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Review of Jeremy G. Butler, Television

Style
a
Barry Salt
a
The London Film School , 24 Shelton Street, London, WC2H 9UB,
UK
Published online: 15 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Barry Salt (2010) Review of Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style , New Review of
Film and Television Studies, 8:4, 454-458, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2010.514668

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 New Review of Film and Television Studies
Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2010, 454–458

REVIEW ESSAY
Review of Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style
Barry Salt*
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The London Film School, 24 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9UB, UK

Barry Salt reviews Jeremy G. Butler’s Television Style (Routledge, 2010),
noting that the study of style in television is a neglected area of academic
study. Salt suggests that Butler could have taken his study further, by
incorporating some of the techniques of statistical style analysis.
Keywords: television style; Jeremy G. Butler; ER; Homicide: Life on the Street

Television style is a very large area, covering all the shows from 60 years of mass
television. It has received some attention academically, but almost entirely in an
impressionistic way, with a major bias towards bringing in the writer’s pet
theories to explain the meaning of TV programmes. Jeremy Butler discusses, and
uses, some of these theoretical concepts. One is John Thornton Caldwell’s notion
of ‘televisuality’, which is defined by ‘excessive stylisation and visual
exhibitionism’ (Butler 2010, 175). In part this is merely a result of introducing
new stylistic effects, and in part results from the use of reflexive devices, which
foreground the fact that we are watching television. Both cases can obviously be
dealt with without needing a special new word to describe them. Another even
more fuzzy concept called into play by Butler is ‘film noir’, which has long been
reduced to near meaninglessness by being attached to too many diverse films, and
by having its defining stylistic terms expanded much too much.
However, a substantial part of Jeremy Butler’s basic approach to
investigating television style seems sound to me, but then that is inevitable, as
he follows David Bordwell’s approach to film style, which in its turn is based,
though without proper acknowledgment, on my own ideas and practice. One of
the main ideas here is reversing the process of the way films and television shows
are put together when analysing them, as I have been advocating for more than 30
years. This in its turn means using the terms used by film and television makers
when carrying out the stylistic analysis. Here Butler falls short of the ideal, as he
again uses too many terms invented by media studies academics, when they are
actually not needed. For instance, in his methodological introduction he claims
that there is no equivalent used by actual film and television makers to the

*Email: b.salt@lfs.org.uk

ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2010.514668
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 New Review of Film and Television Studies 455
academic expression ‘mise en scène’. But there is, and it is the simple word
‘direction’, or related phrases, depending on the context. The same goes for other
favourite academic inventions, such as ‘non-diegetic music’, which I can assure
you drives film and television composers mad when they hear it used. They have
always had a precise word for this sort of accompanying music, and it has been
‘underscore’ for the last half-century. The same goes for ‘the 180 degree line’,
which is just an unnecessary new name for what film-makers had been calling
‘the eyeline’ for many decades before media studies were invented.
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When Butler gets down to analysing representative scenes from television

programmes, he mostly does reasonably well in picking up the stylistic details of
their construction. The problems come in the lack of empirical analysis that goes
beyond that. He does not mention the work on extending stylistic analysis of
television series by objective methods in three previous American essays by
Barker (1985), Porter (1987) and Barbatsis and Guy (1991), though he does make
a number of references to my own work (Salt 2006) in this area.
One of the shows that Jeremy Butler concentrates on is ER, but he neglects the
context in which it appeared in late 1994. More than a year beforehand, at the
beginning of 1993, Homicide: Life on the Street began to be broadcast. This police
procedural set out to get more of the grit of real police life and work onto the
television screen, and apart from its content, it adopted the style of cinéma vérité for
television fictional purposes. This involved hand-held camera and long takes,
though it was not exactly like real cinéma vérité. For instance, Homicide had more
whip pans from one character to another in dialogue scenes than the real article had.
And it had more circling round the characters than the real thing. Jeremy Butler does
however record its other peculiarity, which is the extensive use of jump cuts inside
dialogue scenes, which you also do not find in cinéma vérité to the same extent. The
hand-held tracking and circling of Homicide are obviously what inspired the
signature scenes of ER, which are the tracking and panning around the emergency
gurney being pushed through the hospital. ER substitutes a Steadicam camera for
Homicide’s hand-held camera, which is part of the general reaching for high budget
audience-pleasing glossiness in ER, along with its sentimental story conclusions.
Equally importantly, most of ER is shot in a much more conventional way than
Homicide, with the camera mounted on a dolly. Jeremy Butler does not note this. All
these differences can be pointed up objectively, by spending a few days making a
statistical style analysis of the two programmes, which can then be compared with
the analyses of other 1994 television dramas in my Moving into Pictures. To take
camera movement first, the use of the various kinds of camera movements can be
tabulated as shown in Table 1, with normalization to the number of each type used
per 500 shots.
The Homicide episode is ‘A Many Splendored Thing’ (Season 2, Ep. 4, aired 27
January 1994), directed by John McNaughton, while the three ER episodes are the
second, third and fourth after the initial pilot, aired on 22 September, 29 September
and 6 October 1994, directed by Mimi Leder, Mark Tinker and Mimi Leder again.
 Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 09:20 24 October 2014

456

Table 1. Camera movements in Homicide and ER.

Pan Track with
Programme title Pan Tilt with tilt Track pan or tilt Crane Zoom Total moves
Homicide: Life on the Street 44 10 44 17 117 2 234
B. Salt

ER – ‘Day One’ 12 8 8 4 50 1 83
ER – ‘Going Home’ 22 7 8 24 66 1 128
ER – ‘Hit and Run’ 21 6 15 16 38 4 1 101
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 457
You can see that Homicide has much, much more camera movement than the
ER episodes. In fact nearly half the shots in Homicide are moving camera shots.
This shows up part of the stylistic difference between the two shows. But the new
thing that emerges is the difference between the ER episodes. The amount of
tracking, both straight tracking and tracking with panning and/or tilting, in the
Mark Tinker episode ‘Going Home’, is twice as great as that in the two Mimi
Leder episodes. The difference between the styles of these two ER directors is
amplified by the Scale of Shot distributions for the three shows (see Figure 1).
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Again, the choice of closeness of shot between Big Close Up (or Extreme Close
Up, if you like), ordinary Close Up, which includes the shoulders, and so on, is
normalized for the number of shots of that each per 500 shots.
You can see the heavier emphasis on Close Ups in the ER programmes, but
there is also a noticeable difference between them. Mark Tinker’s ‘Going Home’
(black bars in Figure 1) pushes the emphasis away from Big Close Up (BCU)
towards Medium Close Up (MCU) when compared to the two Mimi Leder
episodes. This was noticeable even when running through the programme before
analysing it. The Average Shot Length (ASL) of the ER episodes ranges from 6.5
to 7.4 seconds, but the ASL of the episode of Homicide is much longer at 11.3
seconds. Further differences show up in the shot length recordings for each of
these films, which you can see on the Cinemetrics website (www.cinemetrics.lv).
The ER signature moving master shots are well spaced out, separated by more
ordinary length shorter shots, but the spread in length between the shorter shots
and the long takes is a lot greater in Mark Tinker’s ‘Day One’ than in the Mimi
Leder episodes. So taking all this together, inside the series style of ER you can
just detect the style of an individual director. The differences between the work of
Mimi Leder and Mark Tinker are not big stylistic differences, but they are
appreciable, and might be considered a kind of equivalent to the way different
artists lay paint onto a canvas. This can be a major feature of their work
sometimes, as in the case of Frans Hals.

Homicide ER - Day One ER - Hit and Run ER - Going Home

300

250

200
No. of Shot

150

100

50

0
BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS
Scale of Shot

Figure 1. Scale of shot distributions in Homicide and ER.

 458 B. Salt
Butler’s attempts to analyse lighting style are not always correct. For instance,
he describes the basic lighting style of ER as ‘high-key’, and compares it to sitcom
lighting. This is not true, as a glance at the frame stills he includes on page 145 will
show (Figures 4.10–4.15). You can see that there are frequently shadows on the
camera side of some of the actors’ faces, which would not happen in any sitcom,
including a contemporary one like Seinfeld. Not to mention ALL the scenes in ER
which get into the secondary spaces off the main emergency sections of the
hospital, such as the conference room. These are definitely lit in the mid-key range,
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and frequently in low-key. The basic lighting of ER is essentially the result of

mostly relying on the practical lights to light the scene, which means that the actors
move out of fully lighted areas to somewhat underlit areas as they move around.
However, the close shots taken from a fixed camera support in ER are relit to give
more attractive modelling to the figures, in the standard feature film way.
The television equivalent of the filmic auteur is the creator (or creators) of a
series programme. These television makers control the content and style of the
series by making the pilot programme, and then acting as continuing producers of
the resulting series. In this case of ER they were both experienced Hollywood film
directors, namely, Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg, and similarly in the
case of Homicide, which Barry Levinson set up. But I am not demanding an auteur
theory be applied to the aesthetic evaluation of TV. The three basic principles of
originality, influence on other TV makers and success in fulfilling the makers’
intentions will work just as well as they do for film. Though they will produce a
lower aesthetic value for television on the whole, when compared to film.
Jeremy Butler’s book is supported by video clips showing the scenes he
discusses which are held on a special website, which is a very good touch. The
frame stills he uses in this book to make his points are also good, but they would
be better if their contrast and brightness had been increased a bit in a picture
editing program to eliminate the deadening flatness characteristic of colour
images rendered in black and white. Another improvement would be if academic
publishers would realize that heavily illustrated books like this need a much
larger page size to enable the illustrations to be printed bigger for readability, and
also to make it possible to get the body text referring to the illustrations as close to
them as possible.

References
Barbatsis, G., and Y. Guy. 1991. Analyzing meaning in form: Soap opera’s construction of
realness. The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 35, no. 1: 59 – 74.
Barker, D. 1985. Television production techniques as communication. Critical Studies in
Mass Communication 2: 234– 46.
Butler, Jeremy G. 2010. Television style. London: Routledge.
Porter, M.J. 1987. A comparative analysis of directing styles in Hill Street Blues. The
Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 31, no. 3: 323– 44.
Salt, B. 2006. The stylistic analysis of television drama programs. In Moving into pictures,
259– 76. London: Starword.