"Do you think I should finish this film?"
"If I may, it's a series."
"No. It's a film, admittedly a bit long, divided into eight pieces."
"If you say so."
This conversation between fictional French director Rene Vidal (Vincent Macaigne, himself playing an exaggerated version of filmmaker Olivier Assayas) and a production insurance representative is highlighted in the trailer for Assayas' Irma Vep series, which premiered on HBO in Summer 2022. Rene's insistence on viewing his second remake of Feuillade's Les Vampires as a feature film is a running gag/discourse starting point in the series, serving as a sly yet obvious metatextual rumination on the placement of Assayas' own serialized remake within the cultural landscape. Yet HBO (as Kackman notes, "It's Not TV. It's HBO.") prioritizes such a discursive formulation in the advertising itself: for a viewer who is plugged into the cultural conversation, Irma Vep's indeterminate medium status becomes part of its appeal and potency. Rene's comments serve as both a textual concern and a marketing meta-text, reflecting its odd position within the post-prestige era, in which commentators waged lengthy classification battles over The Sopranos and Twin Peaks, among others. Assayas is gently poking fun at himself -- while still raising the question of seriality, contemporary television, and "the cinematic." The reception context in which Irma Vep will be interpreted becomes part of the very text itself.
This opening is, truthfully, just a bit of a brainstorming session for what might become a final paper. But as I read Michael Kackman's "Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity," in which he describes Terry Gross' 2007 evocation of The Wire as a program that deserves to be heralded within the "aesthetic context" of cinema, I could not help but think of Irma Vep and this continual concern of medium specificity and classification. Kackman suggests that the need to place "prestige" television and cinema in conversation is indicative of a scholarly return to "elitist aesthetics," taking us away from the previous generation of scholarship's emphasis on "the medium's low cultural value." In this formulation, I think Kackman potentially underemphasizes the degree to which prestige TV is, first and foremost, an industrial marketing tactic -- of course, it's baked into his earliest example, in which HBO suggests that "it's not TV" but something different altogether. But if the rise of "neoformalist evaluative aesthetics of television" in academia responded to the rise of "prestige" television, it is perhaps in large part because the positionality of these series in the marketplace suggested that they demanded such an academic attitude. We have now reached the point where such concerns are now baked into the texts themselves -- an "intertextual aesthetics" perhaps, in conversation with broader discourses on television, cinema, and the continuing collapse? Whether the viewer takes it as a joke or not, the Rene Vidal exchange in the Irma Vep trailer primes the viewer to reconsider what they're watching. Is it television? Is it cinema? Does that present us with a gendered distinction? Does the distinction matter to the spectator?
Naturally, in a streaming era, which emerged well after Kackman's essay, one can ponder what the difference may be between these previously valuable distinctions. Yet as I look back through the readings, I'm continually struck by how endless cycles of conflict over generic labels shares an affinity with these questions of medium categorization, each shaped by factors of marketing, reception, distribution, and Kackman's conceptualization of "legitimacy." If genres are "cultural products," as Jason Mittell indicates in his introduction (1), it should be no surprise that these generic and medium-based debates come with financial and industrial stakes; Kackman notes as much, writing that "quality television" can be seen as "a complicated aggregation of industry discourses" as well aesthetics and audience response. Within the paradigm of "bad objects" and televisual categorization that Kackman alludes to, we see scholarly and industrial conflicts over the application of particular labels. Interpreting Muriel Cantor and Suzanne Pingree's work on the soap opera, Jane Feuer argues that these authors contend that "daytime soap operas are manifestations of women's culture, and prime-time serials are not" (5); in Tara McPherson's article on 24, she notes that creator Bob Cochran was not "eager to have the show labelled as a soap," for presumably the very same gendered reasons that led Cantor and Pingree to their conclusions (175). Kackman, in some fashion, pushes even further, suggesting that the desire to legitimize "quality TV" attempts to convert a formerly feminine form to the more masculinist domain of aesthetic theory and narrative cinema.
The classification of medium or genre comes with built in political stakes, as the readings each explicate. What is so appealing about both Feuer and McPherson's contributions is the notion of hybridity -- or, as Feuer puts, a transcendence of "the distinction between the two forms" (5). For Feuer, there is a "pervasive influence of serial form and multiple plot structure upon all of American television" -- and one could argue, much of contemporary cinema as well, further collapsing hierarchies and distinctions (5). In McPherson's article, 24 signals a "re-masculinisation of serial melodrama via a very particular deployment of both narrative and style," (174). I think this re-masculinisation is profoundly significant, in part because the male melodrama seems to be the quintessential form of popular media in the 2010s and 2020s. Though recent diversification efforts have proven to change the Marvel Cinematic Universe slightly, what is the MCU if not a large-form, serialized male melodrama? Can we even begin to think about the popularity of Top Gun: Maverick without acknowledging that it is a male melodrama in every capacity, one that, like 24, signifies both "a kind of cultural return to the hard-bodied, hyper-masculinity" (180) of Reagan/Bush and a potentially homoerotic complication of said masculinity? Thinking transnationally, what about the massive popularity of RRR?
One might raise an eyebrow at the idea that I have listed exclusively films in this passage. This is a deliberate mode of provocation; if "quality TV," per Kackman, constitutes a "search for legitimacy" that ultimately reifies the "illegitimacy" of television as a cultural practice, I wonder if there is value in a reversal of said practice, one founded on emphasizing that the "good objects" of contemporary pop cinema are now built on the same melodramatic, soap opera structures of serialized melodrama that television is. All franchise filmmaking is, at its core, an exercise in soap opera storytelling and aesthetics. And even the most overtly auteurist projects on television are ultimately bound to the melodramatic structures of seriality that govern not just the medium of television, but serialized narrative, predating either novel technological form. Even as Rene Vidal (and Assayas, by extension) desperately tries to convince himself that he's making real cinema, elevated above the realm of television, he must come to grips with what Feuillade himself was crafting in the 1910s: a serialized melodrama, a soap opera, elevated to aesthetic status by the Surrealists but every bit the "bad object" that television signifies for Rene.
