Televisuality, realism and ideology in TV

Thèmes abordés

Televisuality, realism, conventions, codes, ideology, specularity, Caldwell, Althusser, representation, editing, style, mise-en-scène

Résumé du document

John T. Caldwell uses the term « televisuality » to address the 1980s turn to stylistic exhibitionism in American television. "Televisuality was a stylizing performance" (Caldwell, 1995), TV dominated by style. It generated a new approach to realism by creating new codes.
What are these codes? How does televisuality impact on realism? How does realism relate to ideology?

Extraits

[...] There is a soundtrack; characters and viewers hear the same thing. It is part of the décor, not a narrative effect. In both shows, editing follows the pattern of shot/counter shot to establish the spatial relationship between the characters (each cut coincides precisely with a change of speaker or the entrance or going out of a protagonist). Editing is directed by the action to convey an appearance of naturalness, of realseemingness. Editing is made as invisible as possible to the viewer. [...]

[...] Allen and A. Hill (Eds.), The Television Studies Reader (pp. 404-417). London: Routledge. Fiske, J. (1987). Television Culture. London: Routledge. Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In L. Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. [...]

[...] It is about girls, parties and Hollywood/show business. The core values are celebrity/career, making money and friendship. It represents the Californian way of life and the American Dream: episodes include shots of the context: Los Angeles. How I Met Your Mother features 5 friends women and 3 men) around 25/30 living in New York. The series is about love and the quest for a soul mate, the ‘natural' stages in life. Although How I Met Your Mother features the modern urban American, the New Yorker, challenging CBS's ideology of the ‘real' American, this critic of CBS's dominant ideology is absorbed because the characters champion the value of the nuclear family: marriage (pitch of the series: “How Ted got married?; 1st episode: two main characters get engaged), having children (older Ted is addressing to his children; season Marshall and Lily try to have a baby). [...]

[...] Thus, TV realism is the way through which ideology naturalizes itself and becomes common sense, for “Ideology is a (re)presentation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, 1971) and television is a privileged medium for this representation. Works cited : Caldwell, J. T. (1995). Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Johnson, V. (2004). Welcome Home? CBS, PAX-TV, and “Heartland” Values in a Neo-Network Era. In R. [...]

[...] Televisuality John T. Caldwell uses the term « televisuality » to address the 1980s turn to stylistic exhibitionism in American television. “Televisuality was a stylizing performance” (Caldwell, 1995), TV dominated by style. It generated a new approach to realism by creating new codes. What are these codes? How does televisuality impact on realism? How does realism relate to ideology? We will address these questions by analyzing two TV shows: CBS's How I Met Your Mother and HBO's Entourage. Both shows feature a group of friends with friendship as the core value but the other values they emphasize, their styles are different. [...]