TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS the complex, the explanatorily powerful and conflictual (1961: 68,
88 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS the complex, the explanatorily powerful and conflictual (1961: 68,
111). That was also said to have been the great power of one- shot television drama, especially in the days when (for budgetary reasons) it was live and dominated by close- ups and dialog. So the TV version of “kitchen- sink” drama and cinema in 1960s Britain encouraged consideration of a class- based society, while 1950s US TV mounted a critique of suburbanization, pointing out the para- noia and violence underpinning the whitest of families sheltering behind their whitest of picket fences.
US network drama supposedly underwent a rebirth when ABC screened Twin Peaks (1990–1). It captured the hypocrisy of every- day middle- class life, turning network television to schizoid critiques with an intense, directly sexual gaze. The first episode drew a third of the US audience. It was instantly hailed as setting new trends and standards, due to the cinematic score, lush visuality, slow pacing, references to classical Hollywood films, and arty authorship via the participation of David Lynch – even as it drew on soap- operatic ensemble casting and indeterminacy alongside these high- prestige elements. Although some critics were puzzled by the show, baby- boomer viewers (many of whom were in the desired demographic group of their thirties) enjoyed its cinematic conceits. Twin Peaks became the most publicly- discussed program on the air, according to network research (Nelson 1992; Lavery 2004; Yehya 2008; Gomery 2008: 331).
Both the socialist realism of a Days of Hope and the avant gard- isme of a Twin Peaks are derided by latter- day pro- business bureau- crats, intellectuals, and critics as too dark, slow, unattractive, gritty, and socio- political. Such condemnations appear in Building a Global Audience, a report commissioned by the Blair Labour Government on how to stimulate export sales of TV shows (Graham and Asso-
ciates 1999). Long- form historical drama was compromised in Western Europe by the dire effects of deregulation and privatiza- tion across the 1980s and 1990s, although some notable series con- tinued, such as the monumental Heimat on German TV (1984–2004). Internationally, the mini- series seemed to die off during the 1990s due to its costs, but in the US it became a suc- cessful source of high- quality drama on both the networks and cable (CBS, NBC, TNT, and HBO) in 2008–9, bolstered by revenue prospects through international and DVD sales, and there
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was a modest revival in France due to public investment (Bourdon et al. 2008: 118–19; de Leeuw et al. 2008: 134; Lowry 2009). The noted Scandinavian film movement Dogma 95, led by Lars von Trier, probably gained its greatest exposure through Denmark’s Riget, a wry mid- 1990s mini- series about medicine that undercut viewers’ bourgeois safety in ultimate omniscience, the certitude that they would “understand” in the end, with all loose ends securely tied and genres clearly distinct (it veered ecstatically from humor to horror). Riget was released in movie form in the UK and the US (Cervantes 2008).
And some lengthy dramatic forms continue. In a country like Finland, with its history of imperial conquest and economic dependency on Russia and Sweden, issues of national identity and economic migration have long formed a core of TV drama, for example Elämänmeno [The Way Life Goes] (1978). The nation’s status as an interstitial borderland caught in the dialectic of pastoral- ism and urbanism has been a central concern (de Leeuw et al. 2008: 135–7; Moring 2009). Or consider US medical dramas. For decades, the staple heroes of these stories were gallant, pioneering, risk- taking surgeons boldly experimenting to keep people alive. From the 1940s to the 1960s, this focus on acute care also charac- terized public policy and the profession, which worked closely with producers to ensure that series accurately reflected their view of medicine going boldly where none had ventured before. As that boosterish emphasis was superseded in policy circles because of inflationary costs and a new emphasis on economies rather than breakthroughs, heroic TV drama fell out of step until the moral ambiguity of such programs as ER (1994–2008), Chicago Hope (1994–2000), and Grey’s Anatomy (2005–). Nevertheless, the sys- tem’s grotesque capitalist inefficiencies remain unaddressed –
healthcare is largely a wonderful, not a wasteful, thing in TV drama (Turow 1989; Turow and Gans- Boriskin 2007; Holtz 2008).
Drama in general continues to be important to public broadcast- ers. In Britain, it accounted for half of ITV’s 2006 evening programs (Ofcom 2007: 31). Pace the fears of the Labour Party’s business friends, challenging drama need not be done within an entirely natu- ralist frame – consider the mixed- genre, deconstructive mélange of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) emerging from the drab- ness of Thatcherite Britain, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic Berlin