TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS The most durable dramatic form borrowed from radio has been

86 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS The most durable dramatic form borrowed from radio has been

the soap opera and telenovela. John Tulloch says the special intimacy that audience members experience in successful soap opera exem- plifies a myth being taken up by a commercial cultural apparatus “to provide social order at times of cultural crisis” (1990: 58). In many parts of the world, soaps/novelas have normalized extra- marital sexual pleasure, same- sex relationships, health issues, and gender politics. They have been likened in their barometric sensi- tivity to “the nineteenth- century weekly sermon to a packed con- gregation” (Graham 2000: 7). Their visual styles coalesce with their narrative concerns. Interior sets and close- ups of people in pairs with pastel colors surrounding them synchronize with plot lines about emotional interiority and the circularity of love. Neither is ever really individual and neither can ever conclude, in that both the genre and actual emotional life lack obvious closure (Curti 1988: 153–4, 157–9). Viewers are more likely to chat about soaps and draw on them to think about everyday life than other genres, whether the subject matter be marital frustration versus televisual romance, TV glamour versus suburban dross, or a raft of social issues (“Women’s Favorites on TV” 2009; Brown 1990; Ang 1982).

What about so- called quality drama, prime- time “event” televi- sion that addresses major historical themes and is rarely spun into lengthy series over many years? The efflorescence of the detail- rich, sociology- poor, anally- retentive, period- piece British TV drama of the late 1960s and since – what Rupert Murdoch (1989) haughtily calls “drama run by the costume department” – was tied to a realization on the screen of past days of class equanimity, thereby redirecting attention from the political economy of the present (for a rather kinder appreciation, see Giddings and Selby

2001). But when it took hold, historical drama was extraordinary in its purchase. In the UK, major mini- series that embodied these issues included The Forsyte Saga (1967), The First Churchills (1969), and The Pallisers (1974). Adaptations of British novels and histories proved so popular in the US that heroic reconstructions of a lost Englishness became a means of garnering export sales even if they drew opprobrium for faux- historical, elite foci.

A strong contrast comes with Britain’s Days of Hope, a 1975 mini- series about working- class politics from World War I through

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to the General Strike. It was made by committed Marxists Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, and Jim Allen, who hoped contemporary viewers would interpret the series in the light of class struggle in 1970s Britain. This led to an unparalleled debate about the value of socialist realism as a means of laying bare complex social issues, versus commitments to the avant garde that thought conventional narratives could never radicalize their audiences, due to the reac- tionary nature of dramatic conventions that position spectators as perfectly knowledgeable. The debate thrived for five years in the columns of Screen and Edinburgh ’77 Magazine (see Bennett et al. 1981: 305–52).

In the US, Roots (1977) and Holocaust (1978) were massively successful, profoundly political US mini- series about slavery and the Holocaust, the greatest contradictions of the Enlightenment apart from misogyny and private property (Turnock et al. 2008: 192–3). Stuart Cunningham’s work on historical mini- series of 1980s Australian TV argues for a high level of aesthetic and polit- ical sophistication in such long- form drama. Engaging The Dismissal (1983) and Vietnam: The Mini- Series (1987), he argues that these sprawling yet condensed narratives displaced a fixation with events through attention to causes and outcomes. At their best, they made for “an unparalleled upgrading of the terms within which historical information and argument is mediated through mainstream televi- sion,” dealing (in these instances) with the political backdrop to a CIA- backed coup and conflict within a high- profile family during an unpopular war.

A multi- perspectival element was provided by the Bildungsroman- like “multiplication of authorising perspectives.” Vietnam: The Mini- Series explained a nation torn apart inside the microcosm of a family by simultaneously engaging maturational questions and his-

torical debates. It imbricated the self and the social at sites of inter- personal and political disagreement and negotiation that interpellated the engaged citizen rather than the “distracted con- sumer” (2008). Albert Moran argued: “[t]he central strategy of the Australian historical mini- series is to portray the development of national consciousness inside emergence of an individual con- sciousness” (1989: 252).