Television Rewired: The Rise Of The Auteur Series
Even before A Companion to Wong Kar-wai was published by Wiley in 2016, a new book began to take shape in my imagination. At the same time that Wong’s cinema and the gloriously varied and diverse ideas of the critics I had assembled for the Companion continued to delight and occupy me as an editor, my own television viewing for pleasure had begun to fascinate me in a deeper way. I was increasingly riveted by the changes that started to take place on television in 1990, when David Lynch’s Twin Peaks first went on air. I knew of several books about a new so-called golden and even platinum age of television, but I found them superficial, indiscriminate, and lacking in focus on precisely what had changed. Should The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Deadwood, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica really be considered in the same category as Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men? What about Breaking Bad? Girls? Nurse Jackie? Enlightened? How to Get Away With Murder? All of these shows represent some kind of change from pre-1990 TV, but did they, I wondered, constitute the same level of evolution? And how did they relate to television history? What did The Sopranos, The Wire , and Breaking Bad have to do with the older crime shows like Columbo? Did the introduction of obscene language and dark situations and protagonists constitute a crucial break from the past? What was the relationship between the old sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and new shows like Girls, Nurse Jackie, and Enlightened? Were nudity and flawed leading characters really the signs of a golden age? Was The X-Files different in kind or only in degree from Kolchak, the Night Stalker, the inspiration for the new show that chronicled Scully and Mulder? Ditto Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) and the old series of the same name from the late 1970’s?
As with all my books, urgent questions launched me into exploration before I really had any clarity about what I was looking for. As is my usual process, I stood back and let curiosity take me where it would. It took me back to talking with David Lynch, David Chase, and Matt Weiner. I went a-knocking on a couple of new doors too, and found Brad Anderson, Uta Briesewitz, and Nina Kostroff Noble, who led the way to David Simon and Eric Overmyer. I couldn’t get interviews with Lena Dunham and Laura Dern, with whom I very much wanted to speak, a big disappointment. But the conversations I did have gave me my focus for my new book. I soon saw I was looking at a new landscape on which there was a big distinction between artists working in television and formulaic craftspeople, whom some cruelly call hacks, but who may be master craftspersons although not artists. The more I watched; the more I thought; the more I spoke with a very specific group working in series television, the clearer it became to me that beginning in 1990 there had been a clean break between the new auteur television and all the old series. It was also clear that auteur television had very little in common with new formula TV. We were witnessing the beginning and expansion of television as a medium in which art could be created by auteurs but was flooded with formula shows which imitated the superficial characteristics of the auteur series’. I decided to call it formula 2.0; most of it was little more than routine narrative with a few new bells and whistles. Some of it was highly skilled and inventive, but none of the 2.0 series’ was–as are the work of Lynch, Chase, Simon, Overmyer, and Lena Dunham– a new form of literature, a successor to Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Hemingway, and perhaps Virginia Woolf.
This insight blossomed into Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series by fomenting a struggle to articulate the distinctions I intuited between auteur and formula entertainment. What was it that the television auteurs had in common with the greats of western literature that was not to be found in even the best of formula series’ 2.0? I arrived at some answers to that question which cannot be summed up in a sound bite, but rather needed many chapters to explore. No one will be surprised to learn that the answers had to do with personal vision, and kinship with the great modern ideas and practices being developed by cutting edge science, philosophy, psychology, and fine art. No one will be surprised to learn that where the auteurs challenged audiences, formulaic series’ developers comforted them. False comfort? I think so. Even after five years of research and writing, my interest is still quickened by new thoughts about auteur television series’ and their unusual relationship to the media.
Television Rewired will be published in July 2019. The work I did for it has generated many insights but also many questions I did not have before. In the last year of my work about auteur television, my old friend and gadfly, curiosity, began to tickle those subterranean recesses from which all my best ideas come to me unbidden. What, I ask myself, do I actually know about formula 2.0? While I was concentrating on auteur television, I didn’t have time to ask a question that is now tugging at my imagination. I’ve written a lot about what art means in the form of a television series, and that has made me more curious about the inner workings of ordinary formulaic entertainment? I’d get a couple of books on the subject if I could, but you see, although there have been many weighty speculations of a partial nature about the culture industry, for example about sexism and racism, there are no books that are seriously speculative about the incredible lightness of being of diversions most people think of when they hear the word “entertainment.” That’s right, and there’s a little voice that keeps saying that there should be. Entertainment—frivolous, intense, familiar, repetitive, temporary and disposable–what is it and how does it work? How can it be distinguished from other forms of easy watching popular discourse? Or does everything that isn’t art come under that rubric? Hey there, voice; are you talking to me? Are you talking to ME?
Watch this space.