Psychoanalysts used to refer to the time reserved for each patient as her “hour.” In a similar vein, TV drama is said to occupy an hour. Although both have by now shrunk to about 45 minutes of actual time, the idea of selling yourself or your product by the hour remains common to both. The idea of scheduling by the hour is not the only thing television and psychotherapy have in common. Both are, so to speak, serialized. They unfold over time with gaps in between each session. They are intimate and lend themselves to a two-person dialogue. For all these reasons, television is a better medium than film for portraying the “reality” of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy as psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard and others have noted. In his book on The Sopranos, Gabbard notes that this serialized drama did more than a whole history of films to capture the actual “feel” of a long-term therapy and to portray the analyst as a reasonable if imperfect individual. In an article on Slate, Gabbard waxes even more enthusiastic about the first season of HBO’s In Treatment :

A videotape of an actual therapy session, replete with silence, evasion, and idiosyncratic references to people and places, would bore the average television viewer in approximately 18 seconds. Given that, it’s all the more surprising that . . . In Treatment manages to be both riveting and the most convincing psychotherapy seen on television yet.

I am not saying—although it is true—that television content is overwhelmingly psychotherapeutic. I am not here discussing Dr. Phil’s one hour miracle solutions nor even the kind of pseudo-therapy sought out on medical shows like Grey’s Anatomy (where there is one shrink for all the doctors on the show) or its spinoff Private Practice (where the season cliffhanger left the pregnant therapist under a knife wielded by a delusional patient). I am not referring to that moment on The L Word when two women sought out couples therapy and after listening to them for ten minutes, the shrink said “ You two have absolutely nothing in common” and dismissed them. (One wishes it were that easy in real life.) What is remarkable about In Treatment is that it actually attempts to portray the real thing: long term psychoanalytic therapy—on American “not television.” As a literary genre the memoir of a psychoanalysis has a long history whether told from the patient’s viewpoint or the analyst’s or both. Yet this kind of material has never been thought suitable for entertainment media. You could say that such a resolutely inward focus does not capture the melodramatic tone of much serialized TV. Yet we know that cutting back and forth between two people talking is the essence of television. A camera technique that focuses on the smallest eye movements, that gazes into the soul of one person talking to another has long characterized the shot/answer shot of daytime soap opera, not to mention becoming a staple shot sequence for many primetime melodramatic serials. In Treatment takes the minimalism of the shot/reverse shot to what can be a mesmerizing Zen-like extreme in the therapy sessions.

So In Treatment is and is not “real TV.” It seems to be a meditation on the reaction shot at which star Gabriel Byrne is said to be a master. Again, shots of someone listening are stock footage on TV (especially on the local news). But shots of someone listening yet not reacting are the essence of cinema. This gaze is also the essence of psychotherapy, the “sitting up” kind. Paul doesn’t use the couch because that would disrupt the gaze. The show uses the most subtle and refined acting technique. And yet—letting the audience know more than the other character in the scene without using words is another staple of melodramatic television acting.

As an earlier Flow article pointed out, HBO’s In Treatment follows the Israeli version in offering “modular scheduling.” You can follow all five patients or only one of them. In the first season, the five “storylines” overlapped only when Alex and Laura had an affair. This kind of scheduling offers numerous “options” to the viewer, but in some ways the psychotherapy storylines were already modular on The Sopranos in the sense that Tony’s therapy with Dr. Melfi became the focus of the show for some viewers whereas his gangster or family life were the focus for others. After the first season, there was not much of an attempt to integrate Dr. Melfi into the other threads, even the shooting style of her scenes was sparser than the cinematic mise-en-scène of the mini-mansion or the Bada Bing. You didn’t have to like violent gangster narratives to watch The Sopranos, even psychoanalysts could watch it and comment, as they did on Slate. For these viewers the validity and depth of the therapy was the raison d’être for the whole show. This modularity is of course much more pronounced on In Treatment even if the second season seems to be moving the show away from the purity of the therapy per se. Not only that, but the second season is trying to give the show an internet afterlife by providing the viewers with extra-diegetic documents and information. There was a strange hour-long documentary which told us why therapy is good for us by interviewing some therapists and then their patients. More fascinating in terms of breaking the diegesis are the court papers and depositions excerpted on the website and emailed to fans.

For me the most fascinating day is Friday (Gina). Yes, Dr. Melfi taught us that therapists see their own therapist. But somehow the visits with Peter Bogdanovich were a bit too laughable. Paul’s sessions with Gina, on the hand, are searing. If you never fetishized acting or thought it was just the Kuleshov effect, Dianne Wiest will slap you into shape. In terms of getting in touch with unconscious impulses, In Treatment is the next best thing to psychoanalysis itself.

Image Credits:
1. HBO’s In Treatment
2. Gabriel Byrne: Master of the Reaction Shot
3. Dianne Wiest as Gina
4. Front Page Image

Please feel free to comment.

I would like to explore the applicability of the concept of diegesis to television drama through some speculations about the recent Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice crossover on ABC in February, 2009.

A difficult to pronounce word, Greek to some, the term diegesis became standardized in film studies through its usage in the Bordwell and Thompson Film Art textbook. Non-diegetic sound is sound whose source is outside the realm of the narrative. Diegesis , then, refers to whatever is inside the world of the narrative. I can recall a much earlier usage of the term by Peter Wollen. Writing about Godard, Wollen wanted to capture that which was expressly NOT classical Hollywood narrative and he used the term “multiple diegesis” to refer to the breaks from narrative realism in a film like Weekend. I borrowed Wollen’s term to describe dream sequences in musicals and also on TV. The word here evokes a particular strain of modernism, an attempt to dis-unify the smooth realism of the text. (This also at a time when references to Brecht and distanciation were everywhere).

I always thought we could learn a lot about television by thinking it through in terms of diegesis. The whole concept of flow– which is so definitional of TV that this journal takes it name from it– was used by Raymond Williams to capture a sense of the lack of the diegetic in television’s sequencing. And yet we’ve always gone on the assumption that there is a strong diegetic unity to a particular television series, as in the term “Buffyverse.” So we have come to regard television as a world in which the diegesis is porous but present. Intertextuality is the norm. And therefore the word “crossover” is somewhat redundant. Crossing over is a norm of American television, where an entire genre—the talk show—exists for the promotion of other forms of entertainment.

Spinning off is the process by which a popular show gives birth to a newbie which may or may not resemble the parent. In the case of Private Practice, there is a strong family resemblance in content but not in tone. Both shows have the same author—Shonda Rhimes—yet the melodramatic excess that created pathos in the original show turns toward the ludicrous in the spinoff. As in all melodrama, the premise is likely to be ridiculous, in this case the idea that “conflict of interest” has no meaning. This is where the concept of diegesis comes in. Grey’s Anatomy—at least for its numerous fans—is able to counter its astonishing lack of realism through the strength of its fictional enclosure. The incestuous and multiple liasons among cast members can be sustained only through a suspension of disbelief, a willingness to take the ridiculously jumbled liaisons at a metaphoric level. This requires an attitude common to the acceptance of much television (melodrama), an “I know it’s silly but I’m moved nevertheless.” As a Grey’s fan, I often find myself drawn into the diegesis to the point where I become engulfed in its reality. I was even willing—with a healthy dose of irony—to accept the Denny’s- return –as- a -ghost storyline—for the reason that I liked the intensity that is provided for the two lovers to be together again. (How more or less ‘realist’ shows get us to accept the supernatural is another interesting topic.) Blogged opinions about Denny were mixed, but those who were willing to go with it seemed to agree with me that extra-diegetic reasons figured in their acceptance i.e. an opportunity to see Katherine Heigl display her movie-star luminosity.

Yet the bloggers also agree that Private Practice is not worthy of the talents of the Grey’s star whose move to LA spun it off. What succeeds as melodrama in the parent show comes across as a kind of bad taste in the mouth in the spinoff. The characters are equally intertwined but just not likeable. Bloggers frequently express the wish that Private Practice would collapse and allow Kate Walsh to return to the parent show. So the crossover was supposed to grant this wish, and in the process serve as a ratings stunt, which apparently it succeeded in doing.

I would like to focus on the central episode of the crossover—the Feb. 12. 2009 episode of Grey’s Anatomy—as the most compelling instance of the diegetic clash occurring as Practice invades the parent show. For me the most fascinating element—other than the worm and cyst brain surgery—was the attempt to create a backstory involving the med school classmate-chums that span both shows: Addison, Derek, Naomi, Sam and Addison’s brother Archer, thus creating multiple groups of med school classmates ranging from the original cast of Grey’s to the current group of interns featured in a scavenger hunt on the crossover, not to mention the backstory involving the senior Dr. Grey and the Chief in earlier years. This makes the world of the hospital into a rich, multi-generational, deeply and incestuously interwoven diegesis that transcends any particular part of the whole. The hospital as diegesis functions similarly in many of the outstanding medical dramas of the past, from St. Elsewhere to ER. Television’s technique of continually adding backstory serves well in this type of inter-diegetic creation. In this episode there is a faux nostalgia about a past that is created almost entirely for the purpose of the crossover. The fact that Naomi is currently seeing Archer on Private Practice and that her ex-husband Sam shows up on the episode gives a modicum of believability to the idea that the whole group once attended Derek and Addison’s wedding for which Derek wrote an anatomically versed song. Indeed the central scene of the crossover episode occurs when the group adjourns to a bar after the surgery and nostalgically mines said tune. The diegesis thus created pulls the audience into a reunion of a past we’ve never witnessed but one that crosses over both shows, thus spanning the individual narrative world of each.

I am not going to say whether the crossover was aesthetically successful or not. I just wanted to explore the complexity that a diegesis can achieve through perfectly normal TV narrative technique. It does not require anything special to achieve thickness and richness within the world of TV series narrative.

Image Credits:
1. Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice
2. Another variation on the crossover: Grey’s stars on Oprah
3. Fansite’s celebratory announcement of crossover

Please feel free to comment.

Thirty years ago, I wrote about a television program that was of deep significance to me personally and professionally. When I moved to Evansville, Indiana to take my first job as an assistant professor, I bought a bed and a 19-inch then state -of -the -art Sony TV. I got through three years stranded alone in the hinterlands by forcing myself to get up everyday and turn the TV on (of course I watched it from the bed). Although the Today show had been around for a long time, I was attracted to a new kind of “breakfast TV” epitomized by the recent debut of Good Morning, America on ABC. With its prefabricated familial setting and intimate mode of address, it was pure ideology. I doubt that I would’ve survived without it. Not only that but it was the inspiration for my first work on television theory in which I deconstructed the show’s spectator positioning and “live” mode of address –none of which mitigated the soothing effect this show and other forms of familial television had on my orphaned psyche.

Thirty years later, I find myself watching GMA again. No longer alone, no longer stranded, I am still a sucker for the ersatz family that allows me to begin my day. During those thirty years, American television exploded with all variety of pseudo-familial experiences. I wrote about some of those too but I would have to say that my favorite has been the ensemble casts of network and cable weekly dramas. During a recent discussion with my best friend Moya Luckett, I started raving about the poor quality of secondary-character casting in movies today (the topic was 27 Dresses) and I realized that my gold standard was TV shows like Ugly Betty or Gilmore Girls in which the teeniest bit player shone like a star. These shows and American television in general make it hard for our real families to compete.

Although breakfast television initiated a smarmy kind of familiarity, it was not uniformly effective over the years. I was willing to settle for Katie and Matt, but Meredith was simply unbearable. So I was drawn back to the original breast (as Melanie Klein might say). Diane Sawyer who I’d always thought of as a simpering beauty queen had taken the helm and assembled around her a rather non-traditional nuclear family. No patriarch to be found, Diane was teamed with the sisterly Robin Roberts, Snow White to an African-American Rose Red. Their two sons were the young and handsome Chris Cuomo and Sam Champion. Chris is a good Italian son to be sure and from a good Italian family. He even interviewed his own mom on the show and he knows how to submit to feminine authority. The fourth in this ensemble is weatherman Sam, a kind of Liberace imitator whose masculinity is always in question (at least at our house). This was the matriarchal family par excellence, and I started to love waking up again. Around our house, the day begins with the following question: what hideous outfit is Diane wearing today and does Robin match her? We feel that Diane’s terrible wardrobe is her saving grace, keeping her one step removed from total perfection. We imagine that she picks her clothes out herself because we can’t envision a stylist with such bad taste (we know about stylists—like Rachel Zoe– from all the Bravo reality shows we watch).

The current GMA family is either a monumental publicity stunt or the best melodramatic serialized narrative ever. The main serialized plot thread being of course Robin’s bout with breast cancer, a storyline at first contained within the GMA diegesis but that later spread to other TV shows and to the cover of People Magazine. Robin decided to come out about her illness on the show and after that, it became part of the hermeneutic code of the show. We tuned in every day at 7 to see if Robin was there. If she wasn’t, we knew she must be having chemo and we worried about her. When she showed us how she had to have her head shaved when her hair fell out, we were full of sympathy. Later, we marveled at her courage when she removed her wig to reveal the cute short cut she now sports. But what impressed us the most was the love and camaraderie demonstrated by her GMA family in general and by Diane in particular. We had no doubt they really loved each other, because we saw Diane coming to her chemo bearing gifts. When it was all over, we were very relieved and we kept watching because we were now hooked on the early morning good cheer of whatever the fab four did together.

Recently they did a feature in which each of the foursome took a turn in the “hot seat” and were asked what were presumed to be scary and intimate questions that members of the audience sent in. It turned out to be things like why did Robin have a different necklace every day? (her sister makes them.) At our house, we had other questions that weren’t asked. We wanted to know why Robin came out as a breast cancer survivor but not as a lesbian? We figured with the butch manner, the sports background and no signs of heterosexuality whatsoever, she must be one of us. We were surprised when nobody in the audience asked that question. Then we wanted to ask Sam if he was really a flaming queen or did he just seem that way to us? They did ask him if he was really chummy with Chris but we wanted to know if he had a crush on Chris.

We know the show must be phony, but we believe in it anyway. I willingly suspend my disbelief because it pleases me to have this mediated experience of a happy family. We make jokes about the show, but we tune in every day. At my house we get up early and wait for GMA to begin. Then we have coffee with Diane and Robin. If one of them is off that day, we watch TIVO’d shows instead. We know what works for us.

Image Credits:
1. The GMA Family
2. The Two Matriarchs : Robin and Diane
3. Completing the Family: Sam and Chris

Please feel free to comment.

I find it curious that reality TV has produced so many “stars” and by “star” I don’t mean the “hosts” of these shows. Reality TV is supposed to be about “real” people in unscripted situations whereas a star is supposed to be glamorous and charismatic and expected to say authored lines. At least folklore would have it that way. Those of us who follow star studies know better. We know that stars can be “ordinary Joe types” (says Richard Dyer) and that TV stars in particular are often loved for their “ordinariness.” This is in fact what Mary Desjardins and others have argued distinguishes TV stars from film stars. So just as we need to deconstruct a binary between “quality TV” and “reality TV,” we can also undo an opposition between “scripted” and “unscripted” and between “star” and “real person.” In fact I believe that undoing such commonly believed binaries is central to work on reality TV even if these binaries do much to explain reality TV’s low cultural status in the society as a whole.

It should not be surprising, then, to discover that the “quality” reality cable service Bravo should produce a line of signature reality shows that have generated a fascinating entourage of reality stars. I don’t doubt that these programs—Project Runway, Top Chef, Top Design, Shear Genius, Step it Up and Dance—in spite of individual and seasonal variations in excellence—can be seen to fit a definition of quality TV that is descriptive rather than evaluative. For example, the large ensemble casts that have emerged from these shows bear resemblance to those of quality dramas like The Sopranos or Grey’s Anatomy. In fact, I would argue the pleasure fans get from watching the contestants/personae interact with one another equals that of an ensemble drama. Not always—but then not all dramatic casts “gel” either. Bravo’s identity as a gay-identified cable service helps. We have come to expect groups of punkish girls and bitchy queen boys to spit invective at each other in a delightfully dishy way. Yet there are also friendships and alliances that move us. The pleasure of the ensemble is common to both reality and quality TV and it can be found even in trashy reality shows like Big Brother. The Big Brother contestants are trapped in that house and even if we hate all of them, their confinement and its subsequent machinations can prove irresistible.

Yet occasionally a star in the old-fashioned sense of the term will emerge from a reality show cast. This is more likely to happen in the cinema-vérité, fly-on-the-wall type of series than on the game-structured ones, although not always (look at Christian Siriano from the fourth season of Project Runway). Again I must turn to Bravo for my examples of stars that emerge from reality shows. Here I would have to cite Jeff from Flipping Out and Bethenny from The Real Housewives of New York, two shows that gave me more pleasure than any Maysles Brothers documentary including Grey Gardens (well, maybe not the musical version). Now Jeff was the star of his own obsessive-compulsive universe from the minute his collagen-stung lips uttered their first demanding words on TV. In what is possibly the strongest ensemble cast ever to emerge from a reality show (surely Jeff’s maid Zoila is at least equal to Will and Grace’s Rosario as an Hispanic character who crosses the line of taste in her comic persona), Jeff stood out.

You may wonder why I chose Bethenny from the stellar cast of Housewives. Actually, I think the stars of season one were the joined- at -the -hip married couple of Alex and Simon. No sitcom episode could outdo the “girl’s night out” party to which Alex brought her codependent spouse nor the reunion episode in which the husband pretended to be shocked that so many audience members asked if he was gay. But I choose Bethenny because halfway through the series I remembered that she had in fact been spun off another reality show—the Martha Stewart version of The Apprentice that apparently no one but me watched. This new phenomenon of spinning off reality stars furthers the links to scripted TV, and follows a familiar pattern for TV personality creation. We will see it again in my final example of Tabatha. Bethenny had that high-powered Food Network personality on her first show, but Housewives really let her neuroses shine through. The episode where she broke up with her fiancee and went around telling everyone contained what could only be called “acting.”

And now we have Tabatha’s Salon Takeover which recombines in the best TV style a show like Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with the signature Bravo reality show Shear Genius from which Tabatha emerged as the fan favorite. Tabatha was a female drag queen and a bitch reminiscent of nasty host Anne Robinson of Weakest Link fame and that’s how she got her own show. Now the ensemble cast for the second season of Shear Genius was far superior to Tabatha’s season but this didn’t prevent her becoming the star of a show in which her full iron-lady toughness and ability to curse rapidly for the camera came to the fore. Of the two episodes thus far, I especially liked the second one during which her hatred for the non-hairdresser schmuck who owned the salon nearly caused her takeover to fail. Of course nobody really bought it when everyone got nicey-nicey in the end, but then who buys the endings of most network dramas? She’s no Gordon Ramsay but then who is? And although I’d watch Hell’s Kitchen with its sleazy working class ambiance over either of Tabatha’s shows any day, that is not my point. I want to argue that the reality/fiction binary is a false opposition at almost every level—including that of star production. But it has a political/economic purpose: it enables certain false distinctions of value to continue to be made.

Image Credits:

1. Bethenny of The Real Housewives of New York City
2. Jeff of Flipping Out
3. Tabatha of Tabatha’s Salon Takeover
4. Front Page Image

Please feel free to comment.

In the new episodes of How Do I Look? (which is not my favorite fashion makeover show but which I use as reality show “filler” when nothing better is on), I have noted a trend that seems to exacerbate the therapeutic thrust of reality TV noted long ago by Mimi White and others. That is to say that while makeover shows have long promised to transform the victim’s psyche, the idea has usually been that the change in wardrobe will precipitate life changes. Now however, we actually seem to be diagnosing women (they are always women) with what I can only call “fashion psychosis.” The wardrobes themselves have taken on the pathology and we can no longer distinguish between craziness inside and outside of the closet. I say “closet” quite literally because in these newer makeover shows the idea is for friends, family and show hosts to penetrate the woman’s closet which is assumed to be the site of pathology. It’s not just that she has bad taste, but rather that her bad taste is now an illness in itself (which needs to be diagnosed and cured on the show). Move over Dr. Phil because there is a new variety of TV therapist—the wardrobe psychoanalyst.

In this regard How Do I Look? seems to be on the cutting edge—not of fashion but of makeover show trendiness. Watch out What Not to Wear! While Stacy and Clinton are still coercing relatively sane women to throw out their old clothes, Finola Hughes is moving into new territory as a fashion therapist. This therapeutic thrust was predicted when the British hosts of What Not To Wear started putting women—literally- on the couch and analyzing their life problems. But then the new wardrobe would provide a magical solution to those problems. Nor is what Finola is doing the same as the kind of counseling given on shows like Extreme Makeover in which the therapy is supportive of the changes wrought by plastic surgery. I can’t claim to have watched every makeover show on TV (although I’m kind of stunned by how many I have watched), but in two recent episodes of How Do I Look?, Finola has taken on decidedly uncooperative victims whose fashion syndromes are so extreme you could look them up in the DSM under diagnoses like “jacket attachment maladjustment.”

After I wrote the above, I looked up the show on the internet to find the episode titles I was going to write about. Now ordinarily my reality TV life is solitary. I don’t read all about it or blog or surf. I just view—and occasionally write. To my surprise, my focus episode, “How Do I Look: De-Plum Your Wardrobe”, has become a cause célèbre since it was first broadcast on June 19, 2008. Compared to another recent episode I will mention which had no comments on the blog—about a grown woman who dressed in fairy costumes—there were 173 comments on the show’s blog for the “Plum” episode. Moreover, the internet is abuzz with commentary all of which made me wonder why I was writing this column. In just a few weeks, my idea had already become passé. Posted June 29, 2008 on a Yahoo music blog, a column by Lyndsey Parker had already critiqued the program’s treatment of Plum, something virtually none of the 173 bloggers had dared to do. In fact the following (from mystyle) is typical of the blog responses:

Unfortunately, Plum is probably Axis II, meaning she has some serious mental illness. To break off a 20 year friendship because your friend confronted you on a dated look is classic Borderline Personality Disorder. She did not have the ego strength to handle criticism, even done with love. Basically, at bottom what I saw was some deep self-loathing. And okay, she didn’t like the clothes, but her comments, ‘Let’s go to the bar.’, I mean c’mon. My diagnosis: Boderline [sic] Personality Disorder with possible substance abuse or dependence.

In other words, both the show and the blog responders believed that host Finola Hughes’ intentions were totally honorable and that Plum was immature at best and psychotic at worst to have challenged the show’s premises. This was in fact made clear at the beginning of the episode where Finola appeared to deliver a disclaimer to the effect that anybody who dared to defy her positive, helping gestures was anti-social. Ms. Parker on the contrary, writing from the point of view of music subcultures, argues “HOWEVER, I do believe any goth, punk, rocker, or general misfit watching the show–that is, anyone who’s dealt with ridicule and scorn for making “weird” fashion choices–probably could relate to Plum’s struggle.”1

Neither of these positions vis-à-vis Plum expresses the point I am wanting to make here, however. Although I agree that the makeover clothes chosen by her unbelievably suburban “accomplices” robbed her of her already well-developed style, I am not interested in Plum’s fashion sense or adolescent behavior patterns. I am interested in the way in which the show itself is attempting to define bad fashion sense as a social disorder. Now the Plum episode (view episode here) was fascinating for many other reasons not the least of which was the way it tried to regulate a reality show participant’s lack of compliance with the show’s premises. There is nothing more refreshingly subversive than reality TV gone out of control. But two other recent episodes which remained (barely) in Finola’s benign hands, raised similar issues for me. That is, what does it mean to be in fashion? Both the woman who dressed up in carefully self-wrought fairy-tale costumes and the former high school “it” girl with a totally refined aesthetic based on 80s and 90s thrift store clothing were, in a sense, more fashion-conscious than any of the “accomplices” including the professional stylists who were supposed to shop for them. Yet each was defined by the show as a “fashion psycho” and each woman had her resistance worn down so that by the end of the show, she was willing to accept Finola’s definition of her and agree that the watered-down mall-shopped versions of her look were indeed more fashionable than the original. And that her unwillingness to admit this previously had constituted a mental illness. And that the process the show put her through had cured her of said mental illness. That is my point.

Image Credits:

1. Plum, Fashion Psychopath
2. Finola helping woman pick out an outfit on How Do I Look
3. Host Finola Hughes
4. Front page Finola

Please feel free to comment.

1. http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/realityrocks/89826/how-do-i-look-plum-crazy

I write about quality TV, yet what I really love to watch is reality TV. My reality shows organize my existence; I could live without any one of them but I can’t live without massive doses of some of them. That’s why Bravo is my favorite channel—just when I begin to mourn the finish of Project Runway, Top Chef comes back on. And just when I thought that Flipping Out had to be the best non-competition reality show ever, they outdid themselves with The Real Housewives of New York. And yet–although I have never been one to use “vulgarity” as anything but a praise-word, I have to confess that there is one reality show I’m embarrassed to admit I love to watch—The Bachelor. ( I also love The Bachelorette, I’m telling you I’m indiscriminate). Not because it’s the most vulgar, quite the contrary, I’m proud to be a viewer of Hell’s Kitchen or Breaking Bonaducci—shows whose white trash bad taste make them almost fashionable. But The Bachelor is mainstream, well-produced, “tasteful” network programming, not the least bit avant-garde. Its contestants are buff, good-looking young men and women in not very mentally challenging occupations—all the boys are in some kind of sales and all the girls are event planners (an occupation whose existence I only know about from watching reality TV). Once they had a woman doctor on the show and she was totally humiliated because she wasn’t as buff or bland as the other girls—she actually believed the physician bachelor should want someone in his own profession instead of a personal fitness trainer. Well, they set her straight before the first date!

From The Bachelor, I have learned that “amazing” is an adjective that works for almost any noun one might need to use. I have learned that all those years I spent developing my vocabulary were a waste of time—I should’ve been cultivating the ability to attempt sporting activities but failing to be truly excellent at them. I should’ve learned to say “I think I’m falling in love with you” and how to graciously accept a rose. If I ever doubted the value of being average, The Bachelor has corrected this misconception.

So you see this is my problem—I find The Bachelor to be morally and socially reprehensible, but I can’t stop watching it. I just can’t seem to delete that season pass on my TIVO. Even though it makes me cringe, I am addicted to it.

I am now going to attempt to specify what this Bachelor spectatorship means. First, I want to say what I think it isn’t. It isn’t sado-masochism or the carnivalesque and it isn’t camp spectatorship either. All of these represent forms of pleasure/displeasure but none of them quite captures my own pleasure/displeasure in viewing The Bachelor. The carnivalesque takes pleasure in the grotesque as a way of undermining the social order, but The Bachelor gives new meaning to the term “bourgeois”. If it ever had a counter-hegemonic moment, it must’ve been on one of the seasons I managed not to watch. Sado-masochism shares with Bachelor spectatorship a delight in others’ pain, but watching Deanna have her heart broken doesn’t arouse me sexually. I couldn’t even muster a tear when, as they said on a recent Bachelorette, her previous bachelor “broke her heart and broke America’s heart too.” (An example of reality TV’s claim to speak for “America” as when contestants now say “America voted me off.”) Camp spectatorship comes the closest because it captures the identification/distancing dance involved. And writing about my experience of The Bachelor may sound campy but it really isn’t. Nowadays many reality shows express an intentional camp sensibility. Take for example a current show much influened by The Bachelor formula– Farmer Wants a Wife. Although you have a gaggle of city girls sitting around a farmhouse dissing each other and collectively dating the farmer, the show has none of The Bachelor’s romantic sincerity. Last week, for instance, the farmer eliminated one of the girls by having her cup of moonshine not runneth over. I don’t believe she “had her heart broken.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Bachelor plays it absolutely straight and I’m not even talking about its rampant heterosexism. In a narrative epoch where irony abounds nearly everywhere, The Bachelor is unable to muster up one iota of self-disparagement. Every bit of irony and every camp reading of the show has to be supplied by the viewer. The show cries out to be camped by sophisticated viewers, and I would imagine even naive ones couldn’t possibly take it as seriously as it does itself. I would like to claim a camp attitude towards The Bachelor in which every moment of identification would be countered by a gesture of distancing. I would like to claim to have snickered my way through every rose ceremony. But honestly I can’t. In fact, I identify with every moment of the show, and my identification is accompanied more by self-loathing than by irony. Camp implies an attitude of superiority toward one’s material and in writing about the show, I can certainly fake that. But as a spectator, I become totally immersed in a formula even a child could see right through. And I hate myself for it. Rather than feel superior, I want to say to myself “you are watching the most heinous exercise in gender stereotyping and public humiliation since ….well, ever.” The formula with its group dating, rose ceremonies and simpering enacted romantic rendezvous shames even the semi-verbal idiots who agree to participate in it. But it is effective, and it makes me think that psycho-analytic criticism needs to be applied to TV in an entirely different way than it was applied to film: a psychoanalysis of the spectator needs to replace one of the text. We need to account for the spectatorship of shame.

Image Credits:

1. The Bachelor, Season 12
2. Allie Garcia-Serra, Oncologist and The Bachelor: Paris Contestant
3. Farmer Wants A Wife

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I used to collect final episodes of long-running sitcoms. I had MASH, of course. Also The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Barney Miller, the latter oddly enough a show I had never watched. I used these shows in classes to illustrate how time and duration operate on TV, how the funniest shows always had the most elegiac finales. Later I moved on to season finales of prime time soaps including two of the most dazzling Dynasty cliffhangers — the Moldavian massacre and the earlier one where Cecil Colby had a heart attack whilst having sex with Alexis and she slapped him and yelled ” you can’t die on me now. ” I even have a faded old VHS tape of the last-ever episode of the daytime soap Santa Barbara a program whose sudden cancellation by NBC was commemorated by a wedding and a final credit sequence in which the executive producer stamped out a cigarette on the studio floor. Final episodes and season finales always seemed to me to epitomize the virtues of television narrative. While watching the May 2005 season finales and final episodes of my regular shows, I found myself thinking about the aesthetics of this peculiarly televisual narrative ritual.

I dimly remember from my literary education that there used to be a well-known work of literary criticism called The Sense of an Ending. Of course since television dramatic narrative derives from serialized novels, one would think this subject had already been covered — say, by Aristotle. Yet we’ve learned from studying soap operas that Aristotle would not have approved of them. They lack that sense of an ending that leads to a final truth and knowledge.

The exception to this rule is when a series reaches a significant moment of closure. This occured twice this May amongst my sample, when Judging Amy aired what a few days later was deemed its final episode and when Dr. Carter had his final moments in the season finale of ER. For me the end of a long-running show or the departure of an original character is where the duration of a series really pays off. I didn’t feel disappointed as Amy had an apotheosis and decided to run for the Senate in a conclusion worthy of Young Mr. Lincoln. Or when Dr. Carter read a letter he had written to himself at the beginning of his career when he and I had looked so much younger and hadn’t suffered any losses. In 1998, I attended a conference in Tel Aviv that dealt with the topic of “long form drama,” a designation I still believe has some merit, but one that does not distinguish between ER and Shoah. It does not quite account for the sprawling, season to season, messy quality of television series narrative.

As we all know, one of the reasons long form drama is so hard to teach is that it lacks a representative unit that can be studied in a class. Even if class time permitted the viewing of say, a 13-episode season of an HBO drama, the viewing experience would be very different from one of watching it over the period of several months. We all know how frustrating it can be to select a “great” episode, perhaps one that moved us intensely as regular viewers of the program, and watch it fizzle in class. That’s why the more Aristotelian, linear episodes of a show tend to win Emmies and tend to teach well, like the “Subway” episode of Homicide or the” Love’s Labor Lost” episode of ER, both Emmy winners and both abandoning paradigmatic structure for a taut linear narrative ending in death. Even an isolated episode that blew us away, like the “Employee of the Month” episode of The Sopranos cannot be understood apart from the two years of serialized therapy that preceded it. Martha Nochimson notes this in her online article, “Tony’s Options: The Sopranos and the Televisuality of the Gangster Genre”. She points to a difference between the televisual and the cinematic , a difference that makes some of our “personal best” moments of television difficult to convey to others. We are unable to reproduce the experience of them, even when it’s perfectly possible to view a show all the way through on DVD.

We don’t really have a critical vocabulary to describe the thick interweaving of story arcs into a season-long narrative span of TV drama. Consequently, it’s difficult to express the peculiar artistry that goes into a really satisfying season finale. I’ve always felt that musical analogies would work better than cinematic ones — terms like crescendo, contrapuntal and rhythm seem to me to get closer to what I want to say about season narratives than do terms like “cross cutting” or “paradigmatic.” Whereas semiotic narrative theory has developed terminology to describe the structure of a work of narrative, it does not go very far towards conveying the experience of it, or , dare I say, the art of it.

I label the type of television that has always excelled at season finales “the melodramatic serial” as opposed to the more common dramatic form of “quality drama.”[1] Although in the 1980s this form proliferated on primetime, it has become increasingly rare. Only Melrose Place in the 1990s was able to duplicate the experience of the season finale. But now we have Desperate Housewives, a new contender for serialized melodramatic status.

Everyone seems to agree that this show has the most outrageous plotting since Melrose Place. And yet the season finale played it down, referencing the old Dynasty finales but going for a quieter less hysterical effect without so much of that rhythmic building to a climax. The husband’s heart attack took us all the way back to Cecil Colby, but the flashback structure and revelations about the past had a hint of closure. In fact there was a high ratio of closure-to-cliffhanger relative to the conventions of the melodramatic serial.

This contrasts with my last-year favorite season finale, the 13th episode of Huff on Showtime, a series that was promoted in TV Guide as “a little bit Six Feet Under, a little bit thirtysomething,”and thus a perfect candidate for quality drama status. Every story arc was brought to a sucker-punch climax. The line “you fucked my mother” — and the fact that Huff’s best friend actually did fuck his mother — topped the best of the eighties melodramatic serials. Maybe that’s why I’m still fascinated by some of the more traditional aspects of television aesthetics. Just when you have your genres set up, somebody strikes them down.

Note
[1] In my article “The lack of influence of thirtysomething” in the just-published book, Contemporary Television Series Michael Hammond (ed.), LUCY MAZDON (ed.) 0748619011, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, July 2005, 224pp.

Image Credits:
1. ER’s Dr. Carter
2. The cast of Desperate Housewives

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