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Cult Television This page intentionally left blank Cult Television Sara Gwenllian- Jones and Roberta E. Pearson, Editors University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 2004 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Cult television / Sara Gwenllian- Jones and Roberta E. Pearson, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0- 8166-3830-6 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0- 8166-3831-4 (PB : alk. paper) 1. Television programs. I. Gwenllian- Jones, Sara. II. Pearson, Roberta E. PN1992.5.C85 2004 791.45'6— dc22 2003018986 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Dedicated to my parents Jean and T. F. G. Jones, and to my brothers Charles and Alun Gwyn Jones S. G.- J. Dedicated to Humphrey and Jennings R. E. P. This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction Sara Gwenllian- Jones and Roberta E. Pearson ix Part I. Cult 1. Toward a Constructivist Approach to Media Cults Philippe Le Guern 3 2. The Mainstream, Distinction, and Cult TV Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt 27 3. Quality Science Fiction: Babylon 5’s Metatextual Universe Petra Kuppers 45 4. “Bright Particular Star”: Patrick Stewart, Jean- Luc Picard, and Cult Television Roberta E. Pearson 61 Part II. Fictions 5. Virtual Reality and Cult Television Sara Gwenllian- Jones 83 6. Charactor; or, The Strange Case of Uma Peel David A. Black 99 7. Flexing Those Anthropological Muscles: X- Files, Cult TV, and the Representation of Race and Ethnicity Karen Backstein 115 8. Monsters and Metaphors: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Old World Mary Hammond 147 Part III. Fans 9. How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption: A Case Study in Doctor Who Fandom Alan McKee 167 10. Trainspotting The Avengers Toby Miller 187 11. Star Trek, Heaven’s Gate, and Textual Transcendence Jeffrey Sconce 199 12. A Kind of German Star Trek: Raumpatrouille Orion and the Life of a Cult TV Series Eva Vieth 223 Contributors 241 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Sara Gwenllian- Jones and Roberta E. Pearson Series as diverse as Star Trek (1966–1969), Moonlighting (1985–1989), and Gilligan’s Island (1965–1967) might all be described as “cult television.” One of the reviewers of the original proposal for this volume suggested rather forcibly that we include an essay on World Federation Wrestling, while colleagues questioned our exclusion of The Simpsons (1989–present) and other of their favorite shows. In the media, in com- mon usage, and sometimes even in academia, “cult” is often loosely applied to any television program that is considered offbeat or edgy, that draws a niche audience, that has a nostalgic appeal, that is considered emblematic of a particular subculture, or that is considered hip. Such a variety of uses renders the term almost meaningless, since it allows much of television’s output of fi ction, and some nonfi ction, to be described as “cult.” So to what precisely does this collection’s title, Cult Television, refer? The [cult object] must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognize through each other a shared expertise. Naturally all these elements (characters and episodes) must have some archetypal appeal. I think that in order to trans- form a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.1 A reference to Umberto Eco’s essay on cult movies and intertextual col- lage now routinely features in any defi nition of cult fi lm or television; scholars of these still slightly disreputable texts invoke the celebrated Euro- theorist to locate their intellectual antecedents. Eco’s essay fo- cuses almost entirely on textual analysis of a single fi lm, Casablanca, established in the United States as a cult object by the university fi lm ix x INTRODUCTION societies, urban repertory houses, and local television stations of the 1960s and 1970s. Eco predicates his own defi nition of a cult object on textual characteristics (archetypal appeal, completely furnished world) and reception (fans quoting and quizzing), but ignores the mechanisms (nontheatrical distribution, independent fi lm and television exhibitors) that rendered Casablanca cult. An understanding and defi nition of cult television must be predicated on the full circuit of communication, that is, texts, production/ distribution, and audiences, rather than on an overvaluation of any one or two of these three factors. This entails asking the following questions: What distinguishes “cult” programs such as Star Trek and The X- Files (1993–present) from other series such as Friends (1994–present), which may attract larger audiences but do not inspire signifi cant interpretive fan cultures? What characteristics do cult television programs share with other television dramas and what, if any, are the generic, textual, and metatextual characteristics specifi c to cult television? How do these characteristics function to engage avid audiences and inspire the production of tertiary texts? To what extent, how, and why does the television industry deliberately seek to develop, produce, and market programs as “cult”? Does the transmedial nature of cult television mean that the term must carry a wider set of meanings than its medium specifi city sug- gests? What are the relations between the massive expansion of the cult television phenomenon in the 1990s and technological developments such as VCRs and the Internet? Are there grounds for distinguishing cult television fandom from other television and nontelevision fandoms? Why do text- producing fan cultures accrue to some series but not to others? We must also consider the ideological functions and impact of the most successful of the cult television texts: what can Star Trek, in its numerous manifestations, The X- Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer tell us about the societies that produce and consume them? Neither this volume’s introduction nor its essays provide full answers to all these questions, but they do map the contours of the terrain to encourage further detailed exploration of the texts, production/distribution, and audiences of cult television. Distinguishing cult television from cult fi lm on one side and from non- cult television drama on the other may help to identify textual characteristics specifi c to the form. Cult fi lms belonging to a “para- cinematic culture” that “seeks to promote an alternative vision of cinematic ‘art,’ aggressively attacking the established canon of ‘quality’ cinema and questioning the legitimacy of reigning aesthetic discourses on movie art2” usually tell self- contained stories. They usually aspire to, if INTRODUCTION xi often fail to achieve, the narrative structure of the classical Hollywood cinema, a linear narrative predicated on forward temporal progression and the resolution of narrative enigmas. The individual fi lms within cult series such as Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth conform to this model: the ending resolves the primary narrative hermeneutic of who lives, who dies, and who has been doing the killing. Of course, given that the term “cult” is used as indiscriminately with regard to fi lm as with regard to television, some fi lms to which the rubric is applied do not tell self- contained narratives. The individual entries in the Star Wars, Aliens, or Crow series do not entirely resolve narrative enigmas; rather each contributes to a longer narrative arc in which events in one fi lm have consequences in the sequel (or prequel as the case might be). Seriality distinguishes cult television from cult fi lm, yet is a charac- teristic shared with the many other American television dramas that follow the serial format with which programs of the early 1980s such as Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere fi rst experimented. The 90 to 120 minutes of a single fi lm, or even the several hours of a series such as Star Wars, cannot possibly provide the scope for narrative developments offered by the hundreds of hours of a long- running television program. To quote Sconce again, this time from an article contrasting fi lm and television adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens: Dickens’ (and the nineteenth- century novel’s) emphasis on serial narrative and episodic emplotment . has proven a . lasting infl uence on . television. Hollywood sacrifi ced the narrative pleasures of serialised delay, diegetic expansion, and heteroglossic play. Long- running television series . face the problem of fi lling time (or even killing time)—often hours, days, and even months of diegetic time and space. A popular series in any medium . must balance repeti- tion of successful (i.e., commercial) story elements with a search for forms of difference that will provide novel variation and interest. Television’s episodic seriality and textual density allow for a narrative elasticity unavailable to Hollywood cinema.3 Seriality and narrative elasticity permitted ER’s fourth season premiere to take the form of a “mocumentary,” and The West Wing’s third season premiere to temporarily abandon the narrative arc concerning Jed Bartlett’s illness in favor of responding to the events of September 11.

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