ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits mumblecore's originating auteurs the Duplass brothers, Joe Swanberg, and Lynn Shelton to examine how their forays into television adapted mumblecore's production culture, film aesthetics, and niche fandom to contemporary indie TV's industrial modes, programming formats, and audience tastes. Focusing on HBO series Togetherness , Swanberg's Netflix anthology series Easy (2016-19), and Shelton's episodic work as a director-for-hire, I parse the affordances for and constraints on indie auteur sensibilities within contemporary US television's ecosystem. Along the way, I contemplate how mumblecore's embodiment of Aughts’ indie cinema's oppositional aesthetic-ethic gains new resonance within the last decade's ‘peak TV’ streaming wars and for the coming decade's vertical reintegration and post-pandemic media industry's socioeconomic fallout. In closing, I consider the alternative path of steadfast feature filmmaking taken by another of mumblecore's originators, Andrew Bujalski, whose mid-career work reflexively reckons with the travails of American independent film entrepreneurship and the inevitability of corporate co-optation – as exemplified by his recent outing for Disney. In each case, what emerges alongside an autocritical awareness of the creative accomplishments and indulgences that early mumblecore encouraged, is evidence of mumblecore's adaptability as a creative praxis and industrial mode amid rapid transformation and precarious times.
