Television is not only MTV (or in the case of we, Indonesians, sinetrons and reality shows). More scholars like Henry Jenkins and Sharon Marie Ross have admitted the complex medium is deserving serious assessment.
October 8, 2008
Inviting Our Participation: An Interview with Sharon Marie Ross
Increasingly, television invites our participation. Some shows, like American Idol, do so through explicit calls to share our thoughts and reactions. Some shows, such as Lost, do so through their deployment of serial structures which demand a particular kind of attention that we associate with cult media. In Convergence Culture, I talk about building entertainment properties to be cultural attractors (drawing like minded people together) and cultural activators (giving these networked audiences something to do). In the recent book, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet, media scholar Sharon Marie Ross identifies as range of "invitational strategies" in contemporary television which encourage our participation as fans.
Beyond the Box is an important contribution to our understanding of convergence culture, an exciting example of what happens when scholars effectively blend research methods including political economy, fan studies, and close textual analysis, which have historically been set in opposition to each other. Ross is able to understand not only what draws fans to such programs but also to explain what fans mean economically to television producers at the current moment of media in transition. I read this book with great gusto, delighted to find a kindred spirit, and pleased to see this further elaboration of the affective economy surrounding contemporary broadcasting.
I am pleased to be able to share with you this interview with an up and coming media scholar. Here, she not only lays out some of the book's core ideas but she also applies them to some very contemporary developments in Broadcasting, such as the Writer's Strike, the Gossip Girl phenomenon, and the release of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible.
Throughout the book, you write about what you call "invitational strategies" surrounding cult television series. Explain what you mean by this term.
The term "invitational strategies" actually emerged from a conversation among me, Janet Staiger, Amanda Lotz, and Matt Hills. I had started with "interpellation" but that didn't quite work for what I was trying to capture in terms of what I see emerging in TV and the Internet. What I've seen, across several genres, is a mode of address (sometimes explicit and sometimes less obvious) where producers/writers, and marketers also at times, create stories (which can encompass the show plot itself, and also how a show is marketed and how a show works with Internet addendums) that reach out to viewers/readers and "prod" them to become a part of the storytelling process. The goal is to have the reader become actively engaged and also to elicit among readers a feeling (and I mean "feeling" emotionally) that the story belongs to them in a significant way. This can run from overt invitations (asking viewers to vote or chat online or buy something) to organic (where a viewer is already likely to be engaged and the invitation is embedded more deeply in the plots) to obscured (where the invitation seems "hidden" and those outside the experience might not see any behind-the-scenes constructing of an invitation at work). I think organic is becoming dominant. The key element is that the reader feels as if those creating the story want their input and involvement in some way--and the reader has the power to refuse the invitation, accept it, bring along a guest, drop by or stay and really party (etc.) A definite two-way event (though as we know, the host ultimately decides what is available for consumption and what the hours of the party might be...I find myself slipping into more metaphors, but hope this explains it!:)
As a fan, I kept asking myself whether we really needed any kind of an invitation or whether fan culture might emerge around any program. You seem to suggest that
some texts are more "inviting" than others and more open to exploring alternative forms of audience participation. How important is that solicitation, whether implicit or explicit, to sparking such responses?
I do think invitations aren't necessary for people we think of as fans ( a category that is murky in and of itself). Those who become a fan on their own are ready to jump in and especially use the Internet to create their own forms of involvement. However, I do think fans respond to invitations when offered in the right way--not too confining, being key. This is especially true of more cult like shows like Lost or Dr. Who or even soaps. An invitation is appreciated as it shows deference to fans--but that invite better not preclude already established ways on interacting. For those for whom "fan" still connotes "horrors" of geekdom and over-investment, an invitation might provide the legitimacy needed to allow them to overcome the stigma of fandom and become involved in similar ways with a show. So many people still think of TV and the Internet as "guilty pleasures" that can slip into unhealthy involvement, and an invitation suggests that any involvement they then engage in is distanced from those societal fears of falling in too deeply...
Throughout the book, you draw heavily on research on soap operas to try to explain the kinds of responses surrounding reality television and cult dramas. What do you think television critics miss by trying to discuss the complexity of contemporary television without dealing with soaps?
Oh--sooo very much! As far as I'm concerned, soap operas (with their roots in also comics and Dickens' serials of yore) are the fundamental form of storytelling. Think about it: a story that keeps going--that will always be there for you no matter what stage of life you're in or what kind of mood--and even persists if you leave; a story that responds to the times and milieu of its viewers; a story that reacts to viewers' desires to some degree...and that requires careful attention without holding you too much to account. When critics dismiss this genre (often via its lower production values and its association with women) they overlook its core pleasures, which aren't about missing out on excitement in one's own life, or having little to do with one's day. The pleasures are about storytelling in its most basic sense: someone tells you a little bit about this person and their life, and you consider it in relation to your own; then you can consider further in relation to those around you--especially those who have also been told the story. And then you can spin the story outwards--what might happen next and why. I believe that humans inherently need stories to empathize with others, plan their futures (individually and as cultures), dream dreams, etc. Soaps tap into this need--and I think it's a healthy need. Contemporary TV that doesn't seem like a soap can often replicate this appeal using soap-like strategies of narration (interruption, open-endedness, current events and mores at work, sprawling plots to follow sprawling casts). If we as critics try to explain the appeal of modern shows without acknowledging their roots in this form and its seriality, we not only do a disservice to history (of the medium), we also are ignoring an understanding of what stories offer human beings. And at an academic level, how can we teach why a show has appeal or how a show needs to be written to have appeal without understanding a genre that has existed since pre-TV? I think scholars have often ignored the soap connection because academia shies away from things emotional in favor of the rational and formulaic...yet stories are all about emotion and psychology because humans are all about emotion and psychology. There are things in life and the world we don't always understand; seeking the answers is what makes us human. Stories (when done well) tap into this--and soaps especially have gloried in basic human questioning. (Why do people stop loving us? why do relatives die? what am I here for?)
You describe your own experiences in viewer activism around Buffy as paving the way for some of your intellectual interest around this topic. What did you learn through your fan involvement and how did it inform your work on this book?
Oh, very very much is indebted to Buffy!! I became a fan "on my own" and this show spoke to me as a woman, a scholar, a feminist, a lover of TV...It tapped into so many of those human questions mentioned above...I had loved TV before, but this was my first real experience as a fan beyond soap operas proper. I found myself fascinated BY myself (ha ha--narcissism reigns always among scholars!). How could a TV show--especially one so initially disparaged--allow me to grow as a person and as a teacher and scholar? How could such a show appeal to so many different kinds of people (as I eventually discovered)? After focusing on this and Xena initially, I began to see other shows that did the same for other groups of viewers--from wrestling to sports to reality TV. Was there something connecting such disparate groups and such disparate styles of TV programs? And given the role of the Internet with Buffy fandom and the role of Joss Whedon in becoming involved with fans online (and off), was there something about this new medium that was bringing together these areas of culturally "disconnected" forms of storytelling? As I started working on this book, Buffy always served as a barometer of sorts. How was Buffy fandom different and how the same from say American Idol or The O.C.? How did the structure of the show differ and not from other shows? How the content/themes? How the role of the producers and critics? I began to see the storytelling connection as fundamental to linking different things that seemed so very different...In the end, does a show call out to people in such a way that they feel a personal connection AND ultimately a social connection to other people? Last, via my involvement with Buffy fandom both personally and as a scholar, I began to see at work the real role and impact of cultural biases against genres and fandoms and to become fascinated by what can get in the way--and also aid and abet--people's willingness to embrace a story as having true value and meaning in life--to embrace "entertainment" as something that serves a purpose.
One of the most talked about examples of "viral media content" this summer was the online distribution of Dr. Horrible. How might we see this experiment as an outgrowth of Joss Whedon's long-term engagement with his hardcore fans?
Definitely an outgrowth! (Loved it, by the way...) Dr. Horrible is a fascinating example of so many themes in my book coming together (after publication, of course! That's always the way...) People who had come to respect Joss Whedon as an auteur came to this text; along with those who loved Buffy or Firefly; and those who love Neil Patrick Harris and How I Met Your Mother; those who follow viral videos...and of course it was a by-product of the writers' strike that was immersed in the Internet's relationship with TV. Some heard of it through friends, some online, some via Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide...So on the one hand, while its success was rooted in Joss Whedon's awareness that his fans are out there and always looking for new work from him and that they will seek work in untraditional forums, on the other hand the success was also a product of the Internet becoming a more acceptable venue for storytelling in the ways in which I have been discussing it and the ability of the Internet to draw together "unheard of" combinations of fans. In short, when someone reaches out with a personal story (and it was pretty personal to pull this off when a strike was going on), people will respond in kind with personal attention.
You discuss teen television as one genre that reflects contemporary youth's expectations of participation. What have current teen shows, such as Gossip Girl, learned from the earlier experiments in "teleparticipation" you discuss in the book?
This is funny--I was watching Gossip Girl all summer while pregnant and began loving it as a junior Dynasty. Having interviewed Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage about The OC and hearing about their travails with the show and Internet fans and FOX, I definitely was looking for signs of the old (good use of soap strategies, attention to the role of new media communication) and signs of the new (how to attend to fans without cowtowing to them, how to not spill all of a story too soon). And there I am, watching a week ago, and I see a brief funny bit in which pre-teen girls accost Serena and Dan (the main couple) in the park, offering their totally contradictory two cents about whether or not the couple should stay together, etc. And Serena and Dan became Josh and Stephanie: we hear you, we admire your interest and your new media involvement (hearing about the couple's troubles via the Gossip Girl blog)--but back off! The story is still unraveling and if we listen to all of you, it'll all spiral into meaninglessness as a story. This reminded me so much of my interview with them, in which they discussed the many different groups of fans they were dealing with, and how trying to keep up with all of their demands ultimately robbed them of their power to deliver a story they were connected with. You can't please everyone--but you should listen at the very least.
Teen shows make it tricky--there are so many different social audiences invested, with differing needs and desires. But the teen demo is so very new media savvy, you need to be able to keep up with their interests--and their skills as readers. I see Gossip Girl skillfully negotiating this demo with its older demo (18-34) by weaving in new media more deftly to the plots, by heeding online talk--but ultimately by the producers laying claim to their role as storytellers. (vs. story-givers--where you totally hand the story off and abandon ship.) It will be interesting to see if 90210 follows suit and if Smallville can survive its core Lex/Clark fan base now that Lex is gone (too early to tell). But I think the teen demo is so key to success with many shows that producers are definitely working harder to listen to them, and reach out to them online and via script. The key thing is can they do this without sacrificing their own creativity and their own needs as storytellers? (I think we often forget that writers, even in L.A., are humans too--driven to tell stories for very personal reasons and not solely driven by profit. It's a mean business and no one sticks with it without really loving it.)
Sharon Ross is an assistant professor in the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches courses in the areas of TV history and critical theory and her research focuses on issues of television reception; this semester she is excited to be teaching a 5 week intensive seminar on a single script from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is the associate editor of the journal for the International Digital Media Arts Association and co-editor with Dr. Louisa Stein of the anthology Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. She has too many "must see" TV shows to mention but highly recommends Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother this season.
Source:http://henryjenkins.org/convergence_culture/
Jumat, 18 September 2009
Selasa, 01 September 2009
Why We Love Popular Culture
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."(Kurt Vonnecut)
taken from http://henryjenkins.org
taken from http://henryjenkins.org
Rabu, 17 Juni 2009
Is There Intelligent Life On Television
Theodore Adorno, the god of Television critic, meets contradictory on Paul Cantor's article:
If you can tear yourself away from your favorite television shows long enough to wander down to your local bookstore, you will be amazed at all the books you'll find these days—about your favorite television shows. The medium that was supposed to be the archenemy of the book is now giving an unexpected—and welcome—boost to the publishing industry. It is well known that for the genre of literary criticism, publishers are extremely reluctant to bring out what are called monographs—books devoted to a single author or a single work (unless that single author is Shakespeare or the single work is Hamlet). Those works of literary criticism that are published often come out in print runs that number in the hundreds. By contrast, a book devoted to a single television show, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer (2001, published by Open Court and edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble), has reached its 22nd printing and its sales number in the hundreds of thousands.
Partly inspired by the success of The Simpsons volume, three serious publishing houses—Open Court, Blackwell, and University Press of Kentucky—currently have series on philosophy and popular culture, with volumes devoted to such TV shows as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Sopranos, South Park, Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, and 24. These volumes use moments in the shows to illustrate complicated issues in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Books from other serious publishers analyze the shows themselves, often using sophisticated critical methodologies originally developed in literary theory.
TV Grows Up
This publishing phenomenon has been little noted; what are we to make of the surprising synergy that has been developing between television and the book? The answer is that the proliferation of serious books about television is a clear sign that the medium has grown up and its fans have grown up with it. Many of the publications in question are guidebooks to individual shows, containing episode-by-episode plot summaries, cast lists, critical commentaries, and other scholarly apparatus, including explanations of recondite cultural references and allusions in the programs. No one ever needed a guidebook to I Love Lucy. If you couldn't tell Fred Mertz from Ricky Ricardo, you probably couldn't read in the first place. But with contemporary shows such as Lost, even devoted fans find themselves bewildered by Byzantine plot twists, abrupt character reversals, and dark thematic developments. Accordingly, they welcome whole books that try to sort out what is happening in their favorite shows and to explain what it all means. The fact that we now need books to explain our favorite TV shows suggests that the best products of the medium have developed the aesthetic virtues we traditionally associate with books—complex and large-scale narratives, depth of characterization, seriousness of themes, and richness of language.
I am not insisting that the general artistic level of television has risen; only that, like any mature medium, it has reached the point where it can serve as the vehicle for some true artists to express themselves. Even so, for those who have not been watching television lately and may be understandably skeptical of my claim, I need to explain what has changed in the medium to make it more sophisticated than it used to be, at least in its best cases. A lot of the change has been driven by technological developments. Whereas in its initial decades television programming was largely controlled by the Big Three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, the development of cable and satellite transmission has made hundreds of channels available, and vastly increased the chances of innovative and experimental programming reaching an audience. To be sure, the hundreds of channels now spew out a greater amount of mindless entertainment than ever before, and often end up recycling the garbage of earlier seasons. But the move from broadcasting to narrowcasting—the targeting of ever more specific audience segments—has allowed TV producers to aim an increasing number of programs at an educated, intelligent, and discriminating audience, with predictably positive results in terms of artistic quality.
During the same period, the development of VCRs and then DVRs, as well as videocassette and DVD rentals and sales, has freed television producers from earlier limits on the complexity of their programs. In roughly the first three decades of television history, if viewers missed a show in its initial broadcast slot, they had little chance of seeing it again; at best they had to wait months for a summer rerun. As a result, producers tended to make every episode of an ongoing series as self-contained and as easily digestible as possible. But the proliferation of forms of video recording has made what is known as "time-shifting" possible. Viewers can now watch a show whenever they want and can easily catch up with any episodes they have missed (a survey in TV Guide revealed that 22% of Lost viewers now watch the show on DVR within seven days of its original air date). Some viewers have chosen to skip television broadcasting entirely and to watch shows only when they come out on DVD, a procedure that facilitates a much more concentrated experience of the unfolding of plot and character. Thus producers are now much freer to introduce elements of complexity into their shows, including elaborate plot arcs that may span an entire season—with confidence that viewers can handle such complications. With the advent of DVDs, television shows can now be "read" and "re-read" just like books—one reason why academic writing about television has suddenly flourished. What cheap paperbacks once were to literary scholarship, the DVD now is to television scholarship.
A Writer's Medium
The various changes in the way people watch television have made the medium much more attractive to creative talent. At the same time, Hollywood executives have discovered that what makes a TV series succeed from season to season is above all good scripts. As a result, in Hollywood circles, television is now known as a writer's medium. In movies, the director generally calls the shots, largely determining what finally appears on screen. That is why we know the names of individual motion picture directors, but are seldom aware of the screenwriters, even at Oscar time. The situation is just the reverse in television, where almost nobody knows who directs individual episodes of a series, but the writer-creators become famous—such as Chris Carter (The X-Files), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and David Chase (The Sopranos). This situation is admittedly complicated by the fact that some television writers occasionally direct episodes of their shows themselves. Nevertheless, in television the way to have a lasting and creative impact is fundamentally as a writer, and Hollywood has come to value good TV writers accordingly. In an interview in the Los Angeles Times last April, Sue Naegle, the new chief of HBO Entertainment, said: "Development by committee or by patching together multiple people's ideas isn't the way to get great television. I think it starts with the writer. Somebody who's very passionate and has a clear idea about what they'd like to do and the kind of show they'd like to produce."
A writer who creates a show often becomes what is called in Hollywood a "showrunner"—the one who puts together all the elements needed to bring the vision of a series to the screen. (For accounts of the role of showrunners, two useful books are Steven Priggé's Created By: Inside the Minds of TV's Top Show Creators, 2005, and David Wild's The Showrunners, 1999.) A good showrunner becomes responsible for the artistic integrity of his work in a way that no motion picture screenwriter can ever hope for. The TV showrunner has become the true auteur in the entertainment business, to use the favorite term of fancy French film theory.
As a result, creative writers are increasingly migrating to television, and it is attracting a higher level of talent than ever before. Today's TV writers are routinely college-educated and often have higher degrees in television writing from schools like USC and UCLA. The writing staff of The Simpsons has a high concentration of Harvard graduates, as witness all the jokes in the series at the expense of Yale. An excellent example of the new level of academic credentials of showrunners is David Milch, who served as writer-producer on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue and created a genuine television masterpiece in Deadwood. Milch graduated summa cum laude from Yale as an undergraduate, went on to get an MFA from Iowa, became a creative writing instructor at Yale, and even worked with Robert Penn Warren revising a literary anthology. In his book Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, Milch cites an impressive literary pedigree for his Western series:
The number of characters in Deadwood does not frighten me. The serial form of the nineteenth century novel is close to what I'm doing. The writers who are alive to me, whom I consider my contemporaries, are writers who lived in another time—Dickens and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Twain.
If academics are now finding material worth studying in television shows, one reason is that writers like Milch are putting it there.
Germany vs. Hollywood
The growing sophistication of television illustrates a general principle of media development. Every medium has a history, no medium has ever emerged full-blown at its origin, all media develop over time, and they only gradually realize their potential. For some of the traditional media, their origins are mercifully shrouded in the mists of time. The earliest Greek tragedies we have are by Aeschylus, and they are magnificent works of art indeed. But they by no means represent the primitive stages in the growth of the form. If we did have the very first tentative steps toward Greek tragedy, we might be appalled at their crudeness and finally understand why this genre we respect so much bears a name that means in Greek nothing more than "goat song." By contrast, television had the great historical misfortune of being born and growing up right before our eyes, and many intellectuals have never forgiven the medium its birth pangs.
Television's problem with its reputation was compounded by the fact that it was the new kid on the media block at just the moment when Cultural Studies in its modern sense was hitting its stride and gearing up to criticize the American entertainment industry. It found its perfect whipping boy in television. I am talking about the Frankfurt School and its chief representative in America: Theodor Adorno. In 1947, he published, along with his colleague Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which contains a chapter called "The Culture Industry"—perhaps the single most influential essay in Cultural Studies of the 20th century. It epitomized, established, and helped promulgate the tradition of studying pop culture as a debased and debasing mass medium. In this chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno write primarily about the motion picture industry, which they, as German émigrés living in the Los Angeles area during World War II, had a chance to observe firsthand. In terms that have become familiar and that reflect their left-wing biases, they present Hollywood as a dream factory, serving up images of desire that provide substitute gratifications for Americans exploited by the capitalist system, and thereby working to reconcile them to their sorry lot.
In 1954, Adorno published on his own an essay entitled: "How to Look at Television" in The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, which extends the Frankfurt School analysis of the culture industry to the new medium. Adorno may well be the first major intellectual figure to have written about television and to this day I know of no one of comparable stature who has dealt with the medium. His essay set the standard and the tone for much of subsequent analysis of television and remains influential.
As always with Adorno, his television essay is in many respects intelligent and perceptive. He does an especially good job of analyzing the ideological work accomplished by various television shows in getting Americans to accept the dull routine of their daily lives. But Adorno shows little awareness that he is dealing with a medium in its earliest stages, that it might develop into something more sophisticated and genuinely artistic in the future. Admittedly, at the end he speaks of the "far-reaching potentialities" of television, but he expects it to improve only because of critics like him, not because of any developmental logic internal to the medium. He hopes that through his essay "the public at large may be sensitized to the nefarious effect" of television, presumably so that government regulation can do something about it. He would not dream that the commercial pressures on an entertainment medium could by themselves improve its quality.
When Adorno was writing in 1954, broadcast television was less than a decade old as a commercial enterprise and still groping toward a distinct identity. As with any new medium, it remained in thrall to its predecessors, following what turned out in many ways to be inappropriate models. In particular, early television modeled itself on radio, structuring itself into national broadcasting networks (in several cases derived directly from existing radio networks) and reproducing radio formats and genres—the game show, the quiz show, the soap opera, the talk show, the variety program, the mystery, and so on. Some of the most successful of the early television shows, such as Gunsmoke, were simply adapted from radio precursors.
The Cultural Pyramid
Thus at several points in the essay Adorno stigmatizes television for features that turn out to have merely reflected its growing pains. For example, he condemns television for creating programs of only 15 or 30 minutes duration, which he correctly views as inadequate for proper dramatic development but incorrectly views as somehow an inherent limitation of the medium. He had no idea that television was soon to move on to one— and even two-hour dramatic formats, and that it eventually was to develop shows like The X-Files or Lost with a full season arc of episodes—some of the largest scale artistic productions ever created in any medium, comparable to Victorian novels in scope.
Elsewhere Adorno dogmatically proclaims: "Every spectator of a television mystery knows with absolute certainty how it is going to end." This may have been true when Adorno was writing (personally I doubt it), but try telling it to fans of the aptly named Lost today. They are not just mystified about how the series is going to end way off in the future; they are not even sure what is going on in the present. Or consider the recent furor over the final episode of the final season of The Sopranos. For weeks media pundits speculated about how the series was going to end, but they all proved wrong, and everybody was shocked by a kind of abrupt conclusion that was unprecedented in television history. This surprising turn in The Sopranos is exactly what one would expect at a later stage of a medium, when producers, for both artistic and commercial reasons, deliberately thwart their audience's expectations in order to generate interest. Amazingly, for a sophisticated Marxist, Adorno does not appear to grasp that media have histories.
Insisting that television is inferior to earlier examples of popular culture, Adorno contrasts 18th-century English novels favorably with the TV shows he was watching in the early 1950s. But his examples of the popular novel are all drawn from the work of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—the three greatest English novelists of the 18th century. And Adorno compares them to the most mindless sitcoms and game shows he can find in the earliest days of American TV. Too many intellectuals like Adorno score points against television by comparing the apex of achievement in earlier media with the nadir of quality in television. Television is a voracious medium. It now requires filling up hundreds of channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The result is that television does show a lot of junk. But inconsistency in quality has always been the bane of any popular medium. For every one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, the Elizabethan theater turned out dozens of potboilers that share all the faults of the worst television fare (gratuitous sex and violence, stereotyped characters, clichés of plot and dialogue). For every one of Dickens's great works, the Victorian Age produced hundreds of penny dreadfuls, trash novels that have been justly condemned to the dustbin of history. A living culture always resembles a pyramid, with a narrow pinnacle of aesthetic mastery resting on a broad base of artistic mediocrity.
Adorno's contempt for American television leads him to treat it in an unscholarly manner. He does not even bother to name the particular shows he is discussing because evidently they all pretty much looked the same to him. One of his examples must be a sitcom I remember called Our Miss Brooks. Here is Adorno's capsule description: "the heroine of an extremely light comedy of pranks is a young schoolteacher who is not only underpaid but is incessantly fined by the caricature of a pompous and authoritarian school principal." I have trouble recognizing the show I remember with some fondness in Adorno's characterization: "The supposedly funny situations consist mostly of her trying to hustle a meal from various acquaintances, but regularly without success." One begins to suspect that Adorno's readings of American television are telling us as much about him as they do about television. I hate to think that the great anti-fascist intellectual had an authoritarian personality himself, but he seems to be suspiciously unnerved by the typically American negative attitude toward authority figures, especially when he sees it displayed by women. Could it be that when Adorno looked at Principal Osgood Conklin of Our Miss Brooks, he was having flashbacks to Professor Immanuel Rath of The Blue Angel, and couldn't bear the image of academic authority humiliated by underlings and students? After all, Germans have always respected their teachers much more than Americans do. One shudders to think what Adorno would have made of Bart Simpson's treatment of Principal Seymour Skinner.
Strange Customs of an Alien Tribe
As one reads Adorno on American television, one gradually begins to realize that he is writing about the subject as a foreigner. Indeed, he resembles an anthropologist trying to describe what are for him the strange customs of an alien tribe. All the symptoms of cultural displacement are there—he doesn't find the local jokes funny, differing cultural products look alike to him, he claims to understand the artifacts better than do the people who create and use them, and so on. Standing far above the cultural phenomena he is analyzing, he is quite eager to criticize them and unwilling to appreciate them in their own terms. He does not think of television programs as the product of individual creators and thus has no interest in their distinct identities. In rejecting what would normally be congenial to him—a Freudian analysis of television—Adorno writes: "To study television shows in terms of the psychology of the authors would almost be tantamount to studying Ford cars in terms of the psychoanalysis of the late Mr. Ford." With his conception of the culture industry, Adorno regards television shows as mass-produced and thus completely without any individuality or distinct identity—in short, without a name.
Adorno ignores the promising developments that would have been evident to any sympathetic observer in his day. Sid Caesar, along with writers of the caliber of Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, was already creating some of the most inventive comedy ever to appear on television. And waiting in the wings in the 1950s was the first authentic genius of the medium, Ernie Kovacs. He pioneered many of the camera techniques that have become standard on television, and later was the first person to realize the potential of videotape for special effects, particularly in comedy. One of Kovacs's greatest television achievements was to create what would today be called a video to the music of Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. With Adorno's love of modernist music, here was a television moment he might have appreciated, although I'm afraid he would have dismissed it as just another cheap popularization of classical music, like the American performances of the Budapest String Quartet, which he scorned as too slickly commercial. Adorno condemned even as great a conductor as Arturo Toscanini because he worked for the National Broadcasting Corporation.
I don't mean to berate Adorno for what he missed in the early days of television. He was after all a German émigré, whose command of English was no doubt shaky, particularly of the kind of colloquial idiom necessary to understand comedy in any medium. (I have noticed that Adorno never finds anything funny in American pop culture, not even Donald Duck.) Adorno was doing his best under difficult circumstances to understand phenomena that were profoundly alien to him. But the problem is that the work of this German émigré on American pop culture became the prototype of academic studies of television for decades, and we are still struggling to get out from under his influence. The idea that television is limited to stereotypes, that it is in its very nature as a medium artistically inauthentic, that it serves only the interests of a ruling elite, that it is ideologically reactionary—all these ideas are the intellectual legacy of Adorno, and they are still repeated by many critics of television today.
Taking the Fan's Perspective
Adorno's television essay is unfortunately typical of the way intellectuals have dealt with new media over the centuries. When a new medium comes along, intellectuals, trapped in modes of thinking conditioned by the old media, tend to dwell obsessively on the novelty of the medium itself, focusing on the ways in which it fails to measure up to the standards of the old media. Early talking films often seemed like badly staged plays, and early television shows often looked like anemic movies. Fortunately, as a medium matures, it seems to breed a new generation of critics who are able to appreciate and articulate its distinctive and novel contributions. That is what is happening in television criticism today.
As a turning point, I would cite particularly the work of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins in such books as Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006). Jenkins shows that it is not just the producers in television who can be creative, but the fans as well. Jenkins demolishes the great myth of the Frankfurt School—the myth of the passive consumer. For Adorno, television viewers sit captive in front of the screen, mesmerized by its images, allowing themselves to be shaped in their desires and their ideas by its overt and covert messages. He repeatedly compares American television to totalitarian propaganda. Unlike Adorno—who merely posits what the television viewer is like—Jenkins has studied and chronicled in detail how real people actually react to the television shows they watch. And what he has found is active, rather than passive consumers—fans of shows who take possession of them—his "textual poachers." They quarrel with producers over new story lines, come up with variations of a show's plots in their own self-published magazines, and develop the characters in directions their creators could never imagine. Jenkins persuasively argues in favor of taking the fan's perspective in analyzing television—and this is the cornerstone of the new turn in Cultural Studies. Academics are now writing about television shows because they admire them, not because they hate the medium. They write out of genuine knowledge of and sympathy for a particular show—they even call it by name.
One of the best books I know on participatory culture is Jennifer Hayward's Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (1997). As her title indicates, in discussing the serial form as basic to modern culture, Hayward finds continuities between the serial publication of Victorian novels and the serial broadcasting of TV soap operas. She thus cuts across the conventional divide between high culture and popular culture that so many critics of television labor mightily to maintain. With painstaking scholarship and archival research, she demonstrates how serial forms make possible productive feedback loops between creators and their audience, thus driving a continual process of refinement and improvement in modern media.
There are of course potential pitfalls in adopting the fan's perspective in academic criticism—a loss of objectivity and the ever present danger of taking a show too seriously, and treating a passing fad as of lasting significance. But as we have seen, the Olympian stance of an Adorno has its problems too—he is so far removed from the phenomena he is analyzing that he ends up out of touch with them, unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. We never object when literary critics write about Shakespeare's plays as "fans." In fact we assume that a Shakespeare scholar admires the plays, and expect to broaden and deepen our own appreciation of them by reading Shakespeare criticism. In many ways, the new writers about television are performing a traditional critical function. They are trying to separate the outstanding from the ordinary, the creative from the banal.
As a result, some of the best "literary criticism" today is paradoxically being written about television. Many literary critics seem to have become bored with their traditional role as the interpreters of great literature, and now are as interested in tearing authors' reputations down as they once were in building them up. In the era of literary deconstruction, it can be refreshing to turn to television books and see critics who are still interested in reconstructing the meaning of the works they discuss. The readers of the new books on television will accept no less, since their reason for turning to these books is to help them better understand their favorite programs. At a time when literary critics often seem to be talking only to each other, the lively market for television books tells us something. The reading public is still interested in thoughtful intellectual conversation about what has always made for good narratives in any medium—complex plot lines, interesting characters, serious and even philosophical issues, and insights into the human condition.
from:http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1568/article_detail.asp
About the writer:
Paul A. Cantor is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield).
If you can tear yourself away from your favorite television shows long enough to wander down to your local bookstore, you will be amazed at all the books you'll find these days—about your favorite television shows. The medium that was supposed to be the archenemy of the book is now giving an unexpected—and welcome—boost to the publishing industry. It is well known that for the genre of literary criticism, publishers are extremely reluctant to bring out what are called monographs—books devoted to a single author or a single work (unless that single author is Shakespeare or the single work is Hamlet). Those works of literary criticism that are published often come out in print runs that number in the hundreds. By contrast, a book devoted to a single television show, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer (2001, published by Open Court and edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble), has reached its 22nd printing and its sales number in the hundreds of thousands.
Partly inspired by the success of The Simpsons volume, three serious publishing houses—Open Court, Blackwell, and University Press of Kentucky—currently have series on philosophy and popular culture, with volumes devoted to such TV shows as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Sopranos, South Park, Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, and 24. These volumes use moments in the shows to illustrate complicated issues in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Books from other serious publishers analyze the shows themselves, often using sophisticated critical methodologies originally developed in literary theory.
TV Grows Up
This publishing phenomenon has been little noted; what are we to make of the surprising synergy that has been developing between television and the book? The answer is that the proliferation of serious books about television is a clear sign that the medium has grown up and its fans have grown up with it. Many of the publications in question are guidebooks to individual shows, containing episode-by-episode plot summaries, cast lists, critical commentaries, and other scholarly apparatus, including explanations of recondite cultural references and allusions in the programs. No one ever needed a guidebook to I Love Lucy. If you couldn't tell Fred Mertz from Ricky Ricardo, you probably couldn't read in the first place. But with contemporary shows such as Lost, even devoted fans find themselves bewildered by Byzantine plot twists, abrupt character reversals, and dark thematic developments. Accordingly, they welcome whole books that try to sort out what is happening in their favorite shows and to explain what it all means. The fact that we now need books to explain our favorite TV shows suggests that the best products of the medium have developed the aesthetic virtues we traditionally associate with books—complex and large-scale narratives, depth of characterization, seriousness of themes, and richness of language.
I am not insisting that the general artistic level of television has risen; only that, like any mature medium, it has reached the point where it can serve as the vehicle for some true artists to express themselves. Even so, for those who have not been watching television lately and may be understandably skeptical of my claim, I need to explain what has changed in the medium to make it more sophisticated than it used to be, at least in its best cases. A lot of the change has been driven by technological developments. Whereas in its initial decades television programming was largely controlled by the Big Three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, the development of cable and satellite transmission has made hundreds of channels available, and vastly increased the chances of innovative and experimental programming reaching an audience. To be sure, the hundreds of channels now spew out a greater amount of mindless entertainment than ever before, and often end up recycling the garbage of earlier seasons. But the move from broadcasting to narrowcasting—the targeting of ever more specific audience segments—has allowed TV producers to aim an increasing number of programs at an educated, intelligent, and discriminating audience, with predictably positive results in terms of artistic quality.
During the same period, the development of VCRs and then DVRs, as well as videocassette and DVD rentals and sales, has freed television producers from earlier limits on the complexity of their programs. In roughly the first three decades of television history, if viewers missed a show in its initial broadcast slot, they had little chance of seeing it again; at best they had to wait months for a summer rerun. As a result, producers tended to make every episode of an ongoing series as self-contained and as easily digestible as possible. But the proliferation of forms of video recording has made what is known as "time-shifting" possible. Viewers can now watch a show whenever they want and can easily catch up with any episodes they have missed (a survey in TV Guide revealed that 22% of Lost viewers now watch the show on DVR within seven days of its original air date). Some viewers have chosen to skip television broadcasting entirely and to watch shows only when they come out on DVD, a procedure that facilitates a much more concentrated experience of the unfolding of plot and character. Thus producers are now much freer to introduce elements of complexity into their shows, including elaborate plot arcs that may span an entire season—with confidence that viewers can handle such complications. With the advent of DVDs, television shows can now be "read" and "re-read" just like books—one reason why academic writing about television has suddenly flourished. What cheap paperbacks once were to literary scholarship, the DVD now is to television scholarship.
A Writer's Medium
The various changes in the way people watch television have made the medium much more attractive to creative talent. At the same time, Hollywood executives have discovered that what makes a TV series succeed from season to season is above all good scripts. As a result, in Hollywood circles, television is now known as a writer's medium. In movies, the director generally calls the shots, largely determining what finally appears on screen. That is why we know the names of individual motion picture directors, but are seldom aware of the screenwriters, even at Oscar time. The situation is just the reverse in television, where almost nobody knows who directs individual episodes of a series, but the writer-creators become famous—such as Chris Carter (The X-Files), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and David Chase (The Sopranos). This situation is admittedly complicated by the fact that some television writers occasionally direct episodes of their shows themselves. Nevertheless, in television the way to have a lasting and creative impact is fundamentally as a writer, and Hollywood has come to value good TV writers accordingly. In an interview in the Los Angeles Times last April, Sue Naegle, the new chief of HBO Entertainment, said: "Development by committee or by patching together multiple people's ideas isn't the way to get great television. I think it starts with the writer. Somebody who's very passionate and has a clear idea about what they'd like to do and the kind of show they'd like to produce."
A writer who creates a show often becomes what is called in Hollywood a "showrunner"—the one who puts together all the elements needed to bring the vision of a series to the screen. (For accounts of the role of showrunners, two useful books are Steven Priggé's Created By: Inside the Minds of TV's Top Show Creators, 2005, and David Wild's The Showrunners, 1999.) A good showrunner becomes responsible for the artistic integrity of his work in a way that no motion picture screenwriter can ever hope for. The TV showrunner has become the true auteur in the entertainment business, to use the favorite term of fancy French film theory.
As a result, creative writers are increasingly migrating to television, and it is attracting a higher level of talent than ever before. Today's TV writers are routinely college-educated and often have higher degrees in television writing from schools like USC and UCLA. The writing staff of The Simpsons has a high concentration of Harvard graduates, as witness all the jokes in the series at the expense of Yale. An excellent example of the new level of academic credentials of showrunners is David Milch, who served as writer-producer on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue and created a genuine television masterpiece in Deadwood. Milch graduated summa cum laude from Yale as an undergraduate, went on to get an MFA from Iowa, became a creative writing instructor at Yale, and even worked with Robert Penn Warren revising a literary anthology. In his book Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, Milch cites an impressive literary pedigree for his Western series:
The number of characters in Deadwood does not frighten me. The serial form of the nineteenth century novel is close to what I'm doing. The writers who are alive to me, whom I consider my contemporaries, are writers who lived in another time—Dickens and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Twain.
If academics are now finding material worth studying in television shows, one reason is that writers like Milch are putting it there.
Germany vs. Hollywood
The growing sophistication of television illustrates a general principle of media development. Every medium has a history, no medium has ever emerged full-blown at its origin, all media develop over time, and they only gradually realize their potential. For some of the traditional media, their origins are mercifully shrouded in the mists of time. The earliest Greek tragedies we have are by Aeschylus, and they are magnificent works of art indeed. But they by no means represent the primitive stages in the growth of the form. If we did have the very first tentative steps toward Greek tragedy, we might be appalled at their crudeness and finally understand why this genre we respect so much bears a name that means in Greek nothing more than "goat song." By contrast, television had the great historical misfortune of being born and growing up right before our eyes, and many intellectuals have never forgiven the medium its birth pangs.
Television's problem with its reputation was compounded by the fact that it was the new kid on the media block at just the moment when Cultural Studies in its modern sense was hitting its stride and gearing up to criticize the American entertainment industry. It found its perfect whipping boy in television. I am talking about the Frankfurt School and its chief representative in America: Theodor Adorno. In 1947, he published, along with his colleague Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which contains a chapter called "The Culture Industry"—perhaps the single most influential essay in Cultural Studies of the 20th century. It epitomized, established, and helped promulgate the tradition of studying pop culture as a debased and debasing mass medium. In this chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno write primarily about the motion picture industry, which they, as German émigrés living in the Los Angeles area during World War II, had a chance to observe firsthand. In terms that have become familiar and that reflect their left-wing biases, they present Hollywood as a dream factory, serving up images of desire that provide substitute gratifications for Americans exploited by the capitalist system, and thereby working to reconcile them to their sorry lot.
In 1954, Adorno published on his own an essay entitled: "How to Look at Television" in The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, which extends the Frankfurt School analysis of the culture industry to the new medium. Adorno may well be the first major intellectual figure to have written about television and to this day I know of no one of comparable stature who has dealt with the medium. His essay set the standard and the tone for much of subsequent analysis of television and remains influential.
As always with Adorno, his television essay is in many respects intelligent and perceptive. He does an especially good job of analyzing the ideological work accomplished by various television shows in getting Americans to accept the dull routine of their daily lives. But Adorno shows little awareness that he is dealing with a medium in its earliest stages, that it might develop into something more sophisticated and genuinely artistic in the future. Admittedly, at the end he speaks of the "far-reaching potentialities" of television, but he expects it to improve only because of critics like him, not because of any developmental logic internal to the medium. He hopes that through his essay "the public at large may be sensitized to the nefarious effect" of television, presumably so that government regulation can do something about it. He would not dream that the commercial pressures on an entertainment medium could by themselves improve its quality.
When Adorno was writing in 1954, broadcast television was less than a decade old as a commercial enterprise and still groping toward a distinct identity. As with any new medium, it remained in thrall to its predecessors, following what turned out in many ways to be inappropriate models. In particular, early television modeled itself on radio, structuring itself into national broadcasting networks (in several cases derived directly from existing radio networks) and reproducing radio formats and genres—the game show, the quiz show, the soap opera, the talk show, the variety program, the mystery, and so on. Some of the most successful of the early television shows, such as Gunsmoke, were simply adapted from radio precursors.
The Cultural Pyramid
Thus at several points in the essay Adorno stigmatizes television for features that turn out to have merely reflected its growing pains. For example, he condemns television for creating programs of only 15 or 30 minutes duration, which he correctly views as inadequate for proper dramatic development but incorrectly views as somehow an inherent limitation of the medium. He had no idea that television was soon to move on to one— and even two-hour dramatic formats, and that it eventually was to develop shows like The X-Files or Lost with a full season arc of episodes—some of the largest scale artistic productions ever created in any medium, comparable to Victorian novels in scope.
Elsewhere Adorno dogmatically proclaims: "Every spectator of a television mystery knows with absolute certainty how it is going to end." This may have been true when Adorno was writing (personally I doubt it), but try telling it to fans of the aptly named Lost today. They are not just mystified about how the series is going to end way off in the future; they are not even sure what is going on in the present. Or consider the recent furor over the final episode of the final season of The Sopranos. For weeks media pundits speculated about how the series was going to end, but they all proved wrong, and everybody was shocked by a kind of abrupt conclusion that was unprecedented in television history. This surprising turn in The Sopranos is exactly what one would expect at a later stage of a medium, when producers, for both artistic and commercial reasons, deliberately thwart their audience's expectations in order to generate interest. Amazingly, for a sophisticated Marxist, Adorno does not appear to grasp that media have histories.
Insisting that television is inferior to earlier examples of popular culture, Adorno contrasts 18th-century English novels favorably with the TV shows he was watching in the early 1950s. But his examples of the popular novel are all drawn from the work of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—the three greatest English novelists of the 18th century. And Adorno compares them to the most mindless sitcoms and game shows he can find in the earliest days of American TV. Too many intellectuals like Adorno score points against television by comparing the apex of achievement in earlier media with the nadir of quality in television. Television is a voracious medium. It now requires filling up hundreds of channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The result is that television does show a lot of junk. But inconsistency in quality has always been the bane of any popular medium. For every one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, the Elizabethan theater turned out dozens of potboilers that share all the faults of the worst television fare (gratuitous sex and violence, stereotyped characters, clichés of plot and dialogue). For every one of Dickens's great works, the Victorian Age produced hundreds of penny dreadfuls, trash novels that have been justly condemned to the dustbin of history. A living culture always resembles a pyramid, with a narrow pinnacle of aesthetic mastery resting on a broad base of artistic mediocrity.
Adorno's contempt for American television leads him to treat it in an unscholarly manner. He does not even bother to name the particular shows he is discussing because evidently they all pretty much looked the same to him. One of his examples must be a sitcom I remember called Our Miss Brooks. Here is Adorno's capsule description: "the heroine of an extremely light comedy of pranks is a young schoolteacher who is not only underpaid but is incessantly fined by the caricature of a pompous and authoritarian school principal." I have trouble recognizing the show I remember with some fondness in Adorno's characterization: "The supposedly funny situations consist mostly of her trying to hustle a meal from various acquaintances, but regularly without success." One begins to suspect that Adorno's readings of American television are telling us as much about him as they do about television. I hate to think that the great anti-fascist intellectual had an authoritarian personality himself, but he seems to be suspiciously unnerved by the typically American negative attitude toward authority figures, especially when he sees it displayed by women. Could it be that when Adorno looked at Principal Osgood Conklin of Our Miss Brooks, he was having flashbacks to Professor Immanuel Rath of The Blue Angel, and couldn't bear the image of academic authority humiliated by underlings and students? After all, Germans have always respected their teachers much more than Americans do. One shudders to think what Adorno would have made of Bart Simpson's treatment of Principal Seymour Skinner.
Strange Customs of an Alien Tribe
As one reads Adorno on American television, one gradually begins to realize that he is writing about the subject as a foreigner. Indeed, he resembles an anthropologist trying to describe what are for him the strange customs of an alien tribe. All the symptoms of cultural displacement are there—he doesn't find the local jokes funny, differing cultural products look alike to him, he claims to understand the artifacts better than do the people who create and use them, and so on. Standing far above the cultural phenomena he is analyzing, he is quite eager to criticize them and unwilling to appreciate them in their own terms. He does not think of television programs as the product of individual creators and thus has no interest in their distinct identities. In rejecting what would normally be congenial to him—a Freudian analysis of television—Adorno writes: "To study television shows in terms of the psychology of the authors would almost be tantamount to studying Ford cars in terms of the psychoanalysis of the late Mr. Ford." With his conception of the culture industry, Adorno regards television shows as mass-produced and thus completely without any individuality or distinct identity—in short, without a name.
Adorno ignores the promising developments that would have been evident to any sympathetic observer in his day. Sid Caesar, along with writers of the caliber of Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, was already creating some of the most inventive comedy ever to appear on television. And waiting in the wings in the 1950s was the first authentic genius of the medium, Ernie Kovacs. He pioneered many of the camera techniques that have become standard on television, and later was the first person to realize the potential of videotape for special effects, particularly in comedy. One of Kovacs's greatest television achievements was to create what would today be called a video to the music of Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. With Adorno's love of modernist music, here was a television moment he might have appreciated, although I'm afraid he would have dismissed it as just another cheap popularization of classical music, like the American performances of the Budapest String Quartet, which he scorned as too slickly commercial. Adorno condemned even as great a conductor as Arturo Toscanini because he worked for the National Broadcasting Corporation.
I don't mean to berate Adorno for what he missed in the early days of television. He was after all a German émigré, whose command of English was no doubt shaky, particularly of the kind of colloquial idiom necessary to understand comedy in any medium. (I have noticed that Adorno never finds anything funny in American pop culture, not even Donald Duck.) Adorno was doing his best under difficult circumstances to understand phenomena that were profoundly alien to him. But the problem is that the work of this German émigré on American pop culture became the prototype of academic studies of television for decades, and we are still struggling to get out from under his influence. The idea that television is limited to stereotypes, that it is in its very nature as a medium artistically inauthentic, that it serves only the interests of a ruling elite, that it is ideologically reactionary—all these ideas are the intellectual legacy of Adorno, and they are still repeated by many critics of television today.
Taking the Fan's Perspective
Adorno's television essay is unfortunately typical of the way intellectuals have dealt with new media over the centuries. When a new medium comes along, intellectuals, trapped in modes of thinking conditioned by the old media, tend to dwell obsessively on the novelty of the medium itself, focusing on the ways in which it fails to measure up to the standards of the old media. Early talking films often seemed like badly staged plays, and early television shows often looked like anemic movies. Fortunately, as a medium matures, it seems to breed a new generation of critics who are able to appreciate and articulate its distinctive and novel contributions. That is what is happening in television criticism today.
As a turning point, I would cite particularly the work of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins in such books as Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006). Jenkins shows that it is not just the producers in television who can be creative, but the fans as well. Jenkins demolishes the great myth of the Frankfurt School—the myth of the passive consumer. For Adorno, television viewers sit captive in front of the screen, mesmerized by its images, allowing themselves to be shaped in their desires and their ideas by its overt and covert messages. He repeatedly compares American television to totalitarian propaganda. Unlike Adorno—who merely posits what the television viewer is like—Jenkins has studied and chronicled in detail how real people actually react to the television shows they watch. And what he has found is active, rather than passive consumers—fans of shows who take possession of them—his "textual poachers." They quarrel with producers over new story lines, come up with variations of a show's plots in their own self-published magazines, and develop the characters in directions their creators could never imagine. Jenkins persuasively argues in favor of taking the fan's perspective in analyzing television—and this is the cornerstone of the new turn in Cultural Studies. Academics are now writing about television shows because they admire them, not because they hate the medium. They write out of genuine knowledge of and sympathy for a particular show—they even call it by name.
One of the best books I know on participatory culture is Jennifer Hayward's Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (1997). As her title indicates, in discussing the serial form as basic to modern culture, Hayward finds continuities between the serial publication of Victorian novels and the serial broadcasting of TV soap operas. She thus cuts across the conventional divide between high culture and popular culture that so many critics of television labor mightily to maintain. With painstaking scholarship and archival research, she demonstrates how serial forms make possible productive feedback loops between creators and their audience, thus driving a continual process of refinement and improvement in modern media.
There are of course potential pitfalls in adopting the fan's perspective in academic criticism—a loss of objectivity and the ever present danger of taking a show too seriously, and treating a passing fad as of lasting significance. But as we have seen, the Olympian stance of an Adorno has its problems too—he is so far removed from the phenomena he is analyzing that he ends up out of touch with them, unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. We never object when literary critics write about Shakespeare's plays as "fans." In fact we assume that a Shakespeare scholar admires the plays, and expect to broaden and deepen our own appreciation of them by reading Shakespeare criticism. In many ways, the new writers about television are performing a traditional critical function. They are trying to separate the outstanding from the ordinary, the creative from the banal.
As a result, some of the best "literary criticism" today is paradoxically being written about television. Many literary critics seem to have become bored with their traditional role as the interpreters of great literature, and now are as interested in tearing authors' reputations down as they once were in building them up. In the era of literary deconstruction, it can be refreshing to turn to television books and see critics who are still interested in reconstructing the meaning of the works they discuss. The readers of the new books on television will accept no less, since their reason for turning to these books is to help them better understand their favorite programs. At a time when literary critics often seem to be talking only to each other, the lively market for television books tells us something. The reading public is still interested in thoughtful intellectual conversation about what has always made for good narratives in any medium—complex plot lines, interesting characters, serious and even philosophical issues, and insights into the human condition.
from:http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1568/article_detail.asp
About the writer:
Paul A. Cantor is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield).
Selasa, 02 Juni 2009
ABOUT RATING
taken from my other blog, posted in 2007:
AGB Nielsen Media is now in the spotlight. Since 2006, they have been the centre of critics and attention. Several concerned people believes that our nation’s degraded tv shows caused by the audience measurement data of Nielsen’s.
Well, let’s imagine if…Nielsen being banned.
They are no longer operating in Indonesia. Despite our television workers are left without knowing the viewers measurement of their shows, does our television programs itself will then be improved? Any guarantee?
No, call me negative, I believe they will not. There are nothing or no one that can improving the quality of television programs than the people that IS working in the industry itself. Television, like any other media that reflects the culture of its people, is actually the ultimate face of our very own nation. Indonesia is not full by the smarts. The smarts are plenty, but the foolish are a lot more. The people that fortunate enough to watch good television and send their kids to university are not the major citizen in our country. The major numbers are the unemployees, the people without enough nutrition not to mention education.
This people, asking do they know who Ayu Utami or Jiffest, were a waste of time. Even my dear university graduated friend does not know who Ayu Utami is (gubrakkk!). She was majoring in economics, yet she never read the economic reviews on newspapers. Saying that the review is too hard to follow since its written in high academical phrases.
Education and economics development of a nation has tight influences to the social structures, social structure is an agent of culture. Its circulating both ways. This is quoted from Fiske (1987) :
Television as culture is crucial part of the social dynamics by which the social structure maintains itself in a constant process of production and reproduction : meanings, popular pleasure, and their circulation are therefore part and parcel of this social structure.
Well, our own education system that created more and more almost-illiterate ‘scholar’ is actually the one that should be taking the blame of our bad shows.
Since we were in school wearing uniforms, we have been told how much bright the future would be if we choosing major on science rather than social or bahasa. Our education system not encouraging pupils to develop their individual interests and talents.
We were taught to look down at social and bahasa subjects. Back at my high school years, I read YB. Mangunwijaya’s essay published in first pages of Kompas Daily News. ‘It is fundamental,’ he wrote, ‘To open the student mind to be free thinkers than only teaches them how to follow instructions.’
Free thinkers are uncommonly being found in the basic field of xy = y, or something like that (on the exception if they do have hobbies on any forms of art). I think people that learn science usually good in recognizing pattern and implementing logic for solving problems. But people that appreciates arts in any of their sub cultural way, usually good on the creative side. Creativity that leads into innovative mind.
So, it wasn’t such a mystery eh, why we always lack of creativity on nurturing good programs. To me, we did have several interesting original shows; Siapa Berani (indosiar), Selamat Datang Pagi (RCTI), Bajaj Bajuri (TransTV), Boneka Si Unyil (original ones by TVRI), Surat Sahabat (TransTV), Pustaka Anak Nusantara (RCTI), Sahabat Pilihan (the only sinetron I have followed, on RCTI), Keluarga Cemara (RCTI), Dokter TV (now known as starantv), Si Doel (RCTI, indosiar), Menggambar Bersama Pak Tino Sidin (TVRI), Cerdas Cermat (TVRI), Lenong Rumpi (RCTI), Kuis Keluarga Lifebuoy (RCTI), Republik BBM (indosiar) and all quizzes created by Ani Sumadi.
Extravaganza… until I am sure not 'inspired' by some part of Saturday Night Live idea, is next on the list.
But from all those programs above, there are none that had past the test of time. Saturday Night Live has been introduced since the seventy. Even Australia’s soap opera such as Neighbors, are lasted longer to our Si Doel (I first would say Tersanjung, but do you sure you want this to be aired much longer?? Hehehe).
Eddy Damian, a professor at University Padjajaran Law Faculty, says, ‘We cannot depends forever on minerals. Innovation is the key’ (Kompas, 2007).
That, and I am sure there are dozens of writing in the media about how in the capitalism era, human resources will be a nation’s major investment.
Speaking the needs of good human resources, television is no exception. But it is not only good skill and wide knowledge, its about overall quality. For being intelligent without qualified personality tend to be more destructive than the otherwise. Suharto is no doubt a smart man, even with his lack of education compares to Sukarno, he had the ability of fast learner and quite good in understanding overall aspects of an issue. But what happened during his government era, we already know. Or some of us :).
Not that our television is in so much crisis of good human resources. TransTV has proved they could produces a competent television workers only in a short 3 months training. IKJ’s television graduates in Mas Naratama era were gotten enough education to be a good tv creative. But the systems on the management of every tv station… ahhh!
Not only the regulation have failed in providing education system that sharpened the individual ability, it's also have failed in teaching circle of life virtue. How in some ways, our action sooner or later will have its effect toward others.
Nielsen’s audience measurement data only taking part on pointing the taste of viewers. They gives feedback, but decisions only in the hands of our television executives. From the need of feedback in communication, AC Nielsen company was born. Television shows are made to communicates to people. The value of communication itself, as I have learned, is about how the messages being received by the viewer. So there. The philosophy lies there. That if it is not received by the targeted group, than the (communication) strategy is not working. Admits, the popular taste media can be so lack of quality. But also, it is not the main function of television to educates people. It is their main function to entertains people.
AGB Nielsen Media is now in the spotlight. Since 2006, they have been the centre of critics and attention. Several concerned people believes that our nation’s degraded tv shows caused by the audience measurement data of Nielsen’s.
Well, let’s imagine if…Nielsen being banned.
They are no longer operating in Indonesia. Despite our television workers are left without knowing the viewers measurement of their shows, does our television programs itself will then be improved? Any guarantee?
No, call me negative, I believe they will not. There are nothing or no one that can improving the quality of television programs than the people that IS working in the industry itself. Television, like any other media that reflects the culture of its people, is actually the ultimate face of our very own nation. Indonesia is not full by the smarts. The smarts are plenty, but the foolish are a lot more. The people that fortunate enough to watch good television and send their kids to university are not the major citizen in our country. The major numbers are the unemployees, the people without enough nutrition not to mention education.
This people, asking do they know who Ayu Utami or Jiffest, were a waste of time. Even my dear university graduated friend does not know who Ayu Utami is (gubrakkk!). She was majoring in economics, yet she never read the economic reviews on newspapers. Saying that the review is too hard to follow since its written in high academical phrases.
Education and economics development of a nation has tight influences to the social structures, social structure is an agent of culture. Its circulating both ways. This is quoted from Fiske (1987) :
Television as culture is crucial part of the social dynamics by which the social structure maintains itself in a constant process of production and reproduction : meanings, popular pleasure, and their circulation are therefore part and parcel of this social structure.
Well, our own education system that created more and more almost-illiterate ‘scholar’ is actually the one that should be taking the blame of our bad shows.
Since we were in school wearing uniforms, we have been told how much bright the future would be if we choosing major on science rather than social or bahasa. Our education system not encouraging pupils to develop their individual interests and talents.
We were taught to look down at social and bahasa subjects. Back at my high school years, I read YB. Mangunwijaya’s essay published in first pages of Kompas Daily News. ‘It is fundamental,’ he wrote, ‘To open the student mind to be free thinkers than only teaches them how to follow instructions.’
Free thinkers are uncommonly being found in the basic field of xy = y, or something like that (on the exception if they do have hobbies on any forms of art). I think people that learn science usually good in recognizing pattern and implementing logic for solving problems. But people that appreciates arts in any of their sub cultural way, usually good on the creative side. Creativity that leads into innovative mind.
So, it wasn’t such a mystery eh, why we always lack of creativity on nurturing good programs. To me, we did have several interesting original shows; Siapa Berani (indosiar), Selamat Datang Pagi (RCTI), Bajaj Bajuri (TransTV), Boneka Si Unyil (original ones by TVRI), Surat Sahabat (TransTV), Pustaka Anak Nusantara (RCTI), Sahabat Pilihan (the only sinetron I have followed, on RCTI), Keluarga Cemara (RCTI), Dokter TV (now known as starantv), Si Doel (RCTI, indosiar), Menggambar Bersama Pak Tino Sidin (TVRI), Cerdas Cermat (TVRI), Lenong Rumpi (RCTI), Kuis Keluarga Lifebuoy (RCTI), Republik BBM (indosiar) and all quizzes created by Ani Sumadi.
Extravaganza… until I am sure not 'inspired' by some part of Saturday Night Live idea, is next on the list.
But from all those programs above, there are none that had past the test of time. Saturday Night Live has been introduced since the seventy. Even Australia’s soap opera such as Neighbors, are lasted longer to our Si Doel (I first would say Tersanjung, but do you sure you want this to be aired much longer?? Hehehe).
Eddy Damian, a professor at University Padjajaran Law Faculty, says, ‘We cannot depends forever on minerals. Innovation is the key’ (Kompas, 2007).
That, and I am sure there are dozens of writing in the media about how in the capitalism era, human resources will be a nation’s major investment.
Speaking the needs of good human resources, television is no exception. But it is not only good skill and wide knowledge, its about overall quality. For being intelligent without qualified personality tend to be more destructive than the otherwise. Suharto is no doubt a smart man, even with his lack of education compares to Sukarno, he had the ability of fast learner and quite good in understanding overall aspects of an issue. But what happened during his government era, we already know. Or some of us :).
Not that our television is in so much crisis of good human resources. TransTV has proved they could produces a competent television workers only in a short 3 months training. IKJ’s television graduates in Mas Naratama era were gotten enough education to be a good tv creative. But the systems on the management of every tv station… ahhh!
Not only the regulation have failed in providing education system that sharpened the individual ability, it's also have failed in teaching circle of life virtue. How in some ways, our action sooner or later will have its effect toward others.
Nielsen’s audience measurement data only taking part on pointing the taste of viewers. They gives feedback, but decisions only in the hands of our television executives. From the need of feedback in communication, AC Nielsen company was born. Television shows are made to communicates to people. The value of communication itself, as I have learned, is about how the messages being received by the viewer. So there. The philosophy lies there. That if it is not received by the targeted group, than the (communication) strategy is not working. Admits, the popular taste media can be so lack of quality. But also, it is not the main function of television to educates people. It is their main function to entertains people.
Selasa, 05 Mei 2009
AMERICAN SERIES & THE CITY
Joe Millionaire America which aired in 2003 had only two seasons, but on their first season the show gained notably 40 million viewers. What happened on Joe Millionaire Indonesia was different story. While in America, shows like The Apprentice, Joe Millionaire, and MTV Real World, had succeeds attracting million viewers, in Indonesia the local versions lasted after two seasons. The case is proved that one format that worked well in one demographic area does not guarantee similar success for different demographic part. Despite rarely watched the shows, I have suspicion that Indonesia Apprentice main problem was the lack of challenging tasks, while reason on MTV Real World and Joe Millionaire involving culture value.
Maybe audiences like seeing the programs just the way they are, without local version needed and made. Because there are something can be felt on the original version that would seem too force if it ever ‘translated’ to local version. Different languages, different cultures, are reasons.
But when I saw series of American drama on pirates DVD stalls from Mall Ambassador to Ratu Plaza, I couldn’t help but think how American series can be so globally accepted it seems like there is this universality of tastes on what’s worked what’s not on drama. Okay stupid, of course it is…isn’t it so obvious? Film, Hollywood film has spoken first. Like the Babel’s director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s speeches on Golden Globe two years ago; motion picture is universal language.
In late 90’s and early 2000’s two most successful ‘ordinary life’ (not medical-law-vampire drama) American series were based in New York; FRIENDS and Sex & The City. The other two; Gilmore Girls and Six Feet Under are outside New York. Now, I like to review my favorite series based on two categorize; New York New York (title taken from an episode of Friday Night Light’s season 3) and Tastes of Small Town America.
NEW YORK NEW YORK
“The colony club is the most exclusive club in New York City which means the world,” explains Blair Waldorf to Dorota.
The sentence is confirming how the American views New York City. That New York is also like the world’s capital city. No wonder there are many successful TV shows based on New York City, from The Cosby Show (80’s) to Growing Pains (Long Island, 90’s) to Gossip Girl (2000’s). TV series based on life in New York do have the dynamic exciting feelings more than ones that based on America’s small town, to name a few; Lipstick Jungle, Cashmere Mafia, Dirty Sexy Money, and the glamorous Sex & the City.
GOSSIP GIRL
From Faulkner to Hamlet to Capote to Wharton, including quoted lines from My Fair Lady to Age of Innocence, Gossip Girl is notably rich with classic cultural reference. More than any other teen series America ever produced. The sharp tongues’ of Gossip Girl are the kids that have it all; looks, glamorously blessed life, and brain. Or minimal, skill on turning phrases.
Of course that were only how Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage creating successful teen drama. Their former work, The OC, was one good example on how good looks and good wardrobes are the main key to one hit series.
Maybe Gossip Girl’s wit comes from its novel, where the Gossip Girl originally from, but never before in the history of teen drama life values mix rich cultural reference is told in such crispy ways.
Kudos to the writers! Savage, even though you didn’t finish your Ph.D thesis, you made all those years learning theories useful. Thank you, thank you, to have given the viewers fair perspective on villainous characters.
Favorite Episodes:
Victor Victrola; Seventeen Candles; Blair Waldorf Must Pie; Hi,Society; School Lies; Much I Do About Nothing; Summer, Kind of Wonderful; The Serena Also Rises; O Brother Where Bart Thou?; In The Realm of The Basses.
SEX AND THE CITY
Carrie Bradshaw is a sexy writer that loves shoes and clothes. She is a thirty something woman who putting expensive designer stuff above the necessity to buy herself a HOUSE/apartment. She is glamour, funny, and smart. She writes about women and relationship and sex. Consider her a feminist, yet when it comes to choose the man of her life, she chose a successful financial expert gleaming with money, Mr. Big. Maybe it is women tendency to pick a man that above us. Logically, how can we let ourselves be lead by a man who has lesser quality than us, right?
Enter Miranda Hobbes, a cynical, smart and pragmatist lawyer that most men would describe as psycho. As a successful and independent big city woman, she finally found true love in Steve Brady. Steve might only a bartender with small income, but he is one person Miranda is needed to find that there is more in life than only anger and bitterness. Steve Brady is the cream that successfully softened Miranda’s hard exterior.
Enter Samantha, the always fabulous and horny. Most insecure women dislikes Samantha’s confidence, I personally found her the most entertaining (). She is like this cool older sister that extremely care and supportive.
Enter Charlotte York; maternal and feminine (not feminist), the most conservative from her bunch Charlotte was dreaming to find the right prince to be the father of her children, like most Indonesian women. Understandable, but maybe because she had temporarily refused to help Carrie financial situation, or that she doesn’t want to touch any local food in Mexico (hey, how about Jakarta’s street vendor Charlotte?), or when she got so angry on Trey and Harry for disobeying her wishes, I found Charlotte a selfish-demanding character and unreliable girl friend.
SATC was a series that told its stories on frames, through Carrie Bradshaw’s narration. The main scene can be found on every episode is Carrie contemplating hers and her friends’ sex/relationship experiences in front of her Apple notebook. Like any other good TV shows, SATC also put many scenes when unexpected difficult situation happens. Unlike many other (used to be) good TV shows, SATC was the one which ended their series on top form before the stories become ridiculous.
More than its novel, and its movie, the TV series adaptation is the best format of Sex and The City.
Favorite Episodes;
Attack of The Five Foot Ten Woman; Don’t Asks Don’t Tell; The Agony and The Ex-Tacy; The Real Me; Ghost Town; Sex and the Country; Anchors Away; Cover Girl; Plus One is the Loneliest Number; Critical Condition; To Market To Market; A Woman’s Right On Shoes; An American Girl in Paris.
FRIENDS
FRIENDS, as I writing this I consider myself lucky to know you. There are no other FRIENDS like you. New series may come and go, but you are the one that will always be on my heart. There will no other FRIENDS that ever entertain me the way you did. You are loveable, warm and funny. And you don’t even have to try so hard, you don’t need to put glamorous scenes and ridiculous scandal to make us love you.
Not like your many friends based their stories on life in New York City, you FRIENDS, are unpretentious. You’re all about this six friends with different background struggling to find their way in life. Unlike one of your friend based on Hollywood, ENTOURAGE, things in yours not always magically turns pretty; every each of your character have trough a jobless period, difficult times through family problems and relationship.
Somehow you – Joey, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Rachel, Phoebe— had manages to make the best from every impossible situation. Through the ten years we had you in our life we have witnessed how amazingly every each of you had stand by each other and overcome troubles in such graceful way without even losing the individual quirkiness of yours.
FRIENDS, you may not be the longest TV drama ever aired, but you definitely the most beloved.
FRIENDS, your warmth will always be on our heart.
Favorite Episodes:
All that included Ross and Rachel’s pres and posts, Monica and Chandler’s before and after marriage.
TASTES OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA
The series based on small town America represented like lyrics on country music: plaid shirts, thick accent and people who cares on their neighbors. I’d like to include Gilmore Girls and Six Feet Under which I think was one of the best TV series ever made. But Six Feet Under was not based on small town at all, the story created around LA area. The three here also have their own distinguishing style:
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
The show not included stories with fang, blood, glamour, and high society scandal, but there are parents who merely adults, student athletes with burden on their shoulders, a small town with high school ambience, the true picture of small town America.
Center around ordinary teens and student athletes dealing that reality is not always turn pretty. Friday Night Lights is the best from all the best. From stacks of overly-dressed teen leading adult scandal dramas, Friday Night Lights’s character with their ordinary costumes is such sublime quality.
As for the circle of adultery issues the show exposed, well, program like Friday Night Lights converts abstract ideas about individual relationships between man and man, men and women, individuals and institutions, whites and blacks into concrete dramatic form. It is a ritual condensation of the dominant criteria for survival in modern complex society (Fiske, 1987).
Unlike sinetrons with their multiply re-telling of Cinderella story, it is a western (America, France) tendency to put sexual relationship issues on their well-made drama. Friday Night Lights is no exception. Infidelity also become substance on this series, but good family value like the Taylor family also included. Oh, and good Christian value since the town is still a religious Christian town.
Maybe that's why Friday Night Lights not for all people, especially in a country with Muslim majority like Indonesia, this one good show is prove that viewers majority on demographic character determine the show success.
Favorite Episodes:
The Beginning; Full Hearts; Blinders; Best Laid Plans; State; Let’s Get It On.
OCTOBER ROAD
October Road was based on Scott Rosenberg’s experience after he wrote the movie Beautiful Girls (1996), how his friends reacted after a movie about their lives.
After experiencing writer’s block, the bestseller writer Nick Garrett returns home to the town where he was raised; Knights Bridge. He has been gone from the town for ten years, leaving not only his family behind (a father and one younger brother), but also a group of friends he grew up with and one ex-girlfriend. All of whom, including the rest of the town, he had betrayed with writing Turtle on a Snare Drum which is a novel about the town he was raised and the people on it, includes his friends and ex-girlfriend. Oh, and during those ten years, the ex-girlfriend had a son while one best friend had an affair with one of the best friend’s wife. Humhumhum…
Seeming like only better for a ninety minutes movie? Well, the writers/producers do have skills. They turn the simple story into a nice entertaining series. With only some minuses:
-Question: What’s wrong with wanting to leave from Knights Ridge for only a couple of months?
-Sometimes it seems all characters have skills on turning witty phrases, too wit for everyday use and some of the characters itself.
Despite little flaws, October Road was a charming show featuring great soundtracks. In fact, they had some scenes that reminded me of 90’s music video style. Check episodes: 'Best Friend Window',‘Stand Alone By Me’ and ‘As Soon As You Are Able’. Favorite song from all? Skid Row’s I’ll Remember You.
Favorite Episodes:
‘Pilot’; ‘Tomorrow’s So Far Away’; ‘Best Friend Windows’; ‘Let’s Get Owen’, ‘Infidelity Tour’; ‘Once Around the Block’; ‘Revenge of The Cupcake Kid’; ‘Stand Alone By Me’; ‘The Fine Art of Surfacing’; ‘As Soon As You Are Able’.
TRUE BLOOD
Scenes of fangs licking bloods from delicate throat, never before I seen the picture of blood-drinking being delivered so delicious. It is confirmed, Allan Ball’s ability in making goodly written out of mainstream drama. Name Six Feet Under. Name American Beauty. Allan’s the man behind them.
Anna Paquin who plays Sookie Stockhouse is True Blood central character. Maybe because the pale feature and fangs that make Bill Compton even hotter, Sookie is the un-official vampire defender that set her eyes to Bill and Bill only. While her best friend Tara Thornton, the crazy temper with drunken mother and painful childhood experiences had lose her heart to Sookie’s older brother, Jason Stockhouse, since she was eight years old. Tara has cousin, Lafayette, who is very creative in making money. Way too creative he sells weeds and vampire's blood aside his 'good job' as a chef at Merlotte. Merlotte bar and diner where Lafayette, Sookie and Tara all works is own by Sam Merlotte, a good guy who has feeling for Sookie.
The story will continue to develop, as like Allan Ball’s Six Feet Under, many surprises are waiting to be revealed. Including the first mystery that opens the show’s pilot: who is the serial killer in town?
The local sinetrons makers can learn many things from watching this show. True Blood has the very same formula like Indonesians major taste on horror stories. Don't miss the two last episodes, I think they are the best from all first season's.
Favorite Episodes:
Strange Love; Mine; Escape From Dragon House; Cold Ground; two last episodes of 1st season.
Maybe audiences like seeing the programs just the way they are, without local version needed and made. Because there are something can be felt on the original version that would seem too force if it ever ‘translated’ to local version. Different languages, different cultures, are reasons.
But when I saw series of American drama on pirates DVD stalls from Mall Ambassador to Ratu Plaza, I couldn’t help but think how American series can be so globally accepted it seems like there is this universality of tastes on what’s worked what’s not on drama. Okay stupid, of course it is…isn’t it so obvious? Film, Hollywood film has spoken first. Like the Babel’s director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s speeches on Golden Globe two years ago; motion picture is universal language.
In late 90’s and early 2000’s two most successful ‘ordinary life’ (not medical-law-vampire drama) American series were based in New York; FRIENDS and Sex & The City. The other two; Gilmore Girls and Six Feet Under are outside New York. Now, I like to review my favorite series based on two categorize; New York New York (title taken from an episode of Friday Night Light’s season 3) and Tastes of Small Town America.
NEW YORK NEW YORK
“The colony club is the most exclusive club in New York City which means the world,” explains Blair Waldorf to Dorota.
The sentence is confirming how the American views New York City. That New York is also like the world’s capital city. No wonder there are many successful TV shows based on New York City, from The Cosby Show (80’s) to Growing Pains (Long Island, 90’s) to Gossip Girl (2000’s). TV series based on life in New York do have the dynamic exciting feelings more than ones that based on America’s small town, to name a few; Lipstick Jungle, Cashmere Mafia, Dirty Sexy Money, and the glamorous Sex & the City.
GOSSIP GIRL
From Faulkner to Hamlet to Capote to Wharton, including quoted lines from My Fair Lady to Age of Innocence, Gossip Girl is notably rich with classic cultural reference. More than any other teen series America ever produced. The sharp tongues’ of Gossip Girl are the kids that have it all; looks, glamorously blessed life, and brain. Or minimal, skill on turning phrases.
Of course that were only how Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage creating successful teen drama. Their former work, The OC, was one good example on how good looks and good wardrobes are the main key to one hit series.
Maybe Gossip Girl’s wit comes from its novel, where the Gossip Girl originally from, but never before in the history of teen drama life values mix rich cultural reference is told in such crispy ways.
Kudos to the writers! Savage, even though you didn’t finish your Ph.D thesis, you made all those years learning theories useful. Thank you, thank you, to have given the viewers fair perspective on villainous characters.
Favorite Episodes:
Victor Victrola; Seventeen Candles; Blair Waldorf Must Pie; Hi,Society; School Lies; Much I Do About Nothing; Summer, Kind of Wonderful; The Serena Also Rises; O Brother Where Bart Thou?; In The Realm of The Basses.
SEX AND THE CITY
Carrie Bradshaw is a sexy writer that loves shoes and clothes. She is a thirty something woman who putting expensive designer stuff above the necessity to buy herself a HOUSE/apartment. She is glamour, funny, and smart. She writes about women and relationship and sex. Consider her a feminist, yet when it comes to choose the man of her life, she chose a successful financial expert gleaming with money, Mr. Big. Maybe it is women tendency to pick a man that above us. Logically, how can we let ourselves be lead by a man who has lesser quality than us, right?
Enter Miranda Hobbes, a cynical, smart and pragmatist lawyer that most men would describe as psycho. As a successful and independent big city woman, she finally found true love in Steve Brady. Steve might only a bartender with small income, but he is one person Miranda is needed to find that there is more in life than only anger and bitterness. Steve Brady is the cream that successfully softened Miranda’s hard exterior.
Enter Samantha, the always fabulous and horny. Most insecure women dislikes Samantha’s confidence, I personally found her the most entertaining (). She is like this cool older sister that extremely care and supportive.
Enter Charlotte York; maternal and feminine (not feminist), the most conservative from her bunch Charlotte was dreaming to find the right prince to be the father of her children, like most Indonesian women. Understandable, but maybe because she had temporarily refused to help Carrie financial situation, or that she doesn’t want to touch any local food in Mexico (hey, how about Jakarta’s street vendor Charlotte?), or when she got so angry on Trey and Harry for disobeying her wishes, I found Charlotte a selfish-demanding character and unreliable girl friend.
SATC was a series that told its stories on frames, through Carrie Bradshaw’s narration. The main scene can be found on every episode is Carrie contemplating hers and her friends’ sex/relationship experiences in front of her Apple notebook. Like any other good TV shows, SATC also put many scenes when unexpected difficult situation happens. Unlike many other (used to be) good TV shows, SATC was the one which ended their series on top form before the stories become ridiculous.
More than its novel, and its movie, the TV series adaptation is the best format of Sex and The City.
Favorite Episodes;
Attack of The Five Foot Ten Woman; Don’t Asks Don’t Tell; The Agony and The Ex-Tacy; The Real Me; Ghost Town; Sex and the Country; Anchors Away; Cover Girl; Plus One is the Loneliest Number; Critical Condition; To Market To Market; A Woman’s Right On Shoes; An American Girl in Paris.
FRIENDS
FRIENDS, as I writing this I consider myself lucky to know you. There are no other FRIENDS like you. New series may come and go, but you are the one that will always be on my heart. There will no other FRIENDS that ever entertain me the way you did. You are loveable, warm and funny. And you don’t even have to try so hard, you don’t need to put glamorous scenes and ridiculous scandal to make us love you.
Not like your many friends based their stories on life in New York City, you FRIENDS, are unpretentious. You’re all about this six friends with different background struggling to find their way in life. Unlike one of your friend based on Hollywood, ENTOURAGE, things in yours not always magically turns pretty; every each of your character have trough a jobless period, difficult times through family problems and relationship.
Somehow you – Joey, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Rachel, Phoebe— had manages to make the best from every impossible situation. Through the ten years we had you in our life we have witnessed how amazingly every each of you had stand by each other and overcome troubles in such graceful way without even losing the individual quirkiness of yours.
FRIENDS, you may not be the longest TV drama ever aired, but you definitely the most beloved.
FRIENDS, your warmth will always be on our heart.
Favorite Episodes:
All that included Ross and Rachel’s pres and posts, Monica and Chandler’s before and after marriage.
TASTES OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA
The series based on small town America represented like lyrics on country music: plaid shirts, thick accent and people who cares on their neighbors. I’d like to include Gilmore Girls and Six Feet Under which I think was one of the best TV series ever made. But Six Feet Under was not based on small town at all, the story created around LA area. The three here also have their own distinguishing style:
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
The show not included stories with fang, blood, glamour, and high society scandal, but there are parents who merely adults, student athletes with burden on their shoulders, a small town with high school ambience, the true picture of small town America.
Center around ordinary teens and student athletes dealing that reality is not always turn pretty. Friday Night Lights is the best from all the best. From stacks of overly-dressed teen leading adult scandal dramas, Friday Night Lights’s character with their ordinary costumes is such sublime quality.
As for the circle of adultery issues the show exposed, well, program like Friday Night Lights converts abstract ideas about individual relationships between man and man, men and women, individuals and institutions, whites and blacks into concrete dramatic form. It is a ritual condensation of the dominant criteria for survival in modern complex society (Fiske, 1987).
Unlike sinetrons with their multiply re-telling of Cinderella story, it is a western (America, France) tendency to put sexual relationship issues on their well-made drama. Friday Night Lights is no exception. Infidelity also become substance on this series, but good family value like the Taylor family also included. Oh, and good Christian value since the town is still a religious Christian town.
Maybe that's why Friday Night Lights not for all people, especially in a country with Muslim majority like Indonesia, this one good show is prove that viewers majority on demographic character determine the show success.
Favorite Episodes:
The Beginning; Full Hearts; Blinders; Best Laid Plans; State; Let’s Get It On.
OCTOBER ROAD
October Road was based on Scott Rosenberg’s experience after he wrote the movie Beautiful Girls (1996), how his friends reacted after a movie about their lives.
After experiencing writer’s block, the bestseller writer Nick Garrett returns home to the town where he was raised; Knights Bridge. He has been gone from the town for ten years, leaving not only his family behind (a father and one younger brother), but also a group of friends he grew up with and one ex-girlfriend. All of whom, including the rest of the town, he had betrayed with writing Turtle on a Snare Drum which is a novel about the town he was raised and the people on it, includes his friends and ex-girlfriend. Oh, and during those ten years, the ex-girlfriend had a son while one best friend had an affair with one of the best friend’s wife. Humhumhum…
Seeming like only better for a ninety minutes movie? Well, the writers/producers do have skills. They turn the simple story into a nice entertaining series. With only some minuses:
-Question: What’s wrong with wanting to leave from Knights Ridge for only a couple of months?
-Sometimes it seems all characters have skills on turning witty phrases, too wit for everyday use and some of the characters itself.
Despite little flaws, October Road was a charming show featuring great soundtracks. In fact, they had some scenes that reminded me of 90’s music video style. Check episodes: 'Best Friend Window',‘Stand Alone By Me’ and ‘As Soon As You Are Able’. Favorite song from all? Skid Row’s I’ll Remember You.
Favorite Episodes:
‘Pilot’; ‘Tomorrow’s So Far Away’; ‘Best Friend Windows’; ‘Let’s Get Owen’, ‘Infidelity Tour’; ‘Once Around the Block’; ‘Revenge of The Cupcake Kid’; ‘Stand Alone By Me’; ‘The Fine Art of Surfacing’; ‘As Soon As You Are Able’.
TRUE BLOOD
Scenes of fangs licking bloods from delicate throat, never before I seen the picture of blood-drinking being delivered so delicious. It is confirmed, Allan Ball’s ability in making goodly written out of mainstream drama. Name Six Feet Under. Name American Beauty. Allan’s the man behind them.
Anna Paquin who plays Sookie Stockhouse is True Blood central character. Maybe because the pale feature and fangs that make Bill Compton even hotter, Sookie is the un-official vampire defender that set her eyes to Bill and Bill only. While her best friend Tara Thornton, the crazy temper with drunken mother and painful childhood experiences had lose her heart to Sookie’s older brother, Jason Stockhouse, since she was eight years old. Tara has cousin, Lafayette, who is very creative in making money. Way too creative he sells weeds and vampire's blood aside his 'good job' as a chef at Merlotte. Merlotte bar and diner where Lafayette, Sookie and Tara all works is own by Sam Merlotte, a good guy who has feeling for Sookie.
The story will continue to develop, as like Allan Ball’s Six Feet Under, many surprises are waiting to be revealed. Including the first mystery that opens the show’s pilot: who is the serial killer in town?
The local sinetrons makers can learn many things from watching this show. True Blood has the very same formula like Indonesians major taste on horror stories. Don't miss the two last episodes, I think they are the best from all first season's.
Favorite Episodes:
Strange Love; Mine; Escape From Dragon House; Cold Ground; two last episodes of 1st season.
Jumat, 06 Maret 2009
911-4-90210
Let’s be honest, the old show isn’t actually very good. It is, in fact, a morally heavy handed-look at a few egomaniacal kids with a penchant for chinos and animal prints, which putters along on the strength of its main character’s perfect facial proportions, a few palm trees, and very little else. So what’s make the brand so powerful? (Nylon September 2008, Special TV ISSUES edition).
Don’t find this statement agreeable. It was Beverly Hills 90210 that started deliciously spicy dialogues on teen drama today. Gossip Girl may now be the champion of what Beverly Hills 90210 did first. Besides, unlike their spectator, from their first season they had putting many serious matters on their stories;
1. Under age gun issues. Remember when David Silver’s best friend Scott accidentally shot and killed himself? There was this really good scene when David expressing his grief to Brandon, not realized he was talking in front of the radio microphone and got whole school listened.
2. Teenagers with mental problem. Brandon Walsh’s girlfriend, Emily Valentine, was this bad girl that set fired in front the Walsh family homes and sending threatening letters to the school newspaper. She ended in mental institution and was visited by Brandon.
3. Drug’s problem. From David with Meth and Kelly with cocaine.
4. The complication of being the minority Jew. Andrea Zuckerman was Brendan Fraser of School Lies. The smartest student with scholarship for fancy West Beverly Hills High. Brandon’s best friend and fellow editor on school’s newspaper.
5. Parents turning gay. Steve Sanders’s mother, a TV presenter, turning lesbian.
6. Politics. In college, Brandon dated the Dean’s daughter. One day an African dictator came to visit the campus. I still remember what the politician said (even though I am strongly against fascism for any reason) when he was confronted, “I did what I must. You could only understand that if you were in my position.”
Now after eight years the most successful teen drama in history is back. In the best magazine issue on the best pop culture magazine in this planet, NYLON, it was written that Beverly Hills 90210 was the hit setting of numerous teen drama followed; Party of Five, Dawson's Creek, Friday Night Lights, and Gossip Girl, three amongst the best, were never been born without Aaron Spelling’s BH 90210. Even though several years before 90210, there was a good TV show based on school life, 21 Jump Street and Head of the Class, a twenty four minutes duration comedy aired every Thursday afternoon on RCTI.
With facts that rarely a show has ever make triumph comeback after disappear from screen in a long times, this one loyal viewer of Beverly Hills 90210 had highly expecting the remake of 90210 only to become disappointed. 90210 has various similarity with its senior; a good model family from small town moving into posh Beverly Hills neighborhood. Only in a Dickensian spirit for such transparent intention, the big brother is not one of the twins, he is black Afro-American. To make it even worst, none of the casts except maybe Beverly Hills alumnae, Shannon Doherty and Jennie Garth had acting convincingly. Sometimes they were just a bunch of good looking people walking around saying things they oh-trying-so-hard-to-feel. Funny though, in the very same magazine, the casts praised the show’s producers as quoted below;
“On a lot of shows nowadays it’s like, ‘All right you got eating disorder for a day and then mommy finds out and then go for family dinner and it’s ok.’ That’s not the way the world works, you don’t get bullied in high school and then all of a sudden it’s patched up the next day. With our show, we’re going to find that the characters all have their own definitive characteristics, but there are many-many layers to peel away throughout the season…,” said the overacting actress Shenae Grimes of Annie Wilson character.
“I was really excited when I heard Gabe and Jeff had signed on as executive producers. You know they were going to be layering these characters and making them real. Not just who plays writing salacious heightened teen-sex mega drama,” Dustin Milligan who plays Ethan Ward.
But to follow 90210 after several episodes were to find exactly what they had critic about American teen dramas nowadays. Let’s be honest, a truly realistic and wonderfully written teen drama ever in television history never even belong to rich teens living adult scandal series, The OC was one of the worst, an empty-written series no better than 90210. Gossip Girl was the one offering strong characters, spicy dialogue and could be somewhat touching, giving an interesting scene when the-haves and the-common-world residents bumping head or befriend each other. Goody entertaining but somehow must be admitted were far from reality ground (c’mon, becoming a CEO of billion dollar industry in the age of seventeen, too Christina Onassis; a waitress from Brooklyn dating an Upper East Sider from old money family is too Austensian). For a good realistic teen drama with serious every day issue on, it was the one and only Friday Night Lights.
90210 have many layers to peel, expose, and cook for some delicious meal. Somehow they want the entire main character to be likeable, whole bunch of boring protagonists without depth and complexity. Hello, is this drama or what? They should learn few things from Gossip Girl. Chuck and Blair might be the villain who says a lot awful things to the less rich, but their saucy characters are the one that draws Gossip Girl many audience.
These are potential storyline they should explore from the beginning:
1. Adrianna with her Dina Lohan wannabe mother could have spice up the story line. She should be the school overachiever queen bee instead of Naomi Clark, an ambitious actress that busy maintaining her acting career, struggling social life, keeping up with good grades, while trying so hard pleasing her mother and becoming family breadwinner. Oh she better be a diet obsessed anorexic than drugs user. Fewer things we need to show on television is cool kids doing drugs, no wonder drugs user never been reduced but always increased. Not only it’s bad example, but also so cliché. To make the story spicier, Adrianna has a sister; mean, clingy, manipulative, and always jealous. She will be the bad girl turn good like Blair Waldorf. There, enough good layers for the next three seasons.
2. Ethan Ward has this mentally troubled brother. More storylines on that would give Ethan Ward more complex sympathetic character, make him look sexier than the Ethan we temporarily seeing.
3. More older casts involve on stories but not Harry Wilson and Tracy Clark or Granny Wilson , but more Donna, and Kelly and Brenda, and who between them two that finally get Dylan. But this could be tricky though. Instead of school play director, I prefer Brenda becoming TV series actress and playing Adrianna’s mother on screen. Oh, and Donna Martin’s boutique has this joint café with Pitch Pit, so while Dixon working his shift, more scene opportunity can be written for the ‘old generation 90210’ and ‘new generation 90210’. Then Donna will hire Silver for her internet skill, in a more useful way.
4. Instead only playing lacrosse, how many conflicts can be written in lacrosse field anyway, Dixon and Navid work closely together in the school newspaper and television. They have different vision and constant argument but will always eventually make up.
5. The quirky Silver prefer more ambitious character; Navid. While Dixon will eventually end up dating another twisted Emily Valentine (remember Brandon’s crazy girlfriend) whose having abused problems when she was small child.
6. This one is not about stories; sharper dialogues like the 90210 older versions were. Taken from en.wikiquote.com:
Brenda: So, who else is in his class anyway?
Brandon: I don't know, uh, Andrea, Donna, Steve Sanders...
Brenda: Dylan McKay?
Brandon: No, he's too smart to take this class.
Brenda: Or too busy chasing blondes?
Brandon: What are you talking about?
Brenda: I just don't understand why every guy's dream girl has to have hair like Daryl Hannah and a body like Kim Basinger.
Brandon: Bren, I'm trying to study here.
Brenda: Well excuse me for living.
Steve: Yo, Sam. Sam!
Scott: Me?
Steve: Come here.
Scott: I'm Scott.
Steve: Whatever. What's going on with him and MC Hammer?
Scott: David wants him to play at the prom.
Steve: MC Hammer's not gonna play at any school dance.
Scott: You know that, and I know that, and MC Hammer knows that. But unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell David.
Brandon: Hey. You're gonna be just fine.
Brenda: How do you know that, Brandon?
Brandon: Cause I'm older. And wiser.
Brenda: And just how much wisdom did you accumulate in those momentous four minutes?
Brandon: A small lifetime.
Brenda: Very small.
Don’t find this statement agreeable. It was Beverly Hills 90210 that started deliciously spicy dialogues on teen drama today. Gossip Girl may now be the champion of what Beverly Hills 90210 did first. Besides, unlike their spectator, from their first season they had putting many serious matters on their stories;
1. Under age gun issues. Remember when David Silver’s best friend Scott accidentally shot and killed himself? There was this really good scene when David expressing his grief to Brandon, not realized he was talking in front of the radio microphone and got whole school listened.
2. Teenagers with mental problem. Brandon Walsh’s girlfriend, Emily Valentine, was this bad girl that set fired in front the Walsh family homes and sending threatening letters to the school newspaper. She ended in mental institution and was visited by Brandon.
3. Drug’s problem. From David with Meth and Kelly with cocaine.
4. The complication of being the minority Jew. Andrea Zuckerman was Brendan Fraser of School Lies. The smartest student with scholarship for fancy West Beverly Hills High. Brandon’s best friend and fellow editor on school’s newspaper.
5. Parents turning gay. Steve Sanders’s mother, a TV presenter, turning lesbian.
6. Politics. In college, Brandon dated the Dean’s daughter. One day an African dictator came to visit the campus. I still remember what the politician said (even though I am strongly against fascism for any reason) when he was confronted, “I did what I must. You could only understand that if you were in my position.”
Now after eight years the most successful teen drama in history is back. In the best magazine issue on the best pop culture magazine in this planet, NYLON, it was written that Beverly Hills 90210 was the hit setting of numerous teen drama followed; Party of Five, Dawson's Creek, Friday Night Lights, and Gossip Girl, three amongst the best, were never been born without Aaron Spelling’s BH 90210. Even though several years before 90210, there was a good TV show based on school life, 21 Jump Street and Head of the Class, a twenty four minutes duration comedy aired every Thursday afternoon on RCTI.
With facts that rarely a show has ever make triumph comeback after disappear from screen in a long times, this one loyal viewer of Beverly Hills 90210 had highly expecting the remake of 90210 only to become disappointed. 90210 has various similarity with its senior; a good model family from small town moving into posh Beverly Hills neighborhood. Only in a Dickensian spirit for such transparent intention, the big brother is not one of the twins, he is black Afro-American. To make it even worst, none of the casts except maybe Beverly Hills alumnae, Shannon Doherty and Jennie Garth had acting convincingly. Sometimes they were just a bunch of good looking people walking around saying things they oh-trying-so-hard-to-feel. Funny though, in the very same magazine, the casts praised the show’s producers as quoted below;
“On a lot of shows nowadays it’s like, ‘All right you got eating disorder for a day and then mommy finds out and then go for family dinner and it’s ok.’ That’s not the way the world works, you don’t get bullied in high school and then all of a sudden it’s patched up the next day. With our show, we’re going to find that the characters all have their own definitive characteristics, but there are many-many layers to peel away throughout the season…,” said the overacting actress Shenae Grimes of Annie Wilson character.
“I was really excited when I heard Gabe and Jeff had signed on as executive producers. You know they were going to be layering these characters and making them real. Not just who plays writing salacious heightened teen-sex mega drama,” Dustin Milligan who plays Ethan Ward.
But to follow 90210 after several episodes were to find exactly what they had critic about American teen dramas nowadays. Let’s be honest, a truly realistic and wonderfully written teen drama ever in television history never even belong to rich teens living adult scandal series, The OC was one of the worst, an empty-written series no better than 90210. Gossip Girl was the one offering strong characters, spicy dialogue and could be somewhat touching, giving an interesting scene when the-haves and the-common-world residents bumping head or befriend each other. Goody entertaining but somehow must be admitted were far from reality ground (c’mon, becoming a CEO of billion dollar industry in the age of seventeen, too Christina Onassis; a waitress from Brooklyn dating an Upper East Sider from old money family is too Austensian). For a good realistic teen drama with serious every day issue on, it was the one and only Friday Night Lights.
90210 have many layers to peel, expose, and cook for some delicious meal. Somehow they want the entire main character to be likeable, whole bunch of boring protagonists without depth and complexity. Hello, is this drama or what? They should learn few things from Gossip Girl. Chuck and Blair might be the villain who says a lot awful things to the less rich, but their saucy characters are the one that draws Gossip Girl many audience.
These are potential storyline they should explore from the beginning:
1. Adrianna with her Dina Lohan wannabe mother could have spice up the story line. She should be the school overachiever queen bee instead of Naomi Clark, an ambitious actress that busy maintaining her acting career, struggling social life, keeping up with good grades, while trying so hard pleasing her mother and becoming family breadwinner. Oh she better be a diet obsessed anorexic than drugs user. Fewer things we need to show on television is cool kids doing drugs, no wonder drugs user never been reduced but always increased. Not only it’s bad example, but also so cliché. To make the story spicier, Adrianna has a sister; mean, clingy, manipulative, and always jealous. She will be the bad girl turn good like Blair Waldorf. There, enough good layers for the next three seasons.
2. Ethan Ward has this mentally troubled brother. More storylines on that would give Ethan Ward more complex sympathetic character, make him look sexier than the Ethan we temporarily seeing.
3. More older casts involve on stories but not Harry Wilson and Tracy Clark or Granny Wilson , but more Donna, and Kelly and Brenda, and who between them two that finally get Dylan. But this could be tricky though. Instead of school play director, I prefer Brenda becoming TV series actress and playing Adrianna’s mother on screen. Oh, and Donna Martin’s boutique has this joint café with Pitch Pit, so while Dixon working his shift, more scene opportunity can be written for the ‘old generation 90210’ and ‘new generation 90210’. Then Donna will hire Silver for her internet skill, in a more useful way.
4. Instead only playing lacrosse, how many conflicts can be written in lacrosse field anyway, Dixon and Navid work closely together in the school newspaper and television. They have different vision and constant argument but will always eventually make up.
5. The quirky Silver prefer more ambitious character; Navid. While Dixon will eventually end up dating another twisted Emily Valentine (remember Brandon’s crazy girlfriend) whose having abused problems when she was small child.
6. This one is not about stories; sharper dialogues like the 90210 older versions were. Taken from en.wikiquote.com:
Brenda: So, who else is in his class anyway?
Brandon: I don't know, uh, Andrea, Donna, Steve Sanders...
Brenda: Dylan McKay?
Brandon: No, he's too smart to take this class.
Brenda: Or too busy chasing blondes?
Brandon: What are you talking about?
Brenda: I just don't understand why every guy's dream girl has to have hair like Daryl Hannah and a body like Kim Basinger.
Brandon: Bren, I'm trying to study here.
Brenda: Well excuse me for living.
Steve: Yo, Sam. Sam!
Scott: Me?
Steve: Come here.
Scott: I'm Scott.
Steve: Whatever. What's going on with him and MC Hammer?
Scott: David wants him to play at the prom.
Steve: MC Hammer's not gonna play at any school dance.
Scott: You know that, and I know that, and MC Hammer knows that. But unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell David.
Brandon: Hey. You're gonna be just fine.
Brenda: How do you know that, Brandon?
Brandon: Cause I'm older. And wiser.
Brenda: And just how much wisdom did you accumulate in those momentous four minutes?
Brandon: A small lifetime.
Brenda: Very small.
Minggu, 08 Februari 2009
Komedi Komedi
'Tergugah' oleh tulisan tentang 'komedi fisik' di televisi pada koran Minggu kemarin:
Bajaj Bajuri bukan hanya berhasil menggali cerita yang sangat Indonesia, program ini pun sempat meraih pencapaian fenomenal dari segi jumlah penonton. Tentu dengan pengecualian Si Doel Anak Sekolahan dan kemudian, Si Doel Anak Gedongan, yang perolehan rating/share-nya sampai detik ini, belum tertandingi. Bajaj Bajuri sempat berkuasa selama tiga tahun, kemudian dipecah dalam versi baru; Bajaj Bajuri Baru dan Salon Oneng. Lalu RCTI menyusul dengan sitkom OB yang terbilang sukses, kemudian ada lagi Ujang Pantry, Suami-Suami Takut Istri, Tawa Sutra, dan Cagur Naik Bajaj di Starantv.
Seperti pernah dikemukakan tokoh periklanan Jepang, Masako Okamura, masyarakat Indonesia menyukai humor (Behind The Scene, Oktober, 2006). Humor yang terbilang jarang digunakan sebagai selling point dalam iklan lokal. Iklan dengan unsur humor sambil menggusung nilai lokal yang kuat, ‘Geng Ijo’-nya rokok Dji Sam Soe, adalah satu-satunya iklan televisi yang berhasil membuat saya urung berpindah channel.
Tahun 2009 yang belum-belum sudah dirumpiken akan menjadi tahun yang sulit, acara hiburan tentu semakin dibutuhkan. Bila tidak sedih sekali sampai membuat penonton merasa menemukan identifikasi penderitaan mereka, tentu yang komedi sekali. Pertanyaan, mampukah celah kesempatan yang terbuka demikian lebar ini, dimanfaatkan sebaik-baiknya oleh pihak kreator televisi? Satu hal yang bisa dirasakan dari berbagai sitkom di televisi nasional, adalah sulitnya menemukan situasi komedi yang bukan asal ditempelkan, mengikuti metode yang umum diterapkan film-film barat, baik Hollywood mau pun keluaran Eropa. Seperti tampak pada sitkom produksi TransCorp., Suami-Suami Takut Istri, di mana unsur ekspresi serta fiksi yang digunakan dalam menciptakan situasi komedi tidak berbeda dari gaya sosok Mister Bean atau Jim Carey.
Situasi komedi dalam film layar lebar condong diciptakan dalam bentuk aksi, jarang sekali menggunakan dialog. Ada pun kelucuan yang tercipta dalam bentuk dialog umum terlihat dalam ‘dagelan’ khas Betawi yang, meski tidak dashyat sekali mengundang tawa, menawarkan ciri dan bentuk kecerdasan tersendiri. Walau pun memang komedi yang diterapkan pelawak-pelawak made in Indonesia bukan tidak lepas dari kekurangan. Seperti pernah diungkapkan Garin Nugroho (Kompas Minggu, 2007), orang Indonesia cenderung senang mendengar kekurangan fisik orang lain diolok-olok. Sehingga Tukul dan Mandra yang berbibir mancung berhidung pesek bisa kaya raya karena faktor penampilan yang ampuh mendatangkan tawa.
Awal sembilan puluhan kala Jojon, Gepeng, dan Bagito bersaudara lewat acara BaSo sedang mencapai puncak ketenaran, acara komedi berdurasi dua puluh empat menit rata-rata adalah favorit stasiun televisi. Secara tipe tak jauh berbeda dengan Extravaganza yang kini ditayangkan TransTV. Hanya saja kalau Extravaganza banyak melibatkan improvisasi aksi, Bagito Show serta program-program lawak senior atau seangkatan cenderung mengandalkan penceritaan yang dibangun dari kekuatan kata-kata. Para pelawak bersandiwara, beradu kata-kata, atau dalam kasus Bagito melontarkan sindiran satir berkenaan dengan masalah pemerintahan.
Konon Extravaganza tidak jauh berbeda dengan konsep Saturday Night Live. Program televisi yang telah bertahan puluhan tahun di televisi Amerika. Saturday Night Live yang banyak mencetak sosok-sosok mapan setelah meninggalkan program tersebut, sebutlah; Tina Fey kreator 30 Rock yang memenangkan Golden Globe, Ben Stiller (menyutradari Tropic Thunder, 2008), Adam Sandler, serta lusinan nama-nama lain.
Sepuluh tahun berlalu dan program-program komedi yang memilih menciptakan situasi lucu melalui ekspresi-aksi tengah mendominasi. Bukan maksud mengatakan bahwa komedi melalui kemampuan memainkan kata-kata hanyalah ciri Indonesia semata, komedi panggung, atau pelawak menceritakan lelucon-lelucon dengan hanya berbekal mikrofon di panggung kafe-kafe komedi, konon adalah tradisi yang dimulai di negeri Paman Sam. Sementara di Indonesia, pertunjukan ketoprak, ludruk atau wayang sah-sah saja disebut sebagai hiburan ‘komedi tempo doeloe’ yang sifatnya Indonesiana, yang berarti komedi dengan penekanan aksi sejak dahulu kala telah dipraktikkan di negara kita.
Inti masalah bukan mana yang mengikuti mana, atau pun mana yang lebih Indonesia, perkaranya, komedi dengan penekanan aksi-reaksi bila sudah terlalu sering digunakan bisa menyebabkan kelelahan serta membuat penonton merasa apa yang ditampilkan terasa terlalu dibuat-buat. Apalagi mengingat beberapa adegan yang diperlihatkan dalam program komedi masa kini, tampaknya menggunakan pola komedi yang bisa ditemui pada film-film Hollywood. Misalnya, penekanan ekspresi komedi pada Suami-Suami Takut Istri, adegan sengaja tak sengaja pada Tawa Sutra, sikap percaya diri berlebihan pada (ex) OB, dan tentu saja, satir teatrikal Extravaganza yang merupakan Saturday Night Live versi Indonesia.
Bajaj Bajuri bukan hanya berhasil menggali cerita yang sangat Indonesia, program ini pun sempat meraih pencapaian fenomenal dari segi jumlah penonton. Tentu dengan pengecualian Si Doel Anak Sekolahan dan kemudian, Si Doel Anak Gedongan, yang perolehan rating/share-nya sampai detik ini, belum tertandingi. Bajaj Bajuri sempat berkuasa selama tiga tahun, kemudian dipecah dalam versi baru; Bajaj Bajuri Baru dan Salon Oneng. Lalu RCTI menyusul dengan sitkom OB yang terbilang sukses, kemudian ada lagi Ujang Pantry, Suami-Suami Takut Istri, Tawa Sutra, dan Cagur Naik Bajaj di Starantv.
Seperti pernah dikemukakan tokoh periklanan Jepang, Masako Okamura, masyarakat Indonesia menyukai humor (Behind The Scene, Oktober, 2006). Humor yang terbilang jarang digunakan sebagai selling point dalam iklan lokal. Iklan dengan unsur humor sambil menggusung nilai lokal yang kuat, ‘Geng Ijo’-nya rokok Dji Sam Soe, adalah satu-satunya iklan televisi yang berhasil membuat saya urung berpindah channel.
Tahun 2009 yang belum-belum sudah dirumpiken akan menjadi tahun yang sulit, acara hiburan tentu semakin dibutuhkan. Bila tidak sedih sekali sampai membuat penonton merasa menemukan identifikasi penderitaan mereka, tentu yang komedi sekali. Pertanyaan, mampukah celah kesempatan yang terbuka demikian lebar ini, dimanfaatkan sebaik-baiknya oleh pihak kreator televisi? Satu hal yang bisa dirasakan dari berbagai sitkom di televisi nasional, adalah sulitnya menemukan situasi komedi yang bukan asal ditempelkan, mengikuti metode yang umum diterapkan film-film barat, baik Hollywood mau pun keluaran Eropa. Seperti tampak pada sitkom produksi TransCorp., Suami-Suami Takut Istri, di mana unsur ekspresi serta fiksi yang digunakan dalam menciptakan situasi komedi tidak berbeda dari gaya sosok Mister Bean atau Jim Carey.
Situasi komedi dalam film layar lebar condong diciptakan dalam bentuk aksi, jarang sekali menggunakan dialog. Ada pun kelucuan yang tercipta dalam bentuk dialog umum terlihat dalam ‘dagelan’ khas Betawi yang, meski tidak dashyat sekali mengundang tawa, menawarkan ciri dan bentuk kecerdasan tersendiri. Walau pun memang komedi yang diterapkan pelawak-pelawak made in Indonesia bukan tidak lepas dari kekurangan. Seperti pernah diungkapkan Garin Nugroho (Kompas Minggu, 2007), orang Indonesia cenderung senang mendengar kekurangan fisik orang lain diolok-olok. Sehingga Tukul dan Mandra yang berbibir mancung berhidung pesek bisa kaya raya karena faktor penampilan yang ampuh mendatangkan tawa.
Awal sembilan puluhan kala Jojon, Gepeng, dan Bagito bersaudara lewat acara BaSo sedang mencapai puncak ketenaran, acara komedi berdurasi dua puluh empat menit rata-rata adalah favorit stasiun televisi. Secara tipe tak jauh berbeda dengan Extravaganza yang kini ditayangkan TransTV. Hanya saja kalau Extravaganza banyak melibatkan improvisasi aksi, Bagito Show serta program-program lawak senior atau seangkatan cenderung mengandalkan penceritaan yang dibangun dari kekuatan kata-kata. Para pelawak bersandiwara, beradu kata-kata, atau dalam kasus Bagito melontarkan sindiran satir berkenaan dengan masalah pemerintahan.
Konon Extravaganza tidak jauh berbeda dengan konsep Saturday Night Live. Program televisi yang telah bertahan puluhan tahun di televisi Amerika. Saturday Night Live yang banyak mencetak sosok-sosok mapan setelah meninggalkan program tersebut, sebutlah; Tina Fey kreator 30 Rock yang memenangkan Golden Globe, Ben Stiller (menyutradari Tropic Thunder, 2008), Adam Sandler, serta lusinan nama-nama lain.
Sepuluh tahun berlalu dan program-program komedi yang memilih menciptakan situasi lucu melalui ekspresi-aksi tengah mendominasi. Bukan maksud mengatakan bahwa komedi melalui kemampuan memainkan kata-kata hanyalah ciri Indonesia semata, komedi panggung, atau pelawak menceritakan lelucon-lelucon dengan hanya berbekal mikrofon di panggung kafe-kafe komedi, konon adalah tradisi yang dimulai di negeri Paman Sam. Sementara di Indonesia, pertunjukan ketoprak, ludruk atau wayang sah-sah saja disebut sebagai hiburan ‘komedi tempo doeloe’ yang sifatnya Indonesiana, yang berarti komedi dengan penekanan aksi sejak dahulu kala telah dipraktikkan di negara kita.
Inti masalah bukan mana yang mengikuti mana, atau pun mana yang lebih Indonesia, perkaranya, komedi dengan penekanan aksi-reaksi bila sudah terlalu sering digunakan bisa menyebabkan kelelahan serta membuat penonton merasa apa yang ditampilkan terasa terlalu dibuat-buat. Apalagi mengingat beberapa adegan yang diperlihatkan dalam program komedi masa kini, tampaknya menggunakan pola komedi yang bisa ditemui pada film-film Hollywood. Misalnya, penekanan ekspresi komedi pada Suami-Suami Takut Istri, adegan sengaja tak sengaja pada Tawa Sutra, sikap percaya diri berlebihan pada (ex) OB, dan tentu saja, satir teatrikal Extravaganza yang merupakan Saturday Night Live versi Indonesia.
Selasa, 20 Januari 2009
Tak Perlu Tunggu Penonton Bosan
Era 2000 awal. Ketika reality show Katakan Cinta naik daun, keberhasilan reality show tersebut lalu diikuti oleh sejumlah reality show yang rata-rata dijadwalkan sore hari pada akhir pekan; Playboy Kabel, H2C, dan kemudian dalam perkembangannya; Nikah Gratis dan Bedah Rumah. Seiring dengan itu, Indosiar mencatat sukses meluncurkan Akademi Fantasia, yang diikuti Indonesian Idol hasil kerja sama RCTI dengan rumah produksi Fremantle. Begitu berhasilnya program-program ini, sampai TPI, satu-satunya stasiun televisi Indonesia saat itu yang tegas-tegas membidik sasaran kelas menengah ke bawah, mewajibkan diri turut serta dalam ‘arena’, menciptakan Kontes Dangdut Indonesia dan Akademi Pelawak Indonesia, yang kental oleh rasa lokal.
Tren bukan hanya kata yang umum mengisi halaman mode majalah wanita. Tren acara merupakan salah satu rumus sukses program televisi. Baik pertelevisian Indonesia mau pun yang keluaran ‘pabrik’ Amerika, tak bisa tidak tersentuh oleh tren. Lihat saja bagaimana reality show di Amerika telah berkembang semenjak MTV Real World (1992) diproduksi pertama kali. Kini telah lusinan konsep dan judul reality dapat disebutkan dengan mudah; MTV Cribs, The Hills, The Newlywed, Punk’D, Room Raiders, The Osbourne dan banyak lagi.
Satu acara dalam konsep baru diluncurkan, sukses, tak lama akan diikuti program-program serupa dengan judul berbeda. Demikian biasa terjadi. Hanya saja, bila kesuksesan satu konsep acara hanya berlangsung secara semusim di Indonesia, tidak demikian halnya yang biasa terjadi di negara-negara lain.
Seperti disebutkan di atas, The Real World yang pada tahun 1992 memulai produksi dengan memotret kehidupan tujuh orang pemuda yang tinggal di New York, telah dibuat lebih dari dua puluh musim serta melakukan shooting di sembilan belas kota selain New York, termasuk London, Paris serta Sidney. Adalah kesuksesan The Real World (yang sebenarnya bukanlah reality show pertama dalam sejarah televisi), yang ‘mengawali’ berbagai produksi reality show yang sekarang banyak kita saksikan. Dan bukan hanya didominasi MTV. Mulai dari E! Channel sampai Discovery Travel and Living, sampai stasiun televisi nasional di Indonesia, sempat mengalami dominasi reality show dalam jadwal acara mereka.
Di Indonesia, Akademi Fantasi Indosiar mengakhiri masa jayanya setelah musim kelima. Katakan Cinta dan Nikah Gratis yang sempat mendominasi perolehan rating/share program televisi, telah lama mengakhiri masa tayang. Memang, Bedah Rumah kini ditayangkan kembali di layar RCTI, tapi sampai berapa lama akan bertahan? Dan lagi, mengapa setelah masa kejayaan reality-reality ini, program dengan format serupa hilang dari jadwal tayang kanal-kanal televisi yang justru makin bertambah jumlahnya?
Stasiun-stasiun televisi di negara kita memang taat sekali mengikuti musim yang berganti. Begitu taatnya, sampai-sampai ketika datang ‘musim’ inovasi acara terbaru, tidak ada lagi yang mau repot-repot me-maintain program sebelumnya. Segera stasiun-stasiun televisi berlomba menayangkan program terbaru yang menurut laporan share/rating Nielsen, konsepnya tengah digemari. Program yang sebelumnya tayang secara hingar bingar mengisi jadwal acara dibiarkan terbengkalai dan pelan-pelan digantikan oleh program yang baru.
Pertanyaan, apa yang akan terjadi bila kondisi serupa terus dipertahankan? Masalah stasiun televisi kita bermuara pada tidak adanya karakteristik khusus dari masing-masing stasiun televisi. Ibarat sebuah tim sepak bola, kekurangan dan kelebihan dari para anggota tim niscaya dapat saling melengkapi. Justru ketika sebuah tim diisi lebih banyak diisi oleh atlit superior maka tim tersebut malah kesulitan bekerja sama dan akhirnya, mengalami kekalahan beruntun.
Kalau boleh beranalogi, umpamanya adalah tim AC Milan pada awal dekade sembilan puluhan. Tim yang pernah mencetak record 58 kali tak terkalahkan, pada musim berikutnya sempat mengalami kemerosotan prestasi setelah pada suatu musim habis-habisan ‘mengimpor’ pemain-pemain terbaik dunia dengan ego besar dan kerja sama tim yang minim. Alih-alih meraih kemenangan demi kemenangan, Milan secara beruntun didera kekalahan. Walau pada akhir musim tetap keluar sebagai juara liga dengan berkali-kali mengorbankan Jean Pierre Papin ke bangku cadangan.
Rumus pertelevisian kita kini; tunggu sampai penonton bosan baru suguhi inovasi terbaru untuk kemudian ramai-ramai diikuti stasiun televisi yang lain, saatnya ditinggalkan. Dengan persaingan antar stasiun yang demikian sengit, karakteristik yang memungkinkan stasiun televisi menyaring jumlah kompetitor dan dengan begitu bisa lebih fokus menayangkan program-program berkualitas, sangat diperlukan.
Karakteristik pula yang kiranya dapat mencegah program-program televisi bagus dan menghibur hanya bertahan beberapa musim untuk kemudian menghilang sama sekali dari layar televisi. Sebab kebosanan penonton kiranya juga dipacu oleh ‘booming’ program yang membuat mereka merasa disuguhi jenis acara yang sama secara beruntun tak kenal jeda tak kunjung usai.
Tren bukan hanya kata yang umum mengisi halaman mode majalah wanita. Tren acara merupakan salah satu rumus sukses program televisi. Baik pertelevisian Indonesia mau pun yang keluaran ‘pabrik’ Amerika, tak bisa tidak tersentuh oleh tren. Lihat saja bagaimana reality show di Amerika telah berkembang semenjak MTV Real World (1992) diproduksi pertama kali. Kini telah lusinan konsep dan judul reality dapat disebutkan dengan mudah; MTV Cribs, The Hills, The Newlywed, Punk’D, Room Raiders, The Osbourne dan banyak lagi.
Satu acara dalam konsep baru diluncurkan, sukses, tak lama akan diikuti program-program serupa dengan judul berbeda. Demikian biasa terjadi. Hanya saja, bila kesuksesan satu konsep acara hanya berlangsung secara semusim di Indonesia, tidak demikian halnya yang biasa terjadi di negara-negara lain.
Seperti disebutkan di atas, The Real World yang pada tahun 1992 memulai produksi dengan memotret kehidupan tujuh orang pemuda yang tinggal di New York, telah dibuat lebih dari dua puluh musim serta melakukan shooting di sembilan belas kota selain New York, termasuk London, Paris serta Sidney. Adalah kesuksesan The Real World (yang sebenarnya bukanlah reality show pertama dalam sejarah televisi), yang ‘mengawali’ berbagai produksi reality show yang sekarang banyak kita saksikan. Dan bukan hanya didominasi MTV. Mulai dari E! Channel sampai Discovery Travel and Living, sampai stasiun televisi nasional di Indonesia, sempat mengalami dominasi reality show dalam jadwal acara mereka.
Di Indonesia, Akademi Fantasi Indosiar mengakhiri masa jayanya setelah musim kelima. Katakan Cinta dan Nikah Gratis yang sempat mendominasi perolehan rating/share program televisi, telah lama mengakhiri masa tayang. Memang, Bedah Rumah kini ditayangkan kembali di layar RCTI, tapi sampai berapa lama akan bertahan? Dan lagi, mengapa setelah masa kejayaan reality-reality ini, program dengan format serupa hilang dari jadwal tayang kanal-kanal televisi yang justru makin bertambah jumlahnya?
Stasiun-stasiun televisi di negara kita memang taat sekali mengikuti musim yang berganti. Begitu taatnya, sampai-sampai ketika datang ‘musim’ inovasi acara terbaru, tidak ada lagi yang mau repot-repot me-maintain program sebelumnya. Segera stasiun-stasiun televisi berlomba menayangkan program terbaru yang menurut laporan share/rating Nielsen, konsepnya tengah digemari. Program yang sebelumnya tayang secara hingar bingar mengisi jadwal acara dibiarkan terbengkalai dan pelan-pelan digantikan oleh program yang baru.
Pertanyaan, apa yang akan terjadi bila kondisi serupa terus dipertahankan? Masalah stasiun televisi kita bermuara pada tidak adanya karakteristik khusus dari masing-masing stasiun televisi. Ibarat sebuah tim sepak bola, kekurangan dan kelebihan dari para anggota tim niscaya dapat saling melengkapi. Justru ketika sebuah tim diisi lebih banyak diisi oleh atlit superior maka tim tersebut malah kesulitan bekerja sama dan akhirnya, mengalami kekalahan beruntun.
Kalau boleh beranalogi, umpamanya adalah tim AC Milan pada awal dekade sembilan puluhan. Tim yang pernah mencetak record 58 kali tak terkalahkan, pada musim berikutnya sempat mengalami kemerosotan prestasi setelah pada suatu musim habis-habisan ‘mengimpor’ pemain-pemain terbaik dunia dengan ego besar dan kerja sama tim yang minim. Alih-alih meraih kemenangan demi kemenangan, Milan secara beruntun didera kekalahan. Walau pada akhir musim tetap keluar sebagai juara liga dengan berkali-kali mengorbankan Jean Pierre Papin ke bangku cadangan.
Rumus pertelevisian kita kini; tunggu sampai penonton bosan baru suguhi inovasi terbaru untuk kemudian ramai-ramai diikuti stasiun televisi yang lain, saatnya ditinggalkan. Dengan persaingan antar stasiun yang demikian sengit, karakteristik yang memungkinkan stasiun televisi menyaring jumlah kompetitor dan dengan begitu bisa lebih fokus menayangkan program-program berkualitas, sangat diperlukan.
Karakteristik pula yang kiranya dapat mencegah program-program televisi bagus dan menghibur hanya bertahan beberapa musim untuk kemudian menghilang sama sekali dari layar televisi. Sebab kebosanan penonton kiranya juga dipacu oleh ‘booming’ program yang membuat mereka merasa disuguhi jenis acara yang sama secara beruntun tak kenal jeda tak kunjung usai.
Minggu, 04 Januari 2009
On Sinetron
From someone who in long history of sinetron only had ever follow two titles, Si Doel Anak Sekolahan & Sahabat Pilihan, here is; Sinetron Only Needs Fixing.
Sinetron had inviting many critics in these past years. In the era when Dessy Ratnasari and Paramitha Rusady were popular, sinetron had face critics for its similarities with Jane Austen’s novels, the love between rich and poor. Seasonal trends, along with the use of natural calm color on screen, are the character of Indonesian television. From the misinterpreted life of the haves, sinetron goes to the booming of teen sinetrons, then to religious sinetrons.
Not only sinetron is the most criticized show in Indonesia, it is also the most programs that exemplified how bad and dangerous television could be. On the other hand, sinetron provides working field for many people. Consider that the production work is not demanding any educational qualification, despite its morning to morning shooting schedule, sinetron’s behind the scene work is also paying well.
UK with its BBC is producing European style dramas, America is famous with serials and sitcoms, and their southern neighbors are the factories of la’novela. Hey, remember how we, the Indonesian housewives and young female before the sinetron era were consuming many Marias’ (usually played by Thalia) from day time till the afternoon? While from Asian countries, Japan becomes so popular with animation and Korea for its sad drama. Drama series in Indonesia had become main example how bad television can be.
But can general channel stay as it is without drama? Discovery Travel & Living, Fox Crime, and MTV, have proved they can. Specific channels still could stand out from unaccountable TV stations offering various drama, sitcoms, quizzes, and talk shows. They are the alternatives from type of programs that regularly inviting critics to give comment. Problem is, can’t all channels drift to specific channel. People still want to see more drama series, reality shows, and Oprah.
Most sinetrons are using the narrative structure of television serial. Herewith list of television serial narrative structure which I took from Jeremy Butler’s Television Critical Methods and Application:
1. Multiple protagonists. The multiplicity protagonists permit a variety of simultaneous story lines within the narrative world of a serial. Soap opera relies on a multiplicity of characters to create a narrative web in which most characters are connected with one another.
2. Exposition. Through this redundancy the soap opera constantly re-establishes its characters and their situations. Part of the redundant information that is regurgitated in the serial is the pasts of the characters. Serial characters carry a specific, significant past which the characters constantly refer to it.
3. Motivation. Like the exposition, the original catalyst for long-running television serials took place years ago. In the episodes we watch day after day, or week after week, the many protagonists’ desires and lacks are mostly already established.
4. Narrative enigma. The serial is saturated with enigmas. It thrives on them. So viewers constantly being brought to the ‘will’ questions.
5. Cause-effect Chain. Serials adapt to this constant interruption much the same way that series do. They segment the narrative. Each serial narrative segment ends with a small climax, which raises new enigmas rather than leading to resolutions.
6. Climax. Eventually, individual story lines do climax on serials. If they didn’t, we would probably stop watching out of total frustration.
7. The lack of Resolution. Almost by definition, serials cannot have total resolution. They cannot resolve all of the enigmas. If they did, there would be no reason to tune in the next day. Climaxes are used to generate new enigmas, rather than resolution.
Sometimes sinetron stories can be too overwhelming to watch. The cause-effect chain has often used, the climax can be repeats a dozen times in one hour, and the narrative enigma is easy to figure. Like in one episode of Anakku Bukan Anakku, for almost an hour audiences were forced to watch the protagonist running in a rail train, escaping from her mean stepfather. Surprisingly, for almost one hour, there is no train passing by, and no people anywhere in sight. Anyone lives in Jakarta know how impossible that happen.
Besides that, in sinetrons –for example; Bawang Merah Bawang Putih, Bukan Cinderella, Kiamat Sudah Dekat, Cinta Fitri, Anakku Bukan Anakk— the villain are far too mean, the protagonists are too kind to be human they could make an angel look bad. Speaking of style, more than duplicating American or Korean TV series/serial, sinetron storytelling type is closer to telenovela.
Critics on sinetron not only can be found in the newspaper, many society members from different social background have expressed the same feelings. Aside from unhealthy scenes for underage children, the actors are too young to play their part (ex.; thirty something man a father of teen children, or early twenty actor set role as head of a company), they are too good looking (ex.; pretty actress as a housekeeper), overdressed (the costumes are too nice to be wear at home), and we could tell that most actors do not playing their parts seriously.
Sinetrons have their minus, but their ratings are reportedly the highest. And TV stations who refused to include sinetron in their prime time schedule are in the fast track of downfall. That was what happened to TV7 when they aired Circus program in prime time hours, that was what happened to Starantv when they aired SuperDeal Quiz series in three hours stripping. Sinetron, according to 2007 Cakram magazine research report, is the most watched program of television.
In times where television competition becomes survival of the fittest arena, the pressure TV stations put to Production House is understandably rough. The tight competition to win ratings/share affected to the sinetron stories where structures can be as unhealthy as written above.
In a country that always criticized as the capital of low mass production, America, hundreds of television channels competing to win viewer without pressing the stories of their drama series. That was how the idea of 90’s cult television drama, Beverly Hills 90210, started. On October 1990, the four year-old Fox network was looking to wrest viewers from the three big networks, found that teens at the time loved series Married with Children and The Simpsons. To battle their competitors, FOX aired a complex teen drama with stories that at that day usually reserved for adults. Beverly Hills 90210 then noted as the beginner of modern teen television (NYLON magazine, September 2008).
To compete some ‘though’ competitor show, American television varied the angles of their series/serial. From sex (Sex in the City), lawyer life (LA. Law), to doctor life (Grey’s Anatomy), to death (Six Feet Under), to Roman history series (Rome), to Manhattan teenagers (Gossip Girl). While Indonesia sinetron struggle with never ending teen drama, religious drama, and cruel antagonists.
There was time when Indonesian own dramas are nice to watch, even back when TVRI was the only national television where we had Losmen, Dokter Sartika, and Jendela Rumah Kita. In early 90s we had Tiga Dara, Opera Tiga Jaman, Sahabat Pilihan, Olga, and Keluarga Cemara. Oh, and do not forget, Si Doel Anak Sekolahan. At that time, Indonesian drama series were nice to watch, with its proper dialogues, storylines, and structures. Not to mention actors and actresses that chosen because they really could act, and not only because their Indo look. Today sinetrons gather many critics, but sinetrons, the typical drama of Indonesian television, can’t be erased from television schedule.
Garin Nugroho says that film is a reflection of Indonesian culture. The very same thing can be say about television. And more than only reflection of Indonesian culture, it is from television the maturity of our nation can be measure. From how the AGB Nielsen’s ratings/share reports were used as an excuse, and from the Nielsen ratings/share data itself, we can recognized the audience nature, hence their character, and from contradiction happens between television workers and the anti-Nielsen cultural critiques today, we can say a lot about Indonesian creators’s maturity.
Climate of competitive attitude, inability to compete healthily, how easy we blame things on others than do what we can to fix it, and how we fail to see the root where problem begins. Sinetron needs to get back to healthy plotlines and structures, in order to make them able competing healthily they need to develop fresher story idea, maybe build a creative team like American sitcoms have, and no stripping. Please, stripping is doing nothing more than developing an unhealthy culture of television. From the seasonal trends of Indonesian television, things that gone wrong over the last years, we can see how easy the audience getting bored and how the Indonesian creators are not in the capacity on doing stripping programs.
Wild Rose, the first telenovela RCTI aired, was scheduled once a week in Friday afternoon. The show became a start of la’novela phenomenon in the 90s. In order to get success, a good story is needed more than stripping schedule.
Sinetron had inviting many critics in these past years. In the era when Dessy Ratnasari and Paramitha Rusady were popular, sinetron had face critics for its similarities with Jane Austen’s novels, the love between rich and poor. Seasonal trends, along with the use of natural calm color on screen, are the character of Indonesian television. From the misinterpreted life of the haves, sinetron goes to the booming of teen sinetrons, then to religious sinetrons.
Not only sinetron is the most criticized show in Indonesia, it is also the most programs that exemplified how bad and dangerous television could be. On the other hand, sinetron provides working field for many people. Consider that the production work is not demanding any educational qualification, despite its morning to morning shooting schedule, sinetron’s behind the scene work is also paying well.
UK with its BBC is producing European style dramas, America is famous with serials and sitcoms, and their southern neighbors are the factories of la’novela. Hey, remember how we, the Indonesian housewives and young female before the sinetron era were consuming many Marias’ (usually played by Thalia) from day time till the afternoon? While from Asian countries, Japan becomes so popular with animation and Korea for its sad drama. Drama series in Indonesia had become main example how bad television can be.
But can general channel stay as it is without drama? Discovery Travel & Living, Fox Crime, and MTV, have proved they can. Specific channels still could stand out from unaccountable TV stations offering various drama, sitcoms, quizzes, and talk shows. They are the alternatives from type of programs that regularly inviting critics to give comment. Problem is, can’t all channels drift to specific channel. People still want to see more drama series, reality shows, and Oprah.
Most sinetrons are using the narrative structure of television serial. Herewith list of television serial narrative structure which I took from Jeremy Butler’s Television Critical Methods and Application:
1. Multiple protagonists. The multiplicity protagonists permit a variety of simultaneous story lines within the narrative world of a serial. Soap opera relies on a multiplicity of characters to create a narrative web in which most characters are connected with one another.
2. Exposition. Through this redundancy the soap opera constantly re-establishes its characters and their situations. Part of the redundant information that is regurgitated in the serial is the pasts of the characters. Serial characters carry a specific, significant past which the characters constantly refer to it.
3. Motivation. Like the exposition, the original catalyst for long-running television serials took place years ago. In the episodes we watch day after day, or week after week, the many protagonists’ desires and lacks are mostly already established.
4. Narrative enigma. The serial is saturated with enigmas. It thrives on them. So viewers constantly being brought to the ‘will’ questions.
5. Cause-effect Chain. Serials adapt to this constant interruption much the same way that series do. They segment the narrative. Each serial narrative segment ends with a small climax, which raises new enigmas rather than leading to resolutions.
6. Climax. Eventually, individual story lines do climax on serials. If they didn’t, we would probably stop watching out of total frustration.
7. The lack of Resolution. Almost by definition, serials cannot have total resolution. They cannot resolve all of the enigmas. If they did, there would be no reason to tune in the next day. Climaxes are used to generate new enigmas, rather than resolution.
Sometimes sinetron stories can be too overwhelming to watch. The cause-effect chain has often used, the climax can be repeats a dozen times in one hour, and the narrative enigma is easy to figure. Like in one episode of Anakku Bukan Anakku, for almost an hour audiences were forced to watch the protagonist running in a rail train, escaping from her mean stepfather. Surprisingly, for almost one hour, there is no train passing by, and no people anywhere in sight. Anyone lives in Jakarta know how impossible that happen.
Besides that, in sinetrons –for example; Bawang Merah Bawang Putih, Bukan Cinderella, Kiamat Sudah Dekat, Cinta Fitri, Anakku Bukan Anakk— the villain are far too mean, the protagonists are too kind to be human they could make an angel look bad. Speaking of style, more than duplicating American or Korean TV series/serial, sinetron storytelling type is closer to telenovela.
Critics on sinetron not only can be found in the newspaper, many society members from different social background have expressed the same feelings. Aside from unhealthy scenes for underage children, the actors are too young to play their part (ex.; thirty something man a father of teen children, or early twenty actor set role as head of a company), they are too good looking (ex.; pretty actress as a housekeeper), overdressed (the costumes are too nice to be wear at home), and we could tell that most actors do not playing their parts seriously.
Sinetrons have their minus, but their ratings are reportedly the highest. And TV stations who refused to include sinetron in their prime time schedule are in the fast track of downfall. That was what happened to TV7 when they aired Circus program in prime time hours, that was what happened to Starantv when they aired SuperDeal Quiz series in three hours stripping. Sinetron, according to 2007 Cakram magazine research report, is the most watched program of television.
In times where television competition becomes survival of the fittest arena, the pressure TV stations put to Production House is understandably rough. The tight competition to win ratings/share affected to the sinetron stories where structures can be as unhealthy as written above.
In a country that always criticized as the capital of low mass production, America, hundreds of television channels competing to win viewer without pressing the stories of their drama series. That was how the idea of 90’s cult television drama, Beverly Hills 90210, started. On October 1990, the four year-old Fox network was looking to wrest viewers from the three big networks, found that teens at the time loved series Married with Children and The Simpsons. To battle their competitors, FOX aired a complex teen drama with stories that at that day usually reserved for adults. Beverly Hills 90210 then noted as the beginner of modern teen television (NYLON magazine, September 2008).
To compete some ‘though’ competitor show, American television varied the angles of their series/serial. From sex (Sex in the City), lawyer life (LA. Law), to doctor life (Grey’s Anatomy), to death (Six Feet Under), to Roman history series (Rome), to Manhattan teenagers (Gossip Girl). While Indonesia sinetron struggle with never ending teen drama, religious drama, and cruel antagonists.
There was time when Indonesian own dramas are nice to watch, even back when TVRI was the only national television where we had Losmen, Dokter Sartika, and Jendela Rumah Kita. In early 90s we had Tiga Dara, Opera Tiga Jaman, Sahabat Pilihan, Olga, and Keluarga Cemara. Oh, and do not forget, Si Doel Anak Sekolahan. At that time, Indonesian drama series were nice to watch, with its proper dialogues, storylines, and structures. Not to mention actors and actresses that chosen because they really could act, and not only because their Indo look. Today sinetrons gather many critics, but sinetrons, the typical drama of Indonesian television, can’t be erased from television schedule.
Garin Nugroho says that film is a reflection of Indonesian culture. The very same thing can be say about television. And more than only reflection of Indonesian culture, it is from television the maturity of our nation can be measure. From how the AGB Nielsen’s ratings/share reports were used as an excuse, and from the Nielsen ratings/share data itself, we can recognized the audience nature, hence their character, and from contradiction happens between television workers and the anti-Nielsen cultural critiques today, we can say a lot about Indonesian creators’s maturity.
Climate of competitive attitude, inability to compete healthily, how easy we blame things on others than do what we can to fix it, and how we fail to see the root where problem begins. Sinetron needs to get back to healthy plotlines and structures, in order to make them able competing healthily they need to develop fresher story idea, maybe build a creative team like American sitcoms have, and no stripping. Please, stripping is doing nothing more than developing an unhealthy culture of television. From the seasonal trends of Indonesian television, things that gone wrong over the last years, we can see how easy the audience getting bored and how the Indonesian creators are not in the capacity on doing stripping programs.
Wild Rose, the first telenovela RCTI aired, was scheduled once a week in Friday afternoon. The show became a start of la’novela phenomenon in the 90s. In order to get success, a good story is needed more than stripping schedule.
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