Core Response #5 by Lewis Brown

My thoughts on the readings are largely disconnected from one another, so I'll break them down by text.

Briefly, on Michael Kackman's notion of the "operational aesthetic": this is a helpful term for thinking through the structure and feel of so much contemporary TV, perhaps more so in the era in which Kackman is writing. One site where I argue it develops, to which Kackman doesn't attend, is the 90's/00's sitcom: the textual pleasures of Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and especially Arrested Development all hinge on a self-conscious writerly sophistication that calls attention to the complexity of its own gags. This operates more one-dimensionally in Seinfeld or Curb, where the self-consciousness tends to lie in augmenting the implausible impact of a seemingly minor event (ex., famously, the marine biologist episode). In Arrested Development this phenomenon is elevated to a highly self-referential cross-episode series of running gags for which the show continues to find scaffolding, the textual pleasure lying in no small part in the fact of a gag's longevity, in the show's capacity to refer back to itself. Buster's affinity for back rubs, teased from the very first episode, is understood on rewatch as a nod to his eventual marine accident that leaves him with a hook for a hand. Kackman's elision here might be useful in that the sitcom format is less easily squared away with the melodrama to which he sees the operational aesthetic as constitutionally indebted; though, that said, there's little to the show (other than it being funny) that would place it outside of melodramatic genre conventions (if anything, this makes me scrutinize the equation of melodrama with familial conflict that Feuer invokes), and it certainly checks Lost's oedipal boxes. The operational aesthetic is to me nowhere more operative than in Game of Thrones, which likewise premises its textual pleasures on a feeling of sophistication following the seasoned (see what I did there?) viewer's grasp of its convoluted lore. This is part of why I can't stand the show: each episode serves only to move the needle a tiny bit on each of the many facets of its narrative construction, offering its viewer a chance to register each of these small actions, taking pleasure and indeed pride in the knowledge they've accrued. Its indebtedness to melodrama is also self-evident. (Speaking of Oedipus...)

The thorniness of genre definitions here brings me to Jason Mittell's article, about which I have little to offer other than to lambast its prose. Mittell's dual invocations of Aristotle and my other intellectual nemesis (behind Anna Khachiyan), Noel Carroll, ground his writing in a classically Platonic philosophical doldrum. I can see it now:
Glaucon: But do genres not likewise inhabit texts?
Socrates: True.
Glaucon: And is this inhabiting not to be understood as a feature of the text?
Socrates: But at what point does it become a feature?
... so on and so forth. This indulgent, hardly comedic exercise is meant in seriousness to point to the crushing abstraction of Mittell's argument (though of course I'm sure it serves its due purpose as the first chapter of a book wherein the arguments, I'm led to imagine, proceed in less abstraction). Perhaps more helpful and to-the-point than my complaint about its prose, I do take partial issue with Mittell's characterization of genres as strictly brought to texts. Though we of course do well to think through their social construction as an ongoing and contingent cultural phenomenon, Mittell risks stripping texts of any agency whatsoever in their positioning with regards to these shifting constructions. Surely (now I sound like Plato) part of how genres are defined and understood resides in the work texts themselves do to play with, provide meaning to, and set or shift the terms of the conventions of a genre in terms of which it's understood. For whatever reason, I kept thinking of the Coens' No Country for Old Men as my counter-point here: maybe it comes to mind because it's such an emphatically self-referential film, a huge part of which resides in its play with genre convention. Its invocation of Touch of Evil does the work of bringing film noir to the text prior to any reader (and if we proceed down the slope of "the reader must understand X in order for Y to be meaningful," as Mittell might have us do, we can piecemeal strip any film of any content of its own), yet the film is at pains to call equally upon conventions of the Western, bringing these genres together as part of its reflexive play. My critique here hasn't brought us any closer to understanding this process in terms specific to TV, a call of Mittell's with which I agree, but I hope it to serve as a corrective for ceasing to attend to the properties of the texts, televisual or otherwise, around which discourses of genre cohere.

This has run long so my thoughts on Jane Feuer's article will be short, but, like Eileen (though interestingly by way of another reading—I guess we all have it on the brain) I found myself thinking quickly about Succession. Again, speaking of Oedipus. I'm not terrifically familiar with Dallas or Dynasty, but the through-line to Succession seems remarkably clear; I wonder if we can characterize (the fundamental ambivalence of?) the three shows' cultural work similarly as well. The (Oedipally inflected) notion that TV melodrama "can never resolve contradictions by containing them within the family, since the family is the very site of economic struggle and moral competition" (16) not only holds true of Succession, it constitutes its fundamental structure. That's part of what, for some viewers, starts to wear by the third season: its terms are unambiguous, the only resolution is in a death that the writers must stave off for the sake of additional seasons. (Not that I'm complaining, though I'm happy they're taking it out to pasture this time around.) No matter how intensely satisfying each of its arcs might be on its own, the viewer understands that "The temporary reconciliation merely portends yet another breach" (16). But putting its form aside, what the show obviously shares with Dallas and Dynasty, as Feuer characterizes them, is its taking a classic family melodrama and setting it in the world of the ultra-rich (at times in American history characterized by this class's ascendance). Certainly Succession, like the reviewers Feuer quotes write of Dallas and Dynasty, allows its liberal viewer a moral offramp in making the abject behavior of each of its characters so readily apparent; one can defend their investment as one of detached judgment of the cruel vanities of the .1%. But to characterize one's spectatorship this way is disingenuous, and runs counter to the identification solicited by the show. If we're led to sympathize with the cater-waiter whose death Kendall's addiction and vanity occasions, we're led to identify with Kendall's guilt more so. It's a self-evidently ambivalent, even bifurcated structure of identification that might pick up on the relationships invited toward the antiheroes of its prestige TV predecessors (Tony Soprano, Don Draper), a comparison nicely elaborated by Eileen's post this week. There's an obvious fascination with sites of extreme power that helps explain the success of everything from The Crown to Succession to Game of Thrones; the candid expressions of failing masculinity to which Eileen draws our attention are one such way into this power's manifestations, they even help the show read more along the lines of a critique than a neutral exposé. (Unlike, ahem, Game of Thrones.) Still, I'm curious how we might characterize the cultural work of Succession other than some sort of psy-op of identification with the wealth criminals who structure our world and its institutions. There are infinitely many differing ways of characterizing the show's success; none of them fully dispense with this idea.

Sorry I didn't read your chapter yet Tara it's optional 👉🏻🥺👈🏻