ABSTRACT
Annie van den Oever: In several publications since the 1970s, amongst them your Visible Fictions, you have described watching mainstream television as a working through in the sense of psychoanalysis (Ellis 1982). I would like to discuss with you some new questions regarding storytelling and television, as its ongoing practice allows us to work through the themes which somehow bother us today. Mundane, mainstream television, you have argued, offers viewers an opportunity to deal with the themes that bother them, and part of the working through is to return to these over and over again. In other words, mainstream television need not be “good” by any classical standard and watching it is not necessarily fun. I recall that significant moment during the London Hands-On History Conference in February 2016, when the American cultural critic, Susan J. Douglas, said that though she studies contemporary American television; she absolutely does not like watching it; to which you replied, “That’s the point!” Could you explain why “not liking television” is the point? What would you say are mainstream television’s most striking elements not to like?
