The future of televisions,a response

Professor Scannell is not wrong in claiming a difference between us in how we primarily imagine the object called television. The best explanation of that difference is probably generation, or generation with a good mix of national context. The imprint of television as we first knew it appears in our writing, even though we both write of a television removed from those contexts. For him, television was integrated into daily rituals, and the scarcity of choice created a far more common national experience of television than I have ever known. The television of my youth was US analog cable. I grew up in a small town far enough from broadcast stations that cable distribution was crucial and an everyday technology of the middle class. That cable world was far from the one of abundance that came later with digital technology, but it did provide enough choice that I never had quite the same sense of shared everyday television.

Our television did not stay tuned to a daily progression through light news to talk and current affairs and soap opera that was offered by the main broadcasters. Rather, my diet of drama – or scripted series – started early. I watched few series in prime time until adulthood; instead, my deepest viewing was of series in their second- and later distribution windows that were the dominant source of programming for many of the early cable channels and broadcasters unaffiliated with the networks. I remember afternoons of one episode of The Brady Bunch after another, and moving between channels after dinner to watch multiple episodes of Three’s Company. Similarly, rather than evening news, my memory is of my mother tuning to Magnum PI on a small black-and-white television in the kitchen each afternoon as she made dinner. Cable, and the clear reception of small independent stations it allowed in my rural region – 50 miles from a minor broadcast market – provided little new or original programming, but its decade-old comedies were new to me and likely explain a lot about the topics at the center of my studies of television.

Furthermore, although I understand – intellectually – the notion of ritual, and the experience of a daily flow of television authored by a cultural voice with the clear mission of the BBC, that has never been my experience of television. Likewise, somewhere there are emerging scholars whose first experience of television was forged in a world where they have never organized viewing by a schedule and always known DVRs, catch-up services, or Netflix. Just as my work sometimes perplexes Scannell, someday those emerging scholars will write about a version of television that I only half recognize. I regard my generational position as a key standpoint in my scholarship – I am old enough to have deeply known the analog age and how media were then, but young enough to have made the digital transition alongside the media I study. Television and its industrial norms have been in near constant change as long as I’ve known them. Perhaps as a result, no norm has ever seemed particularly dominant or ‘natural’.

The extent to which Scannell looks deeper than the words on page and ventures to analyze the mind behind the words is among the most gratifying bits of his account. I take the greatest pride in his assertion that I write without nostalgia or regret for the past. That is a strategic part of my academic practice, and also a function of the fact that I can’t look back on the television of my youth and wish there was more like it, or conceive of television as in any way ‘better’ then. I may have loved it and watching was a meaningful cultural practice for me, but what I watched was mostly predictable, formulaic, and presented a stereotype-laden view of the world. And yet, somehow its narrow view was still wider than the confined and conservative one I lived within. While I must credit television with offering glimpses that provided the basis of dreams to be part of a different and bigger world, I also recognize how the limited range of stories I saw – as a girl and teen in the 1970s and 1980s – warped my priorities and imagined possibilities, and I can feel no nostalgia in comparison with the stories available in the television my children have known.

While I wish everyone the opportunity of feeling so seen and acknowledged as Scannell’s claim that I ‘own’ television suggests, of course this is hardly the case. But I’ll claim to own a corner. It may have once been that scholars could own television, or the television of the nation in which they experienced it, though I’ve never known that television world. In the 20 years that I’ve been writing about television, it has grown steadily more difficult to make claims and not speak in so many qualifiers that I wonder if I’m saying anything at all. Scholars once made claims of television. But my television is mostly a subset: US (until recently), prime time, scripted television. It may travel around the globe, but the conditions of its production – which explain most everything about it (though not how it is understood) – have been peculiarly American. I struggle to situate the television I encounter today amidst forces that simultaneously make television ordinarily both more local and multinational in different ways.

And he is right about my pursuit of something always eluding my grasp. Writing of the now is not without its difficulties. If it can be claimed that I do it well, it is only because I know the history and subject my analyses to considerable historical testing, searching out the antecedent or the pattern that lets me shift the weight of the argument or analysis from the thing that is likely transitory. I know that I could write with greater certainty if I waited, but my body of work – particularly the substantially revised editions of The Television Will Be Revolutionized – has become an evolving account of the change. My focus shifted to explaining how the business and production of television was changing once it became clear that the things we thought – the theory, ideas, and understandings established for another era – were decreasingly able to provide a full explanation. I offer partial and contingent understandings, but it is my hope that others can use them to support analyses more valid than those that explain how television was. Yes, there are inconsistencies as my thinking has developed and changed over time. They pain me, but it strikes me as foolish to ignore new evidence because it warrants reframing.

Among those inconsistencies, today, I worry I erred and gave in to a conviction to ‘redeem’ television in arguing that Internet-distributed television such as Netflix was ‘television’. That assertion was driven by frustration with the heady and acritical embrace of ‘new media’ pervasive in early 2000s. The shows that established Netflix as a US streaming service – back catalog series created for the broadcast networks – were obviously more like television than ‘new media’ (a fantastically imprecise term that has thankfully nearly faded). My affective need to not have television disappeared led me to a not-fully-baked, too-of-the-moment construct of the new dynamic. I did not see that the bigger problem was that ‘television’ had become a construct so overstuffed that many things were leaking out the side. The better solution would have been start unpacking the bag, rather than trying to stuff more into it.

If we are speaking of the future of television, it is clear it is a future of televisions. And with dutiful genuflection to the historians, yes, it has always been televisions. Perhaps it’s the plural that explains my comfort with allowing my identity to evolve from television studies to media studies in the last decade. Televisions studies doesn’t slip off the tongue.

Contrary to the once-abundant predictions of death, television is fracturing far beyond the different-but-related objects Scannell and I invoke in our scholarship. Perhaps it is less the case that television has been revolutionized, than splintered and fragmented so that it is simultaneously what it has always been and also other things too. There are many televisions available to study and there is no need to create hierarchies among them. They bring with them a variety of uses and cultural purposes and play varying roles in enacting and disseminating structures of power. It is in such questions that Scannell and I find common ground. Our televisions and experiences of televisions may differ, but we share a profound curiosity about their role in culture.