TIPTOE

Week 1 and 2

Week 2, 3 and 4

Week 5 and 6

Week 6, 7 and 8

Week 8 and 9

Week 9

The first thing I notice when I look at all the pages of my TV diary is that I mostly watch TV alone. Before diving into why I watch TV alone, I want to talk about why I watch so much TV.

First of all, I would state TV as my number one hobby/interest. I watch TV when I want to relax. It is a pleasurable and positive experience for me. Second, I watch TV for university and study. I do a lot of assignments about TV programs, I reference a lot of TV programs in my media making, and I obviously take TV Cultures, so watching TV is pretty paramount. I watched Weeds this semester because it is created by Jenji Kohan, who created Orange Is The New Black (which I did my presentation on), and I watched Oz because it is a prison drama, which also relates to my presentation. Third, I watch TV for career purposes. I want to work in TV, so I need to know TV. I watch TV programs that I have worked on, and I share these programs with my friends and family. Finally, I watch TV as art. I consume and enjoy TV like someone would with a book, or a painting, or a film. I love TV, I live TV (I am TV… lol).

So, why do I watch TV alone? To be perfectly honest, the people around me do not take TV as seriously as I do. That sentence sounds arrogant, but go back to the paragraph above where I detail how TV is my life.

The people I live with, they work,, they study, and they do the things that relax them like calling their family or listening to music. As you can see in week 8 and 9, I started watching Oz with my boyfriend, Doug. I found this amazing, because Doug doesn’t watch TV (at all), but he got really into Oz when I started. But that lasted a three days. He went back to university and work, and I couldn’t wait for him anymore. I have no patience when I am watching a program. I start from the beginning, and I have to finish it, and I can’t waste anytime because all I want to do is to watch it. Everything I watch, I binge-watch. I don’t really have another way of watching TV (unless it’s The Bachelor where I don’t really have a choice).

Another reason why I watch TV alone is because of my available technology. When I lived in a sharehouse with a TV, I would watch network TV and DVD box sets with my housemates, but I would also stream TV and watch it in my room alone. When I lived in a house with just Doug, a TV and no internet, I got into Masterchef because it was on nearly every night, and I would watch whatever was on, usually alone. Now I live in an apartment with no TV and great internet, and I stream everyday. Because I watch TV on my laptop, usually in bed, it is a one-person affair.

Do I mind watching TV alone? No. I do most things that I enjoy alone. But I didn’t always watch TV alone. When I was a kid, I would watch TV with my family. We would eat dinner and watch cartoons together (The Simpsons, Naruto, anything on Cartoon Network). I started consuming media alone during the summer holidays when I would borrow a bag full of movies from Video Ezy and binge watch rom-coms, comedies and TV series. Then, when I moved out of home and into a boarding school, that’s when I started streaming and binge watching TV. Every since then, living as my own person, often alone, I find watching TV comforting.

So, there are my TV habits. Enjoy.

I binge-watched Oz this semester because I did my presentation on the Netflix prison drama, Orange Is The New Black, and I wanted to watch something of the same genre to compare it to. I ended up loving Oz and procrastinated a lot of assignments because of it.

Oz (1997-2003) is an american prison drama television program. It was the first one-hour original drama made for the premium cable network HBO. As many people know, HBO is synonymous with the idea of ‘quality television’, and the network is branded as such. For this blogpost I will be discussing Oz and the concept of quality television.

Quality television can be defined by many different things (style, content, genre), but it is important to note off the bat that there will always be an element of taste involved in the evaluation of a program’s qualitative values. Everyone has their own distinction of what is ‘high’ vs ‘low’ culture, but there are some shows that the majority agree upon as being ‘quality television’ and are placed in the canon as such. I would argue that Oz is one of these shows, especially in the prison genre, and a great case study to better understand the concept of quality television.

There are some attributes, mentioned in the lecture, that roughly define what it considered to be quality television. A ‘quality’ television program is often attributed to a writer-producer who has authorship over the program. Oz is created by Tom Fontana, who wrote or co-wrote all of the programs 56 episodes. Having one person with great influence over the whole show is likely to have an effect, and I think it provides a sense of consistency across the episodes and season, as there is someone writing with the past and the future of the show in mind. This idea of authorship is linked to the concept of the auteur.

Another quality of quality television is the representation of taboo/difficult or adult subjects. Oz is a very very violent program, as it is set in a maximum security men’s prison. Someone is always getting shanked or starting a fight or getting killed. There is a lot of violent death. There is also a lot of sex, rape and profanity. Oz was able to represent these things because it was on HBO. HBO is able to show explicit content because they are a subscription based network that does not need to censor content to appease advertisers. Representing adult subjects also brings a niche audience that seek this content.

Quality television can also be judged on its narrative. Often there is a slow plot development and an emphasis on building immersive storyworlds. Oz is very immersive because you get to know the prisoners, the staff and the prison politics of Oswald, and the experimental unit where most of Oz is set, Emerald City. It is especially immersive because it is centred on the characters and their relationships with one another (which is a soap opera technique, interestingly enough). Oz sports a talented ensemble cast of characters who live in the prison. These characters drive the narrative through their individual plots that tangle and intertwine with each other. Interestingly, Oz has a narrator, who is the character Hill. Hill lives in the prison, but narrates the action with metaphorical asides and moral messages, often from inside a glass box. Hill is the reason why I started watching Oz, because a friend told me about his character and his role as narrator, and I wanted to see a television program that used this technique. Funnily enough, the choice to have Hill as the narrator is not explained until the last season (trying not to include spoilers).

Because of this focus on character, Oz uses techniques from both the serial and series format of programming. Like a series, the focus is on key characters in a certain location that drive the plot in several directions, but like a serial, there is no breath of relief at the end of each episode. The plots bleed from one episode to the next, with constant complications that take many episodes (or a whole season) to be resolved. In this way, Oz sports a complex narrative that traverses the boundaries between serial and series programming. Although a complex narrative does not constitute ‘quality television’, it is definitely an element that should be considered when evaluating a program and where it sits in relation to other programs.