Our experience of television liveness is linked to our encounter with “unscripted” affective moments, when words fail and something else breaks through: gasps, pauses, silences etc. Television forms reluctant alliances with such “authentic” somatic acts; they can captivate viewers, but they can also become difficult to manage and contain. This affective relationship between media flow and corporeal interruption engages a dynamic of television liveness that is distinct from its traditional usage in theatre performance studies, and yes also relies of performance in ways often ignored by media student scholars.
The possibility of affective liveness remains one of the continuing appeals of television media models, even when those models may no longer be connected to the technology we have historically associated with television.
