Soapy seriality

I have to admit, like many of my other classmates… i was a fan of buffy… for me it was the idea of being a vampire that was so…elusive and “magical”…my close friend was madly in “love” with Angel. (you should have heard her in school, the next day after the episode that Buffy and Angel finally slept together…she was quite literal going on non stop about love and “wholly” unions), another one of them had a “thing” about Giles…app his age and ’scholarly’ ness was intriguing to her… and of course there was die hard Buffy Fan, she was the one among all of us who had the resources ($) to get books, magazines and so on…sarah michelle gellar was her idol.

The was waaay back in primary school, it quite literally became an obession, and it sort of segregated the class into camps. Some of the girls who were strict Christians felt that the show was (hold your breathe) PAGANISTIC (??!!) (sorry but lets just say there was a whole lot of eye rolling)…AAAniways, i remember specifically, how insistent i was on being home to watch it on the tele, my mum said i was addicted and totally shut out the world when i was watching it, rightly so…

Back in Singapore, Chinese wedding dinner banquets usually start about 7ish pm and end as late as 11ish or so and Buffy was screening at 10 and i remember having a HUGE argument with my mum over not wanting to go for the dinner even though there was the VHS recorder… i just did not want to go because they most prob would not let me watch it after the wedding dinner citing the reason that it was too late and i had school BUT see not watching it would mean that my friends would spoil it for me in school discussing what happened!

Looking back…no way did any of us analyze why it was such a “drug” and the reason that we were so hooked on to it… (ah, youth…) *ahem* yea…mmm in a way partly due to my fascination with vampires,  i began to read Anne Rice and oh i STILL have Interview With A Vampire the movie on my VHS (although i suspect its prob mouldy and not working anymore…)

(Kristen Dunst performance was really memorable!) (the make up people did a great job of making her look like a life size doll…) MMM watching Buffy during screening reely brought back memories… 

K rambles aside, i will, again, be extracting some stuff from Jonathan Bignell’s book Published in 2008 by Routledge (*extracts are in italics and with a pXX at the end)

in reference to Sopranos and also stuff over the past 2 weeks perhaps…

Early predictions (in the 1930s for instance) of what television would be emphasised its liveness, its ability to present to a mass audience images of what was happening in the real world. It was expected that the medium would focus on information and actuality. These early thoughts conditioned the ways in which realism connection to the contemporary and uneasiness about bringing controversial visions into the home were played out. (p3) Useful i guess to think in relation to our current  idea of tv realism and also perhaps the larger controls on tv like the broadcasting station, ratings, censorships and so on.

Television programmes have ‘literate’ components shared with written texts and relatively high status forms of written communication, since they are ‘narrative’, sequential, abstract, univocal, “consistent”‘.  They are also like informal communication of spoken language , in anecdotes folk tales or popular songs, in that they are also ‘dramatic, episodic, concrete, soical, dilectical’ (Fiske and Hartley 1978:125) (p17) All of which help to produce fan culture,  that use programmes as the central resource for activities including: constructing social networks, setting up social and commercial events (such as conventions) , creating new texts (such as songs, fanzines, or amateur written fiction). (p27) Guess this would be in relation to spin offs and so on as mentioned in Buffy week…

Also the big hidden picture behind serials, in the week’s reading by Lavery and Thompson (2002) i found a few things stood out…

1) That David Chase said “I consider network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state – the programming not only the commercials. I’m not a Marxist, never was very radical but thats what i considered it to be, to some extent i still do…” 
(wonder if was just his biterness to it all…)
but i guess like anyone in a huge workplace you don’t necessarily agree with what is going on…yet…(open – ended) *up to one to decide*…ha…i personally think that its best to make the BEST out of whatever situation that you are in some how ie: mode of survival which he did! and to a certain extent has ‘made – it’

2) How he has “written or co-written only 8 out of 39 episodes and so far directed 2 episodes (S1)” and that basically The Sopranos “brought together a TEAM of writers and directors” and also mentioned that those (eg David E Kelly) who “take personal control over the show’s authorship invites burn out of the auteur and exhaustion of the narrative premise” which is why Chase chose “a more old fashion way of delegating authority duty…choosing a DRAMATURGICAL model that may be the most effective one for telling artistically mature stories in a continuing series”
i mean if one really has all that brain juices and creativity would burn out really happen?
what about “too many cooks spoils the broth” ?
boils down to there is no one specific winning formula or success strategy that applies to all model aye?

3) Being “a great admirer of Twin Peaks, David Chase has long worried about similar problems concerning The Sopranos and was determined from the start not to make a soap opera/serial of any kind”…YET…as i will explore further on…does’nt the Soprano have elements of that?

Like any other serial, when Sopranos was first aired there were out cries from the usual parental groups for the show being too violent etc etc but more in relation to seriality, it is useful to note how, rather than anticipating and wishing for the end of an individual flim narrative, the television viewer is usually drawn into and out of the flow of material that does not come to a decisive end. (p4)

Guess thats how  ’couch potatoes’ came about huh?

Serials can run for seasons and can cause us to be overcome by that iresistable urge to know what happens next and thus always staying tune. As mention in lectures and various readings it is useful to consider the techinques applied to the scripts/series which allows its “longevity”…(which is the whole point of this entry!) Taking first a look at Twin Peaks…

 

An example which has been commonly used to define what postmodern television is like is the American cult drama serial ‘Twin Peaks’ which began in the United States in April 1990. The advertising for the first episode of the serial in newspapers and magazines promoted the programme as a highly unusual piece of work masterminded by David Lynch a ‘maverick’ film-maker. The television serial was granted the artisitic status of being an experimental work that challenged the norms of television and was attached to the the name of an acknowledged cinema director whose work carried prestiege among audiences of art cinema. (p175)

Once Twin Peaks had attacted a sizeable audience it began to be promoted as a soap opera that viewers would find addictive and was advertisied in the American magazine Soap Opera Weekly. Twin peaks addressed two different audiences, one defined in relation to cinema art and experimentation and focused on the authorial input of one man, and the other in relation to a mass audience genre regarded as downmarket and feminine. (p175)

This characteristic is called multi accentuality (ie situation where meanings are able to be read in different ways by different groups of viewers because a text offers multiple meanings at the same time). Producer Mark Frost designed the serial to appeal to the audiences of American ‘quality drama’ expecially the wealthy and discerning viewers of most interest to US television networks. (p175)

Twin Peaks was an effort to attract cable viewers back to network television by offering them what appeared to be prestige ‘art’ television programme. But the mass audience assiociated with network soap opera were also targeted, confusing the boundaries between elite and popular audiences and blurring the distinctions between ‘art television’ and popular culture. (p176)

Twin Peaks in a way started perhaps a new “trend” or new school of thought when considering the progression of the tv serials we have had so far… countless of course but each of them representational of a certain time period and fitting into a certain category that cultural studies have imprinted on them…but largely i would say it was a start of a mishmash mode that many other serials would come to adopt or attempt to emulate…even a benchmark/standard in a way (not considering the sad unfortunate ending…)

Coming back to   Sopranos… there was a short write up in Bignell on its producer and a brief but pretty concise explanation of its narrative…

David Chase, creator and producer of The Sopranos went to film school and wanted to be an arthouse auteur. But he could not sell a film of his own so he wrote for television. Nevertheless he continued to develop his best film idea, about a tough mobster and his annoying mother. The mobster feels he has to are fo her, but she is in some ways tougher than him and even contracts a killer to murder him. Insight ito the mobster’s dilemmas about family, violence and power are provided by the device of having him talk to a psychoanalyst. (p141)

The drama works by the collision and tension between two behavioural codes: the mobster must be tough and secretive whereas the psychoanalyst expects speech to reveal and unload worrying emotions and weakness. They psychological context allows for non naturalistic forms such as dream sequences in contrast to the naturalistic potrayal of the details of organised crime. (p141)

FOX Television comminssioned the show but Chase felt they were trying to smooth out and tame the ideas they had seen in the pilot scripts he showed them so he took the idea to HBO Original programming which supported the tone and ideas of the scripts. The Sopranos contains a mix of genres – family story and mob gangster show – and has achieved the status of ‘quality television’ : aesthetically interesting, psychologically and morally complex yet sufficiently connected to exisiting genres and forms to draw large audience. (p141)

Why then did i say earlier on that i felt that Sopranos fits the mould of being a soap?

Soaps are multi character dramas and their stories settings and concerns are embedded in the mythologies of coummunity in national popular culture. They appear to ‘reflect’ relaity with their fictional worlds functioning as a microcosm of ‘ordinary life’ but the condensation and narrative progress which are necessary to television fiction mean that they do more than ‘reflect’. There are frequen breaking-points in the soap families and communities (such as birth, death, gossip, antatgoism between characters) which enable new stories to begin. (p195) Everything so far fits what Sopranos has…

So while the foundations of soap opera reflect ideological norms in being centred on family, community and regional identity (in this case the whole Italian identity) it is the lack and disturbance of these structures which drives the narrative. Plots are often based on ‘common sense’ wisdom about human nature, such as ‘pride comes before a fall; and ‘a little knowledge can be a ganerous thing’.  (p195) (like the episode on the Coach who sexually abused one of the players and Tony could not decide between taking matters into his own hands or leaving it up to the police)

The action in soaps takes place within a set of values (in the case of soprano’s tony – being the head of the family and in the mafia/mob) that provide the norms for characters’ lives and even though characters continually violate thse norms, they remain bound by them and have to learn to adjust to them or suffer the consequences. (p195) (say it with me in a sing song mode – TONY soprano!)

While the narrative of the serial poses these moral questions of itscharacters the leakage of the questions out of and back into the realities of the viewer’s life and out of and into other media discourses such as newspaper stories spreads them across society as a whole. It is soap opera realism which allows this transfer between fiction and reality. (p195)  I was just thinking of Al Capone when reading this…(i think a picture of him was briefly flashed in episode where the ‘poland’ dude got shot in the head as well…) he is pretty interesting real life character to think about in relation to Sopranos.

When all is said and done, the briliiant minds behind tv deserve a salute! (for so many things…surviving, sticking it out as such their series make it to tv, bringing entertainment, messages encoded within and so on and so forth…)

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