Abstract
Extending her work on cities in film, Charlotte Brunsdon turns her attention in this book to the televisual construction of cities. Indeed, though her focus is on ‘television cities as they appear on the screen’ (p. 11), a comparison with cinematic treatments of the city is implicit throughout – and explicit in the introduction – contrasting the frisson of the cinematic urban flâneur, meandering through the maze of modernity, with ‘the banal, the mundane, the repetitious’ (p. 6) of television’s suburban, domestic interiors. Inevitably selecting examples, Brunsdon chooses London, Paris and Baltimore as ‘devices through which to explore methodological, as well as substantive, issues in the imbrication of cities and television’ (p. 22).
For good reasons, the police-detective genre is Brunsdon’s ‘preferred choice’ (p. 11). In the first chapter, ‘The Modernity of Maigret’s Paris’, television Paris is exemplified with reference to different versions of Maigret while in chapter three, ‘Portable cities: Baltimore’, the lineage of TV Baltimores, is traced through Homicide (1993–1999) and The Corner (2000) as well as The Wire (2002–2008). London, in a chapter entitled ‘Living-room London’, is seen as more variously televisualised in EastEnders (1985–), Desmond’s (1989–1994) and Holding On (1997) as well as in two contrasting BBC versions of Dickens Our Mutual Friend and the various historic-contemporary treatments of London in series one of Sherlock (2010), Ripper Street (2013–2016) and Call the Midwife (2012–). The strategy allows Brunsdon to focus on specific programme details as well as to reflect more broadly. It affords zooming in to specific shot construction as well as a long-view, historical perspectives. She remarks, for example, on the relative absence over time of discussion of the construction of cities in the medium of television, while noting how that medium has itself changed through time both technologically and in its social functions. She argues that the low cultural prestige of television has led to its effacement from recent narratives of the understanding of television which privilege particularly the ‘not TV’ cities of US prestige, satellite and cable. This last point is pertinent particularly to The Wire but Brunsdon’s account of Baltimore is balanced, as noted, by that city’s lineage in Homicide and The Corner whose different treatments, as unpacked, serve to contrast different styles and eras of television production.
The book is scholarly, almost a quarter of its 220 pages being taken up with endnotes and bibliography. But it is engagingly readable. Archival research diligence yields insights such as the evidence of the BBC’s eye to international markets as early as the 1960s Maigret and the observation that accreditation for TV Baltimores might more properly go to art director, Vincent Peranio (who worked on all three examples discussed) rather than to David Simon as auteur in the shift of critical emphasis ‘in which a genealogy of authorship succeeds one of genre’ (p. 127).
Television Cities is relatively short (it appears in a Duke series called ‘spin-offs’, edited by Lynn Spigel) but it packs in a wide range of thought-provoking issues without losing its focus. The nuanced analyses of differing televisual treatments of cities, illustrated by selected black and white images, are deftly located in broader cultural studies reflections: in the fragmentation of the post-war consensus and its related institutions in the progress of neo-liberalism; on changing circumstances of television production and distribution; on viewing behaviours shifting from national simultaneity to private multi-platform bingeing; on changing habitation and habits of cities under the circumstances of globalisation. Some agendas are overt from the outset, notably the wish to secure acknowledgement for the central role of television in the ‘apprehension of cities’ (p. 23) at a time when the medium is under threat on several fronts. Others emerge in the process such as the more contentious argument that the new television of cable, streaming and the box-set is ‘men’s television, a television emancipated from domesticity and the feminine’ (p. 124). But all this makes Television Cities an engaging and rewarding read for anybody interested in fictions for small, and not-so-small, screens. It will no doubt succeed in its aim of encouraging debate in these domains.