It all started with Traumschiff (ZDF, since 1981). Traumschiff is the German version of Love Boat (CBS, 1977-1986). It is less humorous and more melodramatic, but there is an element of self-deprecation about it: the main stars engage in a lot of winking and eye-twinkling.

Elke Weissmann

It all started with *Traumschiff* (ZDF, since 1981).

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG4cwnCym7A>

*Traumschiff* is the German version of *Love Boat* (CBS, 1977-1986). It
is less humorous and more melodramatic, but there is an element of
self-deprecation about it: the main stars engage in a lot of winking and
eye-twinkling. It stars Sascha Hehn, who avid viewers of German TV
serials might recognise as the son of Dr Wusov from the
*Schwarzwaldklinik* (*Black Forrest Clinic,* ZDF, 1985-1989). Yes, let
us remind us of it:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAyZS5csEks>

Did you feel the cringe of recognition? Was it, then or now, a guilty
pleasure? If so, we are on the same page. I thoroughly enjoyed
*Schwarzwaldklinik*. And when I was at home, in Germany, for Christmas,
I thoroughly enjoyed *Traumschiff*. So much so, that I watched two
back-to-back episodes. I binged on it, if you must.

What made the experience so interesting was not the momentary pleasure
derived from it, but the reactions of my students to my confession that
I had enjoyed this programme so much and my visible embarrassment about
it. They looked at me with surprise -- why was I embarrassed? They
thought it looked great. They couldn't understand the dialogue, but
thought the production values were impressive. Hm, I thought. Hm.

A few days later, I got into a bit of an email banter with a colleague
who found out that I preferred *Charmed* (The WB, 1998-2006) over
*Buffy* (The WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003). I explained that I was
essentially Phoebe, and couldn't relate to *Buffy* in the same way, but
I apologised -- yes, apologised -- for my faulty value judgement. I
understood that *Buffy* was clearly better. Clearly?

::: {#attachment_5462 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 460px"}
[![Figure 1: Still from Charmed 'Something Wicca This Way Comes' (Season
1, Episode 1). From left to right Phoebe (Alyssa Milano), Prue (Shannon
Doherty), and Piper (Holly Marie
Combs)](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Charmed-450x286.jpg){.wp-image-5462
.size-large loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5462" width="450" height="286"
srcset="https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Charmed-450x286.jpg.webp 450w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Charmed-300x191.jpg.webp 300w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Charmed-140x89.jpg.webp 140w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Charmed.jpg 707w"
sizes="(max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px"}](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Charmed.jpg)

Figure 1: Still from *Charmed* 'Something Wicca This Way Comes' (Season
1, Episode 1). From left to right Phoebe (Alyssa Milano), Prue (Shannon
Doherty), and Piper (Holly Marie Combs)
:::

If you have read my blogs before, you know that the issue of value in
television creeps up again and again. I think it largely stems from me
coming out of the German system where television remains an undervalued
medium both academically and culturally. There is only one Chair in
Television Studies in the whole country, and I encountered television
still largely as the bad object that needed to be systematised by new
[disciples](http://politics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-7){target="_blank"}
of the Frankfurt School. It connects also to a long journey of feminist
empowerment that has only recently allowed me to own up to my own
internalised devaluation of everything feminine. As Deborah Jermyn
phrased it so eloquently in a recent dossier for *Critical Studies in
Television*: 'I recall difficult soul-searching about how I could
situate myself as a feminist while also wearing lipstick' ([2016:
377](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1749602016661948){target="_blank"}).

But what this coincidence of talking about value made me realise is that
there are cultures, potentially, in which television studies have to
operate in different countries. Depending on how we see television, we
might value or indeed not value television studies. And even in
countries such as the UK, Canada or the USA where television studies
might well be established as an academic discipline (so much so, that
even Screen and the SCMS now have strands of television studies running
through their conference programmes and journal issues), there continues
to be a hierarchy in terms of what TV is deemed study-able and what
might not be a good object. Just think of all the invisible television
that [Brett
Mills](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.7227/CST.5.1.3){target="_blank"}
drew our attention to so well. Mills encourages us to pay more attention
to the popular and go beyond what we would normally study because, as he
puts it:

*how television is talked about and the programmes that are analysed,
discussed and taught, lead to a normalised understanding of what
television is, what it is constituted of, what it does, who it is for
and what is done with it. In all, then, this issue of Critical Studies
in Television intends to constitute a significant intervention into our
activities and the ways we define and justify the things that we do as
researchers, as scholars, as teachers and as a community. And by
highlighting that which is invisible it hopes to offer alternative
directions for the development of television studies as a whole.* (2012:
1).

Let us be honest: Have we heeded his call? Have we attempted to discuss
more, a greater variety, etc. of programmes? I am putting my hand up and
admit that 'not really'. I am still primarily writing about crime drama
and prime-time British and American drama at that. I make excuses to
myself that it's a result of not wanting to undermine my enjoyment of
some of the other programmes -- and in particular
*Charmed*.[\[1\]](#_edn1){#_ednref1} But what about *Time Team* (Channel
4, 1994-2014) which I am still catching (when I can) on More 4, or,
another favourite of mine, *Escape to the Country* (BBC One and Two,
since 2002)? And why, indeed, have I not written about the phenomenon
that is *Traumschiff*? What makes us decide to pick out specific
programmes? Mills suggests several reasons, including audiences,
publishing demands, the focus on the new, television's ordinariness,
issues of access and methods and approaches. When talking about
audiences, he points to our own likes to make sense of why some
programmes have been discussed more than others:

*As we are academics, so we are audiences. It is unsurprising that we
commonly choose to write about those programmes that we find
interesting, or addictive, or pleasurable. Indeed, it is often the case
that it is those interests that spark our desire to work as academics in
the first place. And it is that enthusiasm which commonly informs our
teaching and becomes an impetus to our work as a whole.* (p.5)

And he continues:

*But by using our own interests as audiences as motivators to research
and analysis we inevitably avoid those programmes that we are unlikely
to encounter and/or enjoy. And as a profession with a demographic
significantly unrepresentative of the general public, it is likely our
tastes often differ from those of mass audiences. In his article Phil
Wickham refers to a conversation he and I had about our colleagues'
ignorance of New Tricks (2003--present), which is highly significant
considering its ratings. His analysis of New Tricks suggests the viewing
habits of older people have largely been ignored in much media analysis,
and certainly have not received as much attention as younger viewers
(even if the analysis of children commonly works from concerns over
effects of the medium on developing minds). This is particularly
problematic considering the elderly consume more television than any
other age group; by ignoring such behaviour we are writing out of our
social history a significant proportion of everyday behaviour, and
ignoring one of the key ways in which television is made sense of.
Thinking about how and why some programmes are invisible might, then, be
a spur to new ways of exploring currently neglected research areas.* (p.
6)

Apologies for citing him in such length, but his point is just too good.
But it also assumes something of us as academics, namely that we operate
more like the younger generation, and that our tastes are different from
the mass audience that consumes *New Tricks*. One of the pleasures of
working at an institution with mostly working-class and lower
middle-class students is that they highlight to me, again and again, how
wrong some of these assumptions are (even if they have been researched
by Ofcom). They, or at least some of them, loved *New Tricks*. As did I.
At the moment, some of them love *Death in Paradise*, which, to be fair,
I'm not that keen on (it's OK), but I know colleagues who do like it.
And yet, they are not writing about it.

I therefore think that the invisibility of some television in our field
is connected to something else as well, something which [our
field](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.7227/CST.5.1.9?journalCode=csta){target="_blank"}
has grappled with since its beginning: legitimacy. Or, to put it more
[Bordieuan](http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42382/){target="_blank"}: [taste
cultures](https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nVaS6gS9Jz4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR12&dq=bourdieu+distinction&ots=73nUth_MkR&sig=h9U6e6B7KZj80tTAkHQIDWcPALg#v=onepage&q=bourdieu%20distinction&f=false){target="_blank"}
and habita. As several scholars (see [Brunsdon
1990](https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/31.1.67){target="_blank"}, [McCabe
and Akass
2007](http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/The-arts/Film-TV--radio/Television/Quality-TV-Contemporary-American-Television-and-Beyond){target="_blank"},
[Newman and Levine
2012](https://www.routledge.com/Legitimating-Television-Media-Convergence-and-Cultural-Status/Newman-Levine/p/book/9780203847640){target="_blank"}),
who have investigated this highlight, Bourdieu's concepts are useful in
understanding how television is legitimated. [Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
(2018)](http://journals.openedition.org/map/2472#text){target="_blank"},
for example, draw heavily on his concepts of 'cultural field', 'capital'
and 'habitus' to investigate HBO's role in favouring a particular kind
of television, one which 'validate\[s\] the taste values of those who
validate HBO'. Akass and McCabe use the term 'habitus' in order to make
sense of 'a largely arbitrary set of unconscious arrangements of rules,
norms and values governing the cultural consecration of HBO'. Habitus,
as Bourdieu indicates, operates in any institutional and social context:
in education, cultural production and cultural consumption. It directs
how people behave because the social context is structured by these
rules, norms and values which are internalised by most participants who
operate in that context. Thus, we are clearly governed by the specific
habitus in our field of Television Studies, but it would be wrong to
assume that this doesn't intersect with those of the academy more
generally, or indeed the national culture we operate in more widely. And
within these habita, taste is still defined along hierarchical lines.
Before doing any further research, my assumption was that taste in
relation to television and hence the legitimacy of specific forms of
television studies would be specific to different countries as a result
of television still connecting strongly with national cultures,
particularly in Europe where it is regulated as national public utility.
I was of course aware, at the same time, of the increased intersection
of the national with the transnational (see [Kuipers
2011](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764211398078){target="_blank"},
[Esser, Smith and Bernal-Merino
2016](https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=20R-CwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=esser+transnational+television&ots=e08OBzvATP&sig=zo1BNgSW3H6QnkGb4TMK_IkJUng#v=onepage&q=esser%20transnational%20television&f=false){target="_blank"})
But, I wanted to find out how television is perceived in different
countries and if this is connected to what kind of television studies is
perceived as legitimate. And put it like this, the findings were
interesting. But like a true serial television writer, I am going to
keep you in suspense. In a number of blogs, to be published in the next
few weeks, I am going to examine the responses in relation to different
elements that cropped up in them: next week, it will be about politics.

::: {#attachment_5463 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 220px"}
[![Figure 2: Blast from the Past: An example of an early TV Studies
publication in Britain that was clearly marked by a sense of having to
defend itself as a legitimate
publication.](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Coronation-Street-Monograph-210x300.jpg){.wp-image-5463
.size-medium loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5463" width="210" height="300"
srcset="https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Coronation-Street-Monograph-210x300.jpg.webp 210w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Coronation-Street-Monograph-315x450.jpg.webp 315w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Coronation-Street-Monograph-98x140.jpg.webp 98w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Coronation-Street-Monograph.jpg 349w"
sizes="(max-width: 210px) 100vw, 210px"}](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Coronation-Street-Monograph.jpg)

Figure 2: Blast from the Past: An example of an early TV Studies
publication in Britain that was clearly marked by a sense of having to
defend itself as a legitimate publication.
:::

 

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

**Elke Weissmann** is Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill
University. She is currently considering changing this to Reader in
Television and Film, however. Her books include *Transnational
Television Drama* (Palgrave) and the edited collection *Renewing
Feminisms* (I.B.Tauris) with Helen Thornham. She sits on the board of
editors for Critical Studies in Television. She migrated to the UK in
2002 after realising that German television was as bad as she
remembered.

 

###### Footnote:

[\[1\]](#_ednref1){#_edn1} And just to give you a sense of how important
*Charmed* remains to fans -- not only can you still watch it daily on
E4, but the
[reboot](http://deadline.com/2018/02/charmed-melonie-diaz-cast-the-cw-reboot-pilot-1202296467/){target="_blank"}
looks more likely to happen this time. See e.g:
[http://www.nme.com/news/tv/first-witch-sister-cast-charmed-reboot-2246533](http://www.nme.com/news/tv/first-witch-sister-cast-charmed-reboot-2246533){target="_blank"}

It all started with

 Traumschiff

(ZDF, since 1981). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG4cwnCym7A

 Traumschiff

is the German version of

 Love Boat

(CBS, 1977-1986). It is less humorous and more melodramatic, but there is an element of self-deprecation about it: the main stars engage in a lot of winking and eye-twinkling.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

EUROPEAN CULTURES OF TELEVISION STUDIES (1): TO BE CONTINUED…