Work on TV
Posted on | September 18, 2008 |
This time next week I’ll be in Melbourne speaking at Monash University’s Film and Television series, Under Construction. Loyal Home Cooked Theory reader and brilliant film scholar Adrian Martin has generously invited me to share some of the thinking behind one of my current projects, “Work on TV.”
This will be an early version of one of the papers I’m giving at the Television and the National conference at ACMI in November. But in keeping with the series, I’ll also be using the paper to explore some recent writing on production cultures, particularly John Caldwell’s latest book. The abstract is below.
Moving beyond the established benchmarks of crime, law and medicine, the past ten years has seen an expansion in the number of workplaces depicted as prime time television entertainment. Not only have these shows created new opportunities for empathy with employees at the front line of the service industry (airlines, beauty, and border security, for example) they have positioned the viewer as a knowing insider to an ever greater range of jobs beyond their own training and expertise – an extension of what John Hartley calls television’s ‘cross-demographic’ function.
From the White House to the underworld, the kitchen to the office park, work on TV has been one of the most successful of recent television genres, reaching its zenith in a suite of programs that have dramatised the art of TV production itself. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, 30 Rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Extras all base their appeal on familiarity with the routines of the cultural industries and the vicissitudes of portfolio careers, providing fresh possibilities for TV content in the process. Coming at a time of increased union activity with the 2007 writers’ strike and its associated publicity, these programs deliberately confused insider/outsider status: viewers were invited to identify not only with the fate of creative talent but also the challenges they posed to management.
This paper suggests that on the surface these shows can be read as evidence of a new style of labour politics befitting the creative economy, where narcissistic self-representations are used to articulate and justify a devalued work ethic. Yet in a post-broadcast era, they might also be regarded as a last-ditch attempt on behalf of a vulnerable industry to gain the support of an audience with little compulsion to remain loyal to its offerings.
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6 Responses to “Work on TV”
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September 21st, 2008 @ 4:13 am
first off, I’d love to read your paper on this! second, is there a similar trend in locally-produced content in other parts of the world - especially regarding series that depict the workstyles of media professionals? there was a Spanish tv series on journalists: “Periodistas” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124958/), and the BBC comedy show “Broken News” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/brokennews/).
this reminds me: how is this different from another 1970s/1980s staple of media work-based tv series, namely several shows that glorified the lives of journalists (”Lou Grant” from 1977-1982, “Murphy Brown” from 1988-1998; and i found on Wikipedia “WKRP in Cincinnati” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati)?
perhaps its telling that today we have shows on ad agencies, talent companies, film and tv productions, and even game studios (http://www.cbc.ca/jpod/), but not on journalists anymore… perhaps they have become to depressing to talk about?
September 22nd, 2008 @ 6:29 pm
Mark! You must help me answer these questions! But I can definitely send a draft of the paper. Of course I need a lot of assistance with local productions elsewhere - I already want to write about the Gervais show, Extras, and I know of this one as well from the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Wallpaper
Part of what I want to explore is whether television turns inwards during times of transition - whether depicting TV production as content is some kind of coping mechanism. This stretches back to the Dick Van Dyke Show but also covers the main one missing from your list: Mary Tyler Moore.
I don’t know about the journalists. In Australia at least there was never much hope of a serious portrayal after Frontline . Though the creators of that are now reaching new heights with a show called The Hollowmen, which satirizes Federal politics. It’s also telling for my purposes that the company behind these programs is called “Working Dog”.
September 23rd, 2008 @ 4:12 am
another option (even now advertising agency-inspired tv series Mad Men scored at the Emmys last night) may be something that comes out of a lot of media work research: the ever-so-slightly-if-not-totally-obvious narcissism that goes on in these creative industries.
in part produced by the industries’ self-love and (especially in the case of journalists) overinflated self-importance, in part result of the constant need to self-commodify in order to get, keep (or stay away from) a certain job, in part consequence of the deeply individualized yet at same time incessantly networked nature of employment in the media.
in other words: media producers produce shows on media production because that is pretty much all they (can or want to) know.
that, and slightly modifying whatever more or less successfull formula works for the competition.
another option: as a growing portion of the laborforce moves into what Richard Florida calls the “creative class” (he suggests its at least 30% of the US workforce), and one thing a lot of folks in these groups have in common is a need to express themselves through consumption, this makes them an attractive proposition for advertisers that ultimately determine whether such shows make it past their pilot or first season, or not.
I wonder whether its important - in the US context - that the newest hit examples of such shows (Entourage, Extras) - are on HBO and not on the networks.
September 23rd, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
Yes. I think these issues are related. i.e. the creative class subscribes to cable and empathises with the industry narcissism depicted on the shows. Which is symptomatic of wider social divides in the US in particular in the distribution of financial, educational and cultural capital.
The problem with this is the “public sphere” - free to air television - is once again abandoned. There is a class divide in the medium between smart, savvy, insider shows and, as The Emmys painfully indicated, the rest of the programming tailored to a mass market (hence the disaster of the reality tv dudes and dudette as hosts). Just read some of the comments in the NYT story to see how hard it is for Americans to think in those terms ( “it’s nice to have something for everybody”).
Queen Tina on NBC is the exception proving the rule, but I have other things to say about that in the paper…
November 28th, 2008 @ 4:28 am
On the chance you still have the “Work on TV” paper I would be thrilled to read it.
November 28th, 2008 @ 3:22 pm
It’s coming! Check back in a few days for the conference paper. Unfortunately it’s still only a brief introduction to the wider project, but I do get the labour politics argument together, I think.