Tv Shows Torrent

For a few days in mid-August 2002, it looked as if television history was about to be made. Newspaper reports began to appear that former president Bill Clinton was considering hosting his own afternoon talk show at an annual salary approaching the record-setting dimensions of $30 to $50 million. No one knew exactly what shape the program would take, but that didn't stop the New York Times from speculating in an editorial that maybe the restless ex-president might utilize "an Oprah-type format in which he can feel the guests' pain. Perhaps he can develop a new genre entirely" ("Heeere's Bill" A22).

The story, unlike so many other rumors from the Clinton era, quickly lost momentum. Yet it did reveal not only the protean possibilities of expresidential employment but also how common the concept of TV genre creation had become. If the New York Times could imagine new television formulas from the lofty perch of its editorial page, then surely the meaning and process of TV genre construction had reached a critical mass.

There is certainly no question that the last decade has seen an explosion in new approaches to programming and formats. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the endlessly malleable genre of reality TV. Previously ranging from the harmless staged voyeurism of Candid Camera (premiere 1948) to the warts-and-all drama of PBS's An American Family (1971) to Fox's true-life crime series Cops (1988) to such audience participation shows as America's Funniest Home Videos (1990), reality TV during the past few seasons has spread its roots in every conceivable direction. The germinating seed was Survivor (2000), whose shrewd combination of quiz show, adventure program, and soap opera elements boosted the fortunes of CBS almost overnight. Its success, in typical television fashion, unleashed a torrent of avid imitators, including Fox's Temptation Island (2001) and Boot Camp (2001), NBC's Fear Factor (2001), and ABC's The Mole (2001). In just as natural a progression, the reality eruption also led to the development of numerous genre hybrids, including MTV's The Osbournes (2002), with its breakthrough melding of sitcom and documentary; Fox's Murder in Small Town X (2001), which blended mystery and adventure as ten contestants tried to solve a fictional murder in an actual town in Maine, and the network's slick mixture of talent and variety shows, American Idol (2002).

One of the curious developments of reality TV's success is that it opened American television's usually closed doors to international programming concepts. CBS's Big Brother (2001) was originally developed in Holland before spreading to more than a dozen countries throughout the world. (Interestingly, the U.S. version was never able to achieve the phenomenal popularity earned by the show's foreign counterparts, a fact perhaps attributed to the absence of the open eroticism unabashedly displayed by its European cousins.) Fox's American Idol came from England, as did the TLC cable network's surprise hit Trading Spaces (2000), adapted from the BBC's Changing Rooms (1997). The Food Network didn't even bother with reformatting; it simply rebroadcast the Japanese program Iron Chef (1993), although it did add an English translation. Whether U.S. audiences are ready for other overseas reality hits, such as Argentina's Human Resources (wherein studio audiences reward an unemployed contestant with a fulltime job) or Germany's Krazy Krauts, remains to be seen.

The eagerness with which U.S. programmers looked abroad during the last few years may be a new trend, but in many ways it stems from the same spirit (and anxiety) that has always led networks to search for some novel aspect of formula production to exploit or, in most cases, rework and recyle. Especially since the 1980s, genre TV programming has rarely operated according to precise formal categories or strict style and content conventions. The competitive pressures of six broadcast networks and a hundred or so special cable networks have led producers and programmers to embrace concepts that deliberately cross "traditional" boundaries and fuse the widest assemblage of elements (as the above description of reality TV series reveals). The frenzied search for audiences, particularly those targeted for their demographic desirability, has forced those executives responsible for selection and scheduling to recognize the importance of ever-more varied formula menus and broader genre mixes. As NBC's current president of entertainment, Jeff Zucker, recently noted, tapping into many genres without emphasizing one "is what we have to do to survive" (qtd. in Goodale 18).

Yet despite the "promiscuous hybridity" (in theorist Graeme Turner's memorable phrase [7]) of modern TV formats, the entire television industry, including TV critics, also continues to operate under a basic conviction that readily understood, mainstream television genres provide a valuable programming signature and means of identification. Network viewing cycles may change from the conventional to the inventive and then back to the conventional, but programmers still long for a strong situation comedy and a strong drama to anchor their prime-time schedules (Hirschberg 68-69). Viewing services like TV Guide and its various cable and Internet imitators persist in classifying programs according to standard categories. Cable networks are created solely to showcase a single genre (whether it be game shows, made-for-TV-movies geared to women, or science fiction). Newspaper critics often act like inspectors for genre quality control, evaluating each new program according to how well it fits into its format, what rul es it has broken, what new elements it has added, and how it compares to its assigned formula competitors past and present. Even technology has staked a claim for genre purity: ReplayTV, the hard-drive-based TV-recording system, has set up special "ReplayZones" on its programming screens to help viewers instantly record programs (and movies) according to their favorite "themes."

But even if networks, journalists, and program services adhere to the belief that "TV genres" is a commonly understood category between the industry and its viewers, television theorists are not so certain. Over the last decade numerous articles have appeared questioning the meaning and definition of how TV genres are conceived and how they are understood. In her essay "Genre Study and Television," Jane Feuer notes that while genres in film "organized large numbers of individual works into a coherent system that could be recognized by the interpretive community," television genres are not necessarily "the main principle of coherence for the medium," and that perhaps this may be "found at a level larger than the program and different from the genre," such as Raymond William's famous concept of "flow" (157). Feuer suggests that the advent of the remote control may lead to "the end of genre" entirely, as "a rapid flow from one genre to another will come to represent the typical viewing experience" (158).

In his chapter "Meaning, Genre and Context," John Corner acknowledges that "[g]enre is a principal factor in the directing of audience choice and of audience expectations" (121), while worrying that "too little attention has been paid to how its specificities affect viewing behavior" (123). Hoping to counter an essentialist tendency he finds common in most writing about TV genres, he argues instead for a sociological mode of inquiry with a greater attention to audience studies.

Although his focus is primarily on film, Rick Altman proposes in his book Film/Genre that "[g]enres are not inert categories shared by all (although at some moments they certainly seem to be), but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular purposes in real situations" (101). Seeking to prove that "Hollywood's golden age was a period of intense genre mixing, primarily to increase a film's marketability" (142), his provocative discussion of studio promotion and marketing techniques offers an intriguing way to examine contemporary hybrid and recombinant television formats.

Jason Mittell proposes a broader, less text-based methodology than Altman's. In his influential essay "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory," he argues for the "need to look beyond the text as the locus for genre and instead locate genres within the complex interrelations among texts, industries, audiences, and historical contexts" (7). For Mittell, TV genres operate as discursive clusters that require the analyst to "explore the material ways in which genres are culturally defined, interpreted, and evaluated" (9). It is an approach that stresses the fluidity of genre definitions over time as well as the importance of detailed research into genre operations and their relationship to cultural power.

The varied perspectives in contemporary genre study are reflected in the four articles selected for this issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television. Murray Forman in "Television before Television Genre: The Case of Popular Music" examines a crucial period in American TV history, between the 1940s and the early 1950s, as network executives tried to establish the boundaries and form of programming when the rules had yet to be written. Forman stresses that before any genre definitions could be drawn, the industry needed to develop greater technical standards (in terms of engineering and camerawork), as well as a more consistent approach to production. By looking closely at the evolution of music programming, he traces the complex ways in which a TV genre developed, as broadcasters, advertisers, and viewers struggled to come to terms with a new format's possibilities.

In his article "Vox Populi as Cable Programming Strategy," Jeffrey Jones explores the rise of the political talk show genre on cable TV during the mid-1990s. In contrast to the pundit-centered discussion programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC, new cable networks like America's Talking and National Empowerment Television, as well as CNN's TalkBack Live, cleverly tapped into populist political rhetoric through an emphasis on interactive technologies. The prominent display of viewer faxes and e-mails and remote video conferences provided a new relationship to the audience as well as a more vivid presentational style. While Jones observes that the political climate has changed since this format first appeared, the legacy of this approach can be seen in the partisan posturings of Fox News, which trumpets its stylistic exuberance and direct audience connection as a corrective to the liberal bias of the traditional news media.

TV genres often operate internationally, as Karen Scott notes in "Popularizing Science and Nature Programming: The Role of 'Spectacle' in Contemporary Wildlife Documentary." Her article explores recent developments in the natural history genre-a genre pioneered by and still most closely associated with British TV producers. Scott traces how contemporary nature series in England have responded to shifting tastes in the viewing audience worldwide by creating more emotional, less traditionally "scientific" content, with a greater reliance on computer-generated imagery and more dramatic, "human interest" narration.

Jason Mittell's 'Audiences Talking Genres: Television Talk Shows and Cultural Hierarchies" demonstrates the varied ways audiences use genre as a site of identity and cultural power. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu's work on social hierarchies and taste distinctions to the more diverse axes of modem American society, Mittell examines how a survey audience responds to different examples of daytime and evening talk shows in constructing generic categories. His analysis of the varied reactions to programs ranging from The Jerry Springer Show to The Larry King Show reveals some of the crucial ways genres are used and operate within the lives of talk show viewers and nonviewers alike.

The study of TV genres is at a significant crossroads, particularly as television programming expands worldwide to a 500-channel digital TV universe and network programmers, critics, and viewers attempt to speak a common language of "genre." I hope this theme issue of JPF&T provides some intriguing new directions that add to our understanding of this vitally important concept.

WORKS CITED

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

Corner, John. "Meaning, Genre and Context." Studying Media. Edinburgh: University Press, 1998. 108-34.

Feuer, Jane. "Genre Study and Television." Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992. 138-60.

Goodale, Gloria. "Reality TV's Fall Mix: Dogs, Dating, and Circus Stunts." Christian Science Monitor Aug. 9, 2002: 18.

"Heeere's Bill." New York Times Aug. 22, 2002, late ed.: A22.

Hirschberg, Lynn, mod. "The Thinking Inside the Box." New York Times Magazine Nov. 3, 2002: 67-71.

Mittell, Jason. "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory' Cinema Journal 40.3 (2001): 3-24.

Turner, Graeme. "Genre, Format and 'Live' Television." The Television Genre Book. Ed. Glen Creeher. London: British Film Institute, 2001. 6-7

BRIAN ROSE teaches in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Directing for Television (1999), Televising the Performing Arts (1992), and Television and the Performing Arts (1986), and the editor of TV Genres (1985).

COPYRIGHT 2003 Heldref Publications
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

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