Whether you’re a fan or not, reality TV has been on the rise over the past 15 years or so. Lifestyle programs, singing competitions, game shows and their ilk are dominating the schedule due to their popularity and inexpensive production costs.

So how has comedy, which was arguably the most popular genre throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, adapted to these changes and continued to engage audiences?

Move over Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier and their like –Umberto Eco’s articulation of “the already said” implies that if we revisit the past (in this case, comedy as a genre that has been lived and enjoyed for decades on television), we must do so with a sense of irony (Collins 1992).

And thus, the cult of the mockumentary is born.

A hybridised genre that combines the stylistic conventions of documentary with fictional content, the mockumentary generally carries postmodern traits of pastiche humour and self-reflexive satire (Collins 1992). Its hyperconscious nature challenges the fundamental issue of documentary’s relationship to truth, and usually emphasizes the irony of realistic, lived situations.

Classic and celebrated examples of the mockumentary include Zelig (1983) and This is Spinal Tap (1984), as well as more contemporary texts such as Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008). Evidently, the ‘mockumentary’ style also serves as a vehicle for horror and thrillers, challenging perceptions of reality and creating a more immersive atmosphere through its ‘fly-on-the-wall’ viewpoint.

Generally, a mockumentary will make use of interviews, location shooting, handheld camera techniques and natural lighting to capture a ‘cinema verite’ style. But it will also use fictional characters and narratives, and directed scenes and scripts in its pursuit of a fictional story.

The Office is one of the most successful mockumentary series to date and uses the mockumentary style to cast irony over issues in the workplace and individuals within institutions. Originally produced for the UK’s BBC, it has spawned a variety of transnational remakes in America, Chile, Germany, France, French Canada, Israel and Brazil.

Depicting the everyday lives of office workers, the show befits a “docusoap” genre that is driven by personal relationships. In the American version, the romantic relationship between Jim and Pam predominantly drives the series, as does Dwight’s never-ending quest for Michael’s approval.

But at the heart of the show is the cringe-worthy boss, Michael Scott. His failed attempts at developing true friendships with his co-workers (cue the awkward “WAZAAAA!” scene with Jim) and deluded sense of value in the office (he owns a ‘World’s Best Boss’ mug… that he purchased himself) pit him as an insecure, unfulfilled and embarrassing character – so heartbreakingly and pitifully hilarious, but somewhat endearing.

In its style, the show utilises a number of documentary elements that challenge our expectation of reality by leaving in imperfections, such as shaky camera footage and soft-focus shots. Scenes are often shot from behind blinds to enhance our sense of being ‘on location’, peering in on the situations. Actors often look directly into the camera, and are also shot in interview formats against plain backgrounds as ‘talking heads’.

In this presentation of the office setting, the show also highlights and satirises the bleak reality of corporate life. Cutaway low-angle shots of the office use a bland monochromatic colour palette of browns and greys, with the droning sounds of printers and phones in the background. Paired together with Jim’s quote “I’m sorry, I’m actually boring myself” when he speaks about his work makes fun of the quotidian and generic nature of office work.

The Office also emphasizes way in which the mockumentary format can be appropriated for transnational audiences and tastes. For example, David Brent, the boss in the original UK version, is more self-deprecating and bitter, whereas Michael Scott carries a sense of endearing naivety. As such, the American version offers some relief from all his awkwardness and socially inappropriate behaviour, while the UK version leaves you suspended in the relentless shame of David Brent’s wicked sense of humour.

Overall, The Office reflects a successful reshaping of the traditional comedy, that has appropriated it for a postmodern context. It demonstrates that the TV format trade is applicable to fiction as well as reality TV. And it’s bigger and better than ever…

THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!

 

 

Collins, J. 1992 ‘Television and Postmodernism’ in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Allen, RC,  2nd ed, UNC Press, Routledge

 

Reality TV is the double-edged sword of 21^st century broadcast television. It’s often criticized for exploiting and humiliating individuals, relentlessly pushing commercial objectives and presenting misleading constructions of proposed “realities”.

But reality TV is also indubitably popular, and an inexpensive format that has kept afloat an ailing broadcast industry that can’t afford to produce the plethora of fictional content that once reigned supreme. Proving most popular (and profitable) of late is the transformation narrative.

With roots in documentary-style TV, transformation narratives evidence drastic changes to the lifestyles of “real life” individuals. We see people supposedly becoming healthier (The Biggest Loser), more beautiful (Extreme Makeover), environmentally conscious (Eco House Challenge), famous (The Voice) – the list goes on.

These shows address the modern practice of identity-making (Jagose 2003), and improving oneself through a process of learning, adapting, and ‘improving’. Often, these transformations are underpinned by commercial imperatives and product placements, alerting viewers “to the existence of more products and services for their utility in the endless project of the self” (Bonner 2003). The proposed ideals are often endorsed by an ‘everyday expert’ who serves as the guiding voice for the transformation. And overall the programs advocate “responsible self-government” and promote normative models of the “good citizen” (Rose 1989) by constructing character arcs that draw on personal stories to educate and influence audiences (Lewis 2009).

World’s Strictest Parents is a particularly notable example of the transformation narrative. It carries particular pedagogical and ideological lessons for the viewer about behavioural ideals in teenagers and disciplinary approaches to parenting. Originally produced by the BBC, it has reaped the benefits of the transnational television format trade and been adapted to American, Australian, Danish, German and Polish versions.

The show follows a particular formula to demonstrate the transformation of its central characters from rebellious teens to respectful young adults.

In one particular episode of the show’s Australian version, we’re introduced to the two Australian teenagers, with rock and roll and hip hop music setting the scene for rebellion. The voiceover introduces us to “party girl Thea” as shaky hand-held camera footage shows her drunkenly running amok in her hometown and yelling in her mother’s face that she is a “lousy mum”. As her mother’s voice expresses concern over her daughter, we see footage of Thea crossing train tracks – invoking connotations of a kid (literally) from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. Similar conventions are used to introduce Corey, with voiceover anecdotes telling of his drug overdose as we see visuals of him moping around his hometown, using low-angle shots to emphasise his bad attitude as he snarls down at the camera.

The show then uses a variety of techniques to contrast the kids’ lives in Australia with the strict, hard-line lifestyles of their new American setting. When we first see Laval (the American dad whose custody the teenagers are in throughout the episode), he and his family are still and stony-faced, filmed in sweeping low-angle shots to represent their steadfast, militant attitude towards parenting and family life. Their hard-line approach is reinforced by non-diegetic military drum music as Laval addresses the kids, and tells them they’re “representing their country”. This reinforces the nationalistic ideals that are often perpetrated through transformation narratives, and their culturally specific values.

Fast editing is used to rapidly connect the long list of rules described by the school principle, enhancing the sense of overwhelming order and structure the kids face in their new environment. Each of these techniques are intended to contrast the ideals of the central characters, dramatizing their differences and the conflict that ensues.

An integral shift in Thea and Corey’s attitudes comes when they read letters from their mothers. The show shifts between the kids’ and the parents’ voiceover readings of the letters, to reiterate their reconciliation. Slow piano music and visual fade ins/outs emphasise the emotional and social transformation the kids are undergoing, while voiceovers drive the plot by articulating internalised transformations of their attitudes that have resulted from their time abroad.

The many references in these voiceovers to being “a better person” reiterate the ideological objectives of the show, in advocating manners, perspective and understanding amongst youth.

Although the show doesn’t necessarily carry many commercial objectives, its particular styles of editing, modes of address, narrative organisation and use of music certainly advocate lifestyle choices that perpetuate ideals of parenting, social behaviour and national identity.

 

Bonner, FJ 2003, Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV, Sage, London

Jagose, A 2003 ‘The Invention of Lifestyle’ in Interpreting Everyday Culture, ed. Martin, F. Bloomsbury Academic

Lewis, T 2009 ‘TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover’

Rose, N 1989 ‘Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self”, London, Routledge

 

‘It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’ – to be honest, I think the catchcry of the once prestigious and unique US cable channel is wearing pretty thin these days. You don’t have to look far to realise there’s a lot more competition out there in the world of ‘quality TV’, and simply because a show is ‘HBO’ doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a step above anything produced by AMC or Showcase or even the networks for that matter.

But still, it pays to take a look at where the HBO brand sits in the face of this relatively new competition and take stock on how big an impact it’s had in perpetrating the idea  of ‘quality TV’.

HBO’s Girls is one of my favourite shows from the last few years. It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s provocative, and expectedly so. After all, HBO has been hailed for its take on niche topics and taboo culture in the 1990s, smashing down barriers with controversial prison drama Oz, iconic comedy Sex and the City and gangster drama The Sopranos. As a subscription television service, their groundbreaking original series were exempt from the usual FFC regulations imposed upon the networks, meaning fewer restrictions on nudity, language and adult themes and greater creative freedom.

Embracing the creative freedom offered by the subscription TV model, HBO utilised it as a point of brand differentiation (Jaramillo 2002). Complex narrative structures and niche programming were unique to HBO and geared towards their niche audiences: a specific class of people who could afford the subscription service. As such, the HBO brand was about cultivating a sense of high-brow programming, that is smart, complex in form, rich in auteur style and innovative (Mittell 2009).

Arguably a classist model, the HBO brand has been satirised for speaking to a particular market of wealthy white people, who like to kick back with a glass of wine on the weekend and indulge in their “critically acclaimed, low-rated, shown-on-premium cable” TV shows.

But if this is true of the HBO brand, then how and why does Girls appeal to their niche audience?

Are a bunch of upper-class, middle-aged white-folk really interested in a show about twenty-something Brooklyn hipster chicks?

I’d say sure, why not?! The beauty of HBO’s niche programming is that it doesn’t really seem to matter what the genre is, or what the series considers, so long as it’s innovative and well-executed, it will find a market. And particularly in a landscape of pirated television and illegal downloads, which are in fact being attributed as a major factor in the proliferation of HBO’s brand and the success of their shows, it would seem crazy to neglect the very demographic responsible for this particular mode of consumption of HBO’s programming: Gen Y.

Girls is a ground-breakingly fresh representation of hipster culture in the 21^st century. Creator and lead actor Lena Dunham’s writing and performance perfectly captures the concerns of her character in way that represents broader issues that specifically face Gen Y.

In the very first scene of the series, her character Hannah is confronted by her parents’ news that they will no longer financially support her. She rebuts with the argument that she works hard, she just can’t make any money from her writing yet, and points out the bleak state of the American economy at the time. Overeducated, unemployed and compelled to work for free, Hannah tries with no success to explain why she can’t yet support herself financially if she’s going to continue to follow the career she’s working towards. Throughout the episode, she experiences conflicts relating to family, friendship, careers, sex, love and drugs – none of which are sugar-coated, which is the essence of HBO’s no-bars-hold ‘brand’ of programming.

It is a comedy, but I’d have to concede that it more so fits HBO’s claim to genre by perpetrating brazen, innovative narratives that trump traditional generic conventions.

I have work, and then I have a dinner thing, and then I am busy—trying to become who I am

The conflicts may not be as grandiose as the gangster showdowns in The Sopranos, and the relationship dramas may not be as romantically enthralling as Sex and the City’s Big-and-Carrie saga. But the relationships and conflicts explored in Girls offer an honest, unabashed take on the issues and concerns of a niche demographic in a way that reasserts HBO’s branding and the ideas of ‘quality TV’.

 

 

Jaramillo, D 2002 ‘The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, ‘The Sopranos’, and the construction of a quality brand’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 1, p. 59

Mittell cited in Dunleavy, Television Drama (2009)

TV Cultures – Assignment Cover Sheet [click through!]

Extension granted until 10am, Tuesday 29 October.

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Broadcast television has traditionally been linked to ideas of nationalism due to the role it plays as a cultural technology. By its very nature, broadcast television is localised by the airwaves that transmit its signal, geographically reaching only so far and thus limiting its influence to particular audiences.

While this has historically carried many affordances in developing specific public spheres, modern media practices and technologies have transformed broadcast television such that it has triggered a “deterritorialisation of the imagination” (Appadurai 1996) by expanding and diversifying the global television market. Cross-border satellite TV channels, international and regional news channels, joint ventures between production companies and adaptations of series have transformed television into a transnational medium.

The Bridge (or Broen/Bron as it is known in its countries of origin) is a perfect example of transnational television production and the affordances offered by this globalised medium. A Danish/Swedish coproduction, it encapsulates the ‘Scandinoir’ genre and represents a cultural cross-section of the two neighbouring countries. It also presents a political/crime genre and narrative format that has proven internationally translatable.

From the outset, the show is assigned a transnational identity as it opens with shots of the eponymous bridge at night, with flashes of seedy orange and blue lights. Long shots of the bridge are cut together with shots of Malmö and Copenhagen’s cityscapes and their most famous monuments. The opening credits include both Danish and Swedish languages and therein contextualise its transnational setting.

The night time shots and dark colour palette used in this opening sequence also establish the ‘Scandinoir’ genre of The Bridge. As a genre, Scandinoir depicts crime and detective stories with complex and imperfect protagonists who are “far from simply heroic” (Economist, 2010). They often deal with uncovering political issues in Scandinavia whereby seemingly idealistic social systems are used to mask injustice.

The opening sequence closes in on the bridge, where a body has been found and the two central detective characters meet. This frames the ‘whodunit’ procedural quality of the crime/detective/Scandinoir genre, and then plays with the narrative expectations that come with this generic code.

Throughout the episode, story information is revealed as the detectives uncover the mystery. The plot evolves as a series of questions whereby every answer raises a new question. As such, the series conforms to the characteristics of a complex narrative that is serial yet somewhat episodic in presenting issues particular to each episode.

The Bridge is a critically acclaimed and popular program, and its success can be largely attributed to its specific dealings with transnational issues between Denmark and Sweden – the bridge itself operates as a metaphor for issues in the show. However, it contains narrative and structural elements as a series that transcend cultural specificity and allow for adaptations in other countries.

US network FX has programmed an American version of The Bridge that adapts the story to focus on a similar crime at the American-Mexican border. Sister production companies Kudos and Shine France are also producing an adaptation called The Tunnel, which focuses on the murder of a French politician in the Channel Tunnel between France and the UK.

The international success of The Bridge as an original series and a format/franchise indicates a shift away from the proliferation of American media products across the globe. Once identified as having a “mediacentric capitalist cultural influence which emanated out to the rest of the world in the form of television programmes” (Sinclair Jacka & Cunningham 1996), the influence of American television programs is now balanced in a globalised media economy whereby “non-Western players also actively collaborate in the production and circulation of global media products” (Iwabuchi 2005).

Broen/Bron not only stands as a milestone for Scandinoir as a genre (which usually pertains to literature, such as Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy), but it has also been key in demonstrating the importance of locality and cultural appropriations of media products. As Nacify explains, “globalized culture provides a shared discursive space” wherein media products are localised, domesticated and indigenised according to culturally-specific uses. Thus, Broen/Bron as a media product demonstrates the ability of broadcast television to transcend cultural specificity and proliferate through transnational appropriation in a globalised market.

 

2010 ‘Inspector Norse’, The Economist, 22 March, viewed September 1 2013, <http://www.economist.com/node/15660846>

Sinclair, J, Jacka, E & Cunningham, S. 1996 ‘Peripheral  Vision’, New Patterns in Global Television, Oxford UP

Iwabuchi, K (2005) ‘Discrepant Intimacy: Popular Culture Flows in East Asia’, in Erni, Nguyet & Chua, Keng (eds.) Asian Media studies: Politics of Subjectivity, Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, p.19-36.

Appadurai, A 1996, Modernity At Large, Minnesota UP

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Since the mid-20^th century, television has been a significant fixture of the Australian home – a centrepiece of the Aussie lounge room as families gather ‘round to view some of our greatest televised moments. To name but a few, broadcast television has brought into our homes the first moon-landing, Cathy Freeman’s gold medal win at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and an unforgettable 80’s soap wedding with more bleach jobs and tulle than you can poke a stick at…

Just beeeewdiful!

But it’s not just the remarkable spectacles that have made the Australian television landscape what it is today. The everyday and weekly programming on broadcast TV have not only refined a fundamentally ‘Australian’ market, but have served to bolster and influence our overall sense of national identity through these shared experiences.

Sunrise conforms to Weiten & Pantti’s model of a breakfast show “obsessed with identifying itself with the daily world of the television viewer” (2005). Broadcast live from 6am across Australia’s eastern states and delayed for the nation’s other time zones, it links together a nation-wide audience and unites them through a collective viewing experience. Sunrise’s hosts, live elements and content are specifically catered to a broad but nuanced market of Australian viewers.

Firstly, we have the male/female hosts who represent the nuclear family and fit our Australian tastes for friendly, funny, wholesome parental archetypes.

Male host David “Kochie” Koch is the business analyst and “daggy dad” of the show, known for cracking cheesy jokes and translating the economic reports into layman’s terms for the viewers. Samantha Armytage has recently taken over the chair that was occupied by Melissa Doyle throughout most of the show’s time on air. Blonde, sweet-natured, aged 35-45 and with a tendency to giggle at Kochie’s dorky jokes – they both fit the bill of the stable “motherly” figure.

From chatting about current affairs, to cracking jokes between segments, the hosts are conversational and serve as familiar, upbeat mediators who put a light-hearted spin on the “newsroom” setup. Opening with news headlines, transitioning into a conversational and quotidian welcome from the hosts, taking a turn into a ‘meta’ shot of the new cameramen then switching back to formality by panning across to the weather reporter – Sunrise shifts in and out of formal and laidback styles to strike the right balance between informative news and more personalised entertainment.

The show’s structure and segments are designed such that it becomes a one-stop-shop for viewers as they prepare for their day ahead. It incorporates sports, news, economics, human interest stories and weather and presents them live – a crucial factor for establishing strong relationships with morning audiences (Weiten & Pantti 2005) as it adds to the notion of a “shared experience”.

The show’s use of live graphics also reinforces itself as part of their viewers’ morning routines, in what Ellis calls “a relationship of co-present intimacy” (1992). The banner fixed to the bottom of the screen provides a constant stream of headlines that instantly updates the viewer no matter what time they tune in. It also features weather information and a clock which add to the show’s functionality as a fixture of the everyday Australian’s routine.

Conforming to Benedict Anderson’s theories of imagined communities (1983), the Sunrise audience is united through individual viewing experiences of the same media product despite not having personally met one another. In fact, Kochie’s address to the viewers as “Sunrisers” reinforces the audience as a unified whole and part of the Sunrise “community”.

Ultimately, Sunrise is not a spectacle of nationalism, as with events like the Olympic Games, but rather a subtle, everyday representation and commodification of Australian identity and ideals. The Australianisms adopted by the hosts, their casual mode of address and the nature of the show’s broadcast across the nation each morning define it as a key fixture of our broadcast TV industry – one that represents and unites the nation’s audience as an imagined community.

 

Ellis, J 1992, ‘Visible Fictions: cinema television, video’ 2^nd ed., Routledge, London

Anderson, B 1983, ‘Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism’, Verso, London, p. 1-9

Weiten, J & Pantti M, 2005 ‘Obsessed with the audience: breakfast television revisited’, Media, Culture & Society, 27 (1), p, 21-39