When I first moved to Austin in 2003, I began prowling the radio dial to get a flavor for the local community. Too much of Austin’s radio landscape is, like most American cities in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, largely a local information desert, with vast swaths of syndicated programming from conglomerates like Clear Channel. There are exceptions; in addition to the successful and popular NPR-affiliate KUT, Austin had, particularly in the early 2000s, several commercial stations that retained a local voice and programming. In addition, a jointly operated student and community station (KVRX/KOOP, at 91.7 FM) has remained a vital local resource.

Nothing, though, prepared me for the self-styled “Information War” being waged on a handful of pirate frequencies scattered around town. 9/11 conspiracy theories are recurrent themes there, but so are chemtrails, anti-vaccine activism, gun control, and Masonic/Illuminati rituals. Prior to 9/11, Radio Free Austin was an on-again, off-again resource, run by and for a handful of dedicated activists. Its history is unclear at best, but most accounts suggest it was originally modeled in part on efforts like Black Liberation Radio of Springfield, Illinois, and Free Radio Berkeley, a 1993 reboot of the Free Speech Movement (eventually taken off the air by the FCC, Free Radio Berkeley still maintains an active website that educates would-be broadcasters about the legal and technical issues involved in micro-broadcasting). Free Radio Austin has struggled to stay on the air as well, with little continuity of programming or infrastructure, and subject to repeated takedowns, its equipment seized by the FCC. By 2003, however, Radio Free Austin was reborn once more – this time as the voice of what eventually would come to be known as the anti-New World Order movement.

For most of the history of media studies as a discipline, the phrase “alternative media” has been associated with progressive politics, anti-corporate, community and/or identity-based activism. Free Radio Berkeley and Black Liberation Radio, the pirate radio station begun in 1986 in an Illinois housing project, clearly fit that model; in Media Matters, for example, John Fiske characterized BLR’s “blackstream knowledge” as a crucial resource for a marginalized community seeking mechanisms of self-representation and political organizing.1 More prominent today, groups like the progressive aggregator Alternet.org and the Free Press media reform movement are working hard to use micro-media to reinvent the public sphere. Theirs is not, however, the only, or even necessarily the most dominant, political orientation espoused in activist media. It is impossible to account for today’s alternative media without considering the anti-globalization efforts of those who characterize themselves as anti-New World Order Patriots – a loose coalition of libertarian and right-wing groups ranging from alternative health care and food activists to the “9/11 Truth” and Christian nationalist militia movements.2 Though largely invisible to most scholars, the US Patriot movement is nothing if not “alternative.”

Today, broadcast radio is an essential part of this movement’s discourse of public engagement, but the actual broadcast signal is less important than ever. Theirs is a fascinating distribution model, with multiple means of access: conventional commercial AM & FM radio stations, low power FM (particularly stations affiliated with evangelical churches), unlicensed “pirate” stations, shortwave, internet streaming, iPhone and Android apps, and call-in listening, which allows listeners to simply call a phone number to listen to programming live. The combination is a bit scattershot, but the cumulative result is widespread availability, including service for those who are otherwise off the grid. In some areas, Patriot radio broadcasts are carried on stations that also air more conventional right wing broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity; in others, they’re more of a fringe media resource.

In Austin, these programs are heard on K259AJ, a 300 watt micro-FM station licensed at 99.7 FM, though in most areas of town, the station is much better heard at 90.1 FM, an unlicensed repeater. Over the years, the frequencies have shifted as the broadcasters tried various transmitters. For much of the early 2000s, broadcasters ran spots claiming use of the airwaves as a public resource, and they invited committed listeners to host transmitters on their property in order to help avoid FCC intervention. In recent years, those requests have stopped, but the signal is still occasionally interrupted, and subject to shutdown if the FCC chooses to intervene.

Austin’s pirate radio is activist oriented, with something of the sublime chaos of local cable access television (from which it has drawn some of its talent). It is not, however, non-profit. Instead, programming is sponsored by a host of survival food, military surplus, and water purification companies, including E-Foods Direct, Berkey water filters, Maine Military Supply, and Utopia Silver, which sells colloidal silver supplements. The majority of programming on Austin pirate stations is affiliated with the Genesis Communication Network, a syndicator whose website claims 650 AM & FM affiliate stations nationwide.3 The largest and most heavily promoted sponsor is Midas Resources, a gold distributor owned by Ted Anderson, the owner and creator of Genesis. Midas ads are regularly interspersed throughout the day, and Anderson often comes on-air in person during programs to announce gold and silver special offers. Precious metals, and not the fiat currency of an illegitimate Federal Reserve, are the preferred coin of the realm.

90.1 FM also carries some programming distributed by the Republic Broadcasting Network, founded in the Austin, Texas suburb of Round Rock by former GCN staffer John Stadtmiller. RBN and GCN share programming and political sympathies, though they have also at times been at odds with one another, with a history of exchanging accusations of intrigue and sabotage. Republic gained national attention when one of its prominent hosts was revealed to be a leader of the Guardians of the Free Republics, a group which sent threatening letters to every state governor in 2010. RBN distanced itself from that host, Sam Kennedy, though its programming has continued to be largely in line with the Guardians’ rhetoric.4

Other regular programming includes The Power Hour, hosted by Joyce Riley, and Katherine Albrecht, an anti-surveillance activist best known as a critic of Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID chips. Also popular is a show featuring retired police officer Jack McLamb, leader of a group called Police & Military Against The New World Order. His mission is to “prevent those in uniform from being unwittingly used to enslave the people of free nations under the anti-God, anti-Freedom (United Nations-led) world government system. The globalists intend to gain, through any available means, total dictatorial control over all the peoples of the world.”5 Like groups like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters (who draw their name from a claim that just three percent of the colonial American population joined in armed rebellion), McLamb group asks law enforcement officers to declare their sympathies in advance of a declaration of martial law.

In the evenings, you can listen to Rule of Law Radio, whose motto is “Reclaiming our freedom with Scripture, truth, law, fundamental principles, & comedy!” The show is a platform for the Sovereign Citizen movement, which contests federal legal authority by rejecting what they call an unconstitutional “federal citizenship” made possible by the 14th Amendment. Instead, they claim “sovereign citizenship”, which they believe renders them immune from most federal law. According to the movement, by participating in such bureaucratic processes as driver license and car registration, paying federal income tax, and Social Security registration, most Americans have either willingly or unwittingly surrendered themselves as collateral for unjust federal government debt. The mechanism of this control is a so-called “straw-man”, a phantasmatic self, conjured in the act of writing one’s name in all capital letters on birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and legal contracts. Sovereign citizens, on the other hand, refuse to recognize such institutions, and reject state and federal authority entirely. They refuse to accept any document with their names in capital letters, and sometimes go so far as to establish local governmental authority, placing “Private Postmaster” license plates on their vehicles. A county sheriff is the highest authority recognized by many sovereign citizen advocates.

It’s unclear how many adherents there are to such views. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI suggest that there are at least 10,000 or more active participants and advocates, while those with some affiliation with the movement range in the hundreds of thousands. Despite the claims on programs like Rule of Law Radio, sovereign citizenship has not proved to be a winning legal strategy. Some of its most prominent advocates have been imprisoned for tax evasion, as well as for promoting fraudulent tax counseling services. Others have been held in contempt of court for nuisance suits, and in 2010 sovereign citizen and tax protester Jerry Kane and his teenage son were killed in a shootout after gunning down two police officers in a traffic stop. Within the movement, Kane and his son are seen as martyrs.6

The true voice of Patriot radio, however, is Austinite Alex Jones. Jones began in public access television, and has for the past dozen years been broadcasting on the radio, his show now syndicated live daily on the Genesis network. In addition, Jones has made some two dozen documentaries, with such titles as Matrix of Evil, Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove, Police State 3: Total Enslavement, and The Obama Deception. These films are advertised heavily on his radio shows, as well as promoted by his websites, www.prisonplanet.com and www.infowars.com. Jones’ broadcasts span a range of topics, but all are eventually drawn into his overarching theme, which is a critique of authoritarian government overreach. Jones has been central to the 9/11 Truth movement and a host of other conspiracy theories. Jones and his followers believe that the events of 9/11 were “false flag” attacks, organized at the highest levels of the US government. These attacks were but one step on a long road toward authoritarianism. Others include “chemtrails,” jet contrails being used as chemical dispersant vehicles to drug and/or poison our population; forced vaccination, for much the same purpose; militarization of local and state police forces; FEMA concentration camps; the rise of a surveillance state; and, most importantly, a global economic conspiracy led by “elites” bent on world domination.

It is this last belief which binds together all of the others. The emotional and political center of Jones’ movement is his antipathy to what he calls “globalist elites” – a shadowy cartel of international bankers on a mission of global enslavement. These globalists, Jones alleges, control both the major US political parties, every President since Lyndon Johnson (in fact, they murdered John F. Kennedy, who threatened to expose their plans), the military industrial complex, the mechanisms of global capital, and virtually every US politician at the federal level other than Ron Paul. This cartel, bound together by the Satanic rituals they practice in secret at the Bohemian Grove, is coordinated by the Jewish Rothschild banking family, working in collusion with the British crown. It will stop at nothing in its pursuit of power. Jones’ mission, as he sees it, is to “wake up” the population to their dangers.

This is not a new theory.

In this, Jones’ rhetoric bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Father Charles Caughlin, the rabble-rousing 1930s radio priest, for whom the phrase “lunatic fringe” was coined. Caughlin began as a populist preacher during the Depression, but he became increasingly aligned with Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. Even after evidence of the incipient Holocaust was mounting, Coughlin blamed Jews for creating the conditions within which the Nazis would emerge as guardians of their national heritage.

Coughlin’s claims, like those found in Henry Ford’s infamous “International Jew” pamphlet, are informed by the anti-Semitic hoax the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which alleged an ancient Zionist conspiracy for world domination.7

Coughlin was driven off the air after it became clear that his attacks on “international bankers” were lifted from Nazi propaganda, but his ideas have lingered in the mythology of supremacist groups for decades. Even today, his speeches are circulated on the white supremacist site stormfront.org and by former Klan leader David Duke.8

The rhetoric of the modern Patriot movement even more closely resembles that of Lyndon LaRouche, who has long alleged a Zionist collusion with the British royal family to establish worldwide economic domination.9

LaRouche, who for decades has been largely an outcast to conventional political discourse, nonetheless can now see some of his most cherished aphorisms resonating throughout our political culture. The most common, and far most far-reaching, of these, is his demonization of “elites.”10 “Elite” is a word engineered to outrage; it stirs a populist contempt for unjust authority and unearned privilege. It is also among the most commonly deployed code words in today’s political rhetoric, ricocheting through the Patriot movement, Tea Party events, and more conventional talk radio programs, like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Of the long litany of complaints that the libertarian right has detailed, the charge of “elitism” has been among the most pervasive, and most successfully deployed.

Video link: LaRouche “exposing the face of evil” on the Alex Jones show.

So, what does all of this mean for media scholars? At minimum, it seems a few key questions arise:

Is today special? That is, is there something fundamentally different about today’s political climate? It’s easy to see these developments as alarming and new, but after all, Richard Hofstadter published his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964, and he argued that these discourses were old then. Hofstadter traced Illuminati/Masonic mythologies from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, finding long lines of historical continuity that led to an anti-Communist right obsessed with a fantasy of imminent catastrophe. His analysis rings true today:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”

11

As Hofstadter wrote, this paranoiac attitude is most likely to emerge in times of political crisis and economic instability:

“Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.”

What is the reach of these discourses? I want to be clear: none of this is to say that all, or even most, Patriot movement adherents are anti-Semitic or white supremacists. I’m confident that very few of them are. The coded language of “international bankers” means something different to a poster on a white supremacist website than it does to an occasional Alex Jones listener. I’m similarly reluctant to assume that every Tea Party sympathizer is a Christian nationalist or neo-Confederate segregationist. Instead, though, they seem be largely ignorant of the history of these discourses of global conspiracy, which have lain relatively dormant, invisible within much of the larger society, for the latter part of the 20th century. It seems crucial, then, to trace, how, and why, these discourses have persisted for decades in American political thought; it is also crucial to consider how and why they’ve come into relatively mainstream discourse.

What is the role of media technology in shaping this political culture? Many of these theories are decades, even centuries, old. The most overt articulations of these theories have been unacceptable in mainstream public discourse since the Holocaust, though they’ve persisted underground. Clearly, new media technologies have given New World Order conspiracy theories a much wider audience than they’ve had in years. What kinds of new linkages are now being formed that were previously impossible or difficult?

What does this mean for our understanding of the public sphere? It’s very difficult to neatly characterize the politics of anti-New World Order activists. As Alex Jones himself is quick to point out, his movement goes beyond a right-left paradigm. In Austin, a 9/11 Truther is as likely to be a hippie or punk vegetarian as to be a conservative Christian evangelical. Those nuances don’t make it onto the nightly cable news, but they’re most certainly felt by those in the streets. The political coalitions – or, to borrow Nancy Fraser’s phrase, subaltern counter-publics – formed around these issues cross wide gulfs of ideology and identity. I wonder if the emergence of these coalitions is itself something of a symptom of a broken political system, increasingly at odds with the culture it purports to represent. Our media systems enable us to identify and participate in smaller and more contingent cultural niches, but our political mechanisms struggle to keep up. Our increasingly coalitional, fragmentary, parliamentary culture is growing ever more at odds with our winner-take-all two-party political system. Frustration and alienation is always a part of politics, but I wonder if today’s alienation is fundamentally different, a product, in part, of the mechanisms by which we communicate and participate as political citizens.

What does this mean for media studies as a discipline? At minimum, these movements challenge our easy assumptions about what “alternative media” means. Furthermore, such movements likely force us to revisit the consensus/hegemony model that has so centrally shaped the theoretical and political concerns of television and media studies. The “vital center” consensus politics of postwar America were always more an ideal than a reality, and the claim of consensus has historically worked as a mechanism for the marginalization of dissent. Still, our scholarly models have recapitulated this ideal as a structuring framework; we have long understood mass media as a mechanism of hegemonic struggle and normalization. The recent mainstreaming of the Patriot Movement, however, calls into question the very meaning of such terms as mass, margin and public. And though we shouldn’t need the reminder, William Faulkner seems more prescient today than ever:

“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”12

10/25/11 Update

Things keep getting stranger down at the Occupy Wall Street protests.

A man who calls himself “David Smith” has been at the OWS protests for weeks, holding up signs urging people to “Google: ‘Zionists Control Wall St.’” In response, right-wing commentators in the conventional press like William Kristol and Rush Limbaugh have used this as evidence of the anti-Semitism of the Occupy movement. Despite widespread critical responses to Smith and his signs from the vast majority of the Occupy protestors, conservative bloggers have taken up the charge as well.

A closer look, however, tells a different story. Patriot radio and forums like Alex Jones’ Prisonplanet.com have been filled with discussions lately of how to redirect the Occupy movement toward abolishing the Federal Reserve (”End the Fed” is their slogan), focusing attention on what they believe to be the underlying Zionist/globalist agenda. Even former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has endorsed the protests, in hope of drawing attention to what he calls a Jewish financial conspiracy. Other anti-Semitic protest signs seen at Wall Street make this connection much clearer:

All public protests are complicated, tangled, and contradictory — there’s no way to predict who will participate. But to suggest that these openly anti-Semitic protestors are somehow emblematic of the Occupy movement as a whole, or of the mainstream American left in general, is to powerfully distort the much more direct line these protestors have to the Patriot and 9/11 Truth movements.

In a video interview on PJMedia.com, David Smith cites scripture that suggests at least some connection to the virulently anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement:

“I would tell them that Jesus in the Gospel according to St. John, Jesus referred to certain elements in the Jewish community as ‘children of the devil,’ Chapter 8 I believe. But, having said that, the fact of the matter is that there is clear, the fingerprints of these Jewish billionaires and hedge fund managers and bankers is clear and convincing.”

This kind of claim is repeated in a variety of places (including some of the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam), but the Biblical verse John 8:44, in particular, is best known as a shibboleth for Christian Identity. The movement, a modern American revision of British-Israelism, has been increasingly integrated into supremacist culture in the US. The movement sees Jews as illegitimate Israelites, the literal “seed of Satan”. The true Israelites, they believe, went to the British Isles, and helped found the Aryan race. Now promoted by the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, Christian Identity counts among its adherents Olympic Park and anti-abortion bomber Eric Rudolph, Randy Weaver of the Ruby Ridge, Idaho shootout that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh, and the Michigan Hutaree militia that was raided by the FBI in 2010.

Tangled, indeed.13

Image Credits

1. Ben Garrison’s “The March of Tyranny”
2. Illegal “Republic of Texas” License Plate
3. The Globalists’ Language is Hidden in Plain View
4. Father Caughlin, “Jew, Christian, and Persecution” 1938
5. Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent
6. LaRouche’s “Demonization” of Barack Obama

Please feel free to comment.

1. John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in US Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. See also Lawrence Soley, Free Radio: Electronic Civil Disobedience. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
2. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/summer/meet-the-patriots
3. http://www.gcnlive.com/assets/forms/affiliates.pdf
4. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0402/Guardians-of-the-free-Republics-tied-to-Texas-radio-station
5. http://www.gcnlive.com/programs/jackMcLamb/
6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/22/jerry-kane-joseph-antigovernment_n_586127.html, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/fall/sovereign-citizen-kane#
7. http://www.adl.org/special_reports/protocols/protocols_intro.asp
   http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007058
8. http://www.davidduke.com/general/was-father-charles-e-coughlin-really-an-anti-semite_4243.html

   http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005516

9. Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
10. http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/synthesis.html
11. http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html
12. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951.
13. Further reading
    http://www.salon.com/2011/10/12/anti_semite_gets_called_out_at_occupy_wall_st/singleton/

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-criticized-for-flashes-of-anti-semitism.html

    http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/10/13/more-anti-semitism-at-occupy-los-angeles/

    Klan leader David Duke’s commentary on the Occupy movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKy22KsxX9k

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Identity

    http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Christian_Identity.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=Christian_ID

Every few years, Flow’s editors select our favorite columns of the last few volumes. We’ve added special introductions to these important pieces, and appended the original comments to the piece below. Enjoy!

Special Features Editor Annie Petersen:
This piece came along at a crucial moment in television studies, when so much of current scholarship was unabashedly, and at times uncritically, celebrating television that offered narrative complexity. The result, as Kackman points out, is a form of “neoformalist evaluative aesthetics.” Kackman’s piece functions less as a corrective than a retexturing: he illuminates the ways in which the celebration of complexity, and its ability to indexically portray the difficult, nuanced world around, is, in fact, a celebration of the most denigrated of narrative modes — melodrama. The piece sparked a vigorous discussion within the television studies community, and its call — to think more rigorously about why, exactly, we are drawn to the aesthetically and narratively complex — remains particularly pertinent today, amdist the anticipation and adulation surrounding the final season of the hyper-complex Lost.

In 2007, when Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air was discussing the top films of the year, she couldn’t help but insert the HBO series The Wire in her own personal top ten. It wasn’t much of a surprise – The Wire has been a recurring topic on Fresh Air for years, and Gross has interviewed a number of actors, writers, and producers related to the show, some more than once. Of course Fresh Air isn’t the only place where we’ve seen this discourse, but it was especially noteworthy that the ultimate mark of distinction for the show was to detach it fully from its medium of origin, and place it in its “true” aesthetic context – that of cinema.

This kind of maneuver is of course not limited to The Wire, nor to HBO (though more than any network, HBO has branded itself as the preeminent site of quality television, most neatly encapsulated in its claim to, well, not be TV at all). From The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos and Lost, we’re in a lively period of some very interesting narrative television.

Both television and the academic discipline that has developed around it have steadily gained legitimacy and accrued cultural capital over the past two decades. The medium – once roundly dismissed as a guilty pleasure or “bad object” – is now regularly discussed in aesthetic terms previously reserved for the relatively more legitimate popular art form of cinema. Auteurism and formalist narrative analysis are resurgent, finding their preferred object in the “mature” complexity of the contemporary serialized prime-time drama.

These evaluative discourses of quality, however, must be understood in relation to the cultural hierarchies that shaped earlier attitudes about television, and which gave the scholarship that explored it its principle political investment. An influential generation of feminist television scholarship took the medium’s low cultural value as a provocative starting point, exploring the overt gendering of its pathologized, culturally subordinate viewers and its mediation of public and private spheres, and finding possibilities for redemptive or resistant readings in its carnivalesque, anarchic character.1 For that generation of scholars, many of the medium’s most compelling possibilities lay not in its aesthetic sophistication, but precisely in its low status. Read in that light, “it’s not television, it’s HBO” is less a declaration of principles than a return to an elitist aesthetics.

In their recent anthology, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass mark Robert Thompson’s largely celebratory 1996 book Television’s Second Golden Age as a milestone moment, when discourses of quality television began to coalesce in the media industries, among audiences, and among scholars of the medium.2 A number of other works have emerged recently that explore the quality television discourse, including the anthologies Popular Television Drama, edited by Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, and Quality Popular Television, edited by Mark Jancovich and James Lyons.3 And while a number of scholars, in these volumes and elsewhere, have reminded us that the discourse of quality television involves textual features as well as particular modes of production and discourses of “quality audiences,” I’m particularly interested in responding here to the development of what increasingly seems to be a neoformalist evaluative aesthetics of television.

One of the more useful and thoughtful articulations of this aesthetic move comes from Jason Mittell, who has recently argued for developing critical modes that better account for contemporary televisual form. In particular, Mittell is interested in what he terms complex narratives, those that blend episodic and serial narrative techniques, build upon extended back stories of both plot and character, are often self-consciously aesthetically experimental, and which promote a particular kind of spectatorial pleasure in the mechanisms of narration itself. To explain this pleasure, Mittell borrows Neil Harris’ term the “operational aesthetic,” which he describes as moments that call “attention to the constructed nature of the narration and ask us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forego realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality in which we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engage in its diegesis.”4

As examples of the form, Mittell offers such programs as Hill St. Blues, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Six Feet Under, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mittell is careful to keep some boundaries between narrative complexity and “quality television,” noting that a program like 24 is narratively complex, but also muddled, incoherent, and largely denied the mantle of “quality.” Mittell’s formulation is useful, since he better than most explains the particular kinds of narrative structures that are central to the cultural formation of “quality television” today.

I find it especially curious, though, that the identification and mobilization of the “operational aesthetic” as a primary site of analysis is essentially an intertextual aesthetics (if such a thing is possible). While this particular formation is partly a matter of internal narrative complexity, it’s also undeniably an aestheticization of creative cultural reception practices. The operational aesthetic, as we find it in such programs as Lost or Battlestar Galactica, is both a textual feature, and something fans do to texts. Long before producers were embedding “Easter eggs” and red herrings in Lost episodes and websites, fans were developing televisual literacies via which they extended and rewrote programs; whether explored by Trek slash writers or soap klatches, or more recent forays into “forensic fandom,” the operational aesthetic owes much to the creative animation of the text by audiences. I think we have more work to do to understand how the interpretive labor of certain kinds of audience formations becomes visible and valorized; are American Idol or Survivor spoiler fans any less complex in their interpretive practices than Losties?

More to the point, I’d argue that our pleasure in the operational aesthetic doesn’t come simply from observing the workings of a finely crafted watch, but from a sense that the product of its machinery will be something more broadly meaningful – it tells us what time it is. This is, essentially, a cultural operation, not an aesthetic one.

Quality TV is in part based upon a set of premises about the particular indexical quality that tv narrative is presumed to have with everyday life. Definitions of quality television, both popularly and in our scholarship, depend on a basic formulation that goes something like this: narrative complexity generates representational complexity; representational complexity offers the possibility of political and cultural complexity.5 When we delight in Willow’s witchcraft, or Number Six’s agonizing over spirituality and what it means to be alive, or Omar’s and Bubbles’ tragic misadventures on the streets of Baltimore, we’re not just appreciating narrative craft. Instead, we’re embracing the dream of a more complex world. Maybe, even, a more just one.

All of this, of course, draws us ever closer to melodrama, as both narrative form and index of a kind of cultural longing. What’s really key here is melodrama’s investment in its immediate cultural environs, that is to say, not just its formal play, but its engagement of cultural tensions, instabilities, and anxieties. In fact, it’s melodrama’s simultaneous invocation of, and inability to resolve, social tensions, that makes it such a ripe form for serial narrativization, and which makes it a central, and maybe even necessary, component of quality television. For melodrama, as Christine Gledhill wrote, “draws into a public arena desires, fears, values and identities which lie beneath the surface of the publicly acknowledged world.”6

By saying that we need to reinvoke melodrama as the constitutive force behind much of what we call quality television, it’s not just to remind critics of the culturally low form that embodies much of what they like about current tv. That is not, in itself, much of a point – and I suspect that most of the scholars embracing the narrative complexity of quality tv would be quick to point out that its antecedents lie in soaps and other “low” serial forms (Mittell certainly does). More importantly, though, I’d like to suggest that our ability even to identify narrative complexity and see it as a marker of quality television is itself an act not of aesthetic, but cultural, recognition. Complexity isn’t just something we find in a text; it’s something we bring to a text – and our recognition of certain characters as meaningfully conflicted, their narrative and moral dilemmas agonizingly or beguilingly puzzling, is a cultural identification. I’d like to see us talk more about melodrama and contemporary quality television not just as an ameliorative, cathartic symbolic resolution of social anxieties, but as a mechanism for the registering of political dreams.

This ultimately begs the question of what kinds of characters, settings, dilemmas, can be seen as cleverly complex, deserving of the “quality” label, and which will be relegated to the scrap heap of soapy excess. Which brings me to Lost.

Lost has become an idealized ur-text of television’s aesthetic possibilities, with a complex mythology interwoven with a serialized character drama, all embraced by a knowing, literate fan community. We might productively read the gendered politics of television scholarship against the show’s central narrative preoccupation with paternity, patriarchy, and masculinity. Most of the program’s characters are driven to reconcile a patriarchal crisis: John Locke must redeem his masculinity and rebuild his impotent body after being manipulated by his father; Jack must resolve an Oedipal conflict with his alcoholic father without becoming him; Kate and Sawyer are stalked by their reactions to violent father figures; and the entire island is a trauma site, an experiment in aberrant reproduction. Nearly all of the show’s major characters are haunted by failed or violent fathers; each week’s episodes explore how their individual encounters with fatherhood have or will shape the collective island culture.

I’m a big fan (though not quite at Jason’s level of commitment), but I’m frustrated when we embrace Lost as simply complex quality television without thinking about the relationship of its narrational mode to its gender politics. Two back to back scenes from the recap episode that played at the beginning of this past season neatly capture my frustrations with the show, and with critical responses to it. In the first, Kate and Jack share a fraught moment when, perhaps against his own best judgment, Jack confesses his love for Kate. It’s a dishy, soapy moment, all the more so because of the episode’s Pop-Up Video-style text that comments sarcastically about how the show’s “shipper” fans will respond to the moment.

This scene is followed by a flash-forward of an angsty, bearded Jack, roaring around in his Mustang, listening to Nirvana, trying to unravel the mystery of the Oceanic Six. While the first of these two scenes readily confesses itself to be a shameless wallow in weak-kneed, bodice-ripping melodrama, the second signals a turn to the formalist pleasures of the confounding diegesis of Lost, complete with an Easter egg all its own – a storefront sign telegraphs the knowing wink, for it is an anagram of the words “flash forward.”

In order to sustain an interpretation of the show as emblematic of narrative complexity in a way that is distinct from the cultural complexity of melodrama, we have to make two key distinctions: first, we must dismiss the first scene’s sentimentalism as a pander to the “low” pathos of melodrama, and we must read Jack’s process of self-discovery on the streets of LA as inherently more legitimate, a self-aware exploration of the complex world of the program. But are these scenes really all that different? While the first comes with semiotic cues that scream out sentimentality and excess, the second does too – it’s just the more conventionally masculine sentimentality and excess of grunge rock and roaring sidepipes. In both, a melodramatic imagination drives the narrative, and drives our own viewing pleasures: can the characters reconcile their conflicted pasts with their new challenges? Will they find happiness, completion, peace? Will they find self-knowledge, or will they remain tragically haunted by their own demons?

While much recent television scholarship has seemingly moved beyond the field’s roots in feminist media criticism, it often does so by re-embracing the gendered hierarchies that made the medium an object of critical and popular scorn. And while “quality television” is a complicated aggregation of industry discourses, aesthetic norms, audience practices and politics, it’s also, at least historically, a political demand – a kind of Jamesonian hermeneutic dream of being… different. I’d like to urge some skepticism about celebrating television’s new golden age of aesthetic quality. By becoming “legitimate,” we risk eliding our field’s history of politically and culturally invested scholarship. And as the characters of Lost might yet one day learn, the search for legitimacy entails great cost, while illegitimacy has intriguing rewards.

Image Credits:
1. Lost: Quality Television, Melodrama and Culturally Complex
2. HBO and The Return to Elitist Aesthetics
3. Jack and Kate’s Dishy Moment – Author’s Screencap
4. Angsty, Bearded Jack — Author’s Screencap
5. Anagram of the words “flash forward” — Author’s Screencap

Original Comments:

Jane Feuer said:

Hi Michael

I thought I should point out that my article in that book was not celebratory and that I have always argued that melodrama feeds both quality drama and soap opera. And I am NOT a fan of Lost. You are right to point out all the ways in which that cult is misguided.

Yours, Jane
-November 3rd, 2008 at 7:39 am

Derek Kompare said:

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this in written form, Michael! A lot to chew on here, with long-lingering debates about “quality,” “complexity,” gender, genre, class, cult, and mainstream. Not to echo completely the calls from Flow to study According To Jim or Two and a Half Men more closely, but I think the overall point of that critique is important: in our focus on the Losts, Wires, and BSGs of the world, what are we gaining, and what are we missing?

I’m all for an “aesthetic turn” in Television Studies (as it has been variously called), but, like you, I’m wary of its implications. As long as we recognize that aesthetics come from multiple somewheres (creative practices, industry norms, viewer practices, cultural politics, etc.), and expand our purview beyond the same half-dozen shows, then I think we can productively and provocatively advance this line of analysis.
-November 3rd, 2008 at 11:34 am

Hollis Griffin said:

Good piece, Michael. I like that you apply the “cultural brakes” to the runaway train that is the aesthetic debate in current media studies circles. As one who worries considerably about the implications of this debate (What does Foucault say? Something about why do away with the categories only to then reinscribe them again at the end?), this seems an apt rejoinder to the narrative complexity argument that still keeps what’s useful about it….
-November 3rd, 2008 at 3:17 pm

Jeffrey Sconce said:

Great piece, Michael. I agree the unexamined equation of quality with complexity is a particularly strange move for television
studies to make. It reached its apotheosis in the Steve Johnson’s “Everything Bad is Good for You” book from a few years back, with
its rather hilarious charts demonstrating how much more complex and thus worthy “The Sopranos” were in relation to “Starsky and Hutch.” Complex TV is apparently better because it forces you to make more neural connections, in the same way that video games are good for hand-eye coordination!

I think much of this impulse comes out of TV studies rather consistent desire to see itself as a misunderstood, maltreated victim–an impulse that sometimes leads us to embrace various hybrids of naturalism and modernism to “prove” TV is just as important as film and the novel. But that’s ultimately a doomed strategy, I think, much like trying to fit in at a country club that never wanted you in the first place. HBO is right–they aren’t television–they’re just bad art cinema.
-November 4th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

Sam Ford said:

Great piece, Michael, and one that requires a much more in-depth response than I am going to be providing with this comment. I just wanted to say that I’ve been of two minds about the “few great shows” issue plaguing much of television studies. On the one hand, it’s helpful to have the consensus narratives I’ve talked with David Thorburn about often, in this case not for building national awareness of common issues and to have a common text that we all share, but rather to have a common text scholars can use to illustrate important themes for the field in a language all can understand. On the other, the creation of “quality television” as a designator defines as “good” a narrow form of artistic markers.

As you know, I focus on researching–and enjoy watching–shows that don’t have seasons, or end dates. Soap operas, professional wrestling, late-night talk shows a la Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert…they defy the markers of quality television. I’d argue that they are very “narratively complex,” but that complexity takes place in a variety of other ways…in the way these shows add value to viewers for the layered memories of seeing a character for years or perhaps decades; in the way subtext is played that relies on complex relationships amongst a large ensemble of characters; etc. To Jeff’s point, narrative is far from the only way for a show to be “complex.” That doesn’t mean that narrative complexity isn’t worth highlighting; but it can’t become synonymous with complexity itself, at the exclusion of emotional complexity, psychological complexity, relational complexity, social complexity, and on and on.

I love your take on operational aesthetics being an external force, Michael, in that it forces us to think about where these dynamics lie. I’ve argued that soap operas are social texts whose resonance with the audience only takes meanings in the relationships and dynamics that are built around them. I think that these reception practices demonstrate that texts seem from “the outside” as redundant and “soapy,” to use the phrase you did–with plots that are often predictable and with a low cultural status–nonetheless generate considerable complexity through their focus on emotional content, character relationships, and the long-term memory conjured up in the subtext and unpacked by viewers amongst themselves.

Lest I anger Jeff by referencing the taboo “fan studies,” I want to clarify that I’m not talking about a narrow definition that involves fanfic, fanvids, and other “active” components but would argue that talking about a show, proselytizing to others, archiving favorite moments, etc., is a lean-forward, active approach.
-November 5th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

Myles said:

I think that, in terms of questioning whether we are making T.S. Eliot’s mistake and canonizing a medium that in fact thrives on its diversity and freedom, we need to consider the question of effort. I speak of, say, a show like Heroes: a show that wants to be “great” by this definition, has occasionally shown flashes of potential, and yet at the end of the day you won’t find a TV critic or, likely, a TV scholar willing to defend it as a member of any sort of elite club of television series.

Of course, as Sam notes in the last comment, the question of viewer interaction has NBC convinced that Heroes is still a hit: because the fans are talking about it, and packing into Comic-Con halls to scream at their favourite stars, it is considered to be a flagship series even as ratings continue to dwindle and they’re forcing out showrunners in an effort to create change. The irony, of course, is that the requirement for viewer action might be why it, and many mythology driven science fiction/fantasy series have failed: while certain viewing circles have embraced the internet as a place to engage with their favourite shows, yet others are frustrated that in order to get the whole story they have to log online and read the latest Heroes comic book. Quality be damned, Heroes’ ratings were going to drop regardless when the casual viewers latching onto a cultural zeitgeist fleed the coop by the time season two came around.

(And as an aside as it relates to Heroes, rumours about how they plan on revamping that show after a failed third season creatively involve a lot of the above rhetoric as it relates to being focused on individual characters – gone are the days, apparently (and hopefully), where fixing a problem meant giving it a power or sending it backwards, forwards, or sideways in time)

It is these shows that straddle that line between melodrama and the “great” narrative complexity which are often most fascinating, those that operate within one sphere but slowly leak into the other when either required or suggested. When Law & Order makes a significant casting change (either a new arrival or a departing favourite), there’s a sudden tonal shift: gone is the straightforward procedural structure, and in its place we find a case that’s shockingly personal, shockingly explosive, or shockingly sudden. When Elizabeth Rohm’s ADA responded to her firing with “This is because I’m a lesbian, isn’t it?” it was a glaring attempt at being this complex narrative, wishing to convince viewers that all along they had been watching a complex investigation into homosexuality at the prosecutor’s table.

As someone who admittedly watches a great deal of “melodramatic” television, I have a certain appreciation for it: while I have been driven away from the more procedural shows due to their lack of anything even approaching narrative complexity, in blogging about shows like ABC Family’s Greek, or The CW’s Gossip Girl and Privileged I often find myself finding depth in fairly surprising places. All of these types of shows have their base storylines, the highly predictable and generally simple notions of teenage relationships, and yet they maintain interest by also presenting characters and situations that feel more realistic. While I’m unlikely to write 4000 words about the Gossip Girl finale, I don’t think that this implies there is nothing to write about: even if these shows trade controlled complexity for seat of the pants narrative rollercoaster, they are still entering into a discourse that is a reflection of viewer interaction, cultural developments and (at some points, at least) an intelligent view of younger viewers.

And that’s all the rambling I’ll do for the time being, ironically time made when the melodrama of Grey’s Anatomy reminded me of the melodrama of Alias’ highly contrived third season.
-November 14th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

Jason Mittell said:

I posted a much-delayed and slightly off-topic response to this essay on my website – be warned that it focuses on Dexter and reveals some key season 1 spoilers…
-January 14th, 2009 at 2:56 pm

John Donovan said:

I find the descriptor “Quality TV” troubling for several reasons. The first is simply the inevitable confusion that results from trying to use an imprecise and widely-used adjective to provide a normative model for what “rewarding” television should be. Another reason for my displeasure with this term is the implication that if a program does not meet the formalistic criteria defining “Quality TV” then it must therefore lack quality altogether, rather than be found lacking a certain quality (which makes it “Quality TV”). The third reason is that the “Quality TV” conversation seems to me, an admitted outsider, an effort to fool us all into thinking that the emperor (the academy) has new clothes, when in fact the debates over “Quality TV” are simply a rehashing of the age-old war between the genres for respect. The final reason for my displeasure follows from the previous three—namely, that it excludes from consideration whole genres of television programs and the singular examples within these genres which stand out.

Take Michael Kackman’s essay on Flow.TV, for example. I wondered whether my own off-balance, squirming feeling in reading this essay was a reflection of Kackman’s own discomfort with trying to define what it is that qualifies a show for the “Quality TV” label. After re-reading his essay a few times, I still couldn’t tell why he believes the Lost series qualifies (or if he even does, though he clearly wants to).

I do know, however, that Bill Moyers Journal wouldn’t qualify. That much is clear to me. Since Kackman’s criteria automatically excludes all programming that is not dramatic (fictional), most that is not melodramatic, and probably anything which is not “cleverly complex” however defined. I am not going to be so bold as to assert that Bill Moyers Journal is “Quality TV,” because I haven’t yet found it to be sufficiently distinctive (in presentation, content, or social import) relative to its talk show peers to deserve such a label. But I do have serious problems with its being automatically excluded from consideration on purely generic grounds. I would suggest that a number of PBS series such as Frontline and Nova are deserving of the “Quality TV” label in the sense of being distinctive television. And while the timeliness of the Frontline series may often prevent it from having a long shelf-life as “must see”, “must talk about” TV, such is not the case with the profoundly important series Eyes on the Prize. Oh, yeah, that’s non-fiction. It’s not “Quality TV.”

The criteria for “Quality TV” should be much more inclusive than its narrative complexity and resonance with everyday life, or in Kackman’s phrase its “engagement of cultural tensions.” It should embrace any television program that rises above its peers in a significant way, demands and holds our attention on the basis of the text alone and not on the muscle of its marketing, and makes itself worthy of deep conversations over a long period of time. No program should be automatically disqualified.
-April 27th, 2009 at 7:39 pm

Ty said:

Hi John – I think you should consider the fact that Kackman is analyzing narrative TV as are all the scholars he refers to, not news/political shows.
-April 27th, 2009 at 11:10 pm

Tara McPherson said:

Somehow missed this when published, but it’s great, Michael. Your move to link the emergence of this latest turn to “quality” to a move away from the strong feminist origins of much of TV studies is spot on.
-April 28th, 2009 at 10:50 pm

Anna Iriemi said:

After reading this article, I examined one of my favorite sitcoms within the context of quality television. It did not make the cut.

While The King of Queens is engaging and comical, it hardly qualifies as quality television. According to the Michael Kackman article, “Quality Television,” quality television operates on “complex narratives.” The King of Queens fails to meet the standards of a complex narrative in that it does not draw attention to the mechanisms of the narrative, rather it immerses its audience in the obscurites of fast-moving scenes. These scenes are obscure because they operate for the purpose of temporary pleasure; immediate laughter and can be quickly forgotten.

In this immediate pleasure, an “operational aesthetic” does not exist . I rarely ask myself “How did the writers pull this off?” when watching this sitcom. I have a clear understanding of the characters and can easily disengage myself from the plot as the punchlines move quickly and are a central proliferation to the function of the show.

Furthermore, The King of Queens does not qualify as quality television because it does not call in to question or examine a larger theme/idea. Unlike “Lost” which consistently examines ideas of fatherhood, isolation and desperation, The King of Queens fails to establish importance within a defined concept and /or challenge that concept. This is not to say that the sitcom is “themeless.” The show certainly touches on points of class and marriage, but falls short in examining these realities in a systematic and literary fashion.

The show often concludes with a final punchline, which though not necessarily its objective, can easily detach the audience from larger themes relative in the program. In this, I believe producers stay true to the show’s core objective…to encourage laughter within the frame of simplicity.

The King of Queens, although stars a Jewish couple, does not employ the tactic of Jewish humor. The show again veers away from making a political statement. While also featuring an African-American family, dialogue suggests a general evasion from exploring issues of race.

The King of Queens operates on the use of simple humor and does so brilliantly. While this sitcom does not fall under the lines of “quality television”, it certainly meets its goal in producing laughter…good, quality laughter.
-May 3rd, 2009 at 3:11 pm

Please feel free to comment.

1. See for example Lynne Joyrich, Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996; and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Also, of particular relevance here is Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tisa Vahimaji, eds. MTM Quality Television, London: BFI, 1985.
2. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. New York: Tauris, 2007.
3. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, eds. Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005; Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry, and Fans. London: BFI, 2008.
4. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television”, The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006. p. 35.
5. This little equation is at the center of Kristen Lentz’ reflection on the early ‘70s moment of quality and relevance. She writes that “the discourse of ‘quality television,’ associated as it was with feminism and improved images of womanhood, attached this feminism to a self-reflexive critique of the medium of television itself.” Through the discursive practices within and around MTM Enterprises, as Lentz succinctly put it, “Television thus enfolded feminism into the project of advancing not the female subject, but the ‘subject’ of television.” “Quality vs. Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television. Camera Oscura 15:1, 2000. p. 47.
6. Christine Gledhill, Home is where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI, 1987. p. 33.

In 2007, when Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air was discussing the top films of the year, she couldn’t help but insert the HBO series The Wire in her own personal top ten. It wasn’t much of a surprise – The Wire has been a recurring topic on Fresh Air for years, and Gross has interviewed a number of actors, writers, and producers related to the show, some more than once. Of course Fresh Air isn’t the only place where we’ve seen this discourse, but it was especially noteworthy that the ultimate mark of distinction for the show was to detach it fully from its medium of origin, and place it in its “true” aesthetic context – that of cinema.

This kind of maneuver is of course not limited to The Wire, nor to HBO (though more than any network, HBO has branded itself as the preeminent site of quality television, most neatly encapsulated in its claim to, well, not be TV at all). From The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos and Lost, we’re in a lively period of some very interesting narrative television.

Both television and the academic discipline that has developed around it have steadily gained legitimacy and accrued cultural capital over the past two decades. The medium – once roundly dismissed as a guilty pleasure or “bad object” – is now regularly discussed in aesthetic terms previously reserved for the relatively more legitimate popular art form of cinema. Auteurism and formalist narrative analysis are resurgent, finding their preferred object in the “mature” complexity of the contemporary serialized prime-time drama.

These evaluative discourses of quality, however, must be understood in relation to the cultural hierarchies that shaped earlier attitudes about television, and which gave the scholarship that explored it its principle political investment. An influential generation of feminist television scholarship took the medium’s low cultural value as a provocative starting point, exploring the overt gendering of its pathologized, culturally subordinate viewers and its mediation of public and private spheres, and finding possibilities for redemptive or resistant readings in its carnivalesque, anarchic character.1 For that generation of scholars, many of the medium’s most compelling possibilities lay not in its aesthetic sophistication, but precisely in its low status. Read in that light, “it’s not television, it’s HBO” is less a declaration of principles than a return to an elitist aesthetics.

In their recent anthology, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass mark Robert Thompson’s largely celebratory 1996 book Television’s Second Golden Age as a milestone moment, when discourses of quality television began to coalesce in the media industries, among audiences, and among scholars of the medium.2 A number of other works have emerged recently that explore the quality television discourse, including the anthologies Popular Television Drama, edited by Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, and Quality Popular Television, edited by Mark Jancovich and James Lyons.3 And while a number of scholars, in these volumes and elsewhere, have reminded us that the discourse of quality television involves textual features as well as particular modes of production and discourses of “quality audiences,” I’m particularly interested in responding here to the development of what increasingly seems to be a neoformalist evaluative aesthetics of television.

One of the more useful and thoughtful articulations of this aesthetic move comes from Jason Mittell, who has recently argued for developing critical modes that better account for contemporary televisual form. In particular, Mittell is interested in what he terms complex narratives, those that blend episodic and serial narrative techniques, build upon extended back stories of both plot and character, are often self-consciously aesthetically experimental, and which promote a particular kind of spectatorial pleasure in the mechanisms of narration itself. To explain this pleasure, Mittell borrows Neil Harris’ term the “operational aesthetic,” which he describes as moments that call “attention to the constructed nature of the narration and ask us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forego realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality in which we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engage in its diegesis.”4

As examples of the form, Mittell offers such programs as Hill St. Blues, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Six Feet Under, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mittell is careful to keep some boundaries between narrative complexity and “quality television,” noting that a program like 24 is narratively complex, but also muddled, incoherent, and largely denied the mantle of “quality.” Mittell’s formulation is useful, since he better than most explains the particular kinds of narrative structures that are central to the cultural formation of “quality television” today.

I find it especially curious, though, that the identification and mobilization of the “operational aesthetic” as a primary site of analysis is essentially an intertextual aesthetics (if such a thing is possible). While this particular formation is partly a matter of internal narrative complexity, it’s also undeniably an aestheticization of creative cultural reception practices. The operational aesthetic, as we find it in such programs as Lost or Battlestar Galactica, is both a textual feature, and something fans do to texts. Long before producers were embedding “Easter eggs” and red herrings in Lost episodes and websites, fans were developing televisual literacies via which they extended and rewrote programs; whether explored by Trek slash writers or soap klatches, or more recent forays into “forensic fandom,” the operational aesthetic owes much to the creative animation of the text by audiences. I think we have more work to do to understand how the interpretive labor of certain kinds of audience formations becomes visible and valorized; are American Idol or Survivor spoiler fans any less complex in their interpretive practices than Losties?

More to the point, I’d argue that our pleasure in the operational aesthetic doesn’t come simply from observing the workings of a finely crafted watch, but from a sense that the product of its machinery will be something more broadly meaningful – it tells us what time it is. This is, essentially, a cultural operation, not an aesthetic one.

Quality TV is in part based upon a set of premises about the particular indexical quality that tv narrative is presumed to have with everyday life. Definitions of quality television, both popularly and in our scholarship, depend on a basic formulation that goes something like this: narrative complexity generates representational complexity; representational complexity offers the possibility of political and cultural complexity.5 When we delight in Willow’s witchcraft, or Number Six’s agonizing over spirituality and what it means to be alive, or Omar’s and Bubbles’ tragic misadventures on the streets of Baltimore, we’re not just appreciating narrative craft. Instead, we’re embracing the dream of a more complex world. Maybe, even, a more just one.

All of this, of course, draws us ever closer to melodrama, as both narrative form and index of a kind of cultural longing. What’s really key here is melodrama’s investment in its immediate cultural environs, that is to say, not just its formal play, but its engagement of cultural tensions, instabilities, and anxieties. In fact, it’s melodrama’s simultaneous invocation of, and inability to resolve, social tensions, that makes it such a ripe form for serial narrativization, and which makes it a central, and maybe even necessary, component of quality television. For melodrama, as Christine Gledhill wrote, “draws into a public arena desires, fears, values and identities which lie beneath the surface of the publicly acknowledged world.”6

By saying that we need to reinvoke melodrama as the constitutive force behind much of what we call quality television, it’s not just to remind critics of the culturally low form that embodies much of what they like about current tv. That is not, in itself, much of a point – and I suspect that most of the scholars embracing the narrative complexity of quality tv would be quick to point out that its antecedents lie in soaps and other “low” serial forms (Mittell certainly does). More importantly, though, I’d like to suggest that our ability even to identify narrative complexity and see it as a marker of quality television is itself an act not of aesthetic, but cultural, recognition. Complexity isn’t just something we find in a text; it’s something we bring to a text – and our recognition of certain characters as meaningfully conflicted, their narrative and moral dilemmas agonizingly or beguilingly puzzling, is a cultural identification. I’d like to see us talk more about melodrama and contemporary quality television not just as an ameliorative, cathartic symbolic resolution of social anxieties, but as a mechanism for the registering of political dreams.

This ultimately begs the question of what kinds of characters, settings, dilemmas, can be seen as cleverly complex, deserving of the “quality” label, and which will be relegated to the scrap heap of soapy excess. Which brings me to Lost.

Lost has become an idealized ur-text of television’s aesthetic possibilities, with a complex mythology interwoven with a serialized character drama, all embraced by a knowing, literate fan community. We might productively read the gendered politics of television scholarship against the show’s central narrative preoccupation with paternity, patriarchy, and masculinity. Most of the program’s characters are driven to reconcile a patriarchal crisis: John Locke must redeem his masculinity and rebuild his impotent body after being manipulated by his father; Jack must resolve an Oedipal conflict with his alcoholic father without becoming him; Kate and Sawyer are stalked by their reactions to violent father figures; and the entire island is a trauma site, an experiment in aberrant reproduction. Nearly all of the show’s major characters are haunted by failed or violent fathers; each week’s episodes explore how their individual encounters with fatherhood have or will shape the collective island culture.

I’m a big fan (though not quite at Jason’s level of commitment), but I’m frustrated when we embrace Lost as simply complex quality television without thinking about the relationship of its narrational mode to its gender politics. Two back to back scenes from the recap episode that played at the beginning of this past season neatly capture my frustrations with the show, and with critical responses to it. In the first, Kate and Jack share a fraught moment when, perhaps against his own best judgment, Jack confesses his love for Kate. It’s a dishy, soapy moment, all the more so because of the episode’s Pop-Up Video-style text that comments sarcastically about how the show’s “shipper” fans will respond to the moment.

This scene is followed by a flash-forward of an angsty, bearded Jack, roaring around in his Mustang, listening to Nirvana, trying to unravel the mystery of the Oceanic Six. While the first of these two scenes readily confesses itself to be a shameless wallow in weak-kneed, bodice-ripping melodrama, the second signals a turn to the formalist pleasures of the confounding diegesis of Lost, complete with an Easter egg all its own – a storefront sign telegraphs the knowing wink, for it is an anagram of the words “flash forward.”

In order to sustain an interpretation of the show as emblematic of narrative complexity in a way that is distinct from the cultural complexity of melodrama, we have to make two key distinctions: first, we must dismiss the first scene’s sentimentalism as a pander to the “low” pathos of melodrama, and we must read Jack’s process of self-discovery on the streets of LA as inherently more legitimate, a self-aware exploration of the complex world of the program. But are these scenes really all that different? While the first comes with semiotic cues that scream out sentimentality and excess, the second does too – it’s just the more conventionally masculine sentimentality and excess of grunge rock and roaring sidepipes. In both, a melodramatic imagination drives the narrative, and drives our own viewing pleasures: can the characters reconcile their conflicted pasts with their new challenges? Will they find happiness, completion, peace? Will they find self-knowledge, or will they remain tragically haunted by their own demons?

While much recent television scholarship has seemingly moved beyond the field’s roots in feminist media criticism, it often does so by re-embracing the gendered hierarchies that made the medium an object of critical and popular scorn. And while “quality television” is a complicated aggregation of industry discourses, aesthetic norms, audience practices and politics, it’s also, at least historically, a political demand – a kind of Jamesonian hermeneutic dream of being… different. I’d like to urge some skepticism about celebrating television’s new golden age of aesthetic quality. By becoming “legitimate,” we risk eliding our field’s history of politically and culturally invested scholarship. And as the characters of Lost might yet one day learn, the search for legitimacy entails great cost, while illegitimacy has intriguing rewards.

Image Credits:
1. Lost: Quality Television, Melodrama and Culturally Complex
2. HBO and The Return to Elitist Aesthetics
3. Jack and Kate’s Dishy Moment – Author’s Screencap
4. Angsty, Bearded Jack — Author’s Screencap
5. Anagram of the words “flash forward” — Author’s Screencap

Please feel free to comment.

1. See for example Lynne Joyrich, Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996; and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Also, of particular relevance here is Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tisa Vahimaji, eds. MTM Quality Television, London: BFI, 1985.
2. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. New York: Tauris, 2007.
3. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, eds. Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005; Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry, and Fans. London: BFI, 2008.
4. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television”, The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006. p. 35.
5. This little equation is at the center of Kristen Lentz’ reflection on the early ‘70s moment of quality and relevance. She writes that “the discourse of ‘quality television,’ associated as it was with feminism and improved images of womanhood, attached this feminism to a self-reflexive critique of the medium of television itself.” Through the discursive practices within and around MTM Enterprises, as Lentz succinctly put it, “Television thus enfolded feminism into the project of advancing not the female subject, but the ‘subject’ of television.” “Quality vs. Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television. Camera Oscura 15:1, 2000. p. 47.
6. Christine Gledhill, Home is where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI, 1987. p. 33.

Like most interesting things, the Flow Conference was an experiment. And like most experiments, it generated some unexpected results. What I find most encouraging about the conference is that it, like Flow itself, took some important steps toward establishing a new metaphor for thoughtful collaboration and discussion. We had hoped to create a conference that built upon the journal's unique strengths: short, succinct presentations of positions; immediate dialogue and feedback; and interdisciplinary conversation.

As an experiment in form, I believe the roundtable model works – in some ways better than the current implementation of the journal itself, since the feedback mechanisms are immediate (spam control seemed to work better for the most part, too!). But while they were immediate, the conversations in the seminar rooms were still hierarchical, with much potential for improvement. In particular, I'd like to see us develop better mechanisms to share the floor through better audience/panel dialogue, as well as better use of technology to serve remote participants, both synchronously and asynchronously.

Overall, I think we're doing a better job of learning how to speak to one another across our different methodologies and perspectives; it's the listening that needs improvement.

Flow, at its best, represents a commitment to a different kind of critical community, one that privileges collective dialogue over individual expression. That's not a natural or easy thing to create. As academics, we're by nature and training very self-centered beasts; authorship (over a phrase, an insight, a theory, a manifesto) is at the core of our identities. And while much of our work is intensely motivated by a community ethic of one sort or another, by habit and personality, we're required, ultimately, to speak. Some scholars are just fine with that, and others struggle to negotiate their cultural values of community with the systems of authorship and authority that are so central to academia. Feminist scholars, in particular, have explored this tension; we'd all do well to consider it as we think through what Flow is, and might be.

Doing so will be especially important if we are to expand Flow's reach into communities outside academia. I was delighted to have participants from fan communities, from activist groups, from the media industries, from journalism. We're only partway there, though, and I'd like to brainstorm about how to restructure the conversation so that conventional modes of academic authority don't dominate.

One aspect of Flow's meandering conversations is that it's wrapped up in an unmistakable transformation of the field of television studies. This is something I have to admit I'm sometimes ambivalent about. I'm certainly excited about Flow's breadth; the scholars in attendance included those doing technology and policy studies, industrial and political economic analyses, studies of production cultures, textual/formal analysis, representational/ideological criticism and cultural studies, media globalization, and audience research (or, more likely, some combination of those and more). Other conferences they regularly attend include SCMS, NCA, ICA, and ASA, as well as Console-ing Passions and MIT's Media in Transition.

Still, I sometimes found myself missing the clarity of intellectual and political investment that comes from a unified approach. But since clarity often comes as much from ignorance as purity of vision, this muddle is probably a net good. I also suspect that everyone in attendance felt occasional dismay that their particular concerns and perspectives were marginal to the central conversation. This, too, is probably a net good, since one of the main goals of the conversation was to get people together who don't always think, write, or engage television in the same ways.

Mostly, I think, this is due to the shifting nature of television studies. A field that was once (in my own imagination, if not exactly in reality) unshakably intertwined with the political project of British cultural studies is now a more diffuse amalgam. Television itself is no longer the universal bad object, which has opened new possibilities for scholars to explore its formal attributes unapologetically; convergence, both theoretically and that of the technologies themselves, has brought new attention to technological and cultural mobility; this, in turn, has challenged the deep embedment of both television and television studies within the domestic sphere; and shifting political and regulatory climates have prompted new scholarly efforts to engage TV's publics. TV studies is all of these things, and much more.

Finally, the breadth of the Flow conference is, I believe, importantly connected to the diversity of the graduate editorial and conference staff that are Flow's lifeblood. Though their work is often invisible, neither the conference nor the journal could have been realized without the efforts of dozens of graduate students. For many of them, their research interests continually cross methodological and theoretical boundaries that seemed insurmountable a half-generation ago; we owe them our thanks, not just for their labors, but for the interdisciplinary curiosity that drags us all to the same table.

Image Credits
www.saywhat.com
www.iastate.edu

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