ABSTRACT
As Dallas Smythe (1981) Has Observed, The World of commercial television is a giant marketplace for advertisers, one in which the viewers are the commodities, and in which spectacle and hypercommercialism often preside (see McAllister 1996). Even most public service broadcasters must either pander to advertisers, as in the American PBS model; live alongside commercial neighbors, and thus all-too-readily adopt the commercial mindset of ratings and shares (see Ang 1991); and/or broadcast multiple programs designed for commercial television systems. The logic of most global television, then, is a commercial logic, one of ad breaks, and of the constant fear of bored viewers reaching for the remote control. Meanwhile, viewer-centered technology such as the remote control, VCRs, TiVO, and DVD players constantly threatens this logic and the marketplace it seeks to serve and protect. Amidst this skirmish, though, television as system leaves itself open to intertextual invasion. Inaugurating intertextual theory, Bakhtin (1981: 39) wrote glowingly of the novel as the prime voice of dialogism, ‘made of different clay than the other already completed genres,’ but television and the television series have surpassed the novel as hyper-dialogic modes of communication. Textuality is always intertextuality, and the text is always an interactive, intersective phenomenon, but certain media and genres particularly encourage intertextuality and an intertextual reading strategy. Television and the television series are the current crown domains of intertextuality. To even think of a television series, let alone to watch it, demands 70a complex and involved, inescapable intertextuality. Moreover, within this televisual domain of intertextuality lies fertile soil for critical intertextuality, and for parodic raids, which this chapter will examine.
