Discourses on Series - Text 1
The distribution of videocassettes is rooted in a logic of selling or collecting films or television series as products, unlike the idea of a televised flow. The transformation of modes of consumption, with the fragmentation of the television channel landscape in the 1980s, had an influence on production, particularly in the case of fictional series. These moved towards greater personalization of the experience, making possible the creation of programs conceived for more diversified audiences. More precisely, however, how were these technological changes tied to greater programming diversity or even to their growing complexity? Let’s look first at the context through discourses on television series, where we will find arguments around differentiation, complexity and quality.
According to Derek Kompare,[1] the concept “publishing flow” has gradually come to replace the idea of televised flow,[2] promoting the consumption of broadcasts as collectible objects, a process which began with the VHS and which continued with the DVD.[3] In the 1990s, television studies began to speak of the possibility of treating television series as products worthy of aesthetic analysis, highlighting the role of scriptwriter-producers in creating worlds and characters and the interpretative participation of audiences. In these discourses can be found intertwined the concepts “auteur television,” “quality television” and “narrative complexity.”
In 1997, Robert Thompson[4] proposed a periodization of television fiction, describing his own time as a “second golden age” characterized by new investment in scriptwriting and directing and by the networks’ desire, in the context of society’s transformation, to broadcast content distinct from their basic programming. In his analysis of the press’s infatuation when television became an experience which included a search for “distinction,” Thompson showed that the networks were trying to promote the idea of an author, one tied to that of the creative act as an exception. These discourses contributed to defining the new contours of a television age and the popular reception of products. Thompson quotes several journalists who see the exceptional quality of these programs as essential, using terms such as “quirky” to define series such as Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure. Thompson demonstrated that the formal and narrative innovation of these programs gradually became a norm, despite the surprise they caused and the initial resistance to them.
Kristin Thompson, also taking Twin Peaks as her starting point, speaks of “the art of television,”[5] showing that narrative practices encourage reception of the product more as a work than as a program forming part of a flow. The possibility of conceiving a television series as separate from the rest of the programming goes hand in hand with the narrative practices, technologies and forms of reception (and of marketing) which make up an artistic product, which moreover are increasingly addressed from an aesthetic perspective by specialists.
