Introduction: American television in the 2010s

One of the most interesting and debatable questions in media and film culture of the late 2000s and especially the 2010s is the almost unprecedented popularity and to some extent mild obsession with television shows. “Is Television Really The New Cinema?,” “TV is The New Cinema” and “New Cinema? It’s On Television” are just three titles from the Los Angeles Times, IndieWire and CineEuropa that appeared in 2010, 2012 and 2014 respectively. In these and many other similar articles, the authors stressed that contemporary television shows excel, among others, at dramatic story telling, longform narrative and complicated characters, thus creating strong bonds between viewers and fictional characters. The digitization of television in the late 2000s, combined with services with impressive recording possibilities, such as TiVo, and Internet streaming services, such as Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, made bingewatching a universal phenomenon and not just an activity enjoyed by people who bought a given TV show’s season(s) on DVD. The quasi-obsession which viewers all over the world shared waiting for specific episodes of Lost (ABC, 2004-2010) – one of the first TV shows that ushered in a whole new television era from its mode of production to its ways of consumption – has now reached a new level of how people understand, consume, and watch television series. According to Variety’s Todd Spangler, the summer of 2015 will officially go down in history as the “Summer of the Binge.” Providing data from a survey by New York-based research and consulting firm Miner & Co. Studio, the main conclusions regarding the new ways television series are consumed are that “The ability to binge-watch TV series […] is a major reason why consumers love subscription VOD services” as “about 87% [of those polled] said they have watched or planned to watch three or more episodes of a series in one sitting while vacationing this summer, and 76% agreed that binge-watching is now commonplace for their families and friends while on holiday” (Spangler 2015). A very interesting finding was the fact that approximately 67% admitted “they’re reading fewer books than on previous summer vacations because they’re watching TV shows streamed online, and 62% are also more likely to stream in places where they used to read (e.g., on a porch or deck)” (Spangler 2015). Binge-watching is not only the preferred method of choice for a significant

percentage of viewers. It can also alter the way we critique television as well as

the way we can define our object of study. No longer is Raymond Williams’s pioneering concept of “flow” the “defining characteristic of broadcasting” (2003, 86) or the basis upon which we approach television narratives. For a great number of viewers, the television experience can consist of watching a couple of episodes of a single series on their laptop or iPad and then moving on to a film or continuing their work. The television set can be absent from their home, but their consumption of television products can remain the same, and/or even be enriched by the possibilities offered to viewers by the new technologies and services mentioned above. The example of binge-watching in the 2010s is part of a larger story of

changes in the television industry in recent years. For example, the media business has transformed in such a way so that while they used to be primarily “content companies,” that is, providing content that viewers will want to watch because of the “inherent value, quality, or attractiveness of the programming,” these companies now have to create “intensive relationships” with the audience in order to cultivate them to become loyal viewers over the long haul (Jones 2012, 180). In order to create brand loyalty to a specific cable or network channel, then, media companies need to craft themselves as having a particular brand to sell. Media companies also try to foster a sense of community among their viewers (Jones 2012, 181). On talk shows, for example, community can be created around specific interests that the audience may share in common, while for cable channel news shows, such as on Fox News or MSNBC, the company may actively promote a specific ideological agenda, and this ends up reinforcing our ideas that we may already hold about politics and politicians, for example. The larger point is that television in our era is important in part because it helps to create the symbols and meanings that we draw on for a sense of community and by creating these intensive relationships, television arguably has more power than ever to reinforce and in turn, shape, our sense of who we are as well as our political beliefs. The idea that television in the 2010s has shifted and changed to create a more

intensive relationship with their viewers distinguishes this period from earlier periods in television’s history. It also marks a kind of “crisis” for some, because in creating an intensive relationship with one particular audience over another, or one community over another, the unifying function of television for helping us think about politics is seriously challenged. Some scholars believe that the crisis in television right now is because we have gone from TV 1 “consensus narratives,” where the viewer is casual but united by the overarching narrative and symbolism of a relatively few television programs on to the next stage, or TV II which consists of targeted programming and then finally to “avid fanship,” which is driven by consumer demand and consumer satisfaction (McCabe and Akass 2007, 3). Because the audience is being reconfigured from a mass audience to a more fragmented niche audience, viewers can no longer be united through watching the same set of shows, drawing on the same set of symbols and participating in a “cultural forum,” to use Horace M. Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch’s 1983 term. Other researchers, including Herbert Schwaab (2013, 21), view this

TV III phase of “narrowcasting” as a positive development, because this means that television has left its “infancy,” and now offers “mature quality television” including complex serial narratives, while still being able to find their adult audience niche. Writers like McCabe and Akass (2007) have underlined that while the production of programs aimed at niche audiences allows for an aesthetic and narrative complexity, this can come at the cost of creating a “cultural void,” relative to the uniting functions of earlier forms of television. Other television writers have also used the idea of three distinct periods to

characterize the maturation of television, going so far, as in Amanda Lotz’s case, as to see television today as an entirely and radically new medium from what had been described in the early era of Marshall’s McLuhan’s theorizing. Lotz describes the first era as the “network era,” which spans from the early 1950s to the 1980s, the time when television basically adapted the radio-network model of content creation, and similarly drew on the same features of marketing, advertising and content creation that had been used by radio. Ken Auletta (2014) has written that:

In the early days, television was both a box and the black-and-white world that issued from it: quiz shows, soaps, Ed Sullivan, Edward R. Murrow, “I Love Lucy.” Until the nineteen-eighties, the vast majority of the shows were commissioned and carried by ABC, CBS, and NBC, which started out as radio networks and were granted television licenses by the F.C.C., with the expectation that they broadcast at no charge to viewers. Audiences were rapt, and broadcasters made money by selling spots to advertisers.