David Lavery
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture: Lost (Spring
2009)
New organs of perception come into
being as a result of necessity. Therefore,
increase your necessity so that you may
increase your perception.
Jalaal al-Din Rumi
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Paul Abbott (UK,
Shameless,
State of Play)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
J. J. Abrams
(US, Felicity,
Alias, Lost,
Fringe)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Judd Apatow
(US, Freaks and
Geeks,
Undeclared)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Alan Ball (US,
Six Feet Under,
True Blood)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Roseanne Barr
(US, Roseanne)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Carter Bays (r)
and Craig
Thomas (l) (US,
How I Met Your
Mother)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Don Belisario (US,
Quantum Leap,
Magnum, PI, JAG)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Greg Berlanti (US,
Everwood, Dirty
Sexy Money)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Peter Berg (US,
Friday Night
Lights)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Carol Black and
Neal Marlens
(pictured) (US, The
Wonder Years,
Growing Pains)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Alan Bleasdale
(UK, Boys from
the Blackstuff)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Steven Bochco
(US, Hill Street
Blues, L.A. Law,
NYPD Blue)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
James Brooks
(US, The Mary
Tyler Moore
Show, The
Simpsons)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Mark Burnett
(UK/US, Survivor)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Stephen J.
Cannell (US, The
A-Team, The
Rockford Files)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Glenn Gordon
Caron (US,
Moonlighting,
Now and Again)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Chris Carter (US,
The X-Files,
Millennium)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Shaun Cassidy
(US, American
Gothic,
Invasion)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Glen (left) and Les (right) Charles
(US, Taxi, Cheers)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Irene Chaiken
(US, The LWord)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Chase
(US, The
Rockford Files,
Northern
Exposure, The
Sopranos)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Marc Cherry (US,
Desperate
Housewives)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
John Cleese
(UK, Monty
Python’s Flying
Circus, Fawlty
Towers)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Bill Cosby (US,
The Cosby
Show)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Richard Curtis
(right) and Ben
Elton (below)
(UK,
Blackadder)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Greg Daniels
(US, The Office)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Russell T. Davies
(UK, Queer as
Folk, Doctor
Who,
Torchwood)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Eick (US,
Battlestar
Galactica, Bionic
Woman)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Doug Ellin (US,
Entourage)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Michele Fazekas
(right) & Tara
Butters (left)
(US, Reaper)
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Paul Feig (US,
Freaks and
Geeks)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Tina Fey (US, 30
Rock)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Tom Fontana
(US, Oz,
Homicide)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Bryan Fuller (US,
Wonderfalls, Dead
Like Me, Heroes,
Pushing Daisies)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Tony Garnett
(UK, Cathy
Come Home,
This Life)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson
(to the right), Steve
Pemberton Reece Shearsmith
(below) (UK, League of
Gentlemen)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Larry Gelbart
(US, M*A*S*H)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Ricky Gervais
(left) and
Stephen
Merchant (right)
(UK, The Office,
Extras)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Vince Gilligan
(US, Breaking
Bad)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jonathan Glassner (US,
Stargate SG-1)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Alfred Gough &
Miles Millar (US,
Smallville)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Matthew
Graham (on the
right), Tony
Jordan, Ashley
Pharoah (on the
left) (UK, Life on
Mars)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
James Griffin and Rachel Lang
(New Zealand, Outrageous
Fortune)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Matt Groening
(US, The
Simpsons,
Futurama)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Barbara Hall
(US, Judging
Amy, Joan of
Arcadia)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Earl Hamner, Jr.
(US, The
Waltons)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Brenda Hampton
(US, Blossom, 7th
Heaven)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Hart Hanson
(US, Bones)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Bruno Heller
(UK/US, Rome,
The Mentalist)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Marshall Herskovitz (left) & Ed Zwick
(right) (US, thirtysomething, My SoCalled Life)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Winnie Holzman
(US, My SoCalled Life)
Television
TelevisionCreator
Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Paul Henning
(US, Green
Acres, Beverly
Hillbillies,
Petticoat
Junction)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Roy Huggins (US,
77 Sunset Strip,
Maverick, The
F.B.I., The
Fugitive)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Mitchell Hurwitz
(US, Arrested
Development )
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Amy Jenkins
(UK, This Life)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Tom Kapinos (US,
Californication)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jason Katims
(US, Roswell,
Friday Night
Lights)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David E. Kelley
[US]: Ally
McBeal, The
Practice, Boston
Legal, Picket
Fences
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Glen Kessler, Daniel Zelman, Todd
Kessler (US, Damages)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Michael Patrick King (L) & Darren Star (R)
(US, Sex and the City)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Daniel Knauf (US,
Carnivale)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Kohan & Max Mutchnick (US,
Will & Grace)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jenji Kohan (US,
Weeds)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Tim Kring (US,
Crossing Jordan,
Heroes)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Eric Kripke (US,
Supernatural)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Lynda LaPlante (UK,
Prime Suspect)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Glen Larson
(US, Battlestar
Galactica-original)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Denis Leary (right) and Peter
Dolan (left) (US, Rescue Me)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Norman Lear
(US, All in the
Family, The
Jeffersons)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Richard
Levinson (left)
and William Link
(right) (US,
Columbo)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Damon Lindelof
(left) and Carlton
Cuse (right) (US,
Crossing Jordan,
Lost)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Graham Linehan
(L) and Arthur
Mathews (R)
(UK, Father Ted)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Chuck Lorre
(US, Two and a
Half Men, Big
Bang Theory)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Lynch & Mark Frost
(US, Twin Peaks)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
William J. MacDonald, John
Milius and Bruno Heller
(US/UK, Rome)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Michael Mann
(US, Miami Vice)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jean Marsh (UK,
Upstairs,
Downstairs)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Quinn Martin
(US, The F.B.I.)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Patrick
McGoohan (UK,
The Prisoner)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Terry McGovern
(UK, Cracker,
The Street)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Lorne Michaels
(US, Saturday
Night Live)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Milch (US,
Hill Street Blues,
NYPD Blue,
Deadwood, John
from Cincinnati)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Tim Minear (US,
Angel,
Wonderfalls,
Firefly, The
Inside, Drive)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Ronald D. Moore (US,
Star Trek: The Next
Generation, Deep Space
Nine, Carnivale,
Battlestar Galactica)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Ryan Murphy (US,
Nip/Tuck)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Terry Nation (UK,
Doctor Who)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Sydney Newman (UK,
Doctor Who, The
Avengers)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Grant Naylor (Rob Grant and Doug
Naylor—front row) (UK, Red Dwarf)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Rockne O’Bannon
(US, Farscape)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Mark V. Olsen and
Will Scheffer (US,
Big Love)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Stephen Poliakoff (UK, Shooting
the Past, Capturing Mary)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Dennis Potter (UK,
The Singing
Detective, Pennies
from Heaven)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Rand Ravich
(US, Life)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Renwick
(UK, One Foot in
the Grave)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Shonda Rhimes
(US), Grey’s
Anatomy, Private
Practice)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Gina Riley &
Jane Turner
(Australia, Kath
and Kim)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Gene
Roddenberry
(US, Star Trek,
Stark Trek: The
Next
Generation)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Shaun Ryan
(US, The Shield,
The Unit)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jennifer Saunders
(UK, Absolutely
Fabulous)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Paul Scheuring (US,
Prison Break)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Josh Schwarz
(US, The O.C.,
Gossip Girl,
Chuck)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jerry Seinfeld
(US, Seinfeld)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Rod Serling (US,
Twilight Zone)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Simon
(US, Homicide,
The Wire)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Gzrry Shandling
(US, The Larry
Sanders Show)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Aaron Sorkin
(US, Sports
Night, West
Wing, Studio 60
on the Sunset
Strip)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Aaron Spelling
(US, Fantasy
Island, Charlie’s
Angel, Dynasty,
Love Boat,
Starsky and
Hutch)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jessica
Stevenson &
Simon Legg
(UK, Spaced)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Matt Stone (left)
and Trey Parker
(right) (US,
South Park)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
J. Michael
Straczynski (US,
Babylon 5)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Grant Tinker
(US, The Mary
Tyler Moore)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David Walliams
& Matt Lucas
(UK, Little
Britain)
Television Creators
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Reg Watson
(Australia,
Neighbours
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Jay Ward (US,
Rocky and
Bullwinkle,
George of the
Jungle)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Matthew
Weiner
(US, The
Sopranos,
Mad Men)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Joss Whedon
(US, Buffy the
Vampire
Slayer, Angel,
Firefly,
Dollhouse)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Dick Wolf
(US, Law &
Order, Law
& Order:
Special
Victims Unit)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
David
Wolstencroft
(UK, Spooks)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Anthony Zuicker
(US, CSI)
Television Creator
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
The Parallel Courses of Cinema & TV
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
François Truffaut,
"Une Certaine
Tendance du
Cinéma Français"
("A Certain
Tendency in French
Cinema"), Cahiers
du Cinéma (1954)
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Andrew Sarris (US):
Auteurism’s American
champion
Drawing on the original insights of the French, the
American critic Andrew Sarris translated the auteur
theory into an American idiom. For a time, under the
influence of Sarris’ goal of converting "film history into
directorial autobiography," American intellectuals
interested in the movies began to think and talk and
understand the movies through the specially-ground
lenses provided by the auteur theory. "Over a group of
films," Sarris insisted in what amounts to his
foundational principle, "a director must exhibit certain
recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his
signature. The way a film looks and moves should have
some relationship to the way a director thinks and
feels" (Sarris 586).
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Truffaut formulated the original auteur
theory in opposition to the monopolization
of film art by writers, Sarris’ critical
venture was likewise undertaken "against
the wind." He sought to undermine the
too-great hold of sociological and political
critics. He wanted to talk about the art in
the movies he loved, not their social
significance.
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
“Auteurism was . . . a palimpsest of
influences, combining romantic expressive
notions of the artist, modernist-formalist
notions of stylistic discontinuity and
fragmentation, and a ‘proto-postmodern,’
fondness for “lower” arts and genres. The real
scandal of the auteur theory lay not so much
in glorifying the director as the equivalent in
prestige to the literary author, but rather, in
exactly who was granted this prestige.”
Robert Stam (87)
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
“In its more extreme incarnations auteurism
can be seen as an anthropomorphic form of
‘love’ for the cinema. The same love that had
formerly been lavished on stars, or that
formalists lavished on artistic devices, the
auteurists now lavished on the men—and they
largely were men—who incarnated the
auteurists’ idea of cinema. Film was
resurrected as secular religion; the ‘aura’ was
back in force thanks to the cult of the auteur.”
Robert Stam (88)
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
The auteur theory’s appeal, the critic Peter
Wollen has noted, was obvious: it "implie[d]
an operation of decipherment . . . reveal[ing]
authors where none had been seen before"
(77). Film directors, it was argued, and soon
thereafter generally assumed, could put their
stamp on a wide variety of movies, even in
several genres. Their attention was not
focused solely on American directors, of
course; they also singled out for praise
French auteurs like Abel Gance, Jean Vigo,
and Jean Renoir.
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
The auteur theory was ready to accept, of course, that
"Just as not every conductor is a Leonard Bernstein, so
not every director is an Alfed Hitchcock" [Dick 147]),
and under its influence not all directors became
maestros—those individuals Sarris categorized as
"Pantheon Directors"--but many shed their anonymity,
their earlier work now retrospectfully interesting, their
new films anticipated. The works of a wide variety of
directors were catalogued, in some cases exhaustively.
And it was not only the movies of these directors that
came in for greater scrutiny. The writings of auteurs
and available interviews with them concerning their film
aesthetics and methods were also put under the
microscope.
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Death of
the
Author
Barthes, Foucault, Gass (l-r)
Death of
the Author
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author.” Image, Music,
Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
142-48.
Foucault, Michael. "What is an Author?" The Foucault Reader.
Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101-20.
Gass, William H. ''The Death of the Author." Habitations of the
Word: Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. 265-88.
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
According to post-modernist critical
theory we are—in Derrida's
phrase—"logocentric." Routinely,
naively we assume that the sounds
uttered by a speaker make manifest
precise meanings present within.
We take it for granted that the
"signifier" of a speaker's language is
"but a temporary representation
through which one moves to get at
the signified, which is what the
speaker, in that revealing English
phrase, 'has in mind'" (Culler,
Ferdinand de Saussure, 119-20).
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Semiotic inquiry often leads to similar
conclusions, as in Umberto Eco's
statement of post-modernist faith that
"all works are created by works" and
"texts . . . created by texts"; "literature
comes from literature, cinema comes
from cinema" (199). Today's audience
(readers or viewers) of "instinctive
semioticians" immediately recognizes
that "all together they [the archetypes
of art] speak to each other
independently of the intention of their
authors" (210). Indeed, Eco observes
profoundly in an essay on Casablanca
and the cult film,
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
As a corrective, deconstructionism would
eliminate entirely the fiction of a speaking or
writing subject. For Derrida, "the author
deliquesces into writing-as-such and the reader
into reading-as-such, and what writing-as-such
effects and reading-as-such engages is not a
work of literature but a text, writing, 'ecriture"
(Abrams 567). And even though Harold Bloom
has taken pains to distinguish his multi-volume
analysis of the "anxiety of influence" from the
anti-humanism of a Derrida, his thesis that no
poet speaks entirely in his or her own voice but
rather struggles, always in the end
unsuccessfully, to escape the more powerful
voice of ancestral poets, obviously contributes
to our failing faith in the power of the author
and transforms inspiration into a merely intertextual matter.
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
We do much the same with texts. "In
primitive societies," Roland Barthes
reminds in his essay on "The Death of
the Author," "narrative is never
undertaken by a person, but by a
mediator, shaman or speaker, whose
'performance' may be admired (that is,
his mastery of the narrative code), but
not his 'genius'" (142). In literate
societies, however, we have created
the whole institution of authorship—
largely forgetting, however, that the
author is a recent invention.
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Only five centuries ago, Michel
Foucault asks us to remember in his
essay "What is an Author?", texts
now thought of as literary were
"accepted, put into circulation, and
valorized without any question about
the identity of their author; their
anonymity caused no difficulties since
their ancientness, whether real or
imagined, was regarded as sufficient
guarantee of their status.”
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
"On the other hand," Foucault observes,
"those texts that we now call scientific—those
dealing with cosmology and the heavens,
medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and
geography—were accepted in the Middle
Ages, and accepted as 'true,' only when
marked with the name of their author.
'Hippocrates said,' 'Pliny recounts,' were not
really formulas of an argument based on
authority; they were the markers inserted in
discourses that were supported to be received
as statements of demonstrated truth" (109).
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
William Gass' fine essay on "The Death of the
Author" offers a dissenting opinion on Barthes'
contention, noting that Barthes' obituary,
substituting wish for deed, was premature: "when,
in 1968, Roland Barthes announced the death of
the author, he was actually calling for it." In Gass'
opinion, the death of the author is comic, not
tragic; it "signifies a decline in authority, in
theological power, as if Zeus were stripped of his
thunderbolts and swans, perhaps residing on
Olympus still, but now living in a camper and
cooking with propane. He is, but he is no longer a
god" (265).
Death of the
Author
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
“[B]ecause of the technological complexity
of the medium and as a result of the
application to most commercial television
production of the principles of modern
industrial organization . . . , it is very
difficult to locate the ‘author’ of a television
program—if by that we mean the single
individual who provides the unifying vision
behind the program.”
Robert C. Allen
TV Authorship
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
“[Newcomb and Alley] demonstrated that despite the
gigantic constituent corporate bureaucracies of this most
massive of mass media—networks, advertising agencies,
production companies, ratings organizations, federal
regulatory authorities—the autobiographical visions of
individual did manage to break through onto the television
screen, just as the personal visions of artists had managed
to reach expression in the older, preelectronic arts. Were
these visions mitigated or, in effect, edited by television’s
trilateral nature of industry, technology, and art? Certainly.
But when and where had an art ever developed
independently of other factors?”
David Marc & Robert Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers
TV Authorship
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
While television exhibits many of the characteristics of
open or writerly text it also differs from them in one
fundamental characteristic: television popular, whereas
open, writerly texts (in the way that Eco and Barthes
originally theorized them) are typically avant-garde,
highbrow ones wit minority appeal. Television, as a
popular medium, needs to be thought of as
"producerly." A producerly text combines the televisual
characteristics of writerly text with the easy accessibility
of the readerly.
John Fiske, Television Culture
TV Authorship
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Unlike the writerly avant-garde text, television does not
work with an authorial voice that uses unfamiliar
discourse in order to draw attention to its discursivity.
The avant garde author-artist will shock the reader into
recognition of the text's discursive structure and will
require the reader to learn new discursive competencies
in order to participate with it in a writerly way in the
production of meaning and pleasure. The producerly
text, on the other hand, relies discursive competencies
that the viewer already possesses, but requires that
they are used in a self-interested, productive way: the
producerly text can therefore, be popular in a way that
the writerly text cannot.
John Fiske, Television Culture
TV Authorship
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
“A self-conscious creative producer may be able to
take what appears to be a mundane idea, a cast of
no distinction, or writing that seems to be ordinary
and conventional, and transform it into a better
sort of television. When the happy circumstance
arises in which the producer is able to assemble
the best writers, actors, directors, and film
editors, and is able to impress upon them a
central concept that speaks his vision, then the
potential is present for exceptional work. It can be
created because art is mastery, discipline, and
vision. It is the ability to mold constraint into a
creative contour.” (Newcomb and Alley, xii-xiv)
TV Authorship
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
“The quality audience gets to separate
itself from the mass audience and can
watch TV without guilt, and without
realizing that the double-edge discourse
they are getting is also ordinary TV.”
Jane Feuer (80)
TV Authorship
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Why TV is Better Than the Movies
(Entertainment Weekly)
1. Women thrive on TV.
2. We care more about TV characters.
3. TV does better with drama.
4. In TV, the writer rules.
5. TV is more fun to talk about.
6. TV deals with mature themes more maturely.
7. TV is more convenient.
8. TV does better with less money.
9. On TV, you can change the channel.
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture
Television Creativity
Special Topics in Popular Culture