'All You Can Eat
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‘All You Can Eat TV’ An exploration of how long form, serial storytelling for television has evolved alongside recent developments in digital television distribution platforms. This thesis also examines how these new technologies have changed the ‘rules’ of narrative, television screenwriting. Masters of Fine Arts by Elise McCredie (DipDA, BA.) Principle Supervisor: Dr Annabelle Murphy Melbourne University Faculty of Fine Arts and Music School of Film and Television April 2018 2 CONTENTS Introduction 3 Chapter 1 5 Chapter 2 13 Chapter 3 19 Conclusion 27 Bibliography/Filmography 30 3 INTRODUCTION “I hate television. I hate it just as much as peanuts but I just can’t stop eating peanuts.” Orson Welles1 I am sitting iPad in front of me, my finger poised over the PAUSE icon. Should I watch another episode or should I go to bed? If I don’t watch another episode will my dreams be full of all the possible outcomes for Don Draper, Walter White or Sarah Lund? Will my imagination soar with possibilities or should I give into the gnawing, addictive urge to watch just one more episode? Will I enjoy it? Or will I, in a foggy state of addictive exhaustion, only take in half of the complicated plot points? If this is the modern conundrum for today’s viewers, then what does it mean for today’s screenwriters? How does this glut of instantly available serial content affect the way we write serial drama? In the last twenty years, there has been a revolution in viewing practices. Broadcast executives have been slowly de-throned as digital advances make viewing serial television a democratic, individualised, multi-platform and frequently illegal practice. My thesis will explore the relationship between these technological advances in distribution and viewing practices and the extraordinary rise in complex television serial narratives. As defined by Trisha Dunleavy in her book Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television, complex serial television is by its nature serial as opposed to episodic, has a genuine diversity of settings and mileux, has transgressive primary characters, and has far more explicit content than would be allowable on broadcast television. 2 The question this thesis asks, is, whether this rise in complex serial television is the result of technological advances? Or whether it has evolved from an audience’s desire for more complex, challenging narratives? Or alternatively, perhaps the two are so inextricably linked that it is impossible to tell where one starts and the other begins? To begin interrogating this, I will look at television in an historical context, charting the seismic shifts in narrative storytelling over the past twenty years. This thesis will specifically investigate long form serial drama. Sitcoms, reality TV, web series and factual are all outside the purview of my research. Comparing pre-digital show Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-91) with post digital Twin Peaks - The Return (Showtime, 2017) will offer an informative insight into both form and content in serial storytelling. How different is the narrative structure of a series when cliff-hangers, episode breaks, and lengthy narrative recaps are no longer de rigeur? As a practicing screenwriter, I am particularly interested in how these technological changes have affected the writing process. As a part of this creative practice-led 1 New York Herald Tribune, October 12, 1956. 2 Trisha Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television (New York: Routledge, 2017). 4 thesis I have written a pilot episode and a bible of an original television series Overflow. In developing this series, I have consciously interrogated my own writing and development process. How aware am I of how my completed television series will be consumed? Does this affect my writing process? Indeed, does the knowledge of consumption methods (by which I mean streaming, binge watching, lack of commercial breaks, consumption on multiple platforms etc…) feed into the way I structure my narrative? As a writer can I remove myself from what eminent television scholar Jason Mittel calls “the historical contexts of production and consumption”?3 In his seminal work, The Medium is the Massage4, Marshal McLuhan decries that content is irrelevant and it is technological forces that dictate change. He suggests that, “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication”.5 However, it is not form alone that this thesis is concerned with. It will also explore how the digital storytelling revolution has opened up television narratives to dark, complex characters and story worlds. Narratives that traditional ‘broad’ casting has been loath to explore for fear of alienating large sections of its audience. Despite the paucity of recent academic research in this field, I will frequently rely upon Complex TV, the seminal work of Jason Mittel, who coins the phrase “narrative complexity” to describe “a new model of storytelling … as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial forms that have typified television since its inception”. 6 Television, which became widely available in the 1950s, has transformed from vaudevillian shows, to soap opera melodrama, to case of the week procedural drama and finally to its current popular form - long running, complicated, searing serial dramas. In Brett Martin’s 2013 interrogation of the ‘golden age of television’, Difficult Men, he claims that complex series television “had become the signature American art form of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth, and Mailer had been to the 1960s.”7 Is television now at the peak of its own fifty-year cycle or is the revolution only just beginning? 3 Jason Mittel, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7. 4 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects (USA: Penguin Books, 1967). 5 Ibid., p.5. 6 Mittel, p.18. 7 Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). 5 CHAPTER ONE – The American Television Revolution The world of 7:30 on Tuesday nights, that’s dead. A stake has been driven through its heart, its head has been cut off and its mouth has been stuffed with garlic. The captive audience is gone. If you give people this opportunity to mainline all in one day, there’s reason to believe they will do it. David Fincher (House of Cards Creator)8 The onset of the ‘American Television Revolution’ is accredited by Alan Seppinwall in his book The Revolution was Televised (2012)9, to HBO’s first one hour dramatic series Oz (HBO, 1997-2003), but the opening salvos of the ‘revolution’ are more widely credited to the defining moment in 1999 when Italo-American mobster Tony Soprano burst onto our small screens – larger than life and prone to anxiety attacks. The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) appeared at a time when technological developments were at the brink of transformation. The arrival of the Sopranos marked a tipping point in the television industry whereby the cable and satellite sector overtook the broadcast networks as the primary producer of break out scripted programming. HBO emerged as the most innovative and influential channel on all of TV.10 In Jason Mittel’s seminal book, Complex TV, he argues strongly for any investigation of modern serial storytelling to be based firmly in the “poetics of television”. By this he means we cannot divorce televisual storytelling “from issues of content, context, and culture.”11 Drawing on film scholar David Bordwell’s12 studies on narrative form, Mittel picks up the idea that formal developments in film (or in this case television) are firmly situated within specific contexts of production, circulation, and reception. He argues that: We need to contextualize [television’s] development within the technological, industrial and reception shifts of the 1990s and 2000s, functioning not as straightforward causes of these formal innovations but certainly as essential factors to allow particular creative strategies to flourish.13 8 Robert Abele, "Playing With a New Deck", Director's Guild of America (2013), https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1301-Winter-2013/House-of- Cards.aspx 9 Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (USA: What’s Alan Watching? 2012). 10 Gary R. Edgerton, The Sopranos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 92. 11 Mittel, p.4. 12 David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches (New York: AMS, 1989). 13Mittel, p.6. 6 In counterpoint to this, is the humanist approach of Raymond Williams, who believed in the power of humanity to dictate the trajectory of technology rather than fall victim to it. Opposed to concepts of technological determinism, Williams held to the belief that technological advances arise from human need and not the other way around claiming that, “viewers have the power to disturb, disrupt and to distract the otherwise cold logic of history and technology.” 14 Although Mittel does not fully subscribe to Marshall McLuhan’s controversial claim of 1967, that content is irrelevant and “the medium is the message”,15 he is, however, unconcerned with the interpretation or the cultural impact of a television series. What interests Mittel is context. Interestingly, he points out that a decade earlier television scholarship was largely concerned with meaning and cultural impact. Cultural studies departments were awash with critical feminist readings of Alias (ABC, 2001-06), or racial representation in The West Wing (NBC, 1999—2006) or how a show like 24 (Fox, 2001-10) reflected on America post 9/11.