Michael Z. Newman

From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative

elevision is a story machine. Every day, thousands of hours of narrative zip through the airwaves and cables and into our sets and minds. Television does more than just tell stories, of course, but its function as a storytelling medium demands analysis, and with this essay I offer a framework for analyzing one kind of television narrative. Unlike some accounts of television as a storytelling medium, however, this one will not isolate the text from its makers and users. My purpose here is to initiate a poetics of television form, an account of storytellers’ strategies in crafting narratives that will solicit certain effects in viewers such as suspense and surprise, hope and fear, and aesthetic appreciation. A poetics can help explain why so many people take so much pleasure in television’s stories. In particular I am interested in one form of American television drama, the contemporary scripted prime-time serial, or PTS. For the past twenty-five years there have been two main forms of hour-long prime-time programs. Serials such as St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982–88) dramatize long-form stories in ways similar to daytime soap operas. Shows such as Law & Order (NBC, 1990–) have an episodic format in which all of the problems raised in the beginning of an episode are solved by the end and questions do not dangle week after week. Evening serials became an important form of American television programming in the 1980s after the ratings success of Dallas (CBS, 1978–91) and the acclaim and awards bestowed on Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87). They became a dominant form in the 1990s with shows such as The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002) and ER (NBC, 1994–) consistently winning both high ratings and critical praise. Later in the 1990s and in the early 2000s the serial saw its presence diminish as episodic programs and reality shows grew in popularity, but as I write it is enjoying a revival at the same From Beats to Arcs:

New media, young audiences and discourses of attention: from Sesame Street to ‘snack culture’:

One need not look far to find claims in popular American discourse that today’s attention spans are short. Central causes of shortened attention are typically assumed to include media technologies and forms of media content, especially those characterized by brevity and fragmentation, such as television commercials and web videos. The putative victims of this supposed condition are often children or members of younger generations whose entire lives have been suffused with electronic media. Some of this discourse might aim merely to be descriptive, but on the whole it indicates negative implications and forecasts undesirable consequences. Attention span and advanced intelligence are often correlated in popular discourse as in educational contexts, and the medicalizing of attention deficit in the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD further creates a negative association with the inability to pay sustained attention. In the popular imagination, stupidity and pathology often characterize this condition, and colloquial usage dehumanizes its victims, however humorously, through figurative language like ‘the attention span of a fly’ or ‘of a gnat’ or ‘of a rock’. The linkage of attention deficit with emergent forms of media functions as a technophobic discourse of media effects, pathologizing a civilization too eager to adopt new tools of communication. If the attention span is imperiled, this can hardly bode well for society. The idea of a connection between a culture’s media and its collective habits and patterns of paying attention has been appealing to a number of influential thinkers, including Walter Benjamin (1968), Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Adorno, 1974; Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002), and Marshall McLuhan (2004). It is especially pertinent when critics and intellectuals ponder

Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television

Circulation of television programs in file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent is one of the many developments in the era of media convergence prompting a renewal of television’s place in the popular imagination. Scholarly study of file-sharing tends to focus on movies and music, keeping TV marginal despite its heavy circulation in P2P networks. By considering its cultural implications as revealed in the discourses of P2P TV sharers, this essay’s aim is to understand TV file-sharing as one term in the negotiation of television’s value during the contemporary period. It is especially concerned with understanding the ethical theories of file-sharing participants. It situates these within the context of television’s shift from low, mass culture to a more legitimated status; from a freely accessible public good to a private good for which one must enter into terms of commercial exchange; and from a national/local form of culture to a global, cosmopolitan experience.