DRAMA Thirty years ago, Horace Newcomb positioned television drama

DRAMA Thirty years ago, Horace Newcomb positioned television drama

alongside novels rather than radio or film, because its “sense of density” explores complex themes in lengthy treatments with slow build- ups and multi- sequenced sites of character development and interaction (1974: 256). Newcomb was making his claim in the context of an appeal to the central question for the humanities- based study of television of his day, i.e. whether it was worthy of formalist (or any) textual analysis, as opposed to behavioral research or generic condemnation. For Douglas Kellner (1982), television provides “stories which dramatize society’s values, ideals and ways of life; they are enacted in story- telling media.” TV is “the elec- tronic ideology machine” whose formulaic drama series offer “hegemonic ideology for advanced capitalism.” These are generally realist texts, meaning that they have neat aetiological chains, an everyday mise- en-scène, and continuity editing. They are unchal- lenging, familiar, and within everyday cultural competence. But

while some critics always subordinate television drama to the stage and the cinema, the noted playwright and scriptwriter David Hare argues that “the vitality of British film came from television,” spe- cifically its support for one- shot drama and series with a small number of episodes (Billington and Hare 2009).

TV drama has interesting semiological and sociological inter- texts; for instance, police- procedural series draw on signage associ- ated with both earlier shows and public concerns about crime, blended with ideological and interpersonal tropes. The genre

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constructs a viewing position that accepts the state monopoly on the exercise of “legitimate” violence in the protection of private property, private morality, and human safety. Police drama increas- ingly moves between public and private spheres, through officers’ emotions. Whereas 1960s shows concentrated on the social land- scape and professional policing – its public face – programs since then have tended to construct interiority for their characters. Emo- tional tendencies merge with action sequences and office life to produce soap- operatic forms (Tulloch 1990: 69–70, 72). A power- ful instance is Dexter (2006–), where personal and professional lives intertwine inexorably, creepily, and multi- generationally.

For the founding parents of TV production, drama was a familiar genre that could meet the needs of either prestigious or commercial dictates. Despite Gerald Cock, the BBC’s inaugural Director of Television, announcing in 1936 that drama would not be important for the new medium, because people “were already sated with entertainment,” it was one of the first sources of programming for TV. Early dramatic forms included live filming of theatrical plays that were not repeated (and sometimes not taped) – the BBC’s first was Luigi Pirandello’s The Man With

a Flower in His Mouth in 1930; radio serials and novels that were adapted; aged movies no longer earning money in cinemas; live broadcasts from theaters; and collaborations (in the US instance) with major film studios, once they decided to cooperate rather than compete with the industry (Cock, quoted in Giddings and Selby 2001: 14).

This type of convergence, TV’s thoroughgoing reach across media, is part of its capacious warehousing project. So in the US, programs such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–8) were made by studios for television, then edited together to form feature films

(in this case, for overseas release). The ultimate example was Star Trek (1966–9), which became a feature- film franchise in the 1980s and 1990s and generated several TV series (1973–4, 1987–94, 1993–9, 1995–2001, and 2001–5). For decades, the networks bor- rowed from Hollywood by offering made- for-TV movies, until CBS abandoned the genre in 2006 in favor of low- cost alternatives. But they were soon resurrected on cable via the Sci Fi Channel, Lifetime, and Hallmark (Attallah 2007: 327–8; Bourdon et al. 2008: 107; Lowry 2009).