Core Response #4 - Larcom

 In this week's readings, I found myself most interested in the back-and-forth between Feuer's piece and Kackman's.  The conversations happening around melodrama, narrative complexity, and the tension between the elitism that celebrates narrative complexity in some textual forms and denigrates it in others—specifically as it relates to a gendered understanding of these forms—felt very topical and relevant to frankly how I approach television viewership as both an audience member and a writer looking for patterns and principles I can apply to my own work. 

Specifically, I found myself interested in Feuer's description of shows that are self-aware and yet do not seem to set out to break their own generic expectations. It's an interesting tension to walk from the creative side of things: you have to be aware of the genre you're writing in any time you're working on a story, but how much do you shirk convention? And how do you approach either your subversion of or your adherence to generic expectation: earnestly, or ironically? All of this contributes to the relative "complexity" with which a work will be viewed, and as Kackman discusses in his piece, the perceived complexity of a work of television often heavily contributes the relative "quality" with which audiences receive it.  (Obviously, it's not the only factor—some heavily complex narratives miss the mark of quality by virtue of becoming convoluted, confusing, or murky.) 

Feuer focuses in her piece on soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty, while Kackman focuses largely on what we might call some of the earlier "prestige" shows—Lost, mainly, but others such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Wire secondarily. There's a considerable gulf between how these two groups of shows are regarded: the latter considered closer to a cinematic experience, a more elitist brand of television, while the former is a much more debased and disregarded brand of television. Kackman points out that a more male-driven, patriarchal focus helps Lost and shows of its ilk to land in the world of elite television, compared to shows like Dallas. 

Melodrama as a generic form and its inherent complexity feed both "types" of television that Feuer and Kackman discuss. From the perspective of a creative, it's interesting to peel back the layers and find a somewhat unifying generic form that connects otherwise fairly disparate programs from one another, and one that's applicable to the work I do as well.