Realist Aesthetics: Televisual Networks

– 3 – Realist Aesthetics: Televisual Networks Networks usurp reality. Lars Bang Larsen (Networks) Read between the lines. The Wire season 5 tagline Televisual narratives have experimented for several decades with the mul- tiprotagonist structures and complex plotting that were broadly adopted in cinema only in the network films of the 1990s and 2000s.1 In the 1950s, soap operas with large ensemble casts, such as Search for Tomorrow (1951– 86) and As the World Turns (1956– 2010), began to complicate a more common televisual episodic form with a serial structure that had already proven successful in earlier contexts, including nineteenth- century novels and early twentieth- century comics and radio dramas. Even with the popularity of daytime soaps, and evening outliers such as Peyton Place (1964– 69), long- arc narrative form did not break through into primetime American television until the 1980s with shows such as Dallas (1978– 91), Knots Landing (1979– 93), and Dynasty (1981– 89). As Jane Feuer points out, the category of “art television,” including narratively innovative series, emerged con- currently, with programs such as Hill Street Blues (1981– 87), Moonlighting (1985– 89), and thirtysomething (1987– 91).2 Even so, formal experiments with seriality were not commonplace until the 1990s, when they shaped a number of shows, across genres, which included Seinfeld (1989– 98), Twin Peaks (1990– 91), The X- Files (1993– 2002), and The Sopranos (1999– 2007). As the television scholar Jason Mittell explains, there was no single 104 Chapter 3 causal agent or event that explains a spike in televisual narrative complexity in the 1990s. Instead, this shift was enabled by a host of factors that included the migration of successful filmmakers to television; the need for television writers to respond creatively to the competition represented by more cost- effective reality TV formats; the continued transformation of the three- network system into a panoply of specialized channels that could sustain complicated serials with smaller cult followings; the recognition of the value of high- prestige narrative programs, especially for sustaining the brands of premium cable channels; the rise of VCRs in the 1980s, DVDs in the 1990s, and video streaming in the 2000s; and the expansion of con- vergence culture and online fan participation in multifaceted narrative worlds.3 The development of narrative complexity in television serials, especially since the 1990s, has enabled the medium to engage in unique ways with what I have been calling the network imaginary. Admittedly, television shows share numerous formal properties with feature films, most evi- dently the fact that they are composed of edited moving images and audio. Nevertheless, differences in institutions, transmission, reception, industry practices, and available genres require a separate consideration of the ways that television has experimented with network aesthetics. Writing in the late 1960s, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore already treat television as the preeminent medium (rivaled only by computers) that puts people in touch with a collective and global life based on interconnection. “Tele- vision transformed the nature of mass media,” they write, “but it also intro- duced a new tactility— a sense of media networks and collective relations that exceeded individual consciousness.”4 Though the broader relationship between television and a sense of networks may require additional inves- tigation, this chapter undertakes the more modest task of exploring how early twenty- first- century serial drama grapples with key concepts and problems raised by the network imaginary. In what follows, I am especially interested in the ways that the prominence of television dramas, centrality of entertainment and communication media to everyday life, and ubiquity of network form necessitate a rethinking of the classical category of realism. In order to elaborate television’s network aesthetics and the particular realism it sets forth, it is important to consider the major formal reason that complex televisual narratives often depart from contemporary filmic narratives. Television shows such as Lost (2004– 10), Heroes (2006– 10), Skins (2007– 13), and Breaking Bad (2008– 13) have all approached social networks, and done so differently from those films (such as Syriana) that I discussed in the previous chapter. Despite the range of distribution mech- Realist Aesthetics 105 anisms and viewing formats available for audiovisual media in this period, a persistent variation in the reception of film versus television has much to do with duration. While films tend to last no more than two or three hours and produce a limited number of sequels, complex television shows may run for several seasons with ten to fifteen episodes per season on premium channels and approximately twenty-four episodes per season on major network channels in the United States.5 While multiseason television series emerged as early as the 1950s, it has only been since the late twentieth century that shows have more regularly moved from a self- contained episodic to a long- arc serial format that conveys narratives across multiple seasons. As Jeffrey Sconce notes, such extended arcs have enabled an increasingly detail- oriented form of storytelling: “What television lacks in spectacle and narrative constraints, it makes up for in depth and duration of character relations, diegetic expansion, and audience investment.”6 By oscillating between episodic and serial form, post- 1990s programs not only are able more regularly to convey linearly delivered narratives but also can suggest complex communities, cities, and universes that ground social networks. Though varied television formats (from live broadcast to DVD to on- demand Internet streaming) lead to different viewing experiences, all of the available formats have encouraged a sustained world-building that bears greater resemblance, in some respects, to contemporary interactive digital environments than to cinema.7 As Raymond Williams already observed in the 1970s, television quickly transformed the scope of narrative reception more than any earlier medium by giving rise to a “dramatized society” that built drama “into the rhythms of everyday life.” As he explains, television enables the viewing of several different types of drama a day— “And not just one day; almost every day. What we now have is drama as habitual experience: more in a week, in many cases, than most human beings would previously have seen in a lifetime.”8 The ubiquity of television programming and the considerable quantity of material that makes up most serials enable a fuller examination of intricate social networks that viewers can live with and process over extended periods of time. Even more profoundly, televisual forms transform the way we experience and think about everyday reality. The core of my analysis in this chapter focuses on a single series, The Wire. This show is by no means exemplary of American television. Indeed, given the incredible diversity of programming in the early twenty- first century— including news, educational programs, game shows, sitcoms, sporting events, cartoons, talk shows, and reality TV— no single series or cluster of shows could stand in for the whole. Nevertheless, The Wire op- 106 Chapter 3 erates, in the pages that follow, as an orienting point that raises questions about both televisual and network form. My focus on a single series seeks deliberately to complicate a tendency in media studies, and sometimes television studies, to assume the explanatory value of Williams’s generalized concept of television’s “flow,” and similar theories, while largely ignoring the medium’s specific programming.9 Though both institutional and social analyses are crucial to television studies, we can also learn a great deal about network form, in particular, through careful engagement with televisual aesthetics and formal innovations. The key node of The Wire offers insight into how dramatic television series aestheticize social networks and put forward a realism proper to them. For all of the writing about this series, ranging from sociological commen- tary to genre- specific analysis, very little scholarship has attended to the show’s fascination with network form, including its treatment of the social networks that make up the city of Baltimore.10 The Wire, which ran for five seasons between 2002 and 2008 and yielded sixty approximately hour-long episodes, follows a wide- ranging assemblage of social actors who relate in a variety of both extraordinary and ordinary ways to early twenty- first- century American institutions and systems. These systems include law enforcement, the drug trade, the legal apparatus, the prison complex, the school system, segregated city zones, political parties, media outlets, and the growing mass of the homeless. My analysis concerns the ways that The Wire’s aesthetic makes sensible associations among its featured social actors and the networks they form. In order to highlight the many tensions of the series— between artifice and reality, experimentation and experience— I put forward and elaborate the term “network realism.” This concept fore- grounds the centrality of networks to a realism that resonates with the early twenty- first century. It also helps to account, in part, for the importance of network aesthetics in our time. Moreover, this concept enables a compar- ative media analysis that situates The Wire, and contemporary

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