Editorial

This issue opens with an article by Karen Boyle, which explores a series of UK television documentaries about the sex abuse scandal involving Jimmy Savile, the British TV and radio personality and, at the height of his fame one of the BBC’s highest paid presenters. Savile died in October 2011, but it is now common knowledge that he was a sexual predator and paedophile. Revealed in a string of official inquiries since his death is a serial sex offender at the heart of British culture and its national institutions like the NHS and the BBC for 50 years; and these TV documentaries make clear the relationship between Savile, a prolific sex offender, and Savile, a national celebrity, at the time when this kind of fame was a new phenomenon. How the one explains the other, or at least, as Boyle notes, how both are closely entangled, find that his untouchable place in the nation’s culture was the core of it all. Savile is not only the one at issue, but also the culture of celebrity as it emerged in the 1970s and solidified in the 1980s and beyond. Our attitude towards it, the way we treat celebrities and the acclaim we gave him – his knighthood, his friendship with PM Margaret Thatcher, his access to royalty – is why Savile evaded exposure and, more importantly, justice during his lifetime. At the heart of Boyle’s article is this issue of representation: who’s given representation and who is not; who is believed and who’s not. Boyle delves deep into the television archive to explore its implication in the making of Savile as celebrity, but also its ability to provide the evidence and corroborate the stories of those who came forward later. Given their vulnerability (sick or disabled children, star-struck teenage fans) or their relationship to authority (young offenders), their allegations were not taken seriously; and Boyle argues for how the documentary format not only facilities a platform for them to testify, but how the archive itself provides evidence after police files vanish. Following the Weinstein allegations and further charges of sexual misconduct in the film and television industries, as well as the birth of MeToo movement, Boyle makes important claims for how these TV documentaries offer a particular space where victim/survivor testimony can ‘accumulate’ but, more importantly, ‘ultimately privilege’, to offer us ‘useful lessons in representing the aftermath of abuse in and on screen’ (emphasis added).

30 August 2016: this is when we lost our cherished friend and colleague, David Lavery. He was one of the co-founding editors (along with Kim Akass, Stephen Lacey, Janet McCabe, Robin Nelson and Rhonda Wilcox) of Critical Studies in Television, and he was influential in steering its agenda at the start. As a way of paying tribute to our treasured collaborator, whose loss remains incalculable to us, this issue devotes its pages to articles that reflect his interests and approach to TV scholarship, as well as a tribute from those who worked closely with him.

Amongst Lavery’s scholarly enthusiasms in recent years were US series with a ‘bad boy’ anti-hero at its core. One of the best examples – and one of David’s favourites – was Breaking Bad (2008–2013), and its hero Walter White (Brian Cranston). Breaking Bad is the subject of the article by Brian Gibson, who explores and deconstructs the critical acclaim and popular adoration that has been showered on the series, and especially its representation of White. Using examples from across its five series, Gibson mounts a detailed, textual analysis of the programme, charting the ways in which White’s grandiose expectations and masculine ideals are called into question. There is, however, a counter impulse in the series, and Gibson draws on ideas of the sublime – notably awe and terror – to argue that, ultimately, Breaking Bad falls under the spell of its own myth-making and myth-debunking. With particular reference to the programme’s finale, Gibson contends that, seduced by its narrative ambitions and visual and aural grandeur, Breaking Bad opts for the ‘romantic-sublime’ as its dominant mode, undercutting its more anti-heroic ambitions.

The relationship between contemporary, post-apocalyptic drama series and older genres – especially the western – is the subject of Amanda Keeler’s article on The Walking Dead (2010–present), the highly successful series that follows a group of survivors of a ‘zombie apocalypse’. From its opening sequence, in which the central character, Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) abandons his car in favour of a horse and rides towards a devastated Atlanta, guns strapped across his back, the series references the iconography and value systems of the western. Keeler positions the programme in relation to ‘post-western’ scholarship, arguing that The Walking Dead both draws on the western for its visual tropes and narrative structures and inverts them. At the centre of her argument is the contention that the programme’s playing with, and upending of, the conventions of the classic western is ultimately ideological: the optimism of the western, where, whatever the travails of the present, the future holds promise, is replaced by a pessimism, in which ‘promise’ lies in a past that cannot be recovered.

One of Lavery’s concerns as a scholar in the last decade of his life was the impact of new technologies, especially the digital. Like the rest of the editorial board of this journal, he was sceptical of some of the more extravagant claims that suggested the digital revolution meant the ‘end of television’; whilst at the same time he was keenly alert to the new possibilities and realities afforded by these developments and innovations. Christopher Cox enters this territory, aiming to demonstrate that not only is television alive and well, but that certain key terms of analogue scholarship continue to have value. His ambitious and stimulating article draws on, and updates, Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘flow’ for a digital age. Cox argues that the basic concept, offered by Williams (2013) in 1977, as – amongst other things – a way of thinking about how programmes sit in relation to each other and to the viewer, requires additional scholarly apparatus in an age of digital content providers, such as Netflix (his main example). Cox introduces, and argues persuasively for, two new terms to account for the ways in which programmes are made available, and viewer choices are exercised: the televisible and the invisual. The televisible refers to media content and digital media forms that shape, and are shaped by, their interactions with each other and with the viewer within digital media platforms, whilst the invisual are the unseen operations of software, algorithms and all the processes that configure and structure how viewers interact with televisible phenomena. ‘Flow’, reconceived in this way, becomes a means of discussing a fundamental tension in contemporary television consumption, between new possibilities for user interactivity, and the choices made for the viewer by an industrialised, and largely invisible, digital platform.

In closing this tribute to David Lavery, and endeavouring to do him justice, Rhonda V. Wilcox, Stacey Abbott and Douglas Howard were tasked to write about his accomplishments and significance within the field of TV Studies. Lavery’s career was always much more than the sum of his scholarly outputs – he penned numerous books, articles and blogs, always written with clarity and demonstrating an unwavering passion for the importance of television. What the tribute highlights is how he strived to set new agendas for the discipline, a more interdisciplinary approach which aimed to make us look differently at the textures and pleasures of television. He also set a remarkable example in the way in which he conducted himself – or what has been called the ‘Lavery Effect’ – in how he created and nurtured collaborative research networks. As if to accentuate the mark left by Lavery on TV studies, the tribute finishes with a series of reviews of his publications, as the authors – Stephanie Graves, Jessica Hautsch, Jay Bamber, Erin Giannini, Ensley F. Guffey – consider the impact of his work on the way we think about TV creativity and authorship, and on the development of what we might understand by a television canon.

The issue concludes with the first of two dossiers guest edited by Michael Goddard and Christopher Hogg, and is based on the ‘Trans TV’ conference held at the University of Westminster in September 2017. Drawing on some of the themes identified in the Cox article, this project engages with the contemporary landscape of what we call and understand by ‘television’. As new online streaming services such as Netflix reconfigure the experience of television, the dossier seeks to explore what has changed, why it’s changed and points to various implications of those shifts. In particular, the focus is on this liminal moment of transformation and seeks to understand the contemporary/emerging institutional entanglements and TV viewing experience. The dossier includes an article by Sofia Rios and Alexa Scarlata, which offers a counter-narrative to the US dominance of the SVOD television market. With a comparative analysis of smaller, but nevertheless locally significant SVOD platforms, Stan (Australia) and Blim (Mexico), Rios and Scarlata provide insight into local initiatives that complicate and reimagine the globalising ambitions of companies like Netflix. Next, the dossier collects together five interventions by leading and emergent television scholars. Appreciating the liminality of this particular moment in the history of television, each grapple with an industry in flux. Instead of waiting for the theoretical dust to settle (something of which David Lavery would have approved), each leap into the fray with initial thoughts about TV viewing practices (Gry Rustad, Tanya Horeck, Mareike Jenner and Tina Kendall), conceptualisations about TV fandom and communities (Matt Hills), industrial practices (Michael Wayne) and digital media platforms and the delivery of television to an audience (Amanda Lotz).

In Memory of David Lavery (1949–2016)

His dreams, as dreams often do, exhibit more wisdom than the dreamer knows.

– David Lavery, Late for the Sky, 1992