Television Aesthetics and Style
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Overview
Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form.
Television Aesthetics and Style provides a unique and vital intervention in the field, raising key questions about television’s artistic properties and possibilities. Through a series of case-studies by internationally renowned scholars, the collection takes a radical step forward in understanding TV’s stylistic achievements.
The first book to look closely at the previously underexplored field of television style, with unique perspectives offered by a range of internationally renowned scholars.
Includes accessible and illuminating case-studies providing close readings of particular TV programmes and episodes.
The first guide to understanding and appreciating the way television handles stylistic elements.
Provides unique insights into a previously overlooked aspect of television and Television Studies.
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction, Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock
Part One: Conceptual Debates 1. Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond, Sarah Cardwell
2. The Qualities of Complexity: Vast versus Dense Seriality in Contemporary Television, Jason Mittell
3. What Does it Mean to Call Television ’Cinematic’?, Brett Mills
4. Rescuing Television from “The Cinematic”: The Perils of Dismissing Television Style, Deborah L. Jaramillo
Part Two: Aesthetics and Style of Television Comedy
5. Why Comedy is at Home on Television, Alex Clayton
6. Situating Comedy: Inhabitation and Duration in Classical American Sitcoms, Sérgio Dias Branco
7. Arrested Developments: Towards an Aesthetic of the Contemporary US Sitcom, Timotheus Vermuelen and James Whitfield
8. Better or Differently: Style and Repetition in The Trip, James Walters
9. The Presentation of Detail and the Organization of Time in The Royle Family, James Zborowski
10. The Man From ISIS: Archer and the Animated Aesthetics of Adult Cartoons, Holly Randell-Moon and Arthur J. Randell
Part Three: Critical Analyses of Television Drama
11. Don Draper and the Promises of Life, George Toles
12. Justifying Justified, William Rothman
13. HBO Aesthetics, Quality TV and Boardwalk Empire, Janet McCabe
14. Storytelling in Song: Television Music, Narrative and Allusion in The O.C., Faye Woods
15. Camera and Performer: Energetic Engagement with The Shield, Lucy Fife Donaldson
16. Flashforwards in Breaking Bad: Openness, Closure and Possibility, Elliott Logan
17. The Fantastic Style of Shameless, Beth Johnson
Part Four: Non-Fiction and History
18. ’Let’s Just Watch it for a Few Minutes’: This is Your Life in 1958, Charles Barr
19. Gaudy Nights: Dance and Reality Television’s Display of Talent, Frances Bonner
20. Television Sublime: The Experimental Television of Lithuanian CAC TV, Linus Andersson
21. Closer to the Action: Post-War American Television and the Zoom Shot, Nick Hall
22. Think-Tape: The Aesthetics of Montage in the Post-War TV Documentary, Ieuan Franklin 23. What FUIs Can Do: The Promises of Computing in Contemporary TV Series, Cormac Deane
Index
This important collection marks the ‘coming out’ of television aesthetics and style in a medium often regarded as devoid of both. Building on nascent work aiming to re-value textual criticism in television, it directly takes on those who condemn such activity as ‘pre-structuralist’. With well-worked illustrations from comedy as well as narrative fiction, it boldly celebrates television’s visual pleasures whilst unpacking contested terms such as ‘cinematic’, ’complexity’ and ’quality’. It acknowledges that aesthetic judgments are situated but posits that they are neither necessarily ’elitist’ nor canonical. In sum, this volume sets the tone of a rigorous conversation in a new phase in Television Studies.
Can television be more than an everyday phenomenon? Can it be compelling, extraordinary, haunting and distinctive and if so how can we analyze and judge it? The editors of this new collection challenge us to think about television aesthetically and the contributors have certainly responded with enthusiasm and passion. Their essays go well beyond the usual emphasis on recent US drama – though that’s well represented here - and also offer detailed and unexpected interpretations of television comedy and non-fiction programmes. Some essays dwell on illuminating television moments while others range more widely into debates about style, seriality and visual pleasure. The authors are among the best in the field and this collection will be essential and rewarding reading for anyone interested in the possibilities of television.
The exciting mix of conceptual and analytical work in this book addresses the richness of contemporary television and offers insights into its past. The focus on aesthetics enables the contributors to ask fundamental questions about what it means to study TV, and the chapters show how aesthetic approaches illuminate British and international traditions, and fictional, factual and hybrid TV genres. Television Aesthetics and Style is at the forefront of thinking through ways of grasping television’s inherited forms and the ways they are changing. It will be essential reading for anyone who wants to take television seriously.
- Title: Television Aesthetics and Style
- Authors: Steven Peacock, Jason Jacobs
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781623562496, 9781441157515, 1441157514, 162356249X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781623562496
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:11:29Z
Jason Jacobs is Associate Professor of Film and Television and Reader in Cultural History in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has written extensively on television history and aesthetics and is the author of The Intimate Screen (2000), Body Trauma TV (2003), Deadwood (2012), and David Milch (forthcoming in 2014). He is currently researching the history of the BBC's commercial arm.
Steven Peacock is Reader in Film and Television Aesthetics at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is the author of Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television (2013), Hollywood and Intimacy (2011), Colour (2010) and editor/author of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (2012) and Reading 24: TV against the Clock (2007). He is also co-editor of The Television Series for Manchester University Press. He has written extensively on the subject of television aesthetics, with a particular interest in the US serial drama.