Week Ten – Reality TV – Origins and Contexts

Reality TV is, “a catch-all category,” that includes a range of entertainment programmes about, “real people” (Hill, A; 2005). The idea of the real is paramount to many of the shows considered a part of the genre and, “this access to the real… presented in the name of dramatic uncertainty, voyeurism, and popular pleasure,” (Ouelette, L and Murray, S; 2009) in turn have become a marketing tool for these shows.

The genre, “is located in border territories, between information and entertainment, documentary and drama,” (Hill, A; 2005) with documentary in particular being an important relationship. These types of shows, “associations with documentary… [and] hybridisation of fictional and factual programme styles,” allow its intersection with everyday life and ordinary people (Kavka, M;2012). One Born Every Minute (2010) fits within lifestyle programming, appealing primarily to women and expectant mothers. By analysing the story and production elements of Season One, Episode Four, we can gain a further understanding of why the show can be considered a docu-soap through such things as characters, interviews, narrative, camerawork, and editing.

The show’s subject matter is expecting mothers and their families coming into the hospital’s labour ward, ordinary people as they go through an extraordinary experience. The show is built around these visiting characters, the nurses merely acting as hosts to the show adding there accounts when relevant. The show is structured to make a form of entertainment through the different relationship the viewer has with the families and the nurses. Characters are also used to contrast on each other, for example in this episode we meet Joy, Kelly and their families. Kelly’s family is quite unconventional with their relationship and she’s familiar to the process of childbirth becoming pregnant at seventeen. Tensions are then built by contrasting Joy and Fabio, two immigrants with no extending family and a wealth of money, but their inability to have a child for many years until IVF finally worked underlies how precious this birth is to them.

Consequently the narrative is very character based and the show uses parallel stories, like many other Reality TV shows, to reveal the underlying ideal that the show is fundamentally not around birth at all but more so the relationships that are achieved and tested in the process. For example, the point of connection with the new mid-wife on the ward delivering her first child and Joy giving birth to her first child. There is also a rhythm to the show in relation to drama, as we have spent more time with Joy in her many days on the ward we become anxious for her when she finally goes into the theatre; while we only meet Kelly half way through the episode and her presence doesn’t resonate quite as much.

To further this notion of reality the main interviews don’t appear staged, though there are some moments where there’s an interview of family members, such as Kelly’s sister, that have been staged for either dramatic effect or to further establish the broader family role. Camera style then follows with fixed camera angles, high angles to depict the hospital walls and slow motion shots. This adds a voyeuristic feel to the scenes and makes the viewer feel as though we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be, with everyday CCTV and family home interviews an obvious influences to these shots. The editing of these shots also works to condense time and space so that the piece has rhythm.

Music is used to weave from action to action and to allow emotional connection through events, for example we hear the lullaby-ish music as when Joy goes into the operating theatre to further the emotion the pair feels. Otherwise the lack of music creates pauses between dialogue as you would hear in reality. Dialogue is also used to further establish the characters we are watching, such as Joy’s continued disbelief of “the whole hand” and comments to Fabio on him eating “half a kilo of yogurt” adding some well needed breadth in scenes. Furthermore, when interviews or music is not occurring there’s sometimes the use of voiceover to keep the viewer up to date on the narrative.

One Born Every Minute demonstrates how a show can be layered through different forms of narrative elements to achieve its genre. The show exhibits how Reality TV can take on a documentary style to illustrate itself as real, with the existence of these types of shows as a way to maintain an understanding of difference between the real and mediated.

References

Hill, A 2005. Reality TV: Audiences And Popular Factual Television, Routledge, London & New York, pp. 1-14.

Kavka, M 2012.Reality TV, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 1-13.

Ouelette, L and Murray, S 2009. Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, New York University Press, New York & London, pp. 1-20.

Week Eight – The Poetics of Complex Narrative

HBO has built a brand identity and status around series that are distinguished by complex narratives, with shows such as The Sopranos (1999), Six Feet Under (2001), Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999), The Wire (2002) and Game of Thrones (2011) examples of this. By looking at the pilot episode of HBO’s latest, “Sunday night crime drama,” (Hale, M; 2014) True Detective (2014) we can see how, “complex television employs a range of serial techniques,” with the underlying theory that, “a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time, rather than resetting back to a steady-state equilibrium at the end of every episode” (Mittel, J; 2014).

The show traces two Louisiana State Police Criminal Investigations Division homicide detectives, Detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Detective Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) in their search for a serial killer across seventeen years. The show takes on a stereotypical police procedural shell and then hybrids this genre in the forms of thriller, drama and southern gothic to form an immersive story world that help lure the audience in. Through this world the show demands, “intensified viewer engagement focused on both diegetic pleasure and formal awareness” (Mittell, J; 2014) and requires a form of deep attention from the viewer. The framework of the show is not anything new, with the pilot episode setting up a ritualistic murder of a woman, to which Cohle suspects a serial killer and no one but Hart believes him. But what is innovative is the shows, “chilly, restrained mood of foreboding,” the narrative (Hale, M; 2014). This aspect is partly achieved due to the anthology format of the series, meaning that each season there is a different cast of characters and story, therefore blurring the line between cinema and television as the show occurs more like a mini-series. Furthermore, the long-form and plot narrative also mean each episode doesn’t necessarily guarantee some sort of ideological closure or reassurance for the viewer, thus allowing their engagement with the show to exist over the series rather than a single episode.

Complex narrative can be viewed in terms of a mode of television storytelling that is orientated around the narrative events of kernels and satellites as a way to connect and give importance to events within the narrative. We can view the partnership between Cohle and Marty as a kernel, a, “narrative moment[s] that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events,” and are central to the cause-and-effect of the plot; as it’s their relationship that is key to the development of this case and story. While something like Cohle buying drinks for the women at the bar can be seen as a satellite, “a minor plot event,” that can be deleted without disturbing the logic of the plot, “though the omission will… impoverish the narrative aesthetically” (Chatman, S;1978) as it develops Cohles character and lost-hope view on life. Satellites are therefore more about an idea of texture and tone in the world building of the show, in order to, “complet[e] the kernel… [and] form the flesh on the skeleton” (Chatman, S; 1978).

True Detective’s skeletal core resides in the story being told in, “two tracks: in 1995, when Cohle and Hart begin their investigation, and in 2012, when the case has been reopened, and both are being questioned by a second set of detectives” (Hale, M; 2014). Through this use of temporal structure, clues are gathered surrounding the original case in 1995 and the audience begins to be shown what went wrong with it. The pilot episode differentiates these two tracks with the differences in characters – Cohle is physically different having grown a beard and Marty being agitated as he talks about his relationship with Cohle – and in the aesthetics of the filming – with the footage being grainy to emulate a police interview video. Throughout the episode we keep going back to these roomed interviews and it’s not until we enter the room through the lens of the detective’s camera that we are placed in the present space with Cohle. The use of fractured time lines and the neglect to situate the viewer in these moments give the show depth and alludes to the complex relationship these two men have.

Distinctive of the show is only having two key character stories driving the narrative, which is reinforced by the female characters not really having established characters but being cardboard cut-outs for the main characters to interact and have another form of relationship with. This idea of masculinity is significant of the HBO brand, along with the high production values of the show making it cinematic in style. The show’s use of space is particularly filmic, from divided Police office sets and broad landscapes, displaying the broken humanity in a wrecked America.

The pilot episode of True Detective is exemplary of how complex narrative elements can come together to make a show quality television. Through the use of such things as fractured time lines, a hybrid genre and cinematic aesthetics, the show identifies and markets itself as a multifaceted engagement all about the journey and not the destination.

References

Chatman, S 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Cornell Univeristy Press, United States of America, pp. 53-56.

Hale, M. ‘A Coupling as Bizarre as the Murder: McConaughey and Harrelson Star on ‘True Detective,’ on HBO,’ The New York Times, 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/arts/television/mcconaughey-and-harrelson-star-in-true-detective-on-hbo.html?_r=0, October 2014.

Mittel, J 2014, ‘Complex TV’, Media Commons Press, http://mcpress.media-commons.org/complextelevision/complexity/, October 2014.

Week Six – Audiences and Matters of Taste

Standing in the cereal aisle at the supermarket it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the shelves and the abundance of breakfast items to choose from, everything down to the minuscule details of toasted without fruit or non-toasted with fruit muesli. We live in a world governed by taste and the ideal that we as an audience think we have the ability to choose, however what we should never forget is in the end it’s all just muesli.

The idea of taste is a natural thing that we create and develop as humans throughout our lives and pop culture plays into this in terms of forming identities. Therefore, identities can be defined and reinvented through what you buy and what you associate with. By associating yourself with watching certain shows you build an identity that, “distinguishes [you] in an essential way,” to be an individual, but also, “whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others” (Bourdieu, P; 1984).Through this taste becomes about the lines of cultural knowledge, with television determining desirable and undesirable forms of culture through the types of shows being watched. For example there are the high-end HBO productions compared to the low-end reality television shows, this division continually becoming more blurred within today’s contemporary television landscape.

Bourdieu notes that as taste is a product of conditionings associated with a particular class of condition of existence, “it unites all those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing them from all others” (Bourdieu, P; 1984). Audiences display their taste through the cultural formation of fandoms, providing cultural place for those who have the same taste in television. Vampire and horror genres of television have culminated the formation of fandoms since the gothic-soap Dark Shadows (1966) and their cult following allows for associative audiences. However, the vampire and gothic genre, “is not generally associated within popular culture with notions of quality, but rather with cult film, trash culture and juvenile audiences,” and this was the calculated risk  well-known quality television network HBO took when it released its flagship programme for 2008 True Blood (Abbott, S cited in Cherry, B; 2012).

True Blood contest genre conception by taking the undesirable forms of culture and presenting them in a HBO tasteful way, seen in, “a number of factors in production of the series,” which has developed the shows, “status as cult TV” (Cherry, B; 2012). It is seen as one of HBOs most controversial shows; “free from the constraints normally imposed on mainstream television” the show employs, “liberal amounts of sex, violence and swearing as well as serious or adult themes in an artful and stylised package” (Cherry, B; 2012). The most fitting example of this “artful and stylised” package can be understood through the opening credit sequence where the show is overviewed through a broader and more abstract context. The sequences not only conceptualises the show at the beginning of each episode, it also acts to encode certain ideals applicable to the show to demonstrates the type of decoding audience the show is appealing to.

The opening credits work so that the initiation of the sequence is not at the beginning of the show, but after an introductory plot development so that the episode can be re-contextualised to the reality the credits ensue. The images are eerie and dark, with the juxtaposition of life and death, and a mix between the historical world it references and the story world the show is about remains depicted and contested. Southern subject matter such as images of forests, swamps, crocodiles and desolate landscapes are prevalent within the sequence, conveying the genre of Southern Gothic layered in the shows episodes and the importance of place within the show as a way for the audience to understand the setting and people. This idea of the south is further achieved through Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” (2005) interpretation of country music with a Southern soul music base. The aesthetic style uses grainy shots, time lapse delays and documentary footage giving the shots a scientific and naturalistic enquiry as a way to relate the viewer. The piece also juxtaposes life and death in a way to pull the two together to illustrate how they’re not that different, for example the red fox decomposing, a link to the undead being an eminent trait of vampires. There is also a sprout of sexuality and death, with the show being driven by exploring what and how things happen when violence and sexuality collide as a contrast between natural processes and their unnatural ramifications.

The opening credit sequence doesn’t outwardly connect the following show to the subject matter of vampires, but instead offers a general emotion and feeling to symbolise the show itself. Therefore by solely analysing this reoccurring sequence we can further understand how taste culture influences audiences to be active in decoding their choices in television, with True Blood being an example of a show that deliberately encodes overt social issues.

References

Bourdieu, P 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press, United States of America, pp. 1-63.

Cherry, B 2012. True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic, I.B. Tauris, London & New York, pp. 1-38.