Telvision Criticism - Univ. of Iowa

As we've all picked up recently, television has been changing in tone a lot recently. The style of shows has shifted and become increasingly more and more cinematic rather than videographic. This trend can be seen in the new sitcoms that have been appearing on television such as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Curb Your Enthusiasm. While these shows are being filmed in the more cinematic single-camera style, they follow many of the conceits of traditional sitcoms like All in the Family and Sanford and Son. Basing each episode on a general conceit, the action happens between the players on the show which leads to a resolution at the end.

Community is not really any different from any of these programs. The difference between this show and the aforementioned ones is the way in which the action plays out. Rather than being purely self-contained, Community situates itself as an open comedic text, making clear its commentaries and pointing to its references and itself in both subtle and heavy-handed ways. This new approach to the sitcom suggests appeals to a new self-aware, postmodern* audience that has been raised on the teat of popular culture.

To quickly situate the show, Community follows the lives of seven students at the fictional Greendale Community College, which is located in Greendale, CO. Much like in any sitcom, the characters have very distinct personalities. There is Annie Edison, former Adderall addict and overachiever; Troy Barnes, lovable but mentally slow former HS football quarterback; Pierce Hawthorne, cantankerous divorcee and moist towlette magnate; Shirley Bennett, Christian single mother and former alcoholic; Abed Nadir, popular culture dictionary and socially awkward chick magnet; Britta Perry, a feminist lacking in self-confidence; and Jeff Winger, a disbarred lawyer with an overabundance of self-confidence.

Each week, the characters negotiate the insanity that is their day-to-day existence at Greendale. They must deal with the overly involved (and not-so-secretly gay) Dean Pelton, loose cannon Senor Chang, and the ever bewildering Star Burns amongst others. So far, nothing is really all that different. It's just like every other sitcom any of us has ever watched in terms of premise. The difference comes in terms of how the show is executed.

More than any other sitcom on television right now and especially more than any other single-camera sitcom, Community completely shatters the fourth wall and our continual understandings of how a sitcom should operate. To be clear, other shows also break the fourth wall and suggest that they are engaged in an act of artifice. The Seth MacFarlane shows revel in their ability to break this border and talk actively to the audience. A recent example comes from Family Guy when they made a joke about the Bronte sisters. Before the action resumed on the episode, Peter and Brian had a side banter about the fact that they just made a "period period joke" before moving back into the narrative of Brian giving Peter his kidney ("New Kidney in Town"). Other episodes where this technique is used include "Three Kings" where Peter introduces three vignettes based on Stephen King novels and "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1" in which Brian and Stewie introduce short stories submitted by regular viewers.

Producers of televised sports began a few years ago using an elaborate web of zipwires and remote-controlled cameras to cover professional football games. These technological changes, designed to mimic the visual codes of videogames and to make the visual dimension of live football coverage that much more spectacular, have also changed the spectatorial pleasures associated with watching football. Specifically, they lead to a peculiar televisual dialectic of embodiment/disembodiment that challenges notions of television as an oral or tactile medium, and of HDTV as inherently painterly. Instead, HDTV is a medium of embodiment, but a form of embodiment that imagines demigod-like control over televisualized bodies, at the same time that the more conventional codes of television continually undermine that illusion of control. In many ways, this dialectic of control/powerlessness mirrors the emotional state of sports fan who alternate between the belief that rooting from home can alter on-screen developments, and feelings that televised events are out of their control.

This screen-grab is, unfortunately, a poor example of the kind of shot I’m talking about: I’m thinking of a camera angle that’s a little bit higher and a placement that’s a little closer to the back of the quarterback’s head. You see this a lot, particularly it seems to me on Fox, when the quarterback is approaching the scrimmage line right before a play. The shot allows you to survey the offense, defense, and the entire field, seemingly from the quarterback’s perspective. However, it’s interesting to notice that this is not a subjective shot: television actually tried that years ago with the helmet cam in the XFL league. The XFL was on to something—they realized that many viewers wanted a more immersive experience watching televised football—but they got the kind of shot and the logics of viewer identification a little wrong. While the helmet cam gave a much more accurate idea of what the quarterback sees, the zipwire shot offers us an idealized version, including the ability to see over tall linemen and nearly the entire breadth of the field.

Of course, the zipwire shot derives from videogaming, and in many ways gives viewers the same sense of omniscience and control that they have in videogames, where the demigod-like nature of this shot (we feel ourselves larger than all of the players, peering in over the rim of the stadium) reinforces the control the player has over the characters on screen. However, television viewers do not have that power; we do not have controls with which to influence the course of the game when watching TV. Instead, the perception of demigod-like power is illusory and fleeting in televised football, because the reality of our position as mere spectators to events eventually becomes inescapable. In neither case can we fully escape the reality of our own positions in relation to the text. Notice that when playing football as a videogame, the “demigod” shot is far more persistent and common than in televised football, where technological (and economic) limitations of shooting live sports makes much more frequent use of conventional, side-line cameras that place us much more in the position of live stadium spectators.

The other main difference between the videogame and the broadcast versions of football lies in the degree of realism, which is where the importance of HD comes into my argument. As realistic as videogame aesthetics and images have become, they are still obvious simulations. it is impossible to ever lose oneself in the illusion that one is controlling real players and games. In other words, then, while television viewers can never maintain the illusion of control, videogame players can never maintain the illusion of realism.

Ultimately, then, the HD aesthetics of televised football create brief bursts of demigod-like spectatorship, creating subject positions of remote-control with more conventional positions as regular stadium spectators. As I mentioned, I think that this shot mirrors (and helps produce) the emotional involvement of the at-home football fan, by giving us the illusion of being in control of game developments at times, but pulling us out of that illusion at other times. I believe that thinking our at-home rooting can telepathically or telekinetically influence events on screen is a rampant (if rarely admitted) aspect of watching football on TV. In a lot of ways, this isn’t that crazy of an idea: after all, stadium fans certainly do have the ability to influence games; their cheering not only seems to rattle some players, but also spurs others to perform their best. When watching a live TV broadcast, then, it’s not surprising that we can imagine ourselves into the role of live spectator, where our rooting actually can have an impact. The zipwire shot encourages that degree of identification; it often gets used, it seems to me, for particularly crucial plays or at the beginning of games to try to invest the viewer ‘s sympathies. The shot acts as a cue, as it were, to suture us into a viewing position that we consistently move in and out of, at the same time intensifying our seeming control over events by placing into a demigod-like subject position.

So partly because of different schedules for everyone, partly just because I have too much time on my hands, I thought I'd open this forum for discussion of class-related issues, examples, etc. that extend and clarify the things we're talking about in class.

To that end, I've included below my segmentation and shot breakdown of the True Blood intro (you can see how extensive semioptic analysis gets) along with my analysis below the table. See what you think, feel free to disagree with me.

As Seiter said in the semiotics readings, perhaps the main point of the method is to fource us to slow down and take the content seriouskly: it's easy to make generalizations aobut TV content, but often when we look more closely, those generalizations are belied by the texts themselves!