Televisuality And Its Discontents: More Reconsideration
As I work on this new book, I am finding that pinning down what we mean by formula is more difficult than might be imagined. It seemed very clear until I began to examine actual shows. Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, and The Wire are clearly beyond formula. But the history of television is not black and white. There are many shades of grey. Don’t we go beyond formula television if a writer creates unorthodox characters even if they are shoehorned into a familiar plot structure? I can say, from experience, that television execs used to hear Gabriel’s horn blow if we wrote even a line of dialogue that challenged truisms and clichés. What if a standard procedural includes many such lines, as does Castle, or a bi-sexual character, who isn’t defined by her sexuality but rather presented to us as one of the cherished cast, as are the heterosexual characters in the series, for example, Angela in Bones? Is Breaking Bad, which is constructed according to the well worn patterns of crime melodrama, but features an intensely immoral, unethical protagonist—called an anti-hero in the popular press–formulaic, or beyond formula? And what is an anti-hero, anyway? Drama centered on guys who have done mighty wrongs have been around since Oedipus, and probably before that in unrecorded history. Doesn’t the answer to this question depend on who has defined what is right and what is wrong, and whether the protagonist lives in a just or an unjust society; in a fathomable or an unfathomable universe?
My best bet now, as I do the spade work, seems to be to talk to the creators of what is being spoken about as if it is post-formulaic television. When people working in the industry are willing to speak to me, I find it keeps me honest and free from theoretical excess. In addition to my twenty-four years of interviews with David Lynch, I have now had eight years of revealing discussions (sizzling with wit, anger, and introspective examination of creative goals and artistic frustrations) with David Chase about what he was up to in The Sopranos and his thoughts about the entertainment media in America. Chase has also put me in contact with people that were crucial to the existence and continuing success of the series, including Richard Plepler, then the Executive Vice President of HBO, now the CEO; Brad Grey, then Chase’s manager, now the CEO of Paramount Studios; Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher Multisanti on The Sopranos; Steven Van Zandt, who played Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, and was the music director on Chase’s film Not Fade Away; and Allan Coulter and Tim Van Patten, two directors on The Sopranos. Chase has also helped me to interview Eigil Bryld, the cinematographer for Not Fade Away; Mark Johnson and Sidney Wolinsky, the Executive Producer and Editor, respectively, for Not Fade Away, and two of the stars of the film, John Magaro and Bella Heathcote. In my conversations with all these members of the creative community, I have witnessed a great deal of yearning for opportunities to express important things about human existence, and an intense exuberance that grew from the opportunities that David Chase gave them to do so. Stay tuned for more news about my research for my book about television with primary sources.