Editorial

Critical Studies in Television 4: 4 starts with an article by Jeffrey Chisum, exploring the AMC television series, Breaking Bad (2008–2013) as a ‘tragic Western’. He traces how the narrative of the series’ antihero, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), inherits a long cultural tradition of the tragic hero, analysing in detail his possession of tragic flaws and the seeming inexorability of his fate. Chisum’s discussion of the intersection between the tragic tradition and that of the western genre across film and television leads to a detailed dissection of the landscape as central to the series processes of meaning making. Following the logic of the series as tragedy, he concludes by making the case for the natural ending of the series (with which undoubtedly many of its fans would agree): the episode entitled ‘Ozymandias’ (S5 E14). Chisum draws out the connections between the series’ presentation of desert landscapes as a metaphor for moral decay, unavoidable fate and timelessness and the Shelley poem of the same title; a critique of the hubris of ruthless tyrants appropriate to the fall of Walter White.

What follows next are two dossiers. The first is prepared by Michael Goddard and Christopher Hogg, as part of their three part series on Trans TV and aims to make sense of the current transformations taking place within contemporary television ecologies. Part two focuses on representational matters and identity politics and begins with Francesca Sobande’s article on Chewing Gum (2015–2017) and Insecure (2016–), which explores contemporary television’s representations of ‘millennial’ Black women within an intersectional framework. Analysing both shows, as well as the viewer response, Sobande begins to map the tensions between post-feminist and Black feminist identities as depicted in these comedy dramas, highlighting the often ‘awkward’ and sometimes contradictory intersectionality of gender, race and (post-)feminism. As such, she highlights both the representational power of contemporary television to portray complex and multifaceted identities and the need for continued attention to be paid to the ways in which this shift relates to Black women today. Her intersectional approach to ethnic, gender, sexual and embodied identities also informs, in different ways, the interventions that make up the rest of this dossier.

Focusing on the relatively recent context of the US network sitcom since the 1990s, Jaap Kooijman’s intervention examines the important representational contributions of shows such as Ellen (1994–1998) and, later, Will & Grace (1998–2006, 2017–), not only in increasing queer visibility in mainstream comedy but also in normalising lead characters who also ‘just happen to be gay’. Indeed, Kooijman argues that the reactionary power of Will & Grace sat primarily in its presentation of queer ordinariness, paving the way for future gay representations on television in which such characters need not be defined by otherness; for example with the character Tony Padilla (Christian Navarro) in 13 Reasons Why (2017–) who utters the paradigmatic line: ‘You know I’m gay, right’.

Craig Haslop’s intervention goes further back into television history, to consider iconic examples of 1960s British tele-fantasy in order to posit subversive queerness as a defining feature of early cult television. Through close textual readings of both The Avengers (1961–1969) and The Prisoner (1968–1969), Haslop evidences the ways in which non-normative representations of gender and sexuality became foundational to storytelling strategies of industrialised cult tele-fantasy as we recognise it today in contemporary internet-distributed shows like Sense8 (2015–2018). In so doing, Haslop draws attention to the transgressive potential of popular television drama long before the arrival of internet-distributed television.

Joke Hermes and Michael Kardolus’s intervention engages more directly with trans aesthetics in its critical reading, informed by fandom, of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–2019). Affirming the subversive and highly pleasurable power of the show in relation to reality TV genres and television in general, while fully acknowledging its problematic aspects of embracing neoliberal meritocratic values, as well as prejudice against transgender embodiment as opposed to drag, the intervention ultimately positions the show as a highly pleasurable, if problematic, instance of intersectional politics come alive.

Finally, Anamarija Horvat’s intervention concludes the second Trans TV dossier by confronting intersectionality directly, through her engagement with the show that perhaps most epitomises the idea of Trans TV: namely, Transparent (2014–). While she is not the first to point out the show’s focus and setting in a milieu of white privilege, she is able to illuminate this in an incisive way by analysing the few encounters of the Pfefferman’s across ethnic and class lines through the limited encounters with the minor African-American characters Elizah (Alexandra Gray) and Dr Gunderson (Paula Newsome). While the show itself is highly aware of these issues, even making themes of intersectionality and ‘white fragility’ explicit through the dialogue, and deliberately evading the ‘white saviour’ trope, it also avoids interrogating the white privilege that is the central lens through which this intersectionality is viewed and, hence, whiteness and white privilege risk being presented as ‘transparent’ and normalised rather than problematic.

This issue concludes with the second TV Essay dossier, a series that aims to debate the idea of the essayistic in television, as an experimental mode of documentary defined by reflexive critical (often politically engaged) thinking, where the practitioner moves from behind the lens to intervene into the social world and directly engage the audience within a shared public sphere in the process of thinking through the televisual. Timothy Corrigan offers us a useful steer, when he observes how the

essayistic acts out a performative presentation of self…in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience. In this larger sense, the essay film become most important in pinpointing a practice that renegotiates assumptions about documentary objectivity, narrative epistemology, and authorial expressivity within the determining context of the unstable heterogeneity of time and place. (2011: 6, emphasis ours)

In relation to television, this dossier situates such thinking within the context of Channel 4, the United Kingdom’s fourth public service channel, in the mid-1980s. In particular, it is devoted to Stuart Marshall (1949–1993), a composer, artist, educator and media practitioner, and centres around his video-essay, Bright Eyes (1984). Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstić identify the essayistic as a form of ‘dissident, non-conformist practice, a viable means of expression for those at the margins and fringes’ of the mainstream (2019: 9). In this sense, the way in which Marshall uses the video-essay as a means of public activism and critique, as Nora Alter observes ‘as a medium for protest, resistance, witness or commentary’ (2018: 148), is explored in the documents assembled in this second dossier.

This type of television and way of thinking about the televisual form as sound and image requires a particular type of institutional patron and broadcasting ecology: in this case, Channel 4. A particular idea of TV as a form of innovation and experiment emerges at the United Kingdom’s fourth broadcast channel, as a new kind of public service broadcaster in the 1980s, with a commitment to commissioning television catering for distinct minorities and neglected audiences. This dossier selectively reprints an archive of photographs and writings, as well as critical responses, as illustrative of Marshall’s thinking through television as an extended critique of the televisual, and how his way of thinking through media and creative practice translates into an TV essayistic mode used to comment directly on the nature of image-making and the medium itself.

Interwoven with this material archive is an original essay by Colin Perry, who seeks to situate Marshall’s creative practice and critical thinking within the context of radical political groups and experimentalists in video and cine film of the 1970s and 1980s and, in turn, identifies how he brought these counter tactics as a new intervention to television. Included alongside is an In Conversation between Rebecca Dobbs (Marshall’s producer) and Caroline Spry (commissioner of his work at Channel 4). In reflecting on working with him at the channel, they make visible the politics of C4 at this historical moment, of its institutional philosophy and commissioning of independent film-makers as a way to address and represent audiences that had previously been ignored and overlooked.