Month: October 2015

Throughout the semester I learned about many different concepts and the shows around them. All this while recording the various shows I watch and how I watch them. My TV cultures time-use diary has shown me how much I depend upon the Internet to watch many of my favorite shows. Most of my shows I have downloaded onto my laptop at some point and often I watch them alone with food.. The rise of the digital age has meant that people are no longer content to watch a show that is segmented by adverts (or they simply do not have the time to watch all of their shows during the designated time-slots) and will simply download or “torrent” the shows later and watch them at their own leisure. Some entertainment companies, specifically “Netflix”, took advantage of this trend to create shows that are only available online (e.g. “Orange is the new black”, “House of cards”, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”, “Daredevil”, and others). Vimeo also recently made a show that can only be downloaded or viewed online called “Con Man”, so clearly the “web-series” is a trend that is becoming more and more common. The “web-series” are the types of shows I just listed, the sort of show where the episodes are made for a purely online format, to be primarily viewed on a computer with an Internet connection. While I watch a lot of regular network and cable shows as well web-series, I watch most of them via online.

The reason I download shows isn’t just because of an annoyance of adverts, but also because many of the shows I like to watch just simply don’t broadcast to where I live, or if they do many won’t be shown for several weeks. The number of people that I know who prefer to download shows (as opposed to watching it on scheduled TV) is quite high, especially among students. This is probably because, as similar children of the digital age, it’s purely to watch or binge-watch (watch a lot of a series’ episodes in a short space of time) at their own pace and when they want. This habit of watching shows on laptops instead of TV seems to be spreading into older generations as well. My TV cultures lectures often have screenings on a projector, and the show that is screened comes from a video file on the lecturer’s laptop.

My TV cultures class does exhibit screenings of a few shows, and I do watch “Last Week Tonight” on TV only the next day after its release, so there are a few exceptions. The TV cultures course has introduced me to a number of shows that I otherwise wouldn’t have watched or taken much notice of (like “True Detective”, “Pimp my ride”, and “Documentary Now”), not to mention a number of television concepts that I had only a limited knowledge of (e.g. Docusoaps, Quality TV, etc). However, I only continued to watch one of the shows introduced to me in the screenings (I was already watching “Last Week Tonight” before the course began), the show being “Documentary Now”, and even then I downloaded it.

In conclusion, my enjoyment of the television cultures course is aided by enjoyment of television in general. However, my habits of downloading shows and watching them alone at my own time did not have any relation to my experiences to the course, and it’s unlikely that I am going to change said viewing habits any time soon. That being said, the lectures and tutorials were highly informative and immersive, which I found to be very useful when learning about the various concepts presented. The course also allowed me to research my own information, especially for the “Modern Family” group presentation. Essentially, the television cultures course was a great course to do, it was highly informative, and it was also a very fun course to do. I am grateful for the experience I had.

The “Mockumentary” aka “a fake documentary that pokes fun, or mocks, the documentary genre”, is well known to modern audiences. This is in part to the success and mainstream knowledge of such mockumentary shows such as “The Office” (UK), “The Office” (US), “Parks and Recreation”, and “Modern Family”. The mockumentary genre itself is can be seen as very clearly parody-based, with plenty of irony and satire of documentaries. The characters get into strange situations, jokes are made, but the documentary styles of moving cameras and “talking head” moments (where a character talks to the camera privately).

When the mockumentary genre first came about, it was as a way to poke fun at the large amount of weekly “reality” television shows around, and as such the audience was assumed to know all the tropes and antics of a reality show, and thus able to understand the jokes. The audience understands that while the production is similar to that of a documentary (the use of talking heads, location shootings, voice-over narration, ‘natural lighting’, scene-setting music, etc), they also know that there is a script, a fictional scenario, a use of actors, and that the action is directed and planned beforehand.

Eventually, audiences seemed to want something else in their mockumentaries, and so we got the combination of the mockumentary with the staples of the sit-com (only without a laugh track or live audience), and with that we got a bunch of our favorite shows. Most notably, abc’s “Modern Family”. There are voice-over narrations, fourth-wall acknowledgements (looking at the camera, seeking validation or empathy from the audience), and there are talking head moments. The show questions the content of reality TV and of people’s fascination with the mundane, of ordinary people doing fairly ordinary things.

With “Modern Family” entering its seventh season, we do have to wonder why it has become such a success, with millions of viewers every week, not to mention more than a couple of Emmys. The genre had been around before, and was established in the mainstream thanks to the original UK version of “The Office” and its resulting International remakes (most notably the US version, but also the Canadian, Israeli, Brazilian, French, German, and others). With the pre-established genre and style of the mockumentary already there, the show’s creators made some differences by adding some cute kids and a “nuclear family” (mum, dad, and a couple of kids in suburbia) to give it a classic sit-com vibe (another pre-established genre that an audience can quickly recognize). The show was just the right combination of classic sit-com narratives with the mockumentary style and feel to grab the audience’s interest. People kept watching for the quick jokes and generally funny scenarios and actors.

On top of this, the mockumentary comedies that exist now have something that makes them easier to create; no audience. Before, comedy shows would have a laugh track and tended to be filmed in front of a live studio audience, which meant that the show would have to be shot on a weekly basis while being shown in front of an audience (20-episode seasons for most US shows), hoping to get just the right reaction from said live audience, which no doubt would have been quite expensive to shoot as well. With the mockumentary like “Modern family”, it became easier to simply shoot the entire 20-episode season over a couple of months, working out all the kinks and issues of the lines, shots, and actions during that time on their own sets without worrying about what reaction the audience will have, which is no doubt easier (and cheaper) to shoot and edit.

The mockumentary format is generally just an interesting, fairly new format for television and the modern audience. It’s just new enough to seem nuanced and interesting, but also established enough to not seem too risky. However, as with all genres there will be a bad mockumentary series, perhaps many, to come in the future. For now, though, we as avid TV-watchers can enjoy the mockumentary style (including “Modern family”) for what it is, and interesting, fairly new and amusing genre.

The genre of the “complex narrative” is an interesting one, particularly in the style of the “serial”. A serial is slightly different than a normal TV series. They tend to have a multiplicity of characters to progress the various simultaneous story-lines and create a large, more intricate narrative web where most of the main characters are connected. A good example of the complex narrative as it pertains to the serial is HBO’s “Game of Thrones”.

The series follows a series of characters across a giant medieval-fantasy realm, complete with drama and excessive amounts of sex and violence. Because the show doesn’t just focus on one character’s story-line (Tyrion, Arya, Sansa, Jon, Daenerys, etc), this means that the characters can have more complex histories. Serials aren’t as segmented as much as a normal series. In regular TV, a “one hour” drama is really forty minutes with about twenty minutes worth of ads in various parts in the episode. In a complex narrative serial like “Game of Thrones”, however, a “one hour” drama is much closer to being an hour long, sometimes a bit longer. “Game of Thrones” (or GOT from now on) is also famous for killing off so many central characters (Ned Stark, for example), which continues to add to its usefulness as an example of a serial. It combines the mystery and soap opera style of characters while emerging itself in a fantasy realm, creating a hybrid show. Serials, like GOT, don’t resolve stories over an episode, but rather over a number of episodes, and even over a number of seasons, it seems. They don’t deliver the same tight, concentrated narrative each episode.

The concentrated narrative of the show also means that it is very difficult for a viewer to be “casually” watching the show. An audience member has to pay close attention in order to comprehend the show, especially in terms of story and characters. Sometimes the series (and, indeed, many other complicated narrative serials) needs to be re-watched in order for the viewer to understand or be reminded of everything that is happening or has happened, and to get what the characters are doing. On top of that, the audience is forced to be open to open to mystery and engage with the wide variety of characters in GOT (and other serials) as well as different interpretations of different events from the viewpoints of the different characters. This has caused the show to gain a lot of attention and a wide amount of fans interested in watching and even coming up with theories and ideas about characters secrets, pasts, and futures (sometimes called “fan-fiction). Thoughts as to Jon’s real parentage, if Jon Snow is really dead, what will happen with Jorah’s greyscale, and many other questions and theories.

Obviously, some of the fans look at the books for answers and inspiration for the theories. However, the shows creators have taken several liberties in recent seasons (particularly season 5), having some characters omitted from the show, adding other characters instead, having other characters go on different paths and storylines, meeting each other when in the book they are meant to be miles apart, and killing off at least half a dozen people that are still alive and well in the books. Whatever the reasons for these changes (both the good and the bad changes, although as a fan of the books I hold a stance that the vast majority of changes have been terrible and nonsense) has meant that both the shows fans and the book-readers can create many ideas as to what direction the shows will go, and the fact that the shows are now caught up on the books adds to the mystery of what the characters and story of the show will do next.

Shows like “True Detective”, “Twin Peaks”, “The Walking Dead”, and “Game of Thrones” create a world and scenario that makes people curious and then places in characters that the audiences want to watch to see what happens. The complex narrative of the serial seems to rely on the love, attentiveness, and curiosity of the audience and its fans.