Discourses on Series - Text 2
John Thornton Caldwell, in Televisuality,[6] taking as his starting point series such as Dallas (CBS, 1979-91), Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-89) and Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87) and by expanding his overview to include non-fiction programs, sums up the characteristics of television in the video years and its aesthetic and narrative innovations by the following points: 1) the representation of minority groups; 2) language; 3) innovation on the formal level; 4) the appearance of ensemble casts and night-time soaps; and 5) narrative threads of systematically greater lengths from one episode to the next.
On the basis of these remarks a discourse on the art of television came into being in France by comparing the quality of American series to the poor scriptwriting of French series,[7] for example, or by developing a history of television series devoted solely to American “auteur” series.[8] These works valorized and legitimized the study of television series from a historical and aesthetic perspective by seeking authorship qualities in the programs analysed according to a logic of the unique or the exception, or the exemplary.
In a recent book, Martha Nochimson develops the idea that a modernist poetics emerged in television in the 1990s and 2000s. A specialist in the work of David Lynch, she proposes to speak of “pre-Peaks” and “post-Peaks” periods, with this series constituting a turning point after which television discovered possibilities apart from the purely commercial, which had dominated the industry since the beginning of American television, tied to a logic of formulae and of perfect scripts or characters. Nochimson sees in commercial television the construction of scripts without the possibility of blunders or rubbing out and the creation of solid characters, whereas series such as Mad Men and The Sopranos provide imperfect, hesitant figures whose vision of the world is vast and unstable. She sees in this a kind of “off-track storytelling” (“a radical shift away from traditional beliefs in the inherent meaning of our daily reality represented by closed structures, absolute values, continuity, definitive solutions, certainties, and unified identities”[9]) in which she finds literary and philosophical modernism, making it possible to confer upon these series the status of “narrative art” and thus of “auteur television.”
