Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

**October 2008**

At the Quality American TV conference in Dublin back in 2004 Maire
Messenger Davies highlighted a key problem in studying television:
namely, the question of availability. She mentioned NBC's critically
acclaimed series *I'll Fly Away* (1991-93), which lived on in memory but
not in any tangible form like DVD or video. (To this day it is stil only
available on Region 1 DVD format.) The comment got us thinking. We had
been formulating the idea for a series of TV books and what she said
struck home. When we came to plan the [Reading Contemporary
Television](http://www.ibtauris.com/Series/Reading%20Contemporary%20Television.aspx) series
for I.B. Tauris, our aim was to capture the zeitgeist, moments in
television, to create, in fact, an archive of memory and criticism
before the shows under discussion disappeared from view. Writing
about *Sex and the City* (1998-2004) and *The Sopranos* (1999-2007) we
had experienced first-hand the problems of creating our own archive. Who
would be around to do the taping, for example? God forbid if both of us
went out on Friday night (and before anyone says it -- no, neither of us
could operate the timer).

Back then it did seem as if writing about TV mimicked the practices of
popular culture. Either we talked of the latest 'hot' new show or we
talked of classics. Such practices opened us up to criticism: that we
merely replicated how the institution of television operates, with its
insatiable hunger for the new and its canonisation of particular shows
to fill voracious scheduling needs. And this is to say nothing of early
TV. With much of it lost, only ever experienced in initial transmission,
scholars were forced to re-construct programmes from production notes,
scripts and other available broadcasting documentation. Interviews,
recollections and personal archives also helped jog the collective
memory of shows long gone.

But, does not this state of affairs explain why we speak as we do?

It is how our knowledge is stored and distributed, how its availability
prompts us to speak in the first place that is important. It is a vital
question, and one contemplated in this first *TV Reflections*. What is
at stake here is the way in which our knowledge of television is, in the
words of Michel Foucault, 'put into discourse' (1990: 11). What channels
does it take; what are the (sometimes unconscious) rules defining what
can and cannot be said, and how *what*is known is overwhelmingly
determined by *the way* it is known.

Take [HBO](http://www.hbo.com/) as an example. Emerging out of
commercial and cultural shifts within the US television industry, the
premier cable company made visible a new set of rules for producing and
consuming television in the post-1996 era. Its original programming
-- *The Sopranos*,*The Wire* (2002-9), *Deadwood* {2004-6), *Sex and the
City*, *Six Feet Under* (2001-5) -- serve as instances that disseminate
and implant knowledge of what constitutes a new form of television
culture. But it is how HBO determines that knowledge and uses its
position as a market leader to shape how and what we, as scholars, can
use that we want to draw attention to here.

We do not wish to imply that HBO is better than regular TV (and, let's
face it, there is a lot of regular TV within its schedules), but what we
are saying is that HBO has constituted a discourse of what kind of
television for which it will be remembered. Embedded in and through the
DNA of its original programmes is how HBO takes great care to be seen --
but more importantly insists we never forget to think about the company
-- as benefactors of a television revolution that is innovative, daring
and searching out the new. Over the last ten years, in particular, HBO
has busied itself creating its legacy, shaping its value through
branding and aggressive marketing campaigns. In its struggle for
institutional survival and market leadership the cable company has set
about producing a unique televisual product -- a lexicon of production
values, an evaluative discourse for thinking about those programmes
(with its audacious tagline, 'It's Not TV. It's HBO'), and preserving
them by stripping across the week and making them available through
HBO-on-Demand and DVD boxsets. Our point: how HBO wants to be remembered
is in and through its original programming -- how they endlessly speak
about and sell themselves, how the media talks about them and how their
customers have come to understand what they are paying for.

[But can HBO ever truly control how their archive is
used](http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,1717134,00.html) and
will be remembered? While networks from the very beginning have sought
to control how their product is viewed and sold, does not the digital
age challenging that ownership?

And those implications are surely affecting the way we write about and
interpret TV.

Unlike 2004 when we had no social life for fear of missing an episode
of *Sex and the City,*now we cannot go out because we are busy watching
boxsets of shows that have never appeared on UK terrestrial TV (*The
Wire)* or else endlessly watching re-runs of favoured ones
(*House* \[2004-2012\]). How television companies and networks shape our
viewing is changing the way we consume, know and read the texts. In
addition to this there are also fan magazines with accompanying DVDs, as
well as a host of digital platforms like TiVo / hard drive, computer
downloads, numerous (free) TV streaming sites run by fans, to say
nothing of the 'official' ones like iTunes. Has textual analysis come to
the fore in television studies at this particular moment because of the
over-determination of the text? And, are these new formats facilitating
a production of new knowledge of how to read and review narrative and
text -- and sometimes in ways which could not have been anticipated in
initial production?

We are at a point where everything is potentially available; but what is
available and how it is made accessible has implications for how we read
and define the television text. Just as memories -- fragmented,
forgotten and misremembered -- have long structured our knowledge of
television, video-sharing websites like YouTube function in similar
ways. There is, of course, the illusion that through digital storage
nothing is forgotten and but can be instantly retrieved; we sense that
everything is obtainable -- we can watch *Ugly Betty *in Arabic if we so
choose; and through the limited and fragmentary availability of
'unofficial' archives, there is also a sense that we are discovering a
seemingly unavailable broadcasting history -- a collective memory
challenging 'official' versions.

But choices are being made all the time. What is seen as worth
remembering? How are those TV memories recorded? And who makes those
choices in the first place? A postmodern television landscape is
emerging out of the bricolage. But how this assemblage contributes to
the way we think and remember, and shapes our knowledge, is something we
need to consider further. And we need to reflect on our research
practices as well as how our scholarship makes visible the above.

Over all of this looms the question of copyright. But that is another
matter and we invite opinions on the subject.

Returning to where we began. When we conceived of the Reading
Contemporary TV series, our idea was to create a dynamic archive, one
that assembled disparate voices speaking in a cacophony. Four years
later, we hope this website will initiate an equally vibrant dialogue,
creating a network with which to share, store and distribute knowledge.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

**Kim Akass** is a Senior Research Fellow and lecturer in Cutural and
Contextual Studies (Film/TV) at the University of Hertfordshire. She has
published widely on US TV, is co-founding editor of *Critical Studies in
Television *and is co-editor (with Janet McCabe) of The Reading
Contemporary TV series for I.B. Tauris. She is currently working on a
book about mothers in the media for I.B. Tauris and is webmistress of
CSTonline.

**Janet McCabe **is Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries at
Birkbeck, University of London. She has co-edited (with Akass) several
collections on contemporary television including *Reading Sex and the
City *(2004) and *Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and
Beyond *(2007). She is (along with Akass) series editor of the Reading
Contemporary TV series (I.B.Tauris), one of the co-founding editors of
the journal *Critical Studies in Television*, as well as its managing
editor. She writes extensively on feminism and television and her latest
book is *The West Wing*, for the TV Milestone Series.


<strong>
 October 2008
</strong>
At the Quality American TV conference in Dublin back in 2004 Maire Messenger Davies highlighted a key problem in studying television: namely, the question of availability. She mentioned NBC’s critically acclaimed series
<em>
 I’ll Fly Away
</em>
(1991-93), which lived on in memory but not in any tangible form like DVD or video.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

WRITING TV INTO DISCOURSE