Editorial

Critical Studies in Television 14(1) opens with a co-written article by Annette Hill, Tina Askanius and Koko Kondo, based on empirical research and using critical theory. The authors draw primarily on Paddy Scannell’s concept of care structures (2014) to make sense of how reality talent shows manage a series of relationships involving producers and performers, the studio audience and those watching (and voting) at home in relation to the making of a live TV experience. Analysing interviews conducted with audiences, performers and production personnel of Got to Dance (2010–2014), Hill, Askanius and Kondo uncover how the care structures involved in production and reception practices producing the live experience are ‘fraught with difficulties’. Much of the hidden labour involves generating ‘an affective investment’, co-creating a sense of community, a mood in the studio. But this also necessitates the organisation of time, a play between the values and meaning of a temporal experience and ‘the more enduring collective social experience’ of the series. While this is carefully managed at the point of broadcast, it is not sustained beyond the show. Such research thus furthers understanding of audience engagement and audiences as participants, and the management of that experience.

Understanding transmedia storytelling (see Jenkins, 2007) as a practice of telling a story experience across multiple traditional and digital delivery platforms has become of key concern to TV scholarship. Trying to make sense of storytelling practices in contemporary culture using digital and emerging technologies, for producing drama series (Lothar, 2016), trends in TV production (Clarke, 2013), and as a way of understanding audience participation and engagement (Evans, 2011), has commanded much attention. Nicholas Benson offers us a history lesson as he draws attention to an early example of transmedia storytelling: Planet of the Apes (1974), the television spin-off series of the film. Benson shows how an existing logic of television and film production informed the series and impacted on how Planet of the Apes was developed, both in terms of what kinds of stories could be presented and how they could be told. In terms of how a story is told on different platforms, Benson suggests that this early example gives an insight into transmedia story management and branding practices (with merchandising), before transmedia storytelling became streamlined and fully integrated into industrial organisational practices in a fragmented media market.

Next the journal shifts to textual matters, of TV style and aesthetics, with a thoughtful exploration of recent incarnations of the sustained tracking shot. Pinpointing commonalities of style, motivation and resonance, Toni Pape addresses the renowned 6-minute tracking shot found in True Detective (2014–present), drawing parallels between this and contemporary examples from third-person videogames and video art. He argues that these particular tracking shots establish an aesthetic of stealth, exploiting and heightening notions of imperceptibility, secrecy and securitisation. In this way, Pape highlights patterns of connectedness between television and other media/arts and demonstrates the political significance of stylistic and aesthetic choices.

CST has long aimed to give space to a wide variety of television genres and the next two articles train attention on specialist reality TV emphasising contemporary lifestyle interests in the United States. The first is by Lee McGuigan and Rosemary Clark and it offers a fascinating and carefully researched article about hunting television in the United States, a long-established genre, popular on cable channels and influencing more mainstream programmes. Focusing on a number of shows from three cable channels dedicated to outdoor programming, the authors note that there is almost no research into hunting television and aim to address this absence by analysing commercial sponsorship of, and in, programmes, as well as the depiction of killing. The claim of most shows is that they are designed to educate viewers about conservation, the safety of hunters and sporting ethics. Yet the authors counter these claims using content analysis of selected sequences and programmes, to argue instead that the main emphasis is on product marketing and ‘killing on camera’ – on the technology and paraphernalia of hunting and the final ‘kill shot’ that are staples of the genre.

TV makeover shows ‘participate in projects of citizenship’, argues media critic Brenda Weber (2009: 38; also see Heller, 2007). She contends that such programming in the United States offers an ‘ideological hub’, enunciating ‘an imagined nation of beautiful, self-assured, and self-confident people whose lifestyles, appearances, domiciles, relationships…signify happiness and material security’ (Weber, 2009: 38). In her article, Tisha Dejmanee addresses similar concerns of what defines imagined US womanhood in and through a series of female-hosted daytime cooking shows on the Food Network. The ‘heartland kitchen’ programmes (as Dejmanee calls them) mediate landscapes of a rural, neo-conservative America, she argues, where home cooking fuses a neoliberal mandate of female selfhood, self-determination and positive self-esteem, with the values of a mythic rural US arcadia and the domestic realm. Such a retreat (often quite literal) into a bucolic America involves the adoration of the homebound wife at the stove. Comfort food is enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a crusade to rectify and reinstitute gendered and racially homogenous fantasies of the nation (see also Faludi, 2007: 116–145), where an old family recipe becomes a salve for the anxieties of social and political change that reside deep in the US cultural imagination.

The representation of history, through drama as well as documentary, is a staple of popular television in the United Kingdom. This strand of programming is represented in the next article, by Bonnie White, which concerns Land Girls (2009–2011), a popular UK drama series that focuses on the experience of the British Land Girls – women who worked on the land to aid the war effort — during the Second World War. Drawing on contextual and textual analysis, White argues that beneath the surface melodrama of its form, the series is a commentary on British identity and the shape of its cultural institutions during the War. White explores the ways in which Land Girls posits a series of national, racial and economic ‘others’ who are brought into tension with notions of a singular and unproblematic ‘Britishness’ at a time of national struggle. The conflicts that ensue, and the opening up of fixed ideas of culture and nationhood that frequently result, have resonance, White contends, for 21st-century audiences.

This issue inaugurates the first dossier devoted to the TV Essay, combining original transcripts and documents with a contextualising essay. Definitions of the essay and essay film materialise at the intersection of documentary and experimental film: it is a form that fuses fact with fiction, reformulates art and documentary styles of film practice, foregrounds a personal, highly subjective form of address, finds tension between the audial and visual, and provokes a dialogic encounter between the film and its audience, often in service of politics. Nöel Burch (1981) has called the essayistic form in film as a vehicle for what Nora M Alter and Timothy Corrigan call a ‘public subjectivity in the process of thinking’ (2017: 4) and the aim of these dossiers is to extend such a conversation to television, particularly public service broadcasting. These TV Essay dossiers seek to address how the essayistic has been used, often as reaction to the strict genre of the TV documentary, to provoke thinking about society and societal change, the nation and an informed citizenship, and the role of public service television to make such debates visible.

This initiative has grown out of the Essay Film Festival, hosted at Birkbeck, University of London, and the first dossier is based on ‘Thinking Cinema on Television: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), ca. 1975’, where a selection of TV productions from 1975, broadcast between October and December, and curated and presented by Volker Pantenburg, were screened in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in March 2017. The dossier focuses on the film department of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne as a centre of experimentation in television. Starting around 1970, commissioning editors like Wilfried Reichart, Werner Dütsch, Angelika Wittlich, Helmut Merker and Georg Alexander, writes Pantenburg in his contextualising essay, produced and commissioned an extraordinary range of diverse productions that explored ways of combining images and sounds to address the aesthetics and history of cinema. What the dossier offers is a glimpse into a way of thinking about television and an ambition to use the form – and its codes and conventions – to make interventions, to offer an essay on a subject, an argument through the specificity of the TV form. Looking at these original documents provides insight into a network of commissioning editors and film-makers, alliances (between film, television and criticism) and intellectual labour.