A Good TV
Show?
Are there coherent criteria for judging television drama?
Some viewers simply let it wash over them, making only the most minimal
judgments, mainly in terms of deciding what to watch. Others make
constant judgements on what they watch. They say they liked a programme
or they didn't like it. They consider some programmes good and others
bad. If pressed, they might indicate certain storylines, characters, settings
or sequences, which turn them on or switch them off. If pressed further,
they might find it difficult to specify exactly why they put a value on some
aspects and not on others. They would be hard put to articulate what
criteria they bring to bear in making such judgments as they do, let alone what
criteria should be brought to bear in making such judgements.
Most programme makers are vague enough about their values,
about how they judge what is good and what is bad in making their
programmes. They tend to be resentful of judgements on their work that do
not conform to their own. They dismiss critics as failed programme makers
and consider criticism as intrusion on their own domain. They believe
that what they have created is what it is and it is not for anybody else to say
what it is and what is not. Not that some critics do not give them cause
for resentment. They are often arbitrary and indulgent in their likes and
dislikes. They often fail to give any credible justification for their
judgements. When it comes down to it, they can be vague as anybody else
about specifying what criteria they apply, let alone what criteria they could
justify applying.
There is, of course, a widespread view that there are no
coherent criteria, or at least none that could be considered normative.
It is this view that probably holds sway at the man-in-the-street level (or
should it be person-at-the-box-level?). It is symptomatic of a deeper
malaise, rooted in a social reality much broader than television and methods of
appraising it. It is the fragmentary character of contemporary
life. It is failure of vision and failure of nerve in the face of it.
Even in the academic world, there is a methodological
anarchism that prevails across a whole range of disciplines, along the entire
spectrum from the ‘softest’ of popular arts of the ‘hardest’ of natural
sciences. From poetry, painting and pop videos to economics, biology and
physics, it is anything goes. A person likes what s/he likes. A person
believes what s/he believes. No one else has any right to say that they
are right or wrong. The astrologer speaks with as much authority as the
astronomer. The survivalist and the socialist can each make their case on
an equal footing. The dramatist can produce either the classic well-made
play or a chaotic happening. The critic in turn can come at it either
from a naively commonsensical point of view or with all the exotically
counter-commonsensical paraphernalia of post-structuralist semiotics. Who
is to say which is right or wrong? Each person's intellectual, moral and
aesthetic preferences are treated as autonomous and sovereign and unanswerable
to anything beyond themselves. Any attempt to pass judgment on anyone
else's aesthetic tastes is considered particularly out of order. There is
such an exaggerated emphasis on instability of meaning as to set the
viewer/reader adrift from any sort of physical, social or textual
determination.
There is a populist strain in media studies, much of it an
over-reaction to the elitism of high culture and traditional literary criticism
and to the negativism of the
While some are paralysed in intellectual indecision about
critical norms, others plough on regardless. The only criteria many television
executives and advertisers regard as relevant are the ratings. In their
world, television programmes are commodities designed to sell other
commodities. Judgements on television drama are based on their ability to
draw the most desirable demographics, i.e., to attract the most affluent
sections of the audience targeted by the advertisers to maximise their
profits. In devising a method for testing pilots prior to transmission,
The fact that many of these shows have achieved high ratings
the world over does not necessarily imply critical approval. Nor would
mass critical approval necessarily establish their intellectual, social, moral
or aesthetic value. The whole world is drinking Coca Cola as well, but
this hardly guarantees its nutritional value. The free play of market
forces is not the same thing as majority rule, nor is majority rule co-incident
with value. Even in RTE, which was never as crass, those involved
in production often dismissed their critics with the TAMs and considered no
further argument necessary.
A more promising place to look might be in the explosion of
interest in media studies in recent decades, giving rise to a burgeoning, if
very diverse, literature. The different approaches to television studies
employ very different methodologies. While some skim the surface and eschew
questions of value, others penetrate beneath the surface and take on questions
of value in the most direct way.
There are, first of all, empirical studies of the type
predominant in the
At the other extreme are the varieties of structuralist and
post-structuralist semiotics, more European in origin, which gravitate to grand
theory and disdain empirical research. It analyses texts in terms of
their formal qualities. It sees its task as the deconstruction of
conventional codes of discourse. It conceives of both auteurs and
audience as decentred subjects across a range of autonomous practices. It
stresses the specificity of each mode of discourse: the literary, the
cinematic, the televisual, etc. It is hostile to realist modes of
representation, to narrative form, to rational coherence, to socio-historical
analysis. It relates the text only to itself and rules out questions of
the relation of the text to anything outside itself, although the truth is that
it is generally so locked into introverted discourse on its own masturbatory
methodology that it rarely gets round to specific texts.
When it does, the texts it favours are the cinematic and
video equivalents of their own obscurantist tracts. It favours
static or chaotic camerawork, disjunction of sound and image, non-sync sound,
monitors and microphones in shot, picture not filling the frame, disruption of
narrative unity, alienation of identification, arbitrary editing, and generally
whatever is incoherent, in the belief that it alienates viewers and challenges
them to construct their own meaning. It alienated viewers, true enough,
but they may feel they can construct their own meaning quite well without all
the gratuitous fragmentation and clutter that auteurs who announce the death of
the author add to an already fragmented and cluttered experience of the world
or without whatever disjointed words of pseudo-wisdom Godard might mumble with
his back to the camera. Ironically, the myopic fixation on form leads to
amorphousness. Paradoxically formalism becomes formlessness.
Both extremes of textual studies, both content analysis and
semiotics, are pluralist, atomistic and ad hoc. Neither culminates in a
coherent theory. Much of the problem is a failure to put texts in
context. Other studies do put texts in context. Contextual studies
also span a considerable range.
Effects research, at one extreme, is the behaviourist
equivalent of content analysis. It attempts to measure quantifiable changes in
individual behaviour patterns resulting from particular viewing
experiences. It continues to investigate (inconclusively) the question of
whether personal acts of violence are influenced by the violence of
action-adventure series, films, news, etc. It tends to concentrate on
overt changes of choice in voting and purchasing patterns, stemming from party
political broadcasts or commercial advertisements. Like content analysis,
it has a certain limited value in tracing certain connections along the
surface. The basic problem, however, is that it defines its context too
narrowly. So too does the uses and gratifications approach which brings
in other factors and stresses the discriminating powers of individual
viewers. Such studies fail to capture either deeper psychological
processes or larger historical shifts.
At the other end of the spectrum are historicist
studies. These engage in research into production or consumption within a
wider sphere. Studies in political economy of the media focus on the
relationship between the prevailing structures of political and economic power
in a society and the cultural products of that society. An economist
approach construes the connection quite narrowly and focuses on the level of
the direct influence of the ownership and control of media in determining the
character of its products. It stresses the role of television programmes in
delivering audiences to advertisers and in conveying the ideology of the ruling
class to subordinate groups. Other studies deal with the
economic basis of cultural production as a far more complex and more subtle
process. The culturalist approach, on the other hand, relates cultural products
to other cultural products, but eschews an emphasis on the economics of their
production.
A more holistic approach stresses the complexity of
mediations, the scope for individual creativity, dissident ideologies and
subversive readings, the subtle and subconscious processes through which
programmes are constructed and interpreted. It sees the ideological
dimension of television drama in systemic rather than conspiratorial terms,
i.e., in terms of the complex contradictions of the capitalist mode of
production, rather than in terms of the conspiracies of conscious and
clear-minded capitalists.
The approach taken here is holistic and historicist.
It stresses the totality of interconnections within the socio-historical nexus
shaping cultural expression. It analyses particular texts and engages in
empirical research. It pushes further and relates texts both to other
texts and to larger socio-historical contexts. It deals with television
drama, not as a simple and fortuitous succession of particular plays, series
and serials, but as a complex pattern of cultural development, intelligible only
in relation to the larger pattern of contemporary social history. It
probes both underlying assumptions and overarching structures of power.
It examines philosophical frames of reference and relates these to social,
political and economic conditions shaping the concrete contexts of television
production and consumption.
There are many judgments made both on particular productions
and on persistent patterns of representation across a range of
productions. The criteria brought to bear in making such judgments
basically fall into two inter-related categories: aesthetic and ideological.
With respect to aesthetic criteria, the relevant question
is: What is it that makes some television drama great or good and other
television drama mediocre or bad?
Obviously, production standards constitute one set of
considerations. The quality of casting, performance, camera angles,
soundtrack, lighting, locations, editing, wardrobe and make-up all play their
part in making the difference between good and bad in the nature of television
drama. However, there has been a tendency in international television to rely
on star casting, fluid camera movements, fast cutting, exotic locations, trendy
soundtracks, stunts, special effects and haute couture to carry television drama
production. The weight of emphasis within the television industry often
tends to be on the technical, formal and financial aspects of television
drama. Discussions on the current state of play then centre on film
versus videotape, studio versus location, the single play versus the series or
serial, in-house versus commissioned production, home production versus
inter-national co-production.
Often confusion reigns on the surface and the deeper
questions remain unasked and unanswered. The most lavish productions are
given to the shoddiest of scripts. Few would deny the primacy of the
script in theory, but in practice the emphasis is sometimes more on stunts,
stars and special effects than on having a significant story to tell and an
appropriate method of telling it.
The significance of the story is the most fundamental
consideration to be brought to bear in judging television drama. All
other considerations, of visual style, pace, performance, should be
subordinated to evaluation of the script in terms of its basic human
meaning. All questions regarding the method of telling the story should
be subordinated to the prior question of whether it is a story worth telling.
What is it then that makes a story worth telling? What
is it that makes some stories more significant than others? What is it that
makes some television drama more meaningful and memorable than the rest?
The most significant stories are those which express the epochal in the
immediate, by portraying the characteristic conflicts and choices of an epoch
as embodied in the immediate circumstances of concrete lives. The most
meaningful and memorable drama has a metaphoric thrust that reaches beyond
itself and presents a whole way of life in microcosm. It provokes
communal recognition and revelation. It does what all great art
does. It synthesises common experience. It cleanses
perception. It illuminates what is dark. It orders what is
chaotic. It unifies what is fragmented. It clarifies what is
preying confusingly in others' lives. It brings to a focus what is there,
but unfocused, for others. It appropriates the past, interprets the
present and envisages the future. It combines epic scale with intimate
impact. It creates individual images of social totality. It
captures the flow of historical process.
Television drama should be judged, not only by the degree to
which it explores the specific potentialities of television as a signifying
practice, but also by norms by which all drama, indeed all art form, should be
judged. It should be judged according to its scope, its depth, its
integrity, its authenticity, its clarity, its relevance, its immediacy, its
rhythm, its resolution. It should be judged by the degree to which it is
probing, challenging, insightful and cathartic. It should be judged as to
whether it raises substantial issues, whether it presents full-blooded and
believable characters in credible situations challenged to make consequential
choices.
The process of artistic creation, which issues in drama of
this calibre, is rooted in the whole of the artist's experience of life.
It is the writer's input which is most fundamental in creating drama,
despite auteur theory and despite the essential importance of directors,
actors, designers and the rest. Drama is decisively shaped by the
richness of the writer's life experience and by the degree to which s/he has
creatively assimilated the most advanced knowledge, the most basic emotions,
the most fundamental socio-historical processes. It is deeply dependent on
the degree to which s/he can feel the pulse of the times about which s/he
is writing and on the degree of intellectual, emotional and moral clarity s/he
can bring to bear upon it.
The question of world-view is crucial. The Hungarian
critic Georg Lukacs has perhaps put this most sharply: "Without a
Weltanschauung, it is impossible to narrate properly or to achieve a
composition which would reflect the differentiated and epically complete
variety of life."
His argument was that, without a philosophy, without the
dynamic co-ordination of life in the writer's mind, there was no drama of any
real magnitude. The greater the playwright, the more and closer were the
ties binding him to the life of his times. It was necessary for the
writer to have a world historical mentality in order to create world historical
characters, i.e., characters who could bear and reveal the fullness of their
world. Dramatic necessity depended on the depth of the inner accord
between such characters and the concrete collisions of the socio-historical
forces of their times. For the world historical personality, who need not
be a powerful ruler or great explorer or whatever, individual vision and
passion coincided with social substance. Sharper individuation did not
weaken, but strengthened, the social character of dramatic collisions.
Conversely, the more acute the understanding of the social character of such
collisions, the less likely to do violence to individual psychology or dramatic
form.
Not that all writers might agree with this, but there is
nothing more important than achieving a world view, grounded in personal
experience and integrating the socio-historical experience of the times.
Some writers have agreed, however, even if it meant passing difficult judgment
upon themselves. The relentlessly honest French writer Flaubert wrote: "I
lack a well-founded and all-embracing concept of life. The world's religions
…on the one hand, progress, brotherhood and democracy on the other, do not any
longer answer the requirements of the present.... I see no possibility, today,
either of finding a new principle or of paying any attention to the old
principles. And so I am in search of that idea upon which everything else
depends, and cannot find it.”
Decades later, the British writer who published his earlier
fiction under the name Christopher St John Sprigg and his cultural criticism
under the name of Christopher Caudwell, wrote to literary friends giving his
reflections upon finding himself at a crucial turning point: "Seriously, I
think my weakness has been the lack of an integrated Weltanschauung ....As long
as there was a disintegration, I had necessarily an unsafe and provisional
attitude to reality, a somewhat .... superficial attitude, which showed in my
writing as ....'lack of baking'. The remedy is nothing so simple as a
working over and polishing up of prose, but to come to terms with myself and my
environment ....Naturally, it is a long process (the getting of wisdom) and I
don't fancy I am anywhere near the end"
Although most scripts today are being written by minds full
of Hollywood razzle-dazzle or cluttered by French deconstructionist chic,
nothing of substantial value will ever come of what is not rooted in the
pursuit of wisdom. The problem is that there is a long-standing and
deeply ingrained prejudice in television against writers with a well worked out
philosophy of life, burning with something definite to say and wanting to say
it through drama. The tired, trite adage passed on from one generation to
the next is: "If you want to send a message, call the
It has created an atmosphere of ludicrous defensiveness about having a message
to communicate. It is identified with political overkill, with clumsy
propaganda, with cardboard characters, grovelling in workerist grottiness and
speaking pidgin agit-prop. However, superficial drama is produced by
superficial people. Some may have a facile message to communicate, a
shallow sense of psychology and an inept handling of dramatic form. Others,
who may have no message to communicate, do not by virtue of that, have a better
grip on individual psychology and great dramatic flair. They are
generally the most superficial of all and lack the vision and the drive to
create fully individuated characters with real psychological insight of
dramatic import.
The characters they do create tend to be individuated
through superficial attributes or eccentric quirks, rather than thorough deep
penetration of their inner life. They are such shallow clichés as to be
nearly interchangeable parts. What was there to distinguish the heroes of
Airwolf, Street Hawk and Knight Rider except the vehicles which they use to
come to the rescue? What was the difference between Charlie's Angels or
Baywatch babes except hair colour? How much was there to know about the
inner life of JR Ewing or TJ Hooker?
The scripts written around such characters are loose, flabby
and vacuous. The plots are full of arbitrary comings and goings, full of
fortuitous happenings, full of opportunist contrivances. There is no
sense of sufficient reason for anything to happen. There is no sense of
adequate motivation for any relationships formed or course of action
pursued. The dialogue is either innocuous or overblown. It never
conveys a single interesting idea or a single genuine emotion.
Confrontations tend to be physical rather than psychological. False
problems are raised and resolved through macho flair and technical hardware,
rather than real problems raised through a meaningful sequence of events and
resolved through a psycho-social coming to terms. In the absence of the
strong dramatic drive that can only come in the process of a real psycho-social
coming to terms with real problems, there is only the recurrent cycle of
standardised characters and plots, combining and re-combining, jazzed up with
hooks, buttons and blows, with fast cutting, with cornball carry-on, with
expensive couture, with elaborate shoot-outs, car chases and burning buildings,
with ludicrous supernatural forces, with soulless sex hyped as sizzling and
salacious.
Nothing can cover the fact that it is false. It may be
melodramatic technically stylish falsity, but it is falsity. It is
banality, bloated with inflated sentiment and hyped with pseudo-monumentalising
devices. Its energy is the energy of faked orgasms. No amount of
posturing can hide the emptiness. It may be chic, blow-dried,
designer-labelled emptiness, but it is emptiness all the same. There is
an intellectual, emotional and moral numbness at the core of it all that no
number of clichés, copulations, car chases or designer clothes can
disguise. Of course, television being the omnivorous medium it, with so
many hours and channels to fill, not everything it produces can be great drama.
In any age and in any medium, there is much dross along with
the gold. All the same, it is not necessary for so much television drama
to be so bad.
Television has in its time produced much good, and sometimes
great, drama and has the potential to push much further. Television has
produced characters which haunt the mind and embody metaphoric meaning.
It has told stories which capture the thrust of socio-historical collision on
the ground. Productions such as Talking to a Stranger, The Sinners, The
Stars Look Down, Upstairs, Downstairs, Shoulder to Shoulder, Roads To Freedom,
Drums Along Balmoral Drive, Threads and the Billy trilogy have given a complex
and honest picture of a whole way of life. Whatever their limitations,
there have been excellent productions probing the horizons of human experience
and illuminating a particular cultural milieu.
Through the 1980s the Hollywood television dominating the
international market went to the other extreme with
Although the flow is still overwhelmingly from US to the
rest, there has been some flow in other directions and watching television In
Ireland has brought the experience of fine drama from many international
sources. In relation to the standards set world wide,
Not every drama need embody total vision to be good.
Not every playwright need have attained a self-conscious, all-encompassing,
coherent world view to create drama of any value. But the drive must be
towards totality and coherence and not away from it. The pressure to
write must come from a push to cleanse perception and not to intensify its
murkiness, to order the fragments of experience and not to add to the clutter,
to illuminate the world and not to contribute to its darkness.
Unfortunately, the tendency is often to murkiness, clutter,
disorder and darkness. It is not simply a problem with writers, but with
the world in the grip of the postmodernist neo-liberal mentality. It is a
mark of decadence in the social order when drama becomes decadent and
storytelling no longer strives towards totality. A decadent,
disintegrating society tells decadent, disintegrating stories. A society
that has lost its vision cannot deal with encompassing themes. A society
that has lost its way lacks the clarity and the energy of strong dramatic
drive. It is only possible for a writer to deal with encompassing themes
and to achieve the clarity and energy of strong dramatic drive by seeing
through and taking on the decadence, by unmasking its pretensions, by
challenging its norms and by opening sources of growth to offset the
decay.
Dramas made in the Dallas and Melrose Place mode lack
authenticity, conviction, depth, proportion, integrity, insight, resolution and
purposefulness. They are dishonest, superficial, trivial, contrived,
arbitrary, opportunist and capricious. They produce neither illumination
nor catharsis. They have a miscellanising, mind-crowding, fragmenting,
dissipating effect. They are decadent. They tell something about
the temper of the times, but in a way that distracts attention from the true
reality of the epoch, in a way that subverts the capacity to come to terms with
it. They delete the difficult dimensions of reality. In the words of
South African poet Jeremy Cronin: “
They are seductively addictive, even to those who know
better. Their cinematic stylishness captures and holds visual
interest. Once a certain amount of attention is invested in continuing
characters and storylines, no matter how absurd, it is difficult not to get
hooked by curiosity about what will happen next. Some enter more fully
than others into the fantasies they construct, fantasies of macho aggression,
fantasies of exploitative power and unearned wealth, fantasies of saccharine sentimentality
and slushy sexuality, fantasies which are aesthetically and psychologically
immature, but by no means ideologically innocent.
Lukacs took the view that the main business of the critic
was to elucidate the relation between artistic creation and ideology.
Where the writer stood in relation to the socio-historical collisions of his
time and how far he had worked out a world view capable of encompassing the
realities the world presented to him: these were the fundamental factors
shaping what sort of story he told and how he told it. To apply this to the
contemporary critic looking at television, there is much to elucidate on the
relation between drama and ideology.
Is television drama ideological? It is a question
likely to provoke, not only a variety of answers, but also a variety of
reactions to even posing the question. Many a viewer, producer, actor or author
might express puzzlement, indifference or contempt at the very nature of the
question. If pressed, they might perhaps admit that television drama may
have its ideological moments. They might cite bits of phatic dialogue and
straightforward declarations of position, such as:
Fr. O' Connor in
Dubliner in A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton:
“Babies don’t get bit by rats in Foxrock.”
John Willie O’Neill in Heritage: “Catholics kneel under
plaster saints. We sit with Christ under guns and swords.”
Certain characters might be seen as carrying ideological connotations: the IRA
kidnappers in The Price and the UDA heavies in the Billy plays. Entire
plays like A Very British Coup or Black Day at Blackrock or entire series like
Frank and Kate in The Price might be admitted to carry
ideological connotations, but surely not Miley and Biddy in Glenroe. Some
scenes in Making the Cut might have ideological nuances, but surely there is
nothing all that ideological about Friends or
What then is ideology? Ideology, in common parlance, is
often taken to be synonymous with propaganda, bias, distortion or false
consciousness. To say all television drama were ideological in this sense
would be to fail to do justice to its narrative complexity and to its capacity
for truthfulness.
Ideology, in the uncommon parlance of Parisian cafes and
culturalist texts, is taken to be a form of misrecognition, illusion and
reaction. In the convoluted discourse of Althusserian or Lacanian
theorists, any form of narrativisation, verisimilitude or identification is
ideological in this negative sense. To say that all television drama is
ideological in this sense would be to consider any form of story-telling, any
realistic portrayal, any evocation of identification with character, to be
inherently regressive, misguided and illusory. This would be to fail to
do justice to the very capacity of narrative for truthfulness and for
progressive meaning.
Ideology, as used here, is not synonymous with propaganda,
false consciousness or reaction. It is not a pejorative or negative
concept. Ideology refers to a set of interconnected views and values
systematically generated by specific socio-historical conditions. The
concept of ideology is meant to shed light on the way a person's view of the
world is shaped by the vantage point from which s/he perceives it. It is
meant to focus on the fact that the images, ideas, norms and codes, which
people take for granted, are rooted in the time, space and social conditions
within which they emerge. They are not eternal, universal or
unconditional verities. It is not meant to indicate that they are
necessarily false, regressive or unscientific. An ideology may be true or
false, progressive or regressive, scientific or unscientific.
To focus on ideology in this way is to assert that the
emergence of ideas, political movements and cultural trends is not arbitrary or
fortuitous. It is not such that anything could have been thought, that
anything could have happened, that anything could have been created, at any
time. It is a matter of deeper logic embedded in the unfolding of
intellectual and cultural history than anything that can be explained by great
thinkers, great artists or historical accidents.
Ideologies are grounded in a society's mode of
production. Contending ideologies, in exceedingly intricate and complex
ways, are rooted in the specific division of labour generated by particular
modes of production. The more highly developed the mode of production,
the more complex the social order, the more specialised the division of labour,
the more abstract the modes of mediation, the more formidable and variable the
process of representation of the totality within which human endeavour takes
place. The contending ideologies that emerge from this constitute a
struggle for the terms in which this totality is to be defined and dealt with.
In the broadest terms, in an advanced capitalist society,
there are many variations of bourgeois ideology contending with each other,
along with residual elements of feudal ideology and emergent developments of
socialist ideology. Each highlights certain key images, emphasises
certain issues and prescribes certain norms at the expense of others. In
relation to the social division of labour, one ideology will give expression to
the whole network of views and values rooted in blood and land (peasant or
aristocratic), another to those rooted in entrepreneurial skill and individual
acquisitiveness (bourgeois), yet another to those rooted in labour and
collective effort (socialist). The most abstract of theoretical
arguments, when it comes down to it, often have their basis in the clash of
peasant, aristocratic, bourgeois or socialist values.
It is not, of course, a matter of any simple one-to-one
correspondence between ideas and class interests. The connections are not
always direct, immediate or conscious. Ideologies often function all the
more effectively by indirection, in a subtle and extended pattern of
incorporation, and below the threshold of consciousness. An ideology
provides the matrix of thought through which the world is perceived and
conceived. Although it structures the very patterns of perception and
conceptualisation, it is itself usually neither perceived nor
conceptualised. It often operates more in terms of implicit assumptions
than explicit statements, shaping all that is seen, moulding it within its
framework, but remaining itself unseen.
Those who are most adamant in their renunciation of ideology
in all its forms and who proclaim themselves to be non-ideological are often
those most under the spell of ideology. Notions of journalistic
objectivity, of political neutrality, of artistic creativity and art for art's
sake, are profoundly and deeply ideological. All such illusions of
autonomy have their source in the ever escalating separation and specialisation
of mental and manual labour, which gives rise to theories and art forms which
are ever more remote from any concrete experiential base. All spheres of
thought and activity fly increasingly apart, seeming to be autonomous worlds
unto themselves, generating ever more one-sided and partial versions of the
whole and making any coherent view of the whole more and more difficult to
attain or even imagine. The most 'independent' of observers is often the
one who is most dependent on the dominant ideology, who has internalised its
norms and procedures so unconsciously and so completely as to be unaware of its
existence and incapable of conceiving of any alternative. In the process,
a taken-for-granted universality and unconditional truthfulness is ascribed to
views and values that are actually perceptions of the world from a particular
class standpoint.
To add further to the complexity, such perceptions come to
be accepted even by those whose actual position in the scheme of things is
sharply at variance with those who inhabit such a class position and have the
power to project their definitions and their codes of behaviour as if
applicable to everyone at all times and everywhere. The poor take on the
world view of the rich. It is not only the queen or the pope, whose power and
position stem from the institutional and ideological remnants of a
pre-capitalist social order, who uphold concepts of inherited wealth and
privilege and divine authority. The working class of the world cry for
Diana Spencer, who never did one day’s serious, and rate her among the great
figures of the century. Labour MPs end their days as life peers. In
Television drama plays an enormous role in the development
and dissemination of ideologies and it does so on many levels. It is not
just when its characters are making speeches declaring their fundamental
values. It is not just when its plots are obviously demonstrating the
virtues or vices of the capitalist system. It is not only through its
particular programmes, but even more through its total flow, through its
kaleidoscope of images, which merge with images drawn from a host of other sources,
to form a sort of composite picture of the world in our minds over a period of
time.
To probe the ideological dimensions of television drama in
this sense, it is necessary to focus, not only on particular dramatic
productions, but on the overall patterns of development of television drama, to
trace the networks of assumptions embodied in the recurring images, plots,
settings, themes, genres and modes of characterisation. It is also
necessary to analyse the shifts which have occurred over a period of time in
relation to the larger shifts within the socio-historical contexts in which
they have occurred.
Looked at in this way, all television drama is pervasively
ideological. As Todd Gitlin has put it in Inside Prime Time:
“Television can no more speak without ideology than we can
speak without prose. We swim in its world even if we don’t believe in
it.” Indeed, so penetrating is the medium that “we don’t even have to be tuned
in to be wired up”.
Perhaps more powerfully and pervasively than any other
medium, television provides the collective images, stereo-types and myths of
popular culture through which we as a society represent ourselves to ourselves
and to others. There is a complex and intricate relationship between the
production and reception of television drama and the larger pattern of
experiencing and coming to terms with the world. Its stories both express
and effect the push and pressure of a wider world.
Examining television drama in terms of the stories a society
tells about itself to itself and to others and about others to itself is likely
to bring to light a great deal about the experiences, moods, concerns, hopes,
fears and values of given social forces in a given culture at a given
time. It may indicate much about the texture of the times, though it does
not do so in a simple and straightforward way. Every drama, even if
unintentionally, reveals something of the dynamics of the interacting nexus of
forces in the society which has produced it.
It often conceals a fair bit about it as well. Every
story, at least implicitly, embodies elements of a world view, in the sense
that it symbolically conveys certain premises about what sort of world it is,
about how the social order is structured, about what the rules of the game of life
are. In doing so, it either acquiesces in the status quo or it queries
it, challenges it, dissents from it or poses alternatives to it. It
either exposes or eclipses the underlying structures of power. It either
normalises or subverts the idealisation of its hegemony, the taken-for-granted
assumptions which legitimate it and make its ideology seem to be only common
sense. It either induces or inhibits the exploration of alternatives to
it.
There has been a tendency to back away from ideological analysis
in media studies, exemplified by Jesus Martin-Barbero’s book Communication,
Culture And Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations. He characterises it as a
conception of the media process which leaves room for nothing but the
strategems of domination, a process defined as a few powerful message senders
controlling passive receivers without any indication of seduction or
resistance. It is perhaps necessary to assert that neither the producers
nor the audiences of mass media are homogeneous, that there are internal
conflicts and contradictions in the production of programmes, that there are
complex strategies of assimilation and resistance in their reception. On one
level, it may be a matter of emphasis: how much weight to put on hegemonic
texts and how much on alternative or subversive or even oppositional readings
of these texts. On another level, it is something more: the unravelling
of more powerful explanatory concepts, such as the media imperialism thesis in
its more sophisticated versions, into pluralistic dissipation of mediations
masking relations of power.
The ideological complexion emerging from the total flow of
television is by no means homogenous. The ideological profile of its
drama varies according to time, place, genre, programme, production source,
author, etc. There are significant differences, for example, from the
1950s to the 2000s; from
Nevertheless, amidst all this, there is an underlying
pattern, a highly complex one to be sure, in which certain views and values
predominate over others, in which certain types of characters, settings,
themes, problems, solutions and lifestyles are dramatised at the expense of
others.
To come to grips with this, it is vital to ask such
questions as:
·
Is
it a significant story?
·
Does
it have metaphoric thrust?
·
Does
it shed light on common experience?
·
Does
it cleanse perception or add to the clutter?
·
Does
it capture the rhythms of historical process?
·
Does
it provoke recognition, revelation or catharsis?
·
Has
it credibility, integrity, proportion, clarity, immediacy, insight, purpose,
depth, relevance, resonance, resolution?
·
What
is the overt point of the story?
·
What
are the unspoken assumptions which set the framework for the story? What
is the underlying world view?
·
What
are the underlying presuppositions about class, sex, morality, religion,
business, the range of legitimate life - styles, the structure of power, the
distribution of wealth?
·
How
are these presuppositions encoded in the narrative conventions, camera
movements, editing, casting, dialogue and visual imagery?
·
What
issues are raised? Why?
·
What
is said about the issues raised? Why?
·
What
is not said? Why not?
·
What
issues are not raised? Why not?
·
What
are the key concepts which set the limits within which issues are raised?
·
What
are the alternative key concepts?
·
What
stories are being told? By whom? Why?
·
What
alternative ways could these stories be told?
·
What
stories are not being told? Why not?
More specifically:
·
How
to characterise and explain the standardised plots and patterns of resolution,
the stereotypical modes of characterisation and the stylised settings of
·
How
to characterise and explain the similarities and differences between these and
those of British productions and of Irish productions?
·
How
have any or all of these changed over the years? Why?
·
What
is the relationship between the patterns of development of these changes and
the larger patterns of social change?
To make a stab at answering these questions, it is necessary to struggle to
synthesise a vast and variable flow of programming.
Suffice it to say here that, between the early days of
television and today, there has been much water under the bridge. New
tensions and new times have brought to light much that was seething beneath the
surface and then burst into open flames, only to be dampened down again.
Much is still smouldering, and whatever the attempts to smoother it under a
shrill and shallow pretence that all is well, things will never be the same
again.
Society has changed enormously in those years and so has
television. The trajectory from Friday to Furillo, from Lucy Ricardo to
Ally McBeal, from Rita Nolan to Nicola Prendergast, is most definitely one with
interesting aesthetic implications and with deep and determinate ideological
dimensions. It is a process deserving systematic articulation and
demanding serious assessment, grounded in clear and coherent criteria of
judgment.