckland (Lecturer in Screen Studies at Liverpool John Moores University) and goes further by listing his areas of research as lm theory, criticism and contemporary Hollywood cinema. The back cover of this title does not mention students or formal education. Instead it offers an introduction to the exciting world of lm and suggests a rather different outcome for the reader than passing an introductory course: whatever your interest in lm, this book will provide the necessary information and critical skills to turn you into a well-informed lm critic. Once again we have an example of the rather different critical culture in which Film Studies is positioned. It is not perhaps surprising but it is illuminating to reect on the very different positions that the three books take in terms of how they treat textual analysis and aesthetic evaluation. Teach Yourself Cultural Studies in fact eschews any such approach. The introduction describes cultural studies as being concerned with the living detail of the everyday, the popular and sometimes the underside of culture, the kind of culture which is always uid and vibrant (Brooker, 1998: 1). It warns its readers that this means engaging with material that might be deemed unworthy of academic account but reminds them that judgments of taste and quality . . . [are] not xed standards but temporary constructs of a particular period (1998: 2). It then goes on to organize its interesting and lively account around a number of key gures in the development of cultural studies so that concepts of the popular, taste or quality are dealt with insofar as they relate to the work of, for instance, Bourdieu or Fiske. Teach Yourself Film Studies, on the other hand, while sharing an interest in the popular, argues that the starting point for studying a lm is to analyse the way it has been constructed (Buckland, 1998: 1) and refers quite openly to drawing on lm aesthetics (1998: 2) for this task. So the rst chapter outlines ways of thinking about mise-en-scne, mise-en-shot, sound and editing before going on to chapters on narrative, authorship and genre. This work is woven into a historical context but is clearly also meant to provide the reader with the methods of formal lm analysis, and a nal chapter on lm reviewing provides an interesting way of thinking about what is at stake in such evaluation. Teach Yourself Media Studies also includes an account of mise-en-scne, lighting and editing, but in a different context. This material is included in a chapter on narrative which takes its place after chapters on institutions, ideology and media and language (semiotics) and before a chapter on representation and reality. It is very much concerned with norms; in the section on mise-en-scne we are told that audiences expect the place they see to bear a resemblance to real life (Downes and Miller, 1998: 55) and a similar emphasis is placed on clarity in discussing editing: the purpose of editing is to assemble individual shots in a sequence which audiences can
39
read as a coherent narrative (Downes and Miller, 1998: 61). There is also the assumption that the student will be interested in the practicalities of how to produce their own media work; hence Chapter 8, which gives detailed practical accounts of television production case studies, and Chapter 9, which suggests practical projects and tips for how to carry them out television is a close-up medium (1998: 130). These are only three examples from a single series and clearly the individual authors have made decisions about organization and inclusion that appear differently in other textbooks. Media studies textbooks in particular might not always include such a heavy concern with practical work. Nevertheless, I think we can see some important emphases in this example, particularly in relation to how questions of analysis are treated. In media studies, in particular, we can note: how television is one example of the media to be studied which also includes photography, advertisements, magazines, newspapers and sometimes popular lms; that the tools of textual analysis are largely contained in a broader unit on narrative; that semiotics and representation are at least as important for textual work as methods of analysing an image in terms of visual organization4 and that judgement is framed in terms of either professional norms or ideological judgements about representation. I would suggest that these kinds of emphases can be found in more specialist or sophisticated accounts. In particular, the difference between making judgements on the basis of representation (in terms of diversity, range, stereotyping) and aesthetics is marked. It could be argued that one of the achievements of media studies has been to raise awareness of how gender and ethnicity are deployed in representation; students arriving to study at undergraduate level are often familiar with the topic, if not with its complexity. But aesthetics is a different matter. If I look critically at Women and Soap Opera (Geraghty, 1991) in this context, I am conscious of my own unease about making (or not making) evaluative judgements about particular soaps that were almost literally unexpressible in the context of feminist writing at that time. Thus, I do discuss aesthetics and the formal pleasures of soaps in Chapter 2 but the grounds for my judgements elsewhere are largely to do with feminist politics and media representation. Crossroads, for instance, is criticized in terms of representation and the detrimental changes when in the storyline a man took over the running of the motel. To have criticized the programme on aesthetic grounds, though, would have been to concede too much to those who felt that the study of such a programme could only be a ludicrous exercise. Now, though, when the role of soaps on television and in academic debate has changed, the decision to withhold judgement looks much more problematic. I am suggesting therefore that the teaching of media studies and television studies in particular would benet from paying more attention to the visual
40
and performative aspects of drama than now seems to be the case, at least in the teaching material currently being produced. This could open up work on television drama which has, in terms of textual accounts, come to be dominated by questions of narrative, representation and, in certain cases, a particular account of realism. One of the tasks of narrative analysis is to make a very common, everyday process strange, and an emphasis on expression as well as meaning, on agency as well as representation, might provide different ways of looking at familiar material. Such work would equip students to enter into aesthetic debates about evaluation (rather than just dismissing them as elitist) and experience them as part of a process that helps to establish the norms against which new work is judged.
Television and canonical work In addition, television studies would, I think, benet from academics being more explicit about the evaluative judgements that we inevitably make. An example of problems with this can be seen in the comparison of another (this time rather different) set of recent textbooks Key Film Texts (Roberts and Wallis, 2002) and The Television Genre Book (Creeber, 2001). The former is specically a canonical exercise (to be read in conjunction with another book that looks at different concepts and approaches to lm study). Key Film Texts offers an analysis of 50 lms that the authors deem to be both important and good, and in the Introduction the authors confronts the question of choice:
Someone decides which is best. What are the criteria? What values do we use to decide? Who gets to make the decisions. The reader is entitled to ask how we chose the lms for this book. We have chosen lms that everyone who claims to know anything about the history and the theory of cinema will be expected to know . . . even people who oppose the canon will expect you to have the basic lm knowledge that includes these lms. It is a grounding, a common pool of references . . . Secondly, it is important to know the lms that have been inuential [for] contemporary lm-makers . . . (Roberts and Wallis, 2002: 2; emphasis in original)
This may not be entirely satisfactory but it does at least put the question of choice and judgement up front. By contrast, The Television Genre Book presents its choices rather differently. In part, this is because it is doing different work, aiming to be an introduction to the study of television, in particular to the study of genre (Creeber, 2001: vii). The preface does indicate that the choice of genres is open to debate and interpretation (2001: vii) and gives a rationale for its decisions about how to treat soap operas or reality TV, for instance; Neale and Turner reinforce this in the introduction with useful accounts of the complexity of the term as applied
41
to television. But the decisions about why specic programmes, particularly those highlighted in the gray boxes, were chosen for discussion are less clearly marked.5 But clearly choices have been made and if the book is successful it could well be a factor in establishing a television studies canon. In the section on television drama, these choices seem to have been made for a variety of reasons, including unusual longevity (Alias Smith and Jones), the rst of a type (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), rule breaking (Hill Street Blues) or status as a classic (Cathy Come Home). Sometimes aesthetic qualities are a specic issue, as in Jason Jacobs description of the stylish pace and uidity of ERs camerawork (2001: 24) or John Corners comment on the sheer cumulative force of The Day Afters combination of melodrama and social exploration (2001: 34). In the more extended sections, indeed, editor Glen Creeber goes further in terms of evaluation and suggests that what he calls the mini-series might be the exemplary television form, being less formulaic than the never-ending serial and citing examples such as The Singing Detective and Twin Peaks, which have given the genre a reputation for producing innovative, challenging and hugely popular drama (2001: 36). But, although referred to in these various ways, the notion of what being good television drama might mean in terms of particular genres or particular programmes is largely unexplicated and what could have been a useful discussion is rather lost.
Conclusion That Sunday evening, my viewing problems were caused by scheduling decisions that had deemed all three programmes to be quality drama and screened them against each other. This is still standard practice, as was evidenced in the announcement of the autumn 2002 schedules when ITV drew ridicule from many practitioners for urging the BBC to reschedule its classic serial, Daniel Deronda, so that it did not clash with ITVs new version of Dr Zhivago. I solved my viewing problems by watching one programme, recording another and waiting for the third to be repeated and, for many, this kind of technological solution renders the kind of questions I have been asking redundant. In a multi-channel environment, quality drama becomes a product targeted at a niche audience and judgement is a matter of taste and social context. To accept this is to miss, as I have argued, an important challenge both as teachers and viewers. Our students are future makers and viewers of television who are making decisions all the time about what kind of programmes they want to watch and make. I am not suggesting that aesthetic or quality norms should be imposed without discussion of their provenance but that textual work provides the possibility of engagement with such issues through an approach that emphasizes analytic description
42
and evaluative discussion across a range of programmes.6 Work on the processes of evaluation in different disciplines has addressed three areas: a concern with particular texts and how they might be described and judged; a concern with the cultural context in which that judgement takes place; and a concern with how audiences are created for whom evaluation is an issue. Cultural studies has tended to privilege the second of these areas in its research and its teaching. I am suggesting that by attending more closely to the rst area we might also help to create the third, critical television audiences.
Notes
The original version of this article was written for a European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop through the Standing Committee for Social Sciences on The Changing Meanings of Popular Culture for Public Broadcasting, Amsterdam, 1315 June, 2002. I am very grateful for that support and particularly thank all the participants, Liesbet Van Zoonen who organized the workshop and the Amsterdam School of Communications Research which hosted it. This article is dedicated to the memory of my father, who died on 13 September 2002. 1 There is a further problem with what Nelson proposes because it would seem to me to involve audience research to test out whether a drama had been effective in these terms. In that sense, it might involve the kind of reception perspective that Schroder proposes. For an account of Our Friends in the North in the context of contemporary British cinema, see Paul Marris (2001). 2 Although I came to the term by a different route, there are connections here with Barkers use of a similar approach, using the same term (Barker with Austin, 2000: 58), in his work on lm theory and popular cinema. 3 Brunsdons paper was originally written as a contribution to the debate about quality generated by the 1988 government discussion document on Broadcasting in the 90s: competition, choice and quality (HMSO Cmd. 517). 4 Some textbooks, however, focus only on the former. See, for instance, the popular and useful Media Studies: A Reader, edited by P. Marris and S. Thornham, in which the Text section is sub-headed codes and structure, or Tools for Cultural Studies, edited by Tony Thwaites et al., with its emphasis on signs and systems. 5 Creeber cites The Cinema Book (Cook, 1985) as a model, but, of course, the examples that book was built around had been subject to a pre-existing process of selection (in the days before video) because they were based on the BFIs lm extract holdings.
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6 I have focused on drama here, but there is no reason why analytic terms for evaluating other kinds of television could not be developed.
References
Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas: Television and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Routledge. Barker, M. with T. Austin (2000) From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis. London: Pluto Press. Brooker, W. (1998) Teach Yourself Cultural Studies. London: Hodder Headline. Brunsdon, C. (1997) Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes. London: Routledge. Brunsdon, C. (1998) Structure of Anxiety: Recent British Television Crime Fiction, Screen 39(3): 22343. Buckland, W. (1998) Teach Yourself Film Studies. London: Hodder Headline. Caldwell, J.T. (1995) Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Carroll, N. (2000) Introducing Film Evaluation, in C. Gledhill and L. Williams (eds) Reinventing Film Studies, pp. 26578. London: Arnold. Casey, B., N. Casey, B. Calvert, L. French and J. Lewis (2002) Television Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Caughie, J. (2000) Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, P. (1985) The Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute. Couldry, N. (2000) Inside Culture. London: Sage. Creeber, G., ed. (2001) The Television Genre Book. London: British Film Institute. Davies, H., D. Buckingham and P. Kelley (2000) In the Worst Possible Taste: Children, Television and Cultural Value, European Journal of Cultural Studies 3(1): 525. Downes, B. and S. Miller (1998) Teach Yourself Media Studies. London: Hodder Headline. Ellis, J. (1982) Visible Fictions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ellis, J. (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris. Frith, S. (2000) The Value of Television and the Future of Television Research, in J. Gripsrud (ed.) Sociology and Aesthetics, pp. 10930. Bergen: Norwegian Academic Press. Geraghty, C. (1991) Women and Soap Opera. Cambridge: Polity. Gledhill, C. (1997) Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera, in S. Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, pp. 33964. London: Sage.
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Gripsrud, J. (1995) The Dynasty Years: Hollywood, Television and Critical Media Studies. London: Routledge. Gripsrud, J. (1998) Television, Broadcasting, Flow: Key Metaphors in TV Theory, in C. Geraghty and D. Lusted (eds) The Television Studies Book, pp. 1732. London: Arnold. Hare, D. (2002) Why Fabulate?, Guardian, Saturday Review, 2 February, p. 3 (www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/ story/0,3605,643339,00.html). Hartley, J. (1999) Uses of Television. London: Routledge. Jacobs, J. (2001) Issues of Judgment and Value in Television Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies 4(4): 42747. Marris, P. (2001) Northern Realism: An Exhausted Tradition?, Cineaste XXVI(4): 4750. Marris, P. and S. Thornham, eds (1996) Media Studies: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mepham, J. (1990) The Ethics of Quality in Television, in G. Mulgan (ed.) The Question of Quality, pp. 5672. London: British Film Institute. Morrison, D. (1986) Invisible Citizens: British Public Opinion and the Future of Broadcasting. London: John Libbey. Mulgan, G. (1990) Televisions Holy Grail: Seven Types of Quality, in G. Mulgan (ed.) The Question of Quality, pp. 432. London: British Film Institute. Nelson, R. (1997) TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change. London: Macmillan. Pawling, C. and T. Perkins (1992) Popular Drama and Realism: The Case of Television, in A. Page (ed.) The Death of the Playwright? Modern British Drama and Literary Theory. London: Macmillan. Roberts, G. and H. Wallis (2002) Key Film Texts. London: Arnold. Schroder, K.C. (1992) Cultural Quality: Search for a Phantom?, in M. Skovmand and K. Schroder (eds) Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media, pp. 199219. London: Routledge. Street, J. (2000) Aesthetics, Policy and the Politics of Popular Culture, European Journal of Cultural Studies 3(1): 2743. Thwaites, T., L. Davis and W. Mules (1994) Tools for Cultural Studies. Melbourne: Macmillan. Turner, G. (2001) Television and Cultural Studies: Unnished Business, International Journal of Cultural Studies 4(4): 37184. Williams, R. (1989) Drama in a Dramatised Society, in Raymond Williams on Television (edited by Alan OConnor), pp. 313. London: Routledge.
CHRISTINE GERAGHTY is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Women and Soap Opera (Polity, 1991) and British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and
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the New Look (Routledge, 2000). She co-edited The Television Studies Book (Arnold, 1998) with David Lusted and has written extensively on lm and television. She is currently working on a monograph on My Beautiful Laundrette for I.B. Tauris. Address: Department of Theatre, Film and TV Studies, University of Glasgow, Gilmorehill Centre, 9 University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. [email: c.geraghty@tfts.arts.gla.ac.uk]

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Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama

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INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies

Aesthetics and quality in popular television drama

evaluation media education teaching television drama television studies quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 6(1)

Geraghty Aesthetics and quality

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