TELEVISION STYLE

S1ylc matters . Television relies on style-setting, lighting, videography,

cdilin g, and so on - to set moods, hail viewers, construct meanings, build nar -
rntives, sei! products, and sh ape information. Yet, to date, style has been the
mosl understudied aspect of the medium. ln this book, Jeremy G. Butler
l'xam ines the meanings behind television's stylistic conventions .
'f't!levisio11Style dissects how style signifies and what significance it has had
111 spcc ific television contexts . Using hundreds of frame captures from televi -
~ion programs, TelevisionStyle dares to look closely at television. Miami Vice,
im, soap operas , sitcoms, and commercials , among other prototypica l televi-
~ion texts, are deconstructed in an attempt to understand how style fnnct ions
in tclcvisio n. Television Style also assays the state of style during an era of
med ia co nvergence and the ostensible demise of nenvork television.
'Ihis boo k is a much needed introduction to television style, and essential
l l ad ing ata moment when the medium is undergoing radical transformation ,
0

1wrhaps even a stylistic renaissance.

1) iscover additiona l examples and resources on the companion web site:
www.tvstylebook.com

1,·rcmy G. Butler is Professor ofTelecommunicatio n and Film at the Univer-

\ ll y oí Alabama . He is author of Television: Criticai Methods and Applications
( 1, d cdition, 2006).
First published 2010 For my father and mother, both of whom are lovers of words
by Routledge
270 Madiso n Ave, New York, NY 10016
on a printed page.
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Rout ledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdo n, Oxon 0Xl4 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Gwup, an informa business
© 2010 Jerem y Butler
Typeset in Minion Pro by Wearsel Ltd, Boldo n, Tyne and Wear
Printed and boun d in the United $tales of America on acid-free paper
by Edwards Brothers , Inc.
All rights reserved . No pari o f lh is book may bc reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any for m or by any electron ic, mechanical, or
other mea ns, now known or hereafter inve nted , including
pho locopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without pernússion in wri ting from lhe publishe rs.
Trademark Notice: Product or corpora te names may be lrademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used on ly for identification and
explanation without intent to infr inge.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Butler, Jeremy G., 1954-
Televisio n style / Jeremy G. Butler.
p. cm .
In cludes bibliographica l references and index .
1. Television- Aesthetics. l. T itle.
PN J 992.55.B88 2009
79 l.45 - dc22
2009020055
ISBNlO: 0-415-96511-X (hbk)
ISBNlO: 0-415-96512 -8 (pbk}
ISBN l O:0-203-87957-0 (ebk)
1SBN13: 978-0-415-965 11-8 (hbk}
ISBN13: 978-0-415-96512·5 (pbk)
ISBNl3: 978-0-203-87957-3 (ebk)
Contents

Preface vii
Ack n owledgments ix

lntr oduction: Dare We Look Closely

at T elevision? 1

1. Tc levision and Zero-Degree Style 26

.., Stylistic Crossover in the Network

Era: From Film to Television 70

1. Th e Persuasive Power of Style 109

.,. Sty lc in an Age of Media
' onvergence 138

,, 'l't·lcvisuality and the Resurrection

of I he Sitcom in the 2000s 173

l111k•x 223

vii
Preface
When it comes to illustrations, a book on style in television is inevitably con-
stricted by the limitation of the printed form. We have struggled against this
Umitation by including hundreds of frame captures from television programs,
but that does little to illuminate the movements of motiom images and
nothing to illustrate the sound accompanying these images. And, of course,
these frame captures are presented here in black-and -white and in reduced
size. To ameliorate the situation somewhat we have created a companion
website that displays enlarged, color versions of all the illustrations. Also,
when not bound by copyright issues, we have included short video clips. You
will find this website at:
www.TVStyleBook.com
Some of its material is password protected and may be accessed with the
following:
Account name: tvstyle
Password: telestylistics
Please use ali lowercase letters when entering the account name and pass -
word . Further, TVStyleBook.com contains many of the links to which I refer
in the text, which are augmented with other television -style onlin e resources.
With very few exceptions, the illustrat ions presented here were digitally
captured from DVDs and video files. Any number of software packages can
create such stills, but I have come to rely on the VLC med ia player, open -
source software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
Not only is VLC free, but it is also quite full featured and creates image files
that may be used by the Shot Logger statistica l style project (www.ShotLogger.
org) . Tutoriais on frame capture and Shot Logger are provided on TVStyle-
Book.com. · Jeremy G. Butler
viii
Ac knowledgm ents
1hcsc chapters, often in embarrassingly rough form, have benefitted from
l l'Vicw by Marysia Galbraith, Patr ick Leary, Greg M. Smith, and Frederick
Whiting. Although David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson were not directly
l11 volved in the creation of Television Style, I would be remiss if I did not
, 11 knowledge how instrumental their work has been to my own thinking on
~,yk i n television and film, beginrung with the first edition of Film Art in
l 1>79. 1 also wish to than k severa! television practitioners who were generous
w11h lheir time and allowed me to pepper them with (proba bly naive) ques-
lh111 h about standard craft practices: Thomas Azzari, Tom Cherones, Dean
l lolland, Michael Laibson, Greg Stroud, and Ken Kwapis. Peter Bradberry
1,,111~cribed severa! interviews for me and I was ably assisted in the prepara-
111111of illustrations by Laura Lineberry and Jung Kim. I am grateful to my
n lllor at Routledge, Matthew Byrnie, for his belief in this project and for his
, 111011ragement in bringing it to fruition .
M,1rysia Galbraith is well experienced in th e running of marathons (and
,1\, ,1nd l0Ks) and she prov ided expert advice, affection, and support during
1111• ma rathon that is the writi ng of a book. I thank Ian Butler for giving me an
, ,, u,t· lo watch The Wonder Pets, whose motto - "What 's going to work?
l r,1111 work!"-is applicable toso many things in life.
( lwplcrs 1-4 are update d, revised, and enlarged versions of essays that
1i.111·prcviously appeared in print over the past 25 years. I am grateful for
l it 1111 1,sion to reprint the following: "Notes on the Soap Opera Apparatus:
l I l1·vhual Style and As the World Turns," Cinema Journal 25, no. 3 (spring
f'HH,) ',] 70; "Miami Vice: Toe Legacy ofF ilm Noir," ]ournal of Popular Film
,111,Ifrlt'vis ion 13, no. 3 (fall 1985): 126- 38; "Toe Television Commercial," in
I, 1,1•1111111:Criticai Methods and Appli cations, 3rd edn (Mahweh: Lawrence
1 , 11 ,.111111 Associates, 2007), 363- 415; "VR in the ER: ER's Use of E-Media,"
\ , 11 ,·11 •12, no. 4 (winter 2001): 313- 31.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
jbutler@ua.edu
April 2009
www.TVStyleBook.com
ix
lntroduction
Dar e We Look Closely at Television?

Television is a rclative of motorcar and airplane: it is a means of cultural

transportation. To be sure, it is a mere instrumen t oftransmission, which does
not offer new means for the artistic interpr etation of reality-as radio and film
did.'
(Rudolf Arnheim , 1935)

1.1ll)' focto rs have milit ated against the study of style in television. Rudolf
\, 11lwimdism issed the artistic pot ential of telev isiona good ten years before it
, ·m lcu as a viable mass medi um . Imp licit within his dismissa l is a deni al of te!-
•, 1\lon style. For Arnheim and others of the first wave of film theorists - nota-
lil}, l.cv Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein - it was thr ough a pa tte rned
1111p lcmcnlation of a med ium's techniques that true artist s i.nterpreted reality.
111111 ,1~ art was thus establish ed in terms ofhow film artists transformedreality
111111ugh style, how film ima ges differed from reality. Style was paramount; it
111,11kfilm into art. These theori sts felt thi s transformation was essent ial to
, l1·v,1 tt· ., 111cchanical recording <levice to what Alexandre Astruc !ater called "la
1111111•111 stylo," the camera as stylus , a <levice ca pable of rendering reality into
1, ,lhl'IK form . Toe film camera was not an artistic impl eme nt until it was ele-
lft •d hl'yond its base reco rdin g function. Similarly , the television came ra
, 111il d ll l'VC r be an arti stic implem ent because, to Arnheim , it was impossib le
1111 li lo gct beyond its transmission function. An entire book devoted to televi-
111111,tyll· would be unfathomable to hi.m.
\V1• 1111 ght today scoff at Arnh eim's short -sighted presumption that te levi-
11111 , 11uld ncver become the artis tic equa l of film (or radio!) , but his charac -
1 11 1111moí television-as-t ran smiss ion persists in contemporary television
t11d11 .111dhas contributed to the dearth of television stylistic ana lyses. When
,111lio1 , d1,u 1ss the essen tial "liveness" or immediacy of televis ion and its lack
111 ll11l.111d Harthes' "phot o effect," they rely on the sarne presumption as
, 1111, 1111, that television is defin ed fun dam ental ly by its ability to transmit
\ 111,1h.11occur sirnu ltaneous to the time of viewi ng. 2 This sarne presump -
1111111,nl, 11110 carly jou rnalisti c cr iticism oftelevision in th e 1950s, where the
1•1111111 li- oi lclevision art is seen to be the live transmiss io n ofwe ll-res pected
l'I, 1hr "art" of these produ ctions is not in the television medium itself,
 but, rather, in the play that is being transmitted. Toe only notice paid
to television style is negative- attributes of the small, high -contrast,
black-and -white image and the primitive, monaural sound. ln classical film
theory, the differences between human perception of reality and reality's rep -
resentation on screen are interpreted as artist ic opportunities. For instance,
black-and -white cinematography is said to allow the film artist to emphasize
compositional elements by eliminating color tona lity. Similar claims were not
made for television's limitations in the 1950s.
TI1etelevision -as-transmission concept has had other impacts on the study
of style. In fact, it shapes many emp írica! approaches to the medium. Cultural -
studies ethnographers prefer to examine the recipient of the transmission and
not the transmission itself. I am over -simplifying here, but the empírica!
emphasis on the recipient and not the text means that the text's stylistic
aspects are of less interest than the recipient's use of the text's signilieds. Cul-
tural-stud ies scholars, for example, have examined viewers' responses to tele-
vision soap opera by talking to the genre's fans and by examining materials
they (the viewers) have written about the programs . What interests the schol-
ars most is how viewers unders tand the characters and relate them to their
own lives and not how the viewers feel about stylistic attributes like shot -
counter shot editing ora zoom -in to conclude a scene.
1 However, not ali impediments to stylistic analysis can be blamed on televi-
sion's roots in sound -image transmission. Auteurism, shot through ,.,,ith
1
romantic notions of the artist, views style as a manifestatio n of the ind i-
1
vidual's unique "vision." When Franço is Truffaut and his colleagues at
Cahiers du Cinéma launched the auteur theory in the mid - 1950s, they never
thought to unearth auteurs within the television industry, because the
medium was seen to be aesthetically stunted and an industrial product - even
more so than the Hollywood film studio system's products. ln 1953, the year
before Truffaut issued auteurism 's manif esto, André Bazin predicted, "the tel-
evision picture will always retain its medíocre legibility."3 How could it pos-
sibly aspire to the art of the cinema? Moreover, Truffaut et ai. were aspiring
directors themselves and so they looked for the auteur's signature in a cine-
matic aspect that directors control: principally, elements of visual style. ln tel-
evision, then as now, a single director seldom controls the visual style of a
program . Over the course of a program's season, ten or 20 directors might be
called upon . Toe auteur of a television program is most likely to be the pro -
ducer and the producer is more likely to be a screenwr iter than a director .
Thus, auteurists have been frustrated in their limited attem pts to find auteurs
in television and, in their view, there can be no style without an auteur .
Taken together, these factors explain why there has been no comprehen -
sive television stylistics or poetics on a par with David Bordwell's Poetics of
Cinema and no historica l poetics of the same scope as Bordwell, Kristin
Thompson, and Janet Staiger's 1he Classical Hollywood Cinema : Film Style
and Mode of Production to 1960.4 These factors also suggest why the recent
crop of television studies anthologies and introd uctory texts give style short
shrift .5 Toe present volume contributes to a poetics of television, although on
,1much more modest levei than Bordwell's work. It brings togethe r chapters
1h:1t contr ibute to a criticai tendency within television studies that has been
l.1rgcly overlooked. I do not, however, intend to overstate their uniqueness .
1)cspite the longstanding bias against television style, despite some quarters
which deny that it exists or believe that its analysis is frivolous, there have
hl·cn some substantive analyses of television style upon which this book
l11·nv ily relies. Some of the most useful have also been influenced by pertinent
work in film studies, such as Bordwell's. To begin a consideration of television
\ tylistics, therefore, we must first survey some prominent antecedent efforts.
~ t y lc and Media Studies
Film style matters because what people call content comes to us in and
through the patterned use ofthe medium's techn iques .. .. Style is the tan-
gible texture of a film, the perceptual surface we encounter as we watch
,111dlisten, and that su rface is our point of departure in mov ing to plot,
thcme, feeling- everything else that matters to us.6
(David Bordwell)
1 ,,, 1,iin clements are common to all stylistic work in media studies. Ali media-
~, 11dk-s sLy listicians must develop a method for describing, in Bordwell's terms,
· "perceptual
1111 surface" of a television program or film. They must also make a ·
1 1·,1· fi)r why the phenomenon they have described is significant, which results
111 •.o mc for m of analysis, interpretat ion and/or evaluation of that which they
h 1\r described. A final step may be to describe how style has changed over time
111d ,tl\o lo suggest causes for that change, although some stylisticians favor a
\ 111h1onic approach over such a diachronic one. ln my review ofwork in this
11, 1 limiling myselfpredom inantiy to studies ofte levision and film-I have
1111111 d 1ha1 media stylistics can be divided into four strains:
l h-M;r iptive styJistics
/\ 11,1lytic stylistics (interpretat ion)
1 v.tlualive stylistics (aesthetics)
111~1orical stylistics
~' " 1 , ommo nly, analytic and evaluat ive stylistics build upon descriptive sty-
111h ,111dhisi-o rical stylistics may engage the other three strains, but I have
111111111 11 111c thodologically illuminating to separa.te these four aspects in order
11,, 111111w their fundamental assumptions about television style and its func -
11.. , 1111•: 1 ,ilso believe strongly in grounding all theory in its practical applica-
1111 11 111' ll\'t iflc texts and to that end I have selected a fairly random shot from
1 1 , , 11111• Sre11eInvestigation- a program known for its sound -image flair-
11111 1 111discuss how descriptive, analytic, and evaluative stylistic methods
.. ,d.l ,1pproach it. Since a historical stylistic analysis would extend well
I• " 11.I1lw province of this individual program, I have left that for another
1 1 lt 111
Uescriptive Stylistics
To discuss style, one must first be able to describe it. This would seem to be an
obvious first step, but it is one that has caused much analytical a.nd theoretical
stumbling. Describing style requires the analyst to hew to a well-defined
understanding of what style is and how it functions in television. Semiotics
offers the most comprehensive set of tools for accomplishing the detailed
description of television style. The initial formal implementation of semiotics
in media studies, in the 1960s, was concerned with the larger questions of
narra tive form rather than the enunciation of that form in sound and image-
as can be seen in Christian Metz's categorization of film scenes, or syntagms,
into "la grande syntagmatique" and his syntagm -by-syntagm ana lysis of the
film, Adieu Philippine .7 However, film semioticians soon zeroed in on the
organizat ion of individual shots within syntagms. 8 These dose readings were
often accomplished by putting a film pr int on an editor to facilitate frame -by-
frame analysis and they comrnonly included frame enlargements when they
were published in journals such as Screen. Raymond Bellour and Stephen
Heath further illustrated their descriptions of style with tables and diagrams
of camera angles and shot scales. 1hus, the dose serniotic analysis of film in
the 1970s incorporated verbal descriptions of individual series of shots, tables
that arrayed the shots into columns and rows, diagrams of camera positions
and blocking, and visual "descriptions" of the shots' composi t ion (i.e., still
frarnes representing the moving image) .
The semiotic description of television found early application in John Fiske
and John Hartley's slim volume, Reading Television, in 1978.9 They engage in
a brief "analysis of a TV syntagm" - a five-shot segrnent of the documentary,
Cathy Come Home (1966). rn Without diagrams or still-image illustrations,
they rely on a verbal shot list. Clearly influenced by Metz, they articu late the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure of the program 's sign system, and
attempt to account for its "aesthetic codes" - that is, its set of conventional -
ized stylistic elements. 11 Fiske continued th is work nine years later in Televi-
sion Culture . 12 His detailed analyses of television texts such as Madonna's
music vídeos and Miami Vice (1984- 9) do not include frame captures, but
they do describe framing, camera movement, editing, and so on, in detail. As
before, Fiske promotes the studying of these techniques within specific codes,
which he defines as "a rule -governed system of signs, whose rules and con-
ventions are shared amongst members of a cultu.re, and which is used to gen -
erate and circulate meanings in and for that culture ." 13 Stylistic description,
thus, is not just a description of techniques in individual shots. Rather, it is
always a matter of placing those techniques in broader contexts . To do so,
Fiske divides television's stylistic codes into "technical codes" govern ing tele-
vision's image and sound techniques and "social codes," sets of conventions
of dress, hair style and the like that belong to the host culture. 14 Fiske does not
want to be associated with an empty formalism that ignores cultural values
and when he descr ibes stylistic codes heis always alert to their cultural signifi-
cance. He contends ,
A textual stuay or te1ev1s1on,men, 111vo1ves tnree roei: me rormat qua11t1es
of television programs [that is, their style] and their flow; the intertextual
relations of television within itself, with other media, and with conversa -
tion; and the study of socially situated readers and the process of
read ing. 15
1:i~kc's last focus clearly bears the influence of cultural studies, but the first
lwo are more comfortable within the province of semiotics.
O riginally published in 1987, the sarne year as Television Culture, the
e '/11 11111cls of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticisrn anthology
w,1, a n important milestone in television studies' development as a discipline
nl criticai studies - sharply distinguishing itself from quantitative,
111 .1~s-communication," empírica! approaches to the medium. 16 Each chapter
,1111 1111arizes a criticai method or theory and explicates its approach to televi-
.11111. ln Ellen Seiter's contribution to that volume, she articulates how semiot -
h •, 111i ght benefit television studies and she does so through a dose analysis of
,1 1 ,11 toon program's title sequence and television coverage of the space shuttle
1 /1ullc• ger disaster, arnong other examples. 17 Her analyses begin with a shot -
11
1,y \ho t description and then seek to describe the television text's syntagmatic
1111 1 p,1radigmatic structures, and the codes that govern them. Seiter relies
1q111n Fiske and Hartley's method and she draws heavily on another study that
1• 1•, ,liso inspired by Fisk and Hartley: Robert Hodge and David Tripp's
1 /11/,/n•11nlld Television: A Semiotic Approach, published the year before the
18
Ili I n lition of Channels of Discourse. Hodge and Tripp "solve" the descrip -
111111 p1oblcm with numerous shot lists and transcriptions of dialogue from
1,111~/11c'c, 1he children 's program they analyze in depth. They include just two,
11,w q11,IIily frame captures in the book, but one senses they would have had
11111 1) more had the video technology and copyright law of mid-1980s pub -
111111,g , upported it. ln Seiter's discussion of Children and Television, she
, 11111111•
nts o n Hodge and Tripp's analysis of Fangface's fi.rstnine shots,
111, thc typical fow1ding gesture of the semiotician to gather a small,
111,111,1gca ble, and synchronic (contemporaneous) text or set of texts for
11i.ily,i11and, using the text as a basis, try to establish the conventions
w1v1• 1n ing the larger system (in this case the series Fangface and the larger
ll'lll of children's animated television). 19
111111l
h .,~pires to an objective system of description (and interpretation ) of
1 11 • li lll~ , although it seldorn entirely achieves that goal. The desire for preci-
1 11 111u1111c:ccssarily objectivity, has led some media stylisticians to employ
I" 11111111IV!' rncthods. Antecedents to this approach include stylometry in quan -
11111 lt11g11b 1ics and literary criticism. ln those fields, according to Katie Wales,
1 1 111111
11 y uses statistical analyses to investigate stylistic pattems in order to
1 1 11111111· ,1111
horship oftexts ... Linguistic features conm1only exaini11edin sty-
1 1111111111dude word length; sentence length, connectives; collocations"
•t•1•h• 1, ,1dtkd). Jº Stylometry may be traced to logician Augustus D. Morgan's
 work in 1851, but as a method of television and film analysis it has only recently
become viable.21Barry Salt pioneered a statistical method and has been a (some -
times contentious) advocate for it under the banner of "practica l film theory." 22
Toe work he has done attempts to measure cinematic stylistic elements by coun t-
ing them and then analyzing them through statistical tests.23 This process builds
upon "descriptive statistics," where the measuring of a phenomenon is said to
describe that phenomenon . Salt, for example, has noted the following parameters
in hundreds of films and a few dozen television progra.ms: average shot length
(ASL), reverse angles , point -of-view shots, inserts, shot scale, and camera move -
ment. 24And he has clone so throug h the painstakingly slow process of watching
the films and programs on editing machines and recording these parameters .
More recent work in stylometry relies upon computer software to generate these
11
descriptive statistics. 25ln screen studies this effort has been facilitated by Cine-
Metrics and Shot Logger. ln the former, Yuri Tsivian and Gunars Civjans have
built a data -entry and data -display system containing shot -length and shot -scale
data on hundreds of films anda few television programs .26 For Shot Logger, I
have constructed data -entry software that uses video tin1e code embedded in
frame captures to automatically measure shot length and then perform some
rudimentary statistical analyses (average shot length, minimum/maximum shot
length, range between minimum and maximum shot lengths, and standard devi-
ation) .27Both CineMetrics and Shot Logger are online efforts that enlist the help
of volw1teer stylisticians to amass a large body of data.
Toe following chapters frequently engage television texts in ilie manner of
a semiotician - seeking to find the essence of style in television 's sound -image
details . It is, of course, possible to get lost in television 's minutiae in this
manner, but I agree with authors such as Bordwell, Thompson, and Salt who
contend that one must "reverse engineer" media texts in order to fully under-
stand their style. 2 8 Thus the sarne attention to detail that scriptwriters, dir -
ectors, cinematographers , editors, and so on, put into the construction of a
television text must be employed in the deconstruction of that text. This is a
lesson of film and television analysis that I learned long ago when, as an
undergraduate, l was forced to perform shot-by -shot scene découpages in a
French cinema class. lnitially, I hated the assignment, but those weekly
encounters with the cinema's building blocks soon taught me a new way of
seeing film, an understanding of how it functions as a sign system, and an
appreciation of the skills of Jean Renoir, René Clair, François Truffaut, and
many others. I regularly "inflict" (as I thought of it then) that assignment on
my own television-studies students now . And it seldom fails to provide them
with moments of insight when they suddenly realize that television is a con-
structed medi um, right down to the smallest minutiae of its mise -en-scene.
Pedagogical exercises often demand precise descriptions of television and in
television and film textbooks one finds useful attention to the details of sound -
image style. Bordwell and Thompson led the way with the 1979 publication of
the first edition of Film Art: An Introduction, which has had enormous impact
011media-studies curricula and is currently in its eighth edition . A virtual mani-
festo for the study of style in visual media, it inspired my own more modest
111 11odLJction to television studies, Television: Criticai Methods and Applications,
wh 1, h was first published in 1994.29 From the perspec tive of television stylistics,
ti h disappointing that the number of well-illustrated television textbooks
11 11·,1,l'd since the mid -1990s remains relatively small, especially when con -
11,1~11'd with the numerous film studies textbooks. However, it is not clear
,, lwthcr lhis is dueto inherent difliculties in television stylistic pedagogy, or the
l111 pk foct that the market for television -studies books is rnuch smaller than
tli.11 to,· íilm studies. One exception to the general paucity of visually sophisti c-
lln l kl cvision textbooks is Herbert Zettl's Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media
\, ,//wtics, which has been published since 1973.30 Zettl has been taken to task
1111111 , ~ornetimes idiosyncratic terminology, but there is no denying the pr eci-
11111wilh which he describes sound -image style and the pedagogical efficacy of
1l1, l11111dr cds ofillustrations in Sight SoundMotion.
1>r,l riplive stylistics, in one form or another, is often the first step in a11
111 drl, of CST: Crime Scene Investigation. In fact, several of the essays in
/', ,1,/11g1 CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope do just that. 31 Toe program is
, , ,11111H 111ly presumed to be highly "stylized," to eschew classical film's transpar -
, 111 ~l}'ll' in favor of an aggressive articulation of sound and image that con -
l1t11ti~ lhe viewer. But how would my own brand of semiotics -inflected stylistics
d, , , ihl' .1 shot selected virtually at random from the Nathan Hope-directed CS1
, l'I 11d1•, "Kill Me IfYou Can" (February 26, 2009)? Toe first step is to "describe"
1111lt'lrvi~ion text with a series of sile11t,still images (Figures 0.1- 0.8). It may be
1, 1111'llnglo claim that since video is made of 30 still frames per second (in th e
1 , !iro,,dcast system), that a single one of those frames accurately describes
11,, ,I1111.hLJt the obvious truth is that we experience television as images in
,,11,111111, ovcr time, anda still irnage, a televisíonfragment, is always going to be
111, 1'I 11cix imalion of that. ln metonymic fashion, we are describing a phenome -
, ,, 1111li h .111element of that phenomenon
1
itself, but the fragment (a frame) and
111111li11 J,, (a moving -image shot, with sound) offer nvo very differe11t experi -
11,, 1o , lclevision scholars of the 1970s, before the adve11tof video 011per -
111,1 , 11 111pul crs and eve11before the existence of consumer -grade VCRs , this
1 11d d,·,l ript ion was arduously diflicult to obtain . As Penelope Houston, a
111111 , , li 11 from a previous generation , admitted, "Toe unattractiv e truth, of
11111 , , ,~ .. lhaL the film,because it cannot be taken home and studied like a
""', l 111 .1 pluy, i.nvites reactions and in1pressions rather than sustained analy-
1 1'I' 11111il the 1990s, television stylisticians had to rely on photographs of
li \ 1o11, 1 111rngeto create still frames - resulting in visual distortions, evident
111 1111, ,,, ,llld low-resolution images that did not reproduce well in prin t pub -
lt ,11,., ' r hc introduction of DVD drives into personal computers - and the
1 , ,,t hu 11dreds of television programs in that format-has facilitated "sus -
, , 11, 1 11i,ily~is" of television and has made the acquisition of television frames
,,,1111111. il, lhe result of justa few key strokes . Toe captured image is still rather
• 1111 111011by th e standards ofprint publications, but high -definition vídeo
11111•1111111g on Lhat. Figures 0.1- 0.8 were captur ed at 1280 x 720 pixels from
1
11 111 11d1•0 of a CSI episode, purchased through iTunes , viewed on my com-
i 11 1 111d1,1p1ured by pressing the "PrtScn" ("print screen") key.

11
Figure 0.1 CSI: a shot begins on the detail of
a pottery book and then the camera moves
on to ...
Figure 0.3 ... lab technician Wendy working
on reassembling the pot and musing about a
missing piece.
Figure 0.5 ... and then back to Wendy.
Figure 0.7 ... then she situates the missing
piece in its place. Toe camera and focus
follow her hand.
Figure 0.2 ... a reconstmcted pot, which
contains clues to a murder. Toe focus shifts
from the book to the pot, and then it pulls
to .. .
Figure 0.4 As the shot continues, Dr
Raymond Langston pokes into the frame
with the missing piece in a jar. The camera
pulls focus to it ...
Figure 0.6 She moves around him, bringing
the focus with her and ...
Figur e 0.8 The shot ends with Wendy in
focus and Dr. Langston out of focus.
'Ihe logistics of image capture were not the only imped iment to the publi-
1,11ion of frame captures in the 1970s and 1980s. ln the United States and
nl hcr countries with restrictive intellectual property laws, the publicat ion of
11,1111c captures was in a legal grey area . Was this copyright infringe ment or
w,1~ il "fair use"? Once again, it was Thompson who took a leadership role
llt, ll wcnt beyond Film Art's bold use of füm frame enJargements. ln 1993, she
1lt,tircd a committee of the Society for Cinema Stud ies (since renamed the
01,k·ly for Cinema and Media Studies) that studied the "Fair Usage Publica-
1111 11of Film Stills" and published a report in Cinema Journal that advocated
1111.1u1hors to claim fair use of stills in books, and, moreover, to not even
11 q1tt'S l permiss ion from copyr ight holde rs.34 Her report embo ldened many
1111 hors and publishers to rely on fair use in their publication of stylistic ana l-
1, oí television and film. Any auth or who has published television stylistic
11111ly,{'Sbefore the 1990s h as his or her own copyr ight horror story and there
11, ¾I Ili occasional problems that arise , but fair use and its advocates have
111g,·ly climinated them , thus paving the way for visual stylistic descriphons. 35
111,,1011sly, TelevisionStyle benefits from the frequent use of frame captures.
111 wcre doing a stylistic analysis of CSI, my description of this shot would
1,111ml upon the contex t of my analysis and the interpretation I was pursu -
11111 1 w uld describe the shot's short depth of fi.eld and the tive rack foc uses.
1 1, 1 111ig ht emp hasize Hope's use of a mo bile frame and off/on -screen space
111l lg11rc 0.4, which conceal s the entrance of Dr Raymond Langston (Lau -
' 1111IN1 burne) , justas his entrance is initially unnoticed by lab technician
111dyC;lcnn (Darcy Farrell). ln regards to mise-en-scene, I cou ld remark on
1111 , 1llll l' lab's relahvely low-key lighting, which seems unusua l for a sett ing
1111 lt1, h s111 aJ1pieces of evidence are being visually examined. Sh ot length is
11, , 111,1,pcct of style, of the program's visual rhythm, and I coul d rely on sta -
1 111d d111a to contextualize the shot's 24-second length. Table 0.1 arrays dat a
11 1li, ,IVcrage shot length of nine CSI episodes . Toe ma in , post -cred its
1111 111 of'" Kill Me IfYo u Can" clocks inata 3.3 ASL. Toe other eight epi -
t. 111'l'a ble 0.1 are from the first season of the show and none of them
1111111 /\S l.s under 3.5. Toe longest shot in this episode is 39 seconds and the
111, t 11 1 ,lll the episodes is 44 seconds . Toe length of shots may be graphed
h1 ,111 1
11<:i11 c Metrics' system, which in the case ofthis CSI episode results in
1 1 1ph found in Figure 0.9. ln the graph, each shot is represented by a ver -
111111·fhl· x-axis legend displays the time at which the shot begins and the
, 1 11111" .1lcs the length of each shot, with zero at the top and 20 seconds at
1.. 111111 1(ollowing some longer shots to extend beyond this lin1it). Toe shot
1 ,1 hnc occurs between 5:19 and 7:24 on the x-axis. lt sta nds out
111 1 li i, the only shot longer tha n 20 seconds in the first 28 minutes of the
1!, \ l I cnd line is automatically drawn horizontally across the grap h,
111 11.:down ward toward the end of the episode as the shots get longer.
11 11'liIhus visually describes the episode's editi ng rhythms, allowing the
11 111 1 lo no te editing patterns . Of course, descriptive stylist ics must not
1 11 , 11 lo Ihc visual components. It must also account for sound design . ln
11111 (,111dmost of this scene) , the sound is relatively barren-only sync
 TableO.l CSI statistical data 1111, 1p1l'l,11ion. If not, then descriptions would have to account for every pixel
1 11
, 11, , 1•1y frame- clearly an impossible task and one which would generate
Title Date Length #of ASL Min Max Range 111111,1d,1bk exegeses. A description of a television show sho uld not replicate
Shots SL SL li, 11•,ltow. ll should, obviously enough, only serve to further the ana lysis.
Burked 09/27/2001 2,619 669 3.9 36 35
Chaos Theory 10/04/2001 2,602 634 4.1 1 41 40 \ 11,1/VI Ir Stylistics
Scuba Doobie-Doo 10/25/2001 2,518 585 4.3 l 23 22
Alter Boys 11/01/ 2001 2,641 739 3.5 33 32 11 ti)"'' of style in television depend upon explicit or implicit assumptions
And Then There Were None 11/22/2001 2,418 672 3.5 28 27 1111111 1 , tylc's purpose and function in the text. Toe stylistician's job then
Identity Crisis 01/17 /2002 2,621 575 4.5 44 43
2,637 549 4.8 44 43 I• 11111 1•, dcco nstructing how style fulfills that function. To doso, the stylisti -
Stalker 04/04/2002
Anatomy of a Lye 05/02/2002 2,653 531 4.9 1 37 36 1111,·x,1111in cs the workings of style within the textual system - seeking pat -
KillMe IfYou Can (pre-credits) 02/26/2009 154 42 3.6 1 12 11 1 111 oi ~tylistic elements and, on a higher levei, the relationships among
Kill Me IfYou Can (post-credits) 02/26 /2009 2,407 713 3.3 1 39 38 1111 1 • p,1ltcrns themselves . Toe overall form of a te!evision program depends
Kill Me lfYou Can (combined) 02/26/2009 2,561 755 3.4 1 39 38 111lt11 w , hot s relate to one another, on how the lighting style of shot A relates
11, tlt.tl 111shol B, on the ju:xtaposition of a musical theme with a particular
1111 •~•·. 1111~hort shots being contrasted with long shots, and on and on. In my
· lll'li.1'1\ on function, am echoing Noel Carroll's "fw1etiona l theory of style"
i 1,,11111 lt1l'l11a. Vsing "style" and "form" interchangeably, he contends,
"
I ..li
,.
11
\,, ord ing to the functiona l account of film form, the form [or style] of
,1111111/ivirlual film is the ensemble of choices intended to realize the point
j "" 13" 111 th,· p11rpose
of the film. This approach to film form is different from the
""
"
""" oi,·~,11plive account. Toe descriptive account says that the form of the film
"" ""
" " 1 1111• ~um total of ali the relations between the elements of the film. Toe
Figure0.9 A CineMetrics graph in which the length of each shot is represented by one line. l1111lt1onal account says that film form comprises only the elements and
Toe height of the graph ranges from Oto 20 seconds. 111,11 s intended to serve as the means to the end ofthe film. 36
1011

dialogue and no music, diegetic or non -diegetic. Such quiet scenes contras t
with the distinctive sound effect that signals CSI's ratiocinative flashbacks.
My description of this shot's style engages terms borrowed from televi -
sion production practices. Depth of field, rack focus, and low-key lightin g
were not invented by semioticians to describe stylistic features - as the term
"syntagm," for instance, was coined to refer to the smallest narrative unit.
Rather, they are terms that depend upon knowledge of how those shots wer e
created . It is here that the reverse engineering aspect of stylistic analysi s
becomes obvious . Toe stylistician must tap into the production culture of a
I' particular time in order to understand stylistic conventions and thus it is rea -
1111111 ill·t L' helpfully distinguishes his approach from descriptive stylistics
1111 11lrnt1fics a usefu! way for thinking about television stylistics . Most ana -
l II d , 1yl1slics of television presume style serves one or more functions
1m") lo the end of a television program . Certa inly, ali of the chapters in
1111 11l11 111c do. Thus, to best understand analytic stylistics we must define
1 1, l1111dionsin television.
111/ 1:,:11rr s Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, Bordwell out line s film
111111broad functions." 37 I willbegin with his four functions, but te levi-
1, t \ 11· 11.1sadditional functions unique to the medi um that must be
1 d l'elcvision stylisticians have contended that style can:

sonable that we, as stylisticians, employ terms rooted in that culture.

However, we should not allow production culture to dictate our vocabular y 1 lo 111111
·
either. Just becaus e most television producers do not use th e term "mise-en- 1 I'" '"
scene," does not mean that it is an unproductive analytica! concept. Stylistic 111h11 1iic
1!., 111,IIC
description incorporates a hybrid terminology, part industry jargon and part
I , 1 lt,l(k
scholarly neologisms.
As should be obvious from my attempt to limit myself to ,descriptive stylis- 11,ti 111 lntcrpellate
tics, I cannot truly do so without straying into interpretation . Formal features 1111t.
•,~·11
l iate
become salient based on the end goa l of an analysis. Description initiate s 1~1111
)' livcness
Each chapter in Television Style investigates aspects of style's function in more
detail, but a few summary comments are in order here.
First, Bordwell suggests that the denotative function of film style controls
"the description of settings and characters, the account given of their motives,
the presentation of dialogue and movement." 38 This is style at its most funda -
mental, the level at which semiotic analysis begins. If I discuss how my sample
CSI shot uses rack focuses to reveal and conceal narratively significant objects,
then I am breaking down a stylistic element's denotative function. Textbooks
such as Sight Sound Motion often stress this basic funct ion of style.
Bordwell's second style function, its expressive quality , refers to the emo-
tions that a film's style displays and those that it elicits in the viewer: "We can
distinguish between style presenting feelingful qualities ('The shot exudes
sadness') and causing feelings in the perce1ver· ('Th e s hot ma k es me sad') ."39
Toe former, to which he limits himself in most ofhis work, "can be carried by
light, color, performances, music, and certain camera movernents." 40 Televi-
sion stylisticians might occasionally discuss "feelingful qualities," but th e
more systematic int erpre tation of this sense of expression is to be found in
quantitativ e empirical research into the feelings caused by television's "formal
features," as style is commonly referred to in this context. Numerous empíri -
ca! studies of style view it principally as a stimulus, as a factor that provoke s
emotions or actions, heightens/decreases attentio n, has an impact on cogni-
tion or otherwise alfects its "subjects." 41 One empirical study, for exampl e,
examines the effect that voiceover narration has on viewer comprehension of
television news.42A group of subjects was shown a news story with narrati on
that redundantly explained the images. Another group was shown a story
where the sound was kept the sarne, but the shots were re -ordered - thu s
eliminating redundancy of sound and image and altering the style or form al
features of the video . Then both groups were given some tests to gauge their
recall of audio information and other factors and the results were then qua n-
tified. This study' s hypotheses revolve around the effect of this stylistic chan gc
on the subjects' cognitive processing. Other research in this sarne vein finds
psychophysiological methods for quantifying the emotional impact of form al
features - tracking heart rate, skin conductance, facial electromyograph y
(EMG), and so on. 43
Toe third function of style BordweJI explicates is its ability to "yield mo re
abstract, conceptual meanings." 44 Toe set design of our CSJ shot is typical o1
the program: the technician works in a room surrounded by glass, revealing
other offices surrounding her. ln Karen Lury's CSJstudy, she makes a case for
specific themes associated with this mise-en-scene: "This sense of both deplh
and transparency at a visual levei neatly echoes the push towards 'transp ar
ency' and truth in the crime -solving narrative." 45 Visual transparency in thc
style thus becomes a metaphor for ratiocinative clarity.
Bordwell's final style function, decoration, deserves a bit more extensivc
exploration than the first three, because, in television stylistics, some gran d
claims have been made for decorative style. "Decoration ," Bordwell wri tcs,
"Asks us to apprehend the sheer pattern -making possibilities of thc
1111 ,111111.""' ln other words, this is style for style's sake. It does not denote,
111, ,~, or symbolize anything other than style itself. The decora tive function
1 1)11•h,1s gone by many names: parametric narration, mannerism, the
1 h 11111 • di<:cL, cxcessive style, and so on. Television stylisticians have often
, , 1tl'I I I hc rad ical or postmodern effect of television style such as this that
1,.. 11111 l11bor on behalf of the narrative or theme. ln the p icture effect, John
! 1I.Jw1 ·II tinds Lhe essential basis of "televisuality" in 1980s television. He
1 • l 11,,~. in cnlhusiastic italics, "The new television does not depend upon the
1//11',·//cri or Lhe fic tion effect, but upon the picture effect."47 ln similarly
r\• 111 p1o~c. Fiskeproclaims,
l111,1•1r, are neither the bearers of ideology, nor the representations of the
", d, hui what [Jean] Baudrillard calls "the hyperreal": the television
1111,1g1·, lhe advertisement, the pop song becomes more "rea l" than
11,,llty," their sensuous imperative isso strong that they are our experi -
1 1111•, liicy are our pleasure. 48
1f 11111,,lhis claim in a chapter on Miami Vice and has even stronger words
1 1)1, 111
M,1do nna's music vídeos:
,t) 11 ,~ ;1 rccycling of images that wrenches them out of the original
111111,1 that cnabled them to make sense and reduces them to free-float-
'"I' , r~:n1íicrs whose only signification is that they are free, outside the
111111111 of lhe normal sense and sense-making, and thus able to enter the
111ld oi plcasure where their materiality can work directly on the sensual
11 1111111 ing the boundary between culture and nature , betw·een ideology
11111 11, ,,h~cnce.'19
'l'Jl1<1.1d1 10 style draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of carnival: "ln
t 111111drrn world, style performs many of the functions of carnival . It is
• •li 1ll1 l1hna 1ing, acting as an empowering language for the subordi-
\ ti w111gMiami Vice and Madonna's 1980s vídeo work today , it may
111111111 lo ,cc their liberating, empowering, free-floating signifiers. Those
1 1i,11 lnl\ linve been rendered virtually quaint in contrast to the stylistic
1 li 11111111\111 of prograrns such as CSI whose "sensuous imperative" is far
11,1111 ~lill, Caldwell's and Fiske's efforts were some of the very few to
1,1,v1\1on slyle ata time (the 1980s) when the medium was presumed
11,111 l hcy cleared the way for studies of programs with very distinc -
l11tkl'd,il's quite easy to get lost in the visual and sound "ornamen -
11,11e t.;/ o/fcrs and which is evident even in Figures 0.1-0.8.
1 , 11, lo11rfunctions of style are well suited to much of television
1+111 Ili, focus on narrative cinema means that heis less interested in
11 11t11> 1• 1 propaganda film. Television, however, is laced with propa -
1 , !Ili 1w1M 1asive material in the form of editoriais, sports commentar -
1 111, 11ursc,co mmercials. Style is an essential part of commercials '
i 1 111111 Is nnd commercials have, due to their short length, more
carefully crafted sound -image style than any 30- or 60-minute program . Sur-
prisingly little has been invested in the analysis of the persuasive function of
style in television commercials - if you discount the massive amount of pro -
prietary marketing research (focus groups and the like) done by advertisers
regarding their own products. Chapter 3, on style and the television commer -
cial, attempts to redress this neglect with a consideration of how television
style persuades. ln this effort, I draw upon an account of visual style in print
advertising by Paul Messa 1is who identifies many of the stylistic methods that
an image may use to convince us to buy a productY
Also discussed in Chapter 3 is television style's hailing function, but this
function underpins virtually all of the chapters. Toe larger concept of hailing
finds its genesis in Louis Althusser 's theory of ideology and the subject: "All
ideology hails or interpe llates concrete ind ividuais as concrete subjects."
52
Hailing is the process by which a society's ideology caUs out, "Hey, you!" and
encourages you to become one of its subjects. Television during the network
era was clearly an hegemonic instrument of dominant ideology, interpellating
television's subjects- although cracks and fissures were always possible in
that edifice.53 Style participated in this interpellation as the <levice through
which the hailing was accomplished, but it also hailed viewers in a narrower
sense- calling to them to watch the television flow (stopping other household
activities) and entreating them not to interrupt the flow by chang ing to one of
the three or four other chann els. This specific hailing function is moot in the
cinema, where spectators have purchased a ticket and already decided to
devote their attention to the illuminated screen displayed in the darkened
theater. Further, even though television is no longer dominated by three net -
works, it still relies heavily on hailing , particularly since viewers' attention is
being pulled in so many more directions. Toe age of converg,ence is also on e
of divergence and distraction. Distinctive style is a sign ificant weapon used by
television practitioners to combat the distraction factor of the modem
med iascape.
Sound style, in particular, is an invaluable stimulus for pulling viewers to
the television flow.54 CSI, for instance, uses a distinctive sound cue to signal a
flashback when the investigators theorize about how a crime happened. Toe
shot I selected above is relatively quiet (dialogue only, no non -diegetic music),
as is typical of much of the program. 'füe visual style of this shot- with ils
complicated camera movement and rack focuses- serves a subtle hailing
function, too. It demands a sustained gaze at the image. Toe narrati vc
information of that shot (a missing pottery piece) is conveyed through th i~
articulation of the visuais. To get that information, you must be paying atten
tion - not looking at e-mail or playing World of Warcraft while you arl'
watching CSI. Toe program rewards the sustained gaze, as do visually soph
isticated programs such as Miami Vice, ER, and single-camera sitcoms -t lw
subjects of Chapt ers 2, 4, and 5, respectively.
Once a viewer has been hailed, been enticed to view a par ticul ar progra m,
style is then used to help diflerentiate brand identities. As discussed i11
Chapter 4, when ER debuted , it needed a way to distinguish Hself from otlm
hospital dramas, particularly ChicagoHope, which debuted in the sarne season
and was programmed in the same time -slot. ER's solution for brand differen-
tiation was part narrative form and actor perfo rman ce, of course, but it also
depended upon an aggressive use of the Steadicam (one of the first television
program s to doso) and four -walled sets to achieve a swirling, dizzying style of
( amera movement that effectively echoed the hectic life in the emergency
1 oon~. ~us, th~ ~ame premise necessary to different iate Coke from Pepsi also
11btams m telev1s1onprograms. CSI clearly illustrates the power ofbrandino as
11~ prod ucer, Jerry Bruckheimer, has been able to use the program's styl; to
, 1,1.nd out fr_omother contemporary crime dramas and to develop a profitab le
C ;'il franch1se: ~ee_ television programs (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
1 000- ],_CSI: M1am1 [2002- ), and CSI: NY [2004- )), graphic novels, and
\1•vcral VJ.deo games, among other merchandise .
11:c _final function of style, to signify liveness, returns us to the beginning
11 11l11 s 111troduction. Ifwe accept Stephen Heath, Gillian Skirrow, and others'
• nrtll•nlion that viewers perceive television as live, then we must look to tele-
\ 1~111 11style for the signifiers of that liveness. Aside from the occasional decla-
1 1111 111 of liveness ("Live, from New York! It's Saturday Night!"), it is stylistic
1 1 , r1H·nts such a~ haphazard framing and "bad" audi o recording that convey a
11, 111g ,c nse of ltveness. This can be observed most clearly in genres that were
11111 1' liv(.'and could be again, such as the case study of the soap opera in
1
li 11111· 1 .. 1. As l n?te at this chapter's beginning, some critics interpret this
111111,y aru cu.lat10nof sound -image techniques as emblematic of a lack of
li 1, ' or as zero-degree style. I prefer to think of it as a set or code of con-
111h111,11 1<.'d techniques that have come to represent liveness, but could be
1 111l11o,1dcasts that are not actually live. Soap operas are recorded "live-
111•1', 111dcome by this code "naturally," but mockumentar ies such as The
• 111 bc coded as "spontaneous" without actually employ ing modes of
11 l11, 111111 lhat are "live" or "live-on-tape." Toe stylistic signifiers of sponta -
11 11111 ltvl'ncss have become so familiar to viewers that they read the text
1 ' 11·11 1;hcn it is not. This code of liveness is as significant a style as
111111l l11p1· r·cndenng of a CSJscript. Throughout TelevisionStyle, I advo-
1 '"' 111 111Hkrst_and"'.gof style as any patterning of sound-image technique
1 1 • 11 1unct 10 11 ,v1thm the television text. I thereby reject the definition
1 1 1 1111'111,irk of the individual genius on a text (although certainly gen-
' 11, , l, ·1111.·nts of television) oras a flourish somehow layered 011 top of
ll ti • (,1lthough some style is decorative). A program does not need
"' 11111111~h cs in order to possess style. Axiomatic to every chapter in
1 1 11i.1111/1 lelevision texts contain style. Style is their texture, their
11, 1,,,1, 1ha1 holds together their signifiers and through which
11111 •'• .ir1·1.ommLmicated.
11.,.d Ir0111 my passion for zero -degree style, I am more eager to
111 rl~,r ~1ylc than Iam to evaluate it. And television studies, in
general, has not developed a coherent method for evaluati ng televi sion as a
medium or style as a portion of it. What efforts there have been in this area
have engaged with an evaluative aesthetics, with aesthetic judgment. Of
course, "aesthetics" ha s a very long and complicated history within various
philosophical and art historical traditions. One must consequentl y be very
clear about its meaning. Within television studies the term can be used in a
non -judgmental manner , as we have already seen with Fiske and Hartley's
investigation of "aesth etic codes." ln this sen se, "aestheti c" means elements of
image-sound style and "codes" refers to sets of image-sound conventi ons.
Fiske and Hartley are no t evaluating or judging those codes. They are only
describing and analyzing them. More recently , however, a stra in of television
studies has evolved that does propose aesthetic evalu ation of the medium.
Christine Geraghty is on e television scholar who advocates for the aesthetic
judgment of television, but she acknow ledges that this will be an uphill battle.
She neatly sumrnarizes severa! reasons for the neglect of aesthetic judgment
within television studies:
the impact of semiotics on the genesis of media studies with its pseudo-
scientific daims about objectiv ity; the impact of postmodern ism with its
emphasis on diversity , decentering and play; the n eed to establish popular
culture and television, in parti cular, as worthy of study that involved
refusing the traditional modes of judgment; the impact of feminist work,
with its demand that certain kinds of denigrated fiction s should be
treated seriou sly; the notion, co min g rather differently from (Michel)
Foucault and [Pierre] Bourdi eu, that to make aesth etic judgments was to
impose the cultural norms ofthe powerful. 55
To these reaso ns, we might add Jason Jacobs' observation regarding an
unwarr anted prejudi ce again st television style:
Toe continued sense that the television text is mostly inferior to the film
text and cannot withstand conce ntr ated criticai pressure because it lacks
"symbolic den sity", rich mise-en-scene, and the promotion of identifica-
tion as a mean s of securing audience proximity, has to be revised in the
light of con temporary television.56
Jacobs clarifies that television might indeed have been "textually ana emic" in
the decades before the 1980s, but that stylistically lavish, even excessive, pro -
grams have been developing since then. 57 He contends such program s reward
dose textual anal ysis. I would certainly agree and argue in Chapter 2 that
Miami Vice led the charge toward lavish style that was followed across severa!
gemes and networ ks by programs such as Homicide: Life on the Street {1993-
9), Ally McBeal (1997- 2002), The Sopranos (1999- 2007), Arrested Develop-
ment (2003- 6), Deadwood (2004- 6), and, of course, the test case for this
introdu ction, CSI (2000- ). Anot her voice within televi sion studi es that has
called for aesthetic evaluation is Greg Smith. ln Beau tiful TV : 1he Art and
A rgume n t of Ally McBeal he pond ers why "it is acceptabl e to do a book -length
,u:sthetic analysis of a film, but to analyze a television series on primarily aes-
lhctic and narrative terms is a radical notion." 58
These autho rs make persuasive cases for the aestheti c judgment of televi-
, ion, but they are less persuasive abou t how such judgment would proceed.
Smith states the aesthetic princip ie underpinning his analysis: "Toe concept of
hcauty that emerges from this book is a fairly old -fash ioned one: a cohesive
,r tem in which elegant, innovative formal technique serves to convey a
11nined, complex argument suit able for mora l and ethical insight. "59 And
lkm1tiful TV does engage intelligently with Ally McBeaI's complex narrative
')·, 1cm and its moraUethical themat ic structure, describing how ground -
111 caking stylistic techniques convey them .60 However, the bulk of his book's
1 xcgcsis is descriptive and analytica l, not evaluative or judgmental . Further,
'>1111lhrecognizes that his intentionally provocative, "old-fashioned" aesthetic
, ,111 be a wor risome one:
By calling this show "beautiful ," I am not saying that elegance and com-
plexity are the on ly qualities that can constit ute beauty, world witho ut
cnd , amen. I am saying that at a momen t when television is widely
frowned upon as a denigrated object, using these old-fash ioned words
can help us to see television more clearly. . . . ln arguing for the art and
,irgument of a quite silly (and often annoying) television series, I wan t to
1cclaim our ability to talk openly, unashamedly, unironically, and rigor -
ously abou t televisionas a beautifuJ object. 61
111, 11111, Smith is using aesthet ic judgment as a justification for his chosen
n hJn l of study, but aside from using some descrip tive words with evaluative
, 11111101 :itio ns- such as "elega nt," "complex, " and "inno vative"- he doe s not
111,11, on the beauty of Ally McBeal in the main part ofhis analysis .62 Similarly,
1 ,, 1,1~ht y's and Jacobs' analyses fall predomin antly into the descripti ve and
111.il) t 11.stylistics categor ies I have discussed above. Geraghty summa rizes her
'l' l'' º'll h thus:
1 .1111no t suggestin g that aesthetic or qu ality norm s should be impo sed
111lhout discussion o f their provenance but that textual work provides the
1111" 1bility of engagement with such issues through an approach that
1·111pha sizes analy tic description and evaluat ive díscussio n across a range
63
111 p 1ogrammes (emphasis added).
1,, d tlt', ll'lcvision aestheticians have not systematically defined the medium 's
11!111~ no rms of evaluation . Rather, those norms have been composed of
f ,111oi,111 .,tlc, ídeologically loaded terms such a "elegance," "comp lexity,"
111 1111, 11 n i1y,""expressiveness," "uniqueness ," "artistic vision ," and so on . If
1 1 1 11111, tudies is to develop a method of aesthetic judgme nt, then it will
1 1 d 111lw one quit e distinct from anteceden t norms found in art h istory,
111,1 t1111 t, music, and even the cinema.
 The search for beauty in television has led some scholars to import the
debunked auteur theory into television studies from film studies. CSJreceives
this treatment in Sue Tumbull's essay on "Toe Hook and the Look: CSI and the
Aesthetics of the Television Crime Series."64 For her, what makes CSI a good
program is its auteurist lineage from director Danny Cannon to Michael Mann.
CSI creator/producer Bruckheimer had worked with Mann on the feature films,
Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), during the time of Miami Vice (1984-90).
Bruckheimer hired Cannon and instructed him to get that "cinematic look," in
65
general, and to emulate Mann's style, in particular. Turnbull thus relies on the
unexamined evaluative criteria that, first, cinematic style is superior to television
style and, second, that style is good when it is the expression of the auteur's
vision. Chapter 2 of this volume devotes much of its discussion of Miami Vice to
identifying cinematic style and examining its crossover into television. However,
I do not share Turnbull's aesthetic hierarchy or her emphasis on the auteur.
Auteurs do exist in television - Paul Henning and Joss Whedon come to mind -
but their "vision" is not necessary to make a program good. Much like a medie-
val cathedral, beautiful television may be the product of dozens of workers'
effo1ts. A Byronic auteur need not be at the helm. One final reasou to avoid
auteurist aesthetics is that auteurism has an amorphous sense of the beautiful.
Individual authors more often describe or point to a beautiful moment instead
of explaining why it is beautiful. Toe result is mysticism.66 Andrew Sarris, in the
1962 essay largely responsible for importing the auteur theory to U.S. fi.lmcriti-
cism, argues that the marks of true auteurs are in their aesthetic implementations
of style-"close to what Astruc defines as mise-en-scene, but not quite."67 Sarris
avers that Jean Renoir qualifies as an auteur and, as proof, refers the reader to a
tiny moment from Rules of the Game:
Renoir gallops up tbe stairs, turns to his right with a lurching movement,
stops in hop -like uncertainty when his name is called by a coquettish
maid [Figure 0.10], and, then, with marvelous postreflex continuity,
resumes his bearishly shambling journey to the heroin e' s boudo ir. If I
could describe the musical grace note of that momentary suspension, and
I can't, I might be able to provi.de a more precise definition of the auteur
theory . As it is, all I can do is point at the specific beauties of interior
meaning on the screen and, )ater , catalogue the moments of recognition
(emphasis added). 68
Much auteurist writing on fi.lmand television presumes this "you recognize it
or you don't" attitude toward beauty and style. lt is less aesthetic analysis than
it is elitism.
Aesthetic evaluation of CSI could point to the elaborate camera movement
that Nathan Hope staged in our test-case shot and demand the reader accept
the labeling of it as television beauty and Hope as an auteur even tho ugh he has
mostly worked as a ci.nematographer, with very few directing credits aside from
CSI. Toe aesthetician could also argue for this shot's elegance and complexity,
as Smith does for style in Ally McBeal. But, to some, camera movement
is overused in "beauti.ful" programs such as
CSl, ER, and The West Wing. For such a
critic, this moment is anything but beautiful.
Until television studies develops an aes-
thctic system that goes beyond taste and
dominant culture norms, we must admit
1ha1 semiotics, postmodernism, cultural
, tudies, feminism, Foucault, and Bourdieu
(rcmembering Geraghty's list) are correct
l o 1.aution us about the hazards of televi-
, 1011 evaluation, especially if it portends a Figure 0.1O Rules of the Game: One of the
11·1w·n to auteurism. "Can we have a televi- "specific beauties" of interior meaning,
•,1011 aesthetic, and do we want one?" asks according to Andrew Sarris.
l h.1rlotte Brunsdon po intedly. 69 Her
,111,wcris mostly negative:
An aesthetic of television would thus, in some ways, have to be an anti -
.,csthetic to be adequate to its object and the practices constituting i.t.
Engaging with the popular , the domestic , and the functional, it [televi-
,lo n I undercuts the very constitution of classical aesthetic judgment. 7º
I 11,tm irnl Stylistics
"11·1.il chapters in th is book place individual programs into larger contexts of
1,1,v l,lo n-style history . Most notably , Chapter 4 unpacks the layers of media
li 1, 1h,1tconverged on ER in the mid -1990s and Chapter 5 discusses the res-
1111, , 111H 1, through stylistic innovation, of the sitcom in the 2000s. My funda -
"" ,11.il:ipproach to television-style history is that style exists at the
1111,,,1•11 1011of economics, technology, industry standards, and semiotic/aes -
11,Ih 111 d cs; and each of these elements has their own, semi-independent
1,11111)·1·0 pick an illustrative example: the technology for the zoom shot was
1!111111l111 n l to the cinema in the 1930s. Early television cameras, however, had
11111 • 1 lr11,t•s,not zooms, although zoom lenses became standard in television
111!111ln lhe l960s. Consequently, studio -based programs of the 1940s and
1 1 11 li.1w rcw zoom shots . Toe television industry of the late 1960s and
1 11 h11w1:vcr, carne to rely on zoom lenses for efficient, inexpensive shoot -
. ti , ,.tp operas, game shows, talk shows, sports programs, and the like- an
11111111 dt·ds ion. But the choice of ending a soap-opera scene with a
11 1111111., charac ter has no econom ic, technological, or industrial impera -
i 1 .1,•"'' pu rely on semiotic codes of narrative signification.
111 1111, il.1,1udies, the most methodical historical stylistician is undoubtedly
1 1li, 11dwl'll. Poetics of Cinema (2008) is the result of his most recent labor
1, 1 1111 pnl'lics vineyards, but 20 years earlier, in Ozu and the Poetics of
1111111' IH8), Bordwell establishes tha t "'Poetics' refers to the study of how
11, 1•11 1 wgcther and how, in determinate contexts, they elicit particular
1 l lt· l.11er clarifies that poetics extends beyond stylistics to include
"thematics" and "large -scale form" and that stylistics, in particular, "deals
with the materiais and patterning of the medium as components of the con -
structive process ."72 Poetics is thus no "mere" formalism. Rather, it
approaches style as the physical manifestation of theme and narrative, in the
case of fiction film. And these elements are always culturally situated. ln Bor-
dwell's words, "A narrative film exhibits a total form consisting of materials -
subject matter, themes - shaped and transformed by overall composition (e.g.,
narrative structure, narrational logic) and stylistic patterning." 73Also, Bord-
well brings to the analytical table a knowledge of cognitive psychology , which
undergirds his understanding of style's effects on viewers.
To comprehend how Bordwell's poetics approaches the history of style, it
is worth quoting Figures Traced in Light at some length:
I propose that we can fruitf ully analyze and explain the historical
dynam ic of film style by inferring, on the basis of the films and what we
know about their making, some pertinent craft traditions. lhe traditions
preservefavored practices, practices that are the result of choices among
alternatives. ln choosing, filmmakers exercise their skill and judgment,
thereby replicating, revising, or rejecting options supplied by their prede -
cessors and peers (emphasis added) .74
Bordwell conceptualizes craft practices as standardized routines that guide prac -
titioners as they make films. He gathers these routines together into sets or
schemas, a concept he appropriates from the work of art historian E.H. Gom -
brich.75 Bordwellexplains, "Schemas are bare-bone, routinized <levicesthat solve
perennial problems."76 Individual practitioners can follow, modify or reject these
routines, but these routines remain "favoreci" or, shall we say, generally domi -
nant within specific film cultures at specific times, or within specific genres or
movements or modes of production. lhe schemas comprise the flexible mies of
film-making, the ever-changing graIIDnar of image-sound signification. On his
understanding of the function of schemas- as providing solutions to problems -
Bordwell builds his theory of the history of film style, which he refers to as the
"problem/solution model."77 Film practitioners are faced with common prob -
lems- for example, how to position actors on a stage to best communicate nar-
rative information.78 During certain time periods, in certain cow1tries, using
certain modes of production, this problem tends to be solved in specific ways by
certain practitioners- e.g., having the actors stand in a line perpendicular to the
camera, as was often done in the early 1900s. But that solution to the problem is
no longer the norm and so the cinepoetician must ask, "How have the norms
altered or maintained across history? What factors have promoted stability as
well as change?"79Colin Burnett accurately sums Bordwell's model:
Problem -solving is cast as a motor of short- and long-term historical
development- a logic that describes the nature of practical filmic creativ -
ity, links the problems faced by filmmakers working in different contexts,
and ultimately drives the history of the art. 80
1 have gone into Bordwell's historical cinepoetics in significant detail because the
overarching project ofTelevision Style is to begin the process ofbuilding a televi-
~ion poetics, a telepoetics, if you will. Toe reader will note traces of Bordwell's
,1pproach throughout the following chapters. Particularly fruitful to the study of
tdc vision style is the notion of schemas, which enable the researcher to character-
11,caccurately the stylistic traits of certain modes of production (e.g., in-studio
multiple-camera production of situation comedies) and discuss their functions
.md significance. Bordwell's problem/solution model of stylistic history also
11nderpins certain TelevisionStyleanalyses-such as my consideration ofhow sin-
11lc camera situation comedies found different solutions to the problems of narra-
t 1vcand hwnor presentation than those of the multiple -camera norm. Moreover,
1.11nnot alone in my incorporation ofBordwell's methods in the analysis oftele -
vl\ 10n. Jason Mittell decries the fact that "the formal attributes of television texts
h,,vc been given little scholarly attention ."81 He advocates Bordwell's approach
111Hicontends, "By looking at Dragnetvia a historical poetic analysis to examine
l11,w cultural meanings and assumptions were encoded in the program, we can
,1·<· how these textual elements fit into larger cultural and generic categories."82
A ri icles of Faith
Style is not simply window-dressing draped over a script; it is the very
flcsh of the work. 83
(David Bordwell)
1111•l ha pters that follow are built on two axioms, two virtual articles of faith :
'l\:levision style exists.
l'clcvision style is significant.
1 '" 'Hill 'J'e/evision Style by making the case for style's existence in a television
• • 1111· o íten presumed to have none, the lowly soap opera . ln Chapter 1, the
11111111 governing the soap opera is articulated and its signification of live-
'" , ,1111 ong other meanings, is explicated. Chapter 2 continues the con -
hl11.11ion of stylistic genre schemas in television by examining the impact of
111 'l'l\ll'ssively stylized film genre, the film noir, upon a television program,
ll,11111 Vice. It is here that we will first encounter Caldwell's notion of the
"1,1 I\U,1 1," of the medium's "visual exhibitionism," which also twines
1111,1111'11 Chapter 3. 84 Toe televisual is a significant stylistic <levice used by
1d , 1l 1,rrs lo convince us to consume conspicuously, but it is not the only
1111l h1\ ..hapter documents seven other stylistic techniques in their arsenal,
111, d wllk h serve the stylistic function of interpellat ion.
l 11 111y .1xiom, "television style exists," I should add a short corollary: televi-
11 , ,1, 1\, As l write this introduction in spring 2009, there are signs too
, 1111, '"'" ln discuss that the network-television era is coming to a dose. For
'"" ih, , signals an end to television itself, but the reality of the matter is
11q 1l,, ' l'clcvision will continue to exist in some form or another for the
 toreseeaD1e rutur e. Chap ter 4 tnes to make some sense ot the coilision ot old
media and new media - both with thei r own stylistic schemas - by examining
an example of failed convergence . Toe online efforts of ER in the 1990s illustrate
how not to leverage an old -med ia -property into the new media, but they also
provide an illuminating exampl e of how television style must adapt to new -
media exigencies. TelevisionStyle's final chapter is yet another geme study, the
mirror image of the first chapt er on the soap opera. However, where the soap
opera has been denigrated as being bereft of style, the single -camera sitcom of
the early 2000s was often chided for having "too much" style, for using style as a
gimmick or unnecessary visual tlourish . It seems fitting, therefore, to dose on a
genre on the opposite end of the stylistic hierarchy.
From the style -less to the style -full, from attenuated style to the televisual,
these chapters weave together the core issues in television stylistics . They incor -
porate a method that blends dose semiotic descript ion with articulations of sty-
listic schemas that are the result of problem-solving by television practitioners
1 whose craft practices are governed by tec hn ological, economic, and aesthetic/
cultural systems. My project in each chapter is to understand how style func -
tions in a speci fic television tex t- a genre, a program, an online version of a
show, a commercial, a particular practitioner 's work, and so on. My larger goal
1 1992), 31-66.
is to begin the work of a television poetics and to advocate for greater attention
to style in future television studies . We can no longer use Penelope Houston 's
excuse that our texts cannot be examined as dosely as a novel or a play because
we cannot take them home to study . Not only can we study, in extremely
detailed fashion, the television text from the comfort of our computer screens,
but we can visuall y "describe" that text with frames easily captured from the
flow of images. Toe digital age has provided all the necessary tools for a renais -
sance in image -sound analysis. We n eed only dare to look dosely at television.
Notes
1. Rudolf Arnheim, "A Forecast of Television," in Film as Art (Berkeley: University
ofCalifornia Press, 1957), 194.
2. One early television-studies essay that emphasizes television's immediacy is
Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, "Television, a World LnAction ," Screen 18, no .
2 (summer 1977) : 7- 59.
3. André Bazin, "Will CLnemaScope Save the Film Industry?," in Bazin at Work:
Major Essay s and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, trans. Alain Piette and Bert
Cardullo, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 80.
4. David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008); David Bordwell,
Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Holly wood Cinem a: Film Style
and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
5. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, eds., The Teievision Studies Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2004) runs 629 pages, but does not indude a single essay on style ora
single image to illustrate stylistic analysis.
6. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinemati c Staging (Berkeley: Univer-
sity ofCalifornia Press, 2005), 32.
7. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiot ics of the Cinema, tran s. Michael Taylor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199 1). Among the essays in tlüs collection
is "Toe Cinema: Language or Language System," originally published as "Le
' 1
1
cinéma : tangue ou langage?" in Communications 4 (1964 ) and commonly regarded
as the first major article about fi.lmsemiotics.
8. Severa] of Bellour's essays have been compiled in The Analysis of Film, ed. Con-
stance Penley (Bloomington: Ind iana University Press, 2000). One of Heath's earli-
est dose readings was published as "Film and System: Terms of Analysis, Part I,"
Screen 16, no. l (spring 1975): 7- 77; and "Film and System: Terms of Analysis,
Part II," Screen 16, no. 2 (summer 1975): 91- 113.
9. John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (Ncw York: Methuen, 1978). lhe
authors provide an annotated bibliography of "semiotic/textual analyses of televi-
sion," 205 - 8.
1O. Ibid., 55- 8.
11. Ibid., 61- 3.
12. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987).
13. Ibid., 4.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. Ibid., 16.
16. Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism
(New York: Routledge, 1987). A second edition, Channe/s of Discourse, Reassem -
bled, was released five years later, but there have been no fur ther editions. Con-
sequently, its claim to "contemporary" criticism is becoming increasingly dated .
17. Ellen Seiter, "Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television," u1Cha11nels of Discourse,
Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapei Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
18. Robert Hodge and David Tripp, Children and Television: A Semiotic Appro ach
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986) .
19. Seiter, "Semiotics," 50- 1.
20. Katie Wales, A Dictionary ofStylistics (New York: Longman, 1989), 439 .
21. David I. Hobnes, "The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship," Liter-
a,y and Linguistíc Compu ting 13, no. 3 (1998) : 112.
22. Barry Salt, "Practical Film Theory and its Application to TV Series Dramas,"
f ournal of Media Practice 2, no. 2 (2001 ): 98- 114.
23. Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland gloss the statistical style analysis of the
cinema in Studying Contemporary A merican Film: A Guide to Movi e Analysis
(London: Arnold, 2002), 102- 16.
24. A sample of these data is displayed on the CineMetrics website. "Barry Salt's Data-
base," CineMetrics, www.cinemetrics.lv/saltdb.php (accessed March 31, 2009).
2!i. According to Holmes, '"Ihe growing power of the computer and the ready availa-
bility of machine-readable texts are now transforming modem stylometry" in
lrnmanities scholarship. Holmes, "The Evolution," 111.
26. "CineMetrics Database," CineMetrics, www.cinemetrics.lv/databas e.php (accessed
March 8, 2009) .
J.7.Jcremy Butler, "Shot Logger," www.shotlogger.org (accessed March 12, 2008).
1
11.The phrase is used in Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 250; but tlle general concept
underpins other stylisticians' approaches. 'fl1ere may be concerns that reverse engin-
eering risks returning to the intentional fallacy.Bordwell responds, 'This framework
does not claim access to intentions as mental episodes, only to intentions as posited
sources of patterns of action. Again, we reverse-engineer" (257).
H/. Jcremy G. Butler, Television: Criticai Methods and Application s, 3rd edn (Mahweh:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007) .
10. J Ierbert Zettl, Sight Sound Motion: Appli ed M edia A esthetics (Belmont:
Wadsworth, 1973). Now in its fifth edition.
11. Michael Allen, ed., Reading CSI: Crim e TV Under the Mi crosope (New York: I.B.
Tauris, 2007).
12. Penelope Houston, "The Criticai Question," Sight and Sound 29, no. 4 (autumn
1960): 164.
33. Channels of Discourse suffers from this problem. See, for exainple, p. 227.
34. Kristin Thompson, "Report of the Ad hoc Committee of the Society For Cinema
Studies, 'Fair Usage Pub lication of Film Stills,' " Society for Cinema and Media
Studies, www .cmstudies .org/index.php?option==com_content&task==view&id =60&
Itemid ==l 10 (accessed March 12, 2009). See also, Kristin Thompson , "Fair Is Still
Fair, And More So," David Bordwell's Website on Cinema, April 23, 2008, \\'WW.
davidbordwell.net/blog/?p==2127 (accessed March 12, 2009).
35. Fair use of images by television educators and scholars was given a recent boost by
the publication of "Toe Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Edu-
cation," Center for Social Media, American University, November 2008, www .
centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/code _for_ media_literacy _educa -
tion (accessed March 18, 2009), but for a recent incident of copyright extortion , see
Justin Mittell, "Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney," Just TV, February 14, 2009,
j usttv. wordpress.com/2009/02/ 14/ fair-use-held -hostage -by -abc -disney ( accessed
March 12, 2009) .
36. Noel Carroll, "Film Form: An Argument for a Functional Theory of Style in the
Individua] Film," in Engaging the Moving Jmage (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003), 141.
37. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 33- 4.
38. Ibid., 33.
39. Ibid., 34.
40. Ibid.
41. See, for example , Elizabeth M. Perse, Media Effects and Society (Mahwah : Law-
rence Erlbaum, 2001), 146- 8; and Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, "Media and
Form," in The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New
Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ,
1996), 193-247.
42. Shuhua Zhou, "Effects of Visual Intensity and Aud iovisual Redundancy in Bad
News, " Media Psychology 6 (2004): 237 - 56.
43. "Facial EMG measures minute changes in the electrical activity of facial muscles,
which reflects minute muscle movements. This technique has been shown to be
capable of measuri ng facial muscle activity to even weakly evocative emo tional
stimuli." Gallup & Robinson, lnc., "Wekome ," FacialEMG, 2009, www.facialemg.
com (accessed March 17, 2009).
44. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 34.
45. Karen Lury, Int erpreting Television (London : Hodder Arnold, 2005), 47.
46. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 34.
47. John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in Arnerican
Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 152.
48. Fiske, Television Culture , 260.
49. Ibid., 250.
50. Ibid., 249.
51. Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising (Thousand
Oaks: Sage, 1997).
52. Louis Althusser , "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philo-
sophy and Other Essays, trans . Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1970), 174, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm,
Louis Althusser Archive (accessed June 12, 2008).
53. A significan t body of work in fihn studies has been devoted to understanding how
style might signify ideologica l unde rcurr ents in 1950s melodrama. Toe key to this
notion is the principie of irony, whi ch has not found extensive application in tele-
vision studies.
54. Rick Altman explicates six functions of television sound style in "Television
Sound," in Television: The Criticai View, 4th edn, ed. Hora .ce Newcomb (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 566- 84.
55. Christine Geraghty, "Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama ," Inter -
national Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no . 25 (2003): 26, 27.
56. )ason Jacobs, "Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies,'' International
Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (December 2001): 433.
57. lbid., 434.
S8. Greg M. Smith , Beautiful TV : The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal (Austin: Uni -
versity ofTexas Press, 2007), 4.
, 9. lbid. , 197.
60. Smith relies on Russian Formalist methods ("<levices," "functions") to describe and
analyze style. Ibid. , 9.
6 1. lbid., 197.
62. According to Google Book Search , "beauty" is used only five times in reference to
Ally McBeal, the program, in Beautiful TV. Of course, "beautifuJ" turns up many
more times as it is in the title of the book. "Preview This Book," Beautifal TV,
Google Book Search, books.google.com (accessed March 20, 2009) .
hl Geraghty, "Aesthetics and Quality ," 41- 2.
M . Sue Turnbull, "Toe Hook and the Look: CSI and the Aesthetics of the Television
Crime Series,'' in Allen, ReadingCSI, 15-32 .
(1,. lbid., 27.
M. For more on stylistic mysticism, see Barrett Hodsdon, "Toe Myst ique of Mise-en -
scene Revisited," Continuurn: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 5, no . 2
( L990), wwwmcc .murdoch.ed u.au/ReadingRoom/5.2/Hodsdon.html (accessed
March 26, 2009).
117. Andrew Sarris, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962," in Auteurs and Authorship:
A Film Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Malden : Blackwell, 2008), 43.
hl\. lbid. Even Sarris's descript ion ofthe shot is inaccurate. He writes that Renoir turns
to his right, but actually he turns in the other direction.
1,9. Charlotte Brunsdon, "Television: Aesthetics and Audiences ," in Logics of Televi-
sion: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed . Patric ia Mellencamp (Bloomington : Indiana
University Press, 1990), 61.
70. lbid., 63.
71. David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton Univers ity
Press, 1988), 1. Available onli ne at quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cjs/images/0920054-
0001.001.pdf . The evolution of Bordwell's thinking is well chronicled in Colin
Burnett, "A New Look at the Concept of Style in Film : Toe Origi ns and Develop -
ment of the Problem -Solution Model,'' New Review of Film and Television Studies
6, no. 2 (August 2008): 127- 49.
J. Bo rdwell, Poetics of Cinema, 17- 18.
1 1. llo rdwell, Ozu and the Poetics o/Cinema, 1.
1. llo rdwell, Figures Traced in Light, 265.
',. Scc E.H. Gombrich , Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Repre-
s!'lllation (Pr inceton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 146- 78. Regarding Bord -
wcll's use of Gombrich, see Burnett, "A New Look," 139- 40.
h David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University
l'rc ss, 1997), 152.
lbid., 150.
li 'ice "Except ionally Exact Perceptions: On Staging in Depth," in ibid., 158- 271.
11 1hid., 158.
Ili llurn ett, "A New Look," 143.
Il i J.1~0 11 Mitteil, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American
( '1d111re (New York: Routledge, 2004), 121.
li' Miltell, Genre and Television, 122.
li I llo rdwell, On the History of Film Style, 8.
11I ( .,1ldwell, Televisuality, 352.

1.
T elevision and Zero--Degree Style
It is commonly presumed - especially among film scholars - that daytime
soap operas have no style, that their harried production. schedule does not
permit the \uxury of stylistic embellishments. How could It _when soap-opera
production companies must churn out 30- 60 broadcast minutes five days a
week, with no breaks for holidays and, more significantly, with no reruns? But
this altitude toward style views it as something extra that is added to a televi-
sion program, an accouterment that might aid the significa~~n process but is
not central to it. ln this book, I have argued that all teleV1s1ontexts have a
style born of a confluence of economic necessity, industry trade practices, aes-
thetics, and network standards . ln this context, soap opera becomes a particu-
larly interesting test case, because it illustrates narrative -television production
under extreme time constraints . ln a sense, it is narrative production without
pretense, designed to present the maximum amount of narrative as efficiently
as budget, time and technology will allow. Analyzing soap -opera style offers
an opportunity to examine Caldwell's "zero-degree style," to see just how effi-
1
ciently diegetic spaces may be constructed. • • • • organized by a single patriarchal discourse or main narrative line, which
Soap opera analysis is also important because of 1ts pos1hon m media
studies at the end of the twentieth century. At the time, the study of television
soap opera lured scholars from cinema studies, myself included, t~ consider
how melodrama might cross over from one medium to another. Film melo-
drama as a gerue and directors such as Douglas Sirk, John Stahl,_a~d Frank
Borzage attracted heightened interest in the late 1970s. Fem1111stswere
particularly interested in unpacking the ideology of the "woman's picture ."
Severa] of these film scholars subsequently became interested in the equiva-
lent television genre- the soap opera. 2 Consequently, soap opera was the fi.rst
television genre to receive sustained attention from cinema scholars. ln the
1980s criticai commentaries on soap opera's narrative structure - modeled on
cinema studies and literary criticism - became as commonplace as child
custody conflicts in the genre itself.
In Charlotte Bmnsdon's assessment of"The Role of Soap Opera in the Devel-
opment of Ferninist Television Scholarship" (1995) she incide~tally chronicles
the vanguard role of ferninist film theorists in the deco~s~ction _~f televisio11
soap opera as a signifyingsystem.3 Toe work done by fennmst tele~1s1011 scholars
up until that time, she maintains, can be grouped into four categones:
26
l. Studies of the position of women withi11televisio11industries.
2.
3.
"Content analyses"- as they are called withi11the tradition of mass-com-
municatio11 research- of women i11soap opera programs.
Considerations of the soap opera as semiotic text.
4. Research on soap-opera viewers and their relatio11shipto the text.4
Of these four, textual studies has the greatest perti11ence to stylistic analysis.
Tania Modlesk.i's relatively early (1979) essay, which sparked much of the
feminist rethink.ing of the genre, is typical of this approach. 5 She conte11ds
that soap opera may prove to be the most (011ly?)feminist televisio11form.
lnvoking Roland Barthes' hermeneutic code, Modleski sees feminist potential
in tlrree aspects of the soap opera: its disrupted narrative form, its avoidance
of narrative closure, and its construction of a fragmented spectatorial view-
point. Consequently, her argument is not concerned so much with what
might be called a feminist television style of sound and image, but with a fem-
inist form of narrative actio11s(and the feminine spectator's relationship to
that form). She thus spends very little time on the actual use of sound and
inrnge. Modleski shares this concentration on narrative structure with many
of the textual -studies writers drawing on literary and cinematic analytical tra-
ditions. Toe idea of an endless story has captivated those accustomed to nar-
rative closure, largely because 11arrative aperture - the open text- is a trait
normally associated with modernist or progressive texts, not forms of popular
cultur~ as seemingly conservative as soap opera. Ellen Seiter, for example,
comments on the significa11ceof soap opera's eternally disrupted and eter -
11allyreconstructed narrative:
Toe importance of small discontinuous 11arrativeunits which are never
do not build towards an ending or dosure of mea11ing, which in their
very complexity cannot give a final ideological word on anything, makes
soap opera uniquely open to feminist readings .6
This feminist concern with ideological paradoxes in soap opera narrative
dominated the reevaluation of the genre in the 1980s and the emphasis 011
narrative form persists..to the present day i11texhial studies.7
By the tum of thrc entury, soap -opera a11alyticalwork could be found in
publications as diverse as the Journal of Employment Counseling and
Screen- much of it from a feminist perspective. 8 Moreover , as Brunsdo11
chronicles in The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera (2000) a11d
Louise Spe11ce reviews in W atching Daytime Soap Operas: 1he Power of
Pleasure (2005), feminist work 011soap opera in the late twentieth century
was dominated by new, ethnographic, audience -oriented research .9 Central
to our concerns, most of this audience -oriented work took for granted the
positio11ing of the spectator through sound a11dimage, through style. These
studies rarely, if ever, asked their interviewees for their opinions about the
characteristics of soap-opera videography, mise-en-scene, or sound design.
Further, in textual -studies work that was done during this time, narrative
form was the primary draw and little attention was paid to the work of
image-sound style in the construction of these never-ending narratives. To
date, there has been no comprehensive study of soap opera as a system of
signification, a text of sound and image constructed in a highly convention -
alized fashion.10
Sampling the Ever-Expanding Text
To begin this work, the detailed analysis of the soap-opera text is necessary,
but it quickly becomes obvious that this text is enormous and ever-expanding.
Consider As the World Turns (cornmonly abbreviated as A TWT). Its continu-
ing narrative text began at 1:30p.m. EST on April 2, I 956 and has since
broadcast over 13,000 episodes. Taking into account its expansion from 30
minutes to 60 minutes on December 1, 1975 and its approximately 250 annual
episodes,11 we can estimate that over ll,000 hours of broadcast time have
been generated. 12 This makes for a rather unwieldy diegetic text when com-
pared to the standard theatrical film or even a season's worth of episodes on
prime -time television.
When I began this research in 1984, I adopted the strategy of narrowing
my study to a sample containing one week's worth of ATWT episodes: July
18- 24, 1984, episode numbers 7,296- 7,300, Wednesday through the follow-
ing Tuesday. A Wednesday -to-Tuesday week- instead ofMonday to Friday-
was chosen to investigate how ATWT handles the weekend interruption of its
ongoing narrative. I wished to test the common assumption that, as Maryjo
Adams explains,
Daily, there is a minor climax-the incentive to tune in to morrow letting
each day build to a major climax on Friday which is ample bait to hook
even the most casual viewer into tuning in on Monday to begin the cycle
again. 13
As a follow-up to the original study, I have sampled another Wednesday -
to -Tuesday week from ATWT: January 30-Fe bruary 5, 2008, episode
numbers 13,194- 13,198. 14 Clearly, ten episodes taken from over 13,000 is
still not a sufficient amount of material on which to build a comprehensive
study of ATWTs visual style, let alone the entire genre's. However, the sty-
listic "schema" governing these samples from 1984 and 2008 has remained
relatively stable, suggesting that this genre's "standardized craft practices"
have not changed much in the past 24 years- to put it in Bordwell's terms . 15
I would hazard to say this schema most probably extends even further back,
to the mid - 1970s when soap opera's craft practices underwent two signific-
ant changes: the expansion to 60-minutes and the conversion from live
broadcasting to videotape recording . A TWT was one of the last two pro -
grams to convert from live broadcasts to taped ones (in 1975), but it was
the first CBS soap opera to expand to one hour (the extra length made live
telecasting untenable, according to Adams) . 16 Additionally, ATWT led the
way for CBS soap operas making the shift from black-and -white to color-
starting on February 20, 1967, eight years before the program expansion .17
After the shift to color , taped recordings of 60-minute programs, the mode
of production of ATWT, in specific, and soap opera , in general, stabilized
a nd so did its schema . It is difficult to test reliably this historical theory,
because soap operas are so very ephemeral. No comprehensi ve archiv e of
soap-opera episodes- particular!y those broadcast live-is available to the
rcsearcher. Unlike prime -time television, soap operas are not distributed on
DVDs and it is only recently that soap-opera episodes have begun to find a
public life after their initial broadcast-through reruns on a cable-television
network (SOAPnet) and streaming on the network s' websites. 18 And,
nccording to Adams, the networks themselves are poor chroniclers of their
programs:
When As the World Turns was a live broadcast, the only records available
for historical research were kinescopes made of a few episodes. Despite
the videotaping of today [ 1980], the tapes are kept only 30 days and then
erased. Special events, weddings, deaths, and flashbacks are kept in
special files for future use. 19
1 m ust rely on my own informal viewing of ATWT before 1984, therefore, to
substantiate the claim of schema stability. Also, the soap -opera's mode of
prod uc'tion from that time lends credence to a theory of stability. There was
lllll e financial, technological, or aesthetic incentive to change this schema
during this time period as the soap opera's ratings and ratings-based advert -
lsing revenue were unassailab le. Only in the past few years has this begun to
rrn de, which may well foment revolutions in the genre's mode of produc -
1ion. We will return to this quest ion of schema change at the end of the
d1:1pter.
Stylistic schema, it should be clarified, signifies the patterning of tech-
11iques, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships of one element to
olhcr elements within a textual system. Only these relationships generate
11,caning. My specific approach will be to discuss the soap opera schema in
il'rn1s of space (mise-en-scene and videographic properties), time (editing),
,,nd sound (dialog,ue, music, and noise or "sound effects"). To best under -
~1,1nd the single.,shot schema and shot-to-s hot relations within a scene I will
11.irrowthe ten-episode sample even further, concentrating on a scene from
lht· prog ram aired Friday, February 1, 2008.20 Toe selected, 91-second scene
hdwee n Katie (Terri Colombino) and Brad (Austin Peck) begins the epi-
\11dc's fourth act, at approximately 30 minutes into the broadcast. (See Table
1 1. TVStyleBook.com provides a video clip of the scene.) It contains 20
•,hots, with an average shot length of 4.55 seconds and a median shot length
111J seconds. Toe setting is Al's Diner, where Brad is attempting to propose
ln Katie. Although he fails in this episode, he will eventually succeed and on
lhl· April 17, 2008 broadcast, they are married.
Table 1.1 As the World Turns scene découpage Shot Number, Figure Dialogue Action/Camera
Dialogue Action/Camera Scale, and Length 1'1ovement
Shot Number, Figure
Scale, and Length Movement
4 Brad: Om
Katie: lhe Fade in (from medium close-up dinner may
1 have been
backdoor's the commercial 5 secs.
long shot
locked , too. break) . Camera (Figure 1.5) ruined, but that
3 secs. doesn't mean
Vle're trapped . zooms back to
(Figures1.1-1 .2) we can't have
a long shot as
Katie ente rs the dessert.
diner.

5 Katie: I'm not

medium close-up really in the
3 secs. mood .
(Figure 1.6)

6 Brad: It's your

2 Brad: Maybe meditun close-up favorite.
medium close-up it's a sign that 1 sec.
3 secs. this was meant (Figure1.1)
(Figure 1.3) to be.
Katie: No , it's a
sign ...

7 Katie: Oh, Promotional

mcdium close-up that's not fair. announcement
Katie: ... that

....
3 1l>CCS. [Music begins.] chromakeyed
longshot my friends are

·-
(l-'ig11r
e 1.8) over the lower
3 secs. out to get me .
fifth of the
(Figure 1.4) frame: "You're

•--
• ~··!
· -· 1
watch ing AS
THEWORLD
TURNS .
- YOU"REWAlnlioiS Ili CSI:NY
AS THE WORLD,TURNS
WEDNESDAY
10/9C."
Continues over
shots 8-11.

continued
 Table 1.1 continued
Shot Number, Figure Dialogue Action!Camera
Shot Number, Figure Dialogue Action/Camera Scale, and Length Movement
Scale, and Length Movement
12 Brad: Sit. Close Katie walks off
8 Brad: long shot your eyes. frame Jeft. The
medium close-up Strawberry 10secs. camera zooms
2 secs. cheesecake . (Figures in to a mediurn
(Figure 1.9) 1.13- 1.14) shot ofBrad .
[re-establishing
shot]

'-, YQLfflf::W
ÃrcHtNf.i
, AS THE WORLD ã URNS

9 Katie: Oh, no,

medium close-up no, no .. . Toe
3 secs. good one, with
(Figure 1.10) the little
chopped up
strawberries?
Brad: Oh,
yeah ...

13 Katie:Why?It's
li 10 Brad: ... yeah ,
111edium shot
1, secs.
not exactly a
surprise.
med ium close-up just the way
(Figtire 1.15) Brad: Oh, yes,
2 secs. you like it.
(Figure 1.11) it is. Close your
eyes. [Only full
line spoke n off
camera. )

l•l
111,·
<lium shot
11 Katie: Okay.
1 1 sccs.
medium close-up We' re stuck
(/•ixure 1.16)
5 secs. here. We might

--- ..
(Figure 1.12) as well enjoy
• ourse lves.
' ' ·•~
'1-;_
..-..
J"'

#' continued
1 ame 1.1 co nti nued
Shot N umber, Figure Dialogu e Action/Camera
Shot Number, Figure Dialogue Action/Camera Scale, and Length Movernent
Scale, and Lengt/1 Movement
17 Brad: Ta-da! Brad begins to
15 medium shot sit.
extr eme close-up 3 secs.
4 secs. (Figures
(Fig11re 1.17) 1.2 1- 1.23}

16 Brad: Okay. Brad hobbles

m edium shot ou t fro m
14 secs. behind the
(Figures cou nter,
1. 18- 1.20} becau se h is foot
is in a cast.
Camera follows
Brad .

IR Katie: Oo h, Brad co ntin ues

long shot that . .. to sit
1 ~ccs. Camera zoo ms
(Figures out to reframe
1.24- 1.25) the tw o of
them.

co11tinued
Table 1.1 continued
Shot Number, Figure Dialogue Action/Camera
Scale, and Length
Shot Number, Figure Dialogue Action!Camera Jvfovement
Scale, and Length Movement
19 Katie: . .. looks Camera starts on
extreme close-up delicious. a tight shot of
5 secs. [Sighs] her fork, follows
(Figures it up to a close-
1.26- 1.31) up of her face.

20
[Cut to the first
medium close-up
shot of the
4 secs.
following
(Figure 1.32)
scene .J

First shot,
following scene.
(Fig ure 1.33)

Soap Opera Mise-en-scene

'1hc mise-en-scene of soap opera is the aspect of its production that is most
.illccted by so-called "below-the-line" costs: "Scenic Design, Scenic Constrnc-
lion and Painting, Studio Stagehands and Artists, Costum e Design, Technical
l'l'r sonnel and Equipment, Studio Space, Support Crew (stage manager, ward-
, nbc, makeup )," as listed in Francis B. Messmore's study of soap -opera pro-
dud ion in New York City.2 1 In con trast , "above -the-line" costs include
, .,l,tries for producers, directors, scriptwriters, the starring performers, and so
1111. Below-the-line costs <leal mostly with the primary elements of mise-en-
11 h 1e, the physical elements of a production: sets, costumes , lighting, and so
nn. Consequently, to minimize below-the-line costs, soap opera's mise -en-
11 i',,e has had to adapt certa in craft practices that have had a major impa ct on

lli l' gcnre's signifying practices. The implications of these craft practices can
IH'observed in the scene we are examining.
 First, and most obviously, the setting is an interior one-as are the buli<of
soap-opera scenes. Soap operas are shot on a limited number of mostly interior
sets and in controlled, studio environments where shooting tin1e can be mini-
mized and below-the -line costs can be kept in check. ATWT typically uses ten
or fewer sets from the dozens tlley hold in storage.22 TI1e February 1, 2008 ¼/
episode, for example, uses eight, of which one is an exterior set. No actual lÓca-
tion shooting was done, which is standard practice for tlle genre. ln Natan Katz- "
man's content analysis of tlle genre, he founcL"of 884 locations coded, only 9
were clearly not indoors, while 690 were in homes, offices, or hospitals."23
Beyond the pragmatic demands of production economics there are certain aes-

""
thetic reasons for the genre's abundance of interior settings. Soap-opera the- /
matics find tlleir most facile expression indoors. Charles Derry writes: V
/
Given this emphasis on interiors, it is not surprising that the soap opera
"
has developed a stable of specific interiors - each of which serves a meta-
phorical function which allows the genre to <lealwith one or more of its
themes.24
~/
Derry identifies the hospital, the courtroom , the newspaper office, the restau- I'-.
/ !'--
rant or nightclub, and the private home - and their respective thematic con-
cerns of Hfe and death, guilt and inno cence, gossip, socializing, and persona l
obsessions.25 This ATWT scene is set in a restaurant, which normally allows
for the maximum interaction among characters, but in this instance Al.'s IICI
Diner has been closed so that Brad can propose to Katie-transposing a scene
of socializing into one of one-on -one intimacy. With the lack of other patrons,
the restaurant becomes an arena for personal politics. ln Brunsdon's terms,
"the action of the soap opera is not restricted to familiai or quasifamilial insti-
tutions but, as it were, colonizes the public masculine sphere, representing it
from the point of view of the personal ."26 Brad pursues Katie and she resists
his advances. ln soap operas as in film melodramas, privat e homes are more
commonly tlle settings for such scenes, but, in fujs case, Al's Diner substitutes
"'
/
for the private hom e.27 /

Toe articulation of space in soap opera sets tends to be shallow and con- /

fined, although this has changed over the years as soap-op era set design has "
grown increasingly elaborate, despite the severe financial constraints. At tlle
beginning of the genre, in the early 1950s, set design was remarkably, even
absurdly, minimalist. A black velvet curtain could be hung in a broadcast
studio and windows and doors could be positioned in front of it- like some-
thing out of a Samuel Beckett play- in arder to create the most basic illusion ' ',
of a room . Toe studios were not large and tllus blocking was limited to side- ',
to-side movement. Even today's soap-opera studios do not permit much
deep-space set design as five or six sets are commonly erected semi-perma -
nently in a single studio, lining the walls so iliat camera equipment can be
placed in tlle center of the room (Figure 1.34).28 ATWT, in particular,
currently shoots in JC Studios, Brooklyn, New York, which has two studio 11_~1111·1.34 Studio layout for soap-opera production, with sets arrayed against the
1
1 spaces: 163' by 70' and 131' by 75'.29 Unlike ER, for instance, in which actors 11,ill, and cameras position ed in the middle.
and cameras can move forward and backward through the sets, ATWT sets "interior movement," even the simplest movements- sitting, standing,
are designed to accommodate their placement around the perimeter of a walking- frequently appear stilted compared to prime-time action series.30
studío. An extremely deep set would pro trud e into the middle of the room,
into space reserved for the cameras. As a result, soap -opera sets strongly Although Lewis' insights take us forward into the realm of videography,
resemble conventional sets designed for a theater with a proscenium: three which I will return to below, I want to emphasize here how craft practice facil-
walls, shallow space, no ceilings, and so on. itates the genre's emphasis on emotion over action.
ATWTs set construction supports conversation, not dynamic movement. The scene under analysis is one principally of interior movement, of Brad's
Ken Lewis, an A TWT scenic designer in the l 970s, comments : barely concealed ardor, but director Michael Eilbaum's use of space in the
scene departs from the emphasis on restricted, side-to-side movement that
Toe sets are designed for the very limited physical movement that occurs predominates in the genre. Herbert Zettl terms this typical movement across
on soaps. Shots are basically dose-ups ... or medium shots, with rarely a 1he width of the screen as being along the x-axis.31 The height of the screen in
glimpse of a floor. Our attention is with the dialogue, not with the "action" this sense is the y-axis and movement toward or away from the camera runs
so furniture is generally grouped ín small dusters that make cu's (close- nlong the z-axis. The Al's Diner set was built to permit movement in some
ups) of talking heads easily accessible. Because of the attention paid to <lepth,along the z-axis. Katie enters the set from the back of the diner (shot 1,
Figure 1.1), not from the side, and then she and Brad make their way to the
Actor movements
íront of the set, as can be seen in shot 18 (Figure 1.25) and the diagram of the
Camera angles sct with camera and actor positions (Figure 1.35). ln essence, the scene is
Axes oi action played out in two zones within the set. Toe first is near the counter (Figure
1.4) and the second is at tl1e table (Figure 1.20). TI1isblocking illustrates th at
CAMERA POSITIONS
lhe genre is able to innovate within its technological/economic restrictions. It
...•······
....
.....
...A A: 1, 12, 14. 16, 18
.,lso proves that individual directors and actors can create variations within
·•'
....
'd 8: 2, 4, 6, 8. 10
C: 3. 5, 7, 9, 11, 15 , tandard craft practices .
/ D: 13, 19 Lighting is a second highly conventionalized element of mise-en-scene.
E: 17, 20 Since the 1920s, film and then television lighting patterns have been domi-
11ated by three -point lighting: key light, fill light, and back light. It is possible

lffll• ···········•...
·••.
\.
to manipulate light in a broad variety of ways, according to position and
lntensity. Moreover gels may be used to change its color. Although there is
~ome variation among individual soap operas, rnost do not stray far from a
high-key norm exemplified in shot five (Figure 1.6), doubtlessly due to the
11ecessity of lighting so many sets every working day. Katie's face is lit with a
, trong key light on her left side, a fill light to soften the shadows on her right
1111d a back light to highlight her hair and separate her from the background .
i\ lthough this effect is actually achieved with more than just three single
llghts, tl1e basic three -point principle remains in effect. Only in the most
1·xtreme circurnstances do soap operas deviate from this convention . Even in
thb nighttime, "candle-lit" scene, there are few shadows on the actors ' faces
e 1rnd lhe restaurant, as a whole, is broadly lit, although some accent lights have
h1•cn placed within the set to create a sense of depth (see shot 12, Figure 1.13).
i\ny consideration of soap opera's mise-en-scene would be incomplete
w1thout some mention of performance, of the gestures and movement
E 1hrough these diegetic spaces by human bodies. By popu lar consensus, the
''>'ICof soap-opera acting differs markedly from that on nighttime television
,111din feature films. Jane Feuer suggests that it is in acting style that the
A
, n11ccpt of excess truly applies to soap opera. She writes that although acting
Figure 1.35 As the World Turns: layout of Al's Diner, showing camera positions and 1111 tclevision seriais seems quite sedate when compared with nineteenth -
actor blocking of the scene where Brad proposes to Katie. 11·11turytheatrical conventions,
 nevertne1ess Jt appears excess1ve in comparison to the more naturalistic
mode currently (1984) employed in other forms oftelevision and in the
cinema, justas the overblown "bad acting" in Sirk's fi.lmsdid for its time.
Yet both forms of melodramatic acting are in keeping with related con-
ventions for distilling and intensifying emotion. 32
Jettisoning the evaluative baggage that "excessive" nonmally carries when
applied to acting, Feuer argues that the stylized "over -acting" in melodrama
is certainly appropriate to the intensity of the emotions portrayed . lndeed, it
is here that one may most clearly see the "return of the repressed" that has
been posited as residing in the visual style of 1950s melodrama . Toe A TWT
scene chosen for analys is is a poor one to illustrate melodramatic acting as it
is one of emotional constraint, of two characters resisting their attraction for
each other. However, tl1e scene I broke down in 1984, which features an
argument between two characters, does indeed contain "excessive" facial
expressions. (Video clips of this scene and similar ones are available on
TVStyleBook.com .) Marisa Tomei's performance in that scene transgresses
contemporary conventions of "realistic" acting- exemplified, possibly, in the
work of Meryl Streep. More important , the style of Tomei's performance
serves as a marker , a signifier, of an extraordinary emotional experience .
Obviously, what she says and how she says it communicate distilled, intensi -
fied emotion to the sympathetic viewer. For some unsympathetic viewers,
this emotional sign ifier represents something else entirely. "Melodramatic"
acting exists on the edge of self-parody .33 Persons unfamiliar with the genre
or accustomed to other acting convent ions may be distanced from Tomei's
performance and find it amusing . The acting in soap op eras, as with all
acting, brings up the problem of reception, for one person's realism is
another 's melodrama. Feuer's article assumes that there is general agreement
upon th e conventions of contemporary acting when, inde ed, they are still
quite indeterminate .34
Soap Opera Videographic Properties
These three aspects of mise-en-scene (sets, lighting, performance) cannot exist
in a vacuum. They are always articulated through the video camera and
related technology. Toe regime of videography greatly intluences our under -
standing of the television image. We may see this in at least four videographic
properties: the use of vídeo as a record ing medium, framing and camera posi-
tion, focal length and the zoom lens, and post -production special effects
(including dissolves, fades, chroma key, and so on) .
Because they are recorded on video, soap operas more closely resembl e
television news "actualities" (video of news events), reality -television pro -
grams, and talk shows than they do nightt ime drama s and theatr ical films,
which are, for tl1etime being, shot on 35 mm film. Toe advent ofhigh -defini -
tion digital -vídeo recording is quickly changing this reliance upon film stock,
but it remains true that soap operas - even those shot in HD vídeo - are no t
presented in as high a resolut ion as theatrical films and television dramas
su~h as Law & Order (1990- ) and CSI: Crime Scene Jnvestigation (2000-).
Th1s resemblance to what television marks as "reality" supports John Ellis'
c,onte~1~ion: "Television presents itself as an immediate presence ... .
1 elev1s~o~pretends to actuality, to immediacy; the television image in many
transm1ss1ons (news, current atfairs, chat shows, announcements) behaves as
though it were live and uses the techniques of direct address." 35 Ellis believes
that tel;v isi~n l~cks Barthes' photo etfect, that sense of "presence -yet-
~bsen_c~ wh1ch 1s ~ener::ed by _the photographic and cinematic images.36
feleVI_s1011
, tnstead, 1s an unmediate presence" -s eemingly live and person -
ally dnected at the viewer in news, talk shows and similar genres.37Ellis'
ar?~ment ~pp~ars particularly germane to soap opera. After ali, the geme
ongmated 111hve broadcasts and ATWT persisted in that format until 1975.
1n its present, recorded -video form soap opera strongly resembles those
broadcasts that we know to be live presentations : local newscasts, sports pro -
grams, Saturday Night Live, and so on . Soap operas seem Jive and, ind eed,
(an choose to be live again. On August 4, 1983, Search for Tomorrow reverted
lo a live broadcast because the show's tape had gone missing and for the
wcek of May 13, 2002, One Life to Live was also broadcast live, iu what at
k-ast one reporter called a "ratings stunt. "38
For Ellis t11isimmediacy is part of his analysis of the text - viewer relation -
\ hip, but I would like to stress that this sense of "live-ness" is evident in the
videographic properties of the text itself, not just the presumed text- viewer
, ituation. Consider soap-opera framing, for example. Toe genre's reliance 011
'hc c~ose-up has often been noted, but what is seldom perceived is the com-
p;1rative haphazardness of these close-ups. Cinemati c codes of framing
opcr_ateto ~axi~ize narrat ive propulsion, to drive ilie story forward wiili
111 ,1x1mu111 d1eget1cetfect and minimum diegetic effort. Soap-opera videotap -
111 g, clue to ilie exigencies of multiple camera production, creates framing that
does not achieve this maximum effect. This is especially apparent in shots of
,11l clerated figure movement. Shot 18, for example, begins with Brad mostly
11
111of frame as he sits down (Figure 1.24). In the following shot, when Katie
1111~ her fork to her mouth, the camera is unab le to keep up with her (Figures
1 }6- l.31) and Brad partially blocks the shot (Figure 1.27). In pejorative
1,•, ms- terms which assume cinemati c conventions as the standard-the
>1i111p ositions of these sh?ts are clumsy and awkward . I wish to avoid those
1,•1ms, however, and suggest that this "awkwardness" functions to confirm the
li,111c1diate presence of the television image. Furthermore, it is as if the char -
11 kr contro ls the framing rather than the framing controlling the character.
1111•e.tmera doesn't fully anticipate the figures' movements. Hence, the
li 1rning on soap opera closely resembles framing in sports and news actuality,
uh lhe camer~ operator struggling to keep up váth the events that transpire
1
1' lorc her or him . This slackness of framing consequently marks ili e scene as
1111wc,:e "reali_~"(immediate presence) rather than "fiction" (photo effect).
1hl' 1mprec1s1011, of soap -opera framing of action has an addit ional impact .
li ,k1·ws the genre s close-ups toward medium close-ups. As we previously
 noted in scenic designer Ken Lewis' comments 011set design, the soap opera
is considered to be a genre built 011 "close-ups of talking heads," but my
exami11atio11 of two weeks' worth of ATWT episodes contradicts this pre-
sumption. Far more common is the medium close-up, as may be observed in
the analyzed scene (Figures 1.5 and 1.6). This aspect of soap -opera craft prac -
tices has both pragrnatic a11daesthetic implicatio11s.Pragmatically, a medium
close-up is easier for camera operators to frame. Barry Salt i11terprets this
avoidance of tight close-ups within the aesthetic standards and craft practices
of contemporary television and film:
under the fast-shooting regime of TV, there is a co11siderable danger of
producing ugly looking pictures of the actors ' heads in BCU ["big close-
up," more commonly known as "extreme close-up" i11the U.S.] if a slight
error is made in framing by the operator. In looser framings, slight
framing errors do not draw attention to themselves quite so much.39
Additionally, relying 011 medium close-ups for the majority of the dose shots
means that when close-ups, or extreme close-ups, are employed theywill have
more impact. For example, a subsequent scene in the February 1, 2008
episode escalates Brad and Katie's emotional state as she refoses his proposal.
For that scene, director Michael Erlbaum brought the camera in closer-sig-
nifying the characters' heightened emot ional state (Figures 1.36 and 1.37). ln
soap opera, as in most television, directors use the tightness of the framing to
signify the levei of intimacy and emotional impact of a shot - as can be varied
in the zoom shot.
ln tenns of focal length, soap opera's norm is a slightly wide-~ngle lens,
used ostensibly to make the small sets look larger. This focal length combines
with high key lighting and camera positions relatively far from the actors to
generate large depth offield. Shallow focus is consequently difficult to achieve.
Toe most significant aspect of camera focal length in the soap opera is the
genre's tendency to employ the zoom lens- that is, the variab le focal length
°
lens- to mark shots of particular emotional importance. 4 Feuer writes of its
use in nighttime seriais: "For coding moments of 'peak' hysteria, Da/las and
Dynasty will employ repeated zooms -in to
close-ups of ali actors in a scene."41 Feuer
suggests that this <levice follows a conven -
tion of daytime soap opera and e:xaggerates
it to the point of excess. Clearly, the
zoom -in is used to signal key emotional
moments, but my observation of daytime
seriais suggests that Dynasty and Dallas
have exaggerated this <levicevery little, if at
ali, beyond how it is used in daytime soap
opera. Moreover, rather than a distinction
Figure 1.36 As tlie World Turns: tighter
close-ups signify the heightened emo- based on degree of "exaggeration," I would
tions ofKatie and ... argue that the daytime serial's zooms differ
from the nighttime serial's zooms only on
the basis of the former's apparent Jack of
control. This distinction arises from the dif-
ferences in filming/taping procedure of
daytime and nighttime, and results in a dis-
cernible contrast between the two styles in
the images themselves. Toe single, film-cam-
era shooting style of Dallas and Dynasty
produces a much more controlled, precise
articulation of zooming codes than does the
multiple -camera videotaping of ATWT. Figure 1.37 ... Brad. In this !ater scene,
Toe soap opera's lack of "precision" links it she rejects bis proposal.
with news events and their illusion of
uncontrolled, unmediated "reality."
Visual Style and Editing
Television space-mise-en-scene articulated through videographic properties-
is manipulated through highly conventionalized editing patterns that comprise
''continuity editing," that editing system which initially developed in classical-
cra Hollywood.42 Central to continuity editing is the shot-reverse shot or shot-
counter shot structure, which is illustrated in two separate segments of the
;rnalyzed scene: shots 4 - 11 (Figures 1.5- 1.12) and 19-20 (Figures l.31 - 1.32).43
1n shot-reverse shot editing, crisscrossing camera angles alternate with one
another, presenting first one character and then the other, or, in other terms,
one spatial field and then another . "Scenographic space," according to Bord-
wcll, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, is built through this alternation and
other techniques of continuity editing.44 Brunsdon, drawing on an unpub -
lished paper by Andy Lowe, makes the following comments about the use of
l'diting and television space in the British soap opera, Crossroads: "Generally,
~cts have two distinct spaces arranged laterally to each other - that is, there are
lwo distinct camera fields, and it is the articulation of these fields which co11-
45
q ructs the space." ln the analyzed scene, two laterally arranged spatial zones
.ire developed around each body once Katie fully enters the diner, as can be
\CCn in the diagram of camera positions on the Al's Diner set (Figure 1.35).
1)uring the scene's d,essert-eating segment, the scenographic zones shift to the
lnrnt of the set, to a table that was not previously visible. Most "action"- in
lhis case, Brad and Katie's dialogue-occurs on two planes, or what can be
l,, llcd "axes of action."46 As illustrated in the diagram, there's one axis toward
1lw back of the set anda second in the front, cutting across the table. By having
111~l Katie and then Brad move to the table, Eilbaum is able to establish this
'-l'lOnd axis. Considering the scene was likely shot live-on-tape (aka, direct-to-
t.1pc),there must have been some nimble repositioning of cameras to avoid
nnc camera being shot by another. (Toe diagram shows five camera positions,
h111lhe scene was probably shot with four cameras, which, obviously, are not
111 lixed positions and can be moved on their dollies.)
 1'wre aiso mat camera A 1s posltlonect at a ':IU-ctegree angle to each action
axis and the shot -counter shot cameras (B and C) are positioned ata roughly
45-degree angle to each axis. This crisscrossing, 45-degree angle is preferred
for close-ups over a 90-degree angle because it generates three -quarter views
of the actors' faces instead of profiles and three -quarter vie-wsreveal more of
the actors' faces (e.g., Figures 1.5 and 1.6). Current craft practices hold that
this better displays the emotions registering on actors' faces and emphasizes
the words that come from their mouths.
ln soap opera's specific use of the shot -counter shot pattern we can see still
another i.nstance in which the seemingly li.venature of television is signified.
Soap-opera editing leaves out "significant" action that conventiona l- that is,
classical film-influenced - editing would include. This is illustrated by two
aspects of shots 12 and 13 in the analyzed scene (Figures 1.13- 1.15). Katie
walks out of shot 12 and is not seen while Brad reaches behind the counter.
We cut to her, seated, at the start of shot 13. Classical film editing - adhering
to craft practices during the 1930s- 1950s- might have induded a medium
shot in which both characters are visible as she changes location and goes
from standing to sitting (and picks up a glass of wine). Conventional editing
wisdom dictates that we return to a character in the sarne state in which we
left her or him. ln other words, Katie should be standing, without a glass of
wine, at the start of shot 13, as she was in shot 12. Once aga.in, soap-opera
style seems closer to the haphazardness of reality television or cinéma vérité
than to the precisely orchestrated style of prime -time television and theatrical
fiction films. One can easily picture a cut like this, missing a small bit of
action, in a program such as The Real World (1992- ), but not i.n a classical
film such as Casablanca (1942).
A second "violation" of continuity editing is a result of the serial nature of
soap opera. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, drawing on Thierry Kuntzel,
describe the scene's semi-autonomous nature:
the autonomy of the classical scene is a mixed one; the scene is both a
detachable segment and a link in a chain. As such, the scene can be taken as
having two roughly distinct phases, the exposition and the development.17
TI1eexpository phase establishes the characters involved, the space they will
inhabit during the scene and the temporal position of the scene's events (pre -
sumably after those of the preceding scenes unless it is marked as a flashback
or flashforward) . Serial narrative, however, is based on the prernise of in
medias res, of beginning in the middJe of the action and thus eschewing
exposition on a general levei. This genre-defining Jack of exposition reveals
itself in microcosm in individual scenes. Our analyzed scene begins 30
minutes into the episode, witJ1Katie and Brad in the midst of a conversation
that is previously established in six separate scenes that day - starting at :09,
:10, :12, :16, :22, and :24. We have thus skipped the exposit ory phase of the
scene and moved directly into its development phase . Moreover, this conver-
sation occurs in a space that was previous ly established in those earlier scenes.
lhe hrst shot of the scene captures Katie and
Brad in the middle of the diner (Figure 1.2),
and does not show us the candle-lit table
that was introduced previously (at nine
minutes into the episode) through a con-
ventional establishing shot (Figure 1.38).
This scene does not even offer us a re-estab-
lishing shot as we go from shot 12 to
13-although if you look closely at the
bottom of Figure 1.13 you can just barely
see the flowers that are on the table. Shot 16
Figure 1.38 As the World Turns: estab-
(Figures 1.18-1.2 0) serves as a retroact ive lishing shot of the diner, from earlier in
re-establishing shot as it shows us where the the episode. The scene analyzed in detail
counter is in relation to the table and ends skips the establishing shot since the space
with a Iong shot of the table in the room . has already been established .
Thus, taken in isolation, this scene does not
foll~w_continuity editing's rules for establishing scenographic space-moving
Katie mto an area of the set that we have not seen in this scene (and moving
her there while off screen). However, the truncation of exposition is a defin-
ing characteristic of the genre and is reflected in this scene's elision of an
expository phase. Since it is the seventh scene to be set in that space on that
particular day, an establishing shot of the diner would clearly be redundant.
Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson are less expansive in their consideration
of the ending of classical scenes, but we may surmise that many scenes have
dénouement phases that mirror their e).._1>ository phases. Once again, soap-
opera editing reflects its larger, never-ending diegetic structure . Toe most
common end to a soap -opera scene is some variety of a close-up, of a charac -
ler about to respond to an event or in contemplation of what has just
occurred. For example, our analyzed scene ends on a medium close-up of
Brad as he watches Katie eat and anticipates her discovery of the ring he's
hidden next to her piece of cheesecake (Figure 1.32). Anticipation is the key
hcre, as it is in so much of soap -opera narrative. TI1efinish of this scene does
not conclude the scene's action, as it might in a classical scene. Rather, it
,1nUcipates the conclusion in a future scene-which occurs at :34 of the
q1isode, less than three minutes !ater. That !ater scene begins without an
1·~tablishing shot, starting instead with a tight c!ose-up of Katie's cheesecake
,,s she continues to eat it (Figure 1.39- the first frame of that scene) and then
, hokes on the ring. Brad then shows her the ring and, not surprisingly, t11at
l.1tcr scene ends on a medium close-up ofher (Figures l.40 - 1.41), similar to
lhe scene -ending one of Brad, tJ1atanticipates what her reaction to the ring
w11l be. Thus we may see that soap-opera editing constructs scenes without
,•~p?sition or dénouement, scenes which signify in microcosm the Jarger
proJect of the narrative. Or, as Louise Spence observes,
The zoom in to the extended close-up ofthe character's face at the end of
lhe sequence is a dose Iook at the expression to enable t11eviewer to
 gauge a character's mental or emotional activity, forecasting new possib-
ilities. A climax may have been reached, but it is always undermined by
the promise of new climaxes, the potential for and prospect of more
problems ... and pleasures [ellipsis in the original]. 48
Soap Opera Time and Rhythm
Time on soap operas is quite unlike that in theatrical film and only minimally
related to that of the nighttime television series. Toe amount of diegetic time in
soap opera dwarfs that of the cinema and that of prime -time television. A 11,000-
hour text, such as As the World Turns, must presumably incorporate temporal
structures quite different from feature films or television's evening series. If it
didn't, soap opera would collapse beneath the weight of its own, ever-enlarging
storylines.How, then, are these mammoth time frames structured?
Television shares with the cinema the potential ability to manipulate time
through editing, but it seldom makes use of that potenti al- at least, not within
the individual scene . Shots are joined together in a seamless continuum that
Figure 1.39 As The World Turns : three Figure 1.40 ... contafos a ring on which
minutes !ater in the episode, a follow-up Katie chokes.
scene begins with a tight close-up of
cheesecake, which ...
preserves real time rather than manipulating or distorting it. A soap-opera
scene is normally taped straight through and simultaneously recorded by
three or more cameras. Scenes in prime -time dramas and classical films are
created from small fragments that are recorded one piece at a time by a single
camera on set. These craft practices have implications for the visual represen-
tation of time through editing. ln a multiple -camera , live-on-tape production
the recorded scene exists as a totality the moment the actors cease performing
it, because the cameras are typically switched-i. e., cut from one to the next-
while the scene is performed .49 Toe scene's temporal continuum exists a
prior i, during the performance, and is preserved as performed when
recorded. 50 ln contrast, a single-camera production records bits and pieces of
performance time, which must be assembled in order to construct the scene's
temporal continuum. What implications does this have for the representation
of time in the text? Toe inter -shot malleability of single-camera editing allows
its editors to lengthen or shorten shots- within the constraints of other
editing conventions-in ways that multiple -camera editors cannot. Shot 13,
in the analyzed scene, ends with Katie moving the wine glass toward her lips,
but it cuts before it gets there. If this were a single-camera production, the
editor could choose to lengthen the shot to include her taking a sip; but the
multiple-camera editor cannot as he or she has no additional material with
which to work. Similarly, if Brad's arrangement of the ring on the cheesecake
seemed to be taking "too long," the single-camera editor could shorten it. Toe
multiple-camera editor could, too, but the time constraints of editing 250 pro -
grams per year militate against making such minar adjustme nts. 5 1 ln sum, in
a live-011-tape, multiple-camera production the "real" time of the perform -
ance equals the diegetic time of the scene.
Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow contend that the equivalence of real
lime and story time in television reconfirms its imm ediacy. All television pro -
grams are in effect identified ·wi.ththe "live" television program. They borrow
lhe following scheme from M. Tardy, comparing the temporal structures of
lhe novel, the film, and the television program (= indicates equivalence, "#
indicates non-equivalence):

Novel: time ofliterary creation "# time of reading "# diegetic time
Film: time of cinematic creation "# projection -viewing time "# diegetic
time
TV program: time of television creation = transmission -viewing time =
diegetic time (time of event). 52

llrom this they conclude:

Figure 1.41 lhe last shot of the scene
shows Katie in close-up, much as the pre-
viou s scene ended on Brad in close-up.
Figure 1.42 As the World Turns : a !ater
scene resumes the action with Brad still
holding the ring, as if no time has passed.
Toe immediate time of the image is pulled into a confusion with the time
of the events shown, tend ing to diminish the imp ression of the mode of
presence in absence characteristic of film, suggesting a permanently alive
view on the world; the generalized fantasy of the television institution of
the image is exactly that it is direct, and direct for me.53
 Thus, the editing style of the individual scene conhrms what has alreacty bee~
noted in the context of soap-opera framing: the immediate presence of telev1-
sion. 'TI1isimmediate presence serves the ideological function of naturalizing
the representation. It invokes the illusion of a "reality" presented immediately
and expressly for the viewer. Heath and Skirrow's cornments are directed to a
news program, World in Action, but they apply equally well to soap opera. ·
Soap-opera scenes preserve a real-time temporal structure, but the length
of individual shots is modulated according to certain conventional rhythms -
regardless of whether those rhythms are _created ~th live switching or ~n
post-production. ATWTs and other Arnencan soaps scenes typ1callycontam
at least one alternating pattern of approxirnately equal shots -counter shots,
where each shot is three seconds or less. Longer re -establishing shots inter -
rupt these alternations. This alternation -longer shots-alternation pattern may
be observed in the example from ATWT. After the openi ng shot shows both
Katie and Brad, we launch into alternating shots of them that are three -to-five
seconds each. Then, shot 12 breaks that rhythm with a 10-second shot that
allows Katie to move toward the candle-lit table and Brad to start preparing
bis surprise. Shots 13- 16 slow the pace with two shots lasting over ten seconds
and shot 16, in which Brad hobbles to the table, is the scene's longest shot: 14
seconds. After this 14-second shot, the scene returns to short, alternating
shots of two -to-five seconds each. ln this typical, 20-shot scene we observe a
1 fundan1ental pattern: alternation of two visual fields with shots approximately
11 three seconds long, longer shots re-establishing the scene or developing the
action, and ternporary resolution.
1 One broad indication of the temporal rhythm of soap opera editing is
average shot length (ASL). Toe ASL of our five-episode sample of ~008 AT~_T
episodes is 4.84 seconds. 54 That number alone is not very revealing, but 1t 1s
useful to compare it with the ASLs of other times and other forrns of film/tel-
evision production. Salt, one of the leading advocates of statistical analysis of
style, has begun work on prin1e-time television dramas - including severa!
from the 1990s.55 Compared with those 1990s prirne-tinle programs, ATWTs
4.84 ASL is very fast, although, notably, the prime -time melodrama serial,
Melrose Place (1992- 9), was cut faster (4.0 ASL). Until further research is
done, however, it's impossible to know ifthat is also true of2000s prime -tinle
programs or theatrical films. Preliminary work has been accomplished by the
CineMetrics project, in which volunteers use software to calculate ASLs and
contribute them to a central database, and Shot Logger, a similar service that
calculates shot length from time -stamped frame captures. 56 ln the CineMet -
rics analysis of 46 U.S. theatrical films released 2000- 8, it has found a median
ASL of 4.8- meaning that an equal number of films are faster and slower than
4.8 ASL. And in data combined from CineMetrics and Shot Logger of 24 tele-
vision programs from the sarne time period the median ASL is 5.25-indicat-
ing that ATWT is edited faster than most of those programs . (See
TVStyleBook.com for more detailed data tables.)
One can see from Salt's analysis of hundreds of theatrical films that ASL
has consistently decreased since 1946. Toe median ASL offilms from the post-
World War II decade was over ten seconds, but by 1999 it had decreased to
57
5.92 seconds. My analysis of ATWT ASLs from 1984 and 2008 confirms this
general decrease. The median ASL of my five-episode sample from 1984 is
7.77 seconds, or 53 percent slower than the median ASL of 5.07 calculated
from my five 2008 episodes. I suspect that the decrease would be even more
radical if ATWTs live broadcasts from the 1950s and 1960s were generally
availab]e. Preliminary analysis of television programs from the 1950s finds
ASLs over 10 seconds are quite common and an episode of The Honeymoon -
crs broadcast October 1, 1955 was shot at the relatively leisurely pace of 17.7
58
scconds per shot. An incomplete analysis of one live, 1960s ATWT episode
111 l'he Shot Logger database clocks in with a 12.6 ASL, but, more notably, this
1·pisode indudes long takes of 30 seconds and more, and some scenes are
played in a single shot.
Even though the time frame of the individual scene is firmly rooted in real
l1111e (albeit modulated real tin1e), the temporal relationship among scenes
,111damong the daily episodes is much more ambiguous. Derry provides a
, 1,uting point for the analysis oftime in soap operas. He contends that there
,11\.' basically two, sometimes contradictory time schemes: "Extended Time"
,1nd "Landmark Time." He explains:
First there is what can be termed a Landmark Time: that is, the episode
broadcast on Thanksgiving is generaUy represented as Thanksgiving, Iike-
wise with Christmas. Landmark Time is complicated by the intrusion of
lixtended Time, whereby one day of soap opera story can be extended
into a week or more ofhalf -hour or hour episodes.59
1IH'~c are further complicated, Derry notes, by the idiosyncratic time schemes
11
1d' rlain diegetic lines. He points out that the time frames of pregnancies are
l11• q11c ntly drawn out, while those of children aging are compressed. 60 Indeed,
1)11•l.111 cr is so common that the soap-opera press and fans have dubbed it
',I >RAS"- soap opera rapid aging syndrome .6 1 Time, it would appear, is con-
1111 1tcd rather casually on soap operas.
1hc implausible, occasionally contradictory time schemes of soap opera
1
1, ,·vidcnt in my ATWT samples. ln the episode that contains the Brad and
1 , 1tt· sccne analyzed above, the subsequent scene of her choking on the ring
11
1111·, to a conclusion with Brad saying, "I was trying to propose ." He holds
111, 11ng in a close-up (Figure 1.40) and then the scene fades to black, at :34 in
1111 hm1dcast, with a shot of Katie appearing shocked (Figure 1.41). After the
111 1
1 111 Katie, the act ends, going to commercials. Following the commercial
"" 11 ,1ncl five intervening scenes, including one just outside AI's Diner, we
• 111111to a close-up of the ring at :42 (Figure 1.42)- as if Brad were frozen in
1111l'm ilion for that entire time. He begins the scene with the line, "J wanted
1 ,, 111go so much better ." Within the logic of the story, Brad's two lines
11
•11 rld only be a few seconds apart, but they are separated by eight minutes of
111
,d, ,I \ I lime and, more significantly, four m inutes of diegetic time occur -
111111 111fivc other locations .
 1 empora1 extens1ons and gaps may not t>etarge m soap opera, t>uttney cto
indicate a more general component of the genre's temp oral style: time is
manipulated, but only between scenes and, especially, between episodes. This
temporal manipulation may result in either extended or compressed time. On
the one hand, diegetic time may be drawn out (as we see above); entire scenes
may even be repeated shot for shot. On the other hand, diegetic time may also
be elided. One segment might end with the characters heading for bed; the
very next scene following the commercial break could be the following day.
Indeed, soap opera may even cons truct a time frame that is apparently contra -
dictory when examined closely, but which seems to make sense while viewed.
Thus, even though the time within a scene adheres strictly to real time con-
straints, the time between scenes and between episodes is quite malleable,
shaped to fit conventional dramatic demands .
This intersegment malleability is facilitated by television's highly seg-
mented nature. Though there must be absolute consistency within a particular
segment- as in the temporal structure of the individual scene- there may be
considerable variation in the time scheme between scenes. Television assumes
pragmatically that the viewer may not have seen the previous segment and
may not see the succeeding one. 62 Consequently, the relationship between
scenes is less causal than the classical cinema, where the narrative is assumed
to be "a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring intime and space"
(BordwelJ and Thompson). 63 ln television, the narrative "links" are very
loosely soldered together, forming a chain that is more dependent upon
simple succession than causality. ln this regard, soap opera is the apotheosis
of television. Its numerous diegetic lines (approximately 20 on ATWT cur -
rently) demanda flexible time scheme in order to facilitate the many activities
that are occurring at the sarne diegetic time; i.e., within a similar present
tense. As Brunsdon notes regarding Crossroads, "There is no single linear time
flow." She continues, "Toe different present tenses of the narrative co-exist,
temporalJy unhierarchised." 64 Individual scenes- small pareeis of present
tenses, as it were- marshal the viewer's attention for the scene's duration,
setting her or him in a rigid real-time scheme. Toe next scene, however, is still
another small pareei, and one which may bear little relationship to the previ-
ous one. Indeed, it may well cont radict the present tense of the past scene. No
present ten se is given greater priority in the world of soap opera, because the
hierarchy tha t exists in classical cinema has been mostly dismantled. 65
Toe hour -long episodes of ATWT in 2008 are broken down into largely
self-sufficient scenes- each typically lasting between 50 and 70 seconds. 66
Scenes are considerably shorter now than they were in 1984, when the average
was above two minutes per scene. In one extreme example, a scene from our
sample week is just five seconds long (and a single shot) . Using the week from
2008 for some specific figures, one can note that median number of 38 scenes
per day are distributed in six segments of commercial -separated narrative
action, which are often called "acts." Acts average six minutes, one second
each- ranging from four to ten minutes, with the second act usually being th e
longest and the fourth act the shortest. Out of each 58.5-minu te daily program
(trom the first shot of the first pre -credit scene to tl1e end of the copyright
credit) , 22 minutes and 14 seconds, on average, are devoted to non -narrative
material . Hence, some 38 percent of each program "hour" is actually extra-
diegetic material. It is small wonder that soap operas were sponsored by soap
manufacturers and proved to be the financial backbone of the television net -
works for decades. Even though the length of the programs has stabilized at
58.5 minutes, there have been significant changes in how that time is alloc-
ated. ln I 984, there were seven narra tive acts, not six as there are today. And
in 1984 ATWT broadcast over 40 diegetic minutes every day. Today, that
number is down to 36 minutes and 20 seconds. Or, viewed from another per-
spective, the percentage of time per episode devoted to non -narrative material
has substantially increased over that time, from 30 percent to 38 percent.
Soap opera time is compar tmenta lized into self-sustain ing individual units
of scene, segment (diegetic acts and extradiegetic commercial breaks), and
.~ingle day's episode. Toe relative strength of the division between each of
lhese units is signified by the <leviceused for the transition. Transitions from
\cene to scene within an act are almos t invariably achieved with straight cuts,
while the conclusion of an act is marked with a fade to black- to facilitate
111ovement from a diegetic segment to an extra -diegetic one or vice versa. Toe
l'fld of the day's program is marked with a copyright notice. Dissolves are
, d dom if ever used between units though they do occur occasionally within a
,n: ne for an "artistic" effect. ln making use of these various transitions to
111 ake tempora l breaks, soap opera is ernploying conventions inherited from
1lw cinema. Depending on the context, a cut can signify immediate succession
oi lhe two images joined-or it can mean an indeterrninate amount of time
h.1s passed. A fade, in contrast, signifies a substantial ellipsis. As we shall see,
1
, 11 lain audio eiements work to pull the viewer across those bound aries, but
1l1l' basic princip ie remains one of segmentation.
"ºªPOpera Sound
1lil· soundtrack is a crucial cornponent of soap opera. As radio soap opera has
il11•,1dy proven, tlie genre can do quite well without any visual accouterments.
1 w n loday it is entirely possible to "view" television soap opera without actu-
dlr 1>cc ing it; indeed, there are many who listen rather than watch. ln an
11111 '811ingthrowback t0 radio days, CBS has rnade available audio-only pod-
•~t, of A TWT, which it touts thus: "As As the World Turns prepar es to celeb-
1 11,· ris 50th year on television, this the show that has delighted fans for so
111 11g has something new to offer: a podcast of th e complete audio track of
67
11 li l'pisode." Unlike Guiding Light, ATWT never existed in a radio forrnat,
l,111 11, podcast closely resembles a radio broadcast-down to an announcer
11111111 lucing the scenes and explaining the action. For instance, the podcast of
Ih, ,111, llyzed scene includes this commentary: "Katie tries the door, but it
1 1111'1 opcn." (Toe Television Style website conta ins an excerpt from the
11
1 d 1 .,, 1.) Soap opera's emphasis on dialogue is evidenced in most of its
1 lpl \ which contain very little specific action and few, if any, camera
positions. ln a practical sense, the images are constru cted to illustrate the
words, rather than vice versa. Heath and Skirrow have noted, "Toe problem
for television as in stitution of images is then the constraint of the image, its
ideological currency constantly to be maintained: the commentary must be
accompanied, the screen filled ."68 ln this regard, sound "precedes" the televi-
sion image. As Ellis has argued, television appeals more to our desire to hear
than ou r desire to look: "ln psychoanalytic terms, when compared to cinema,
TV demonstrates a displacement from the invocatory drive of scopophilia
69
(looking) to the closest related of the invocatory drives, that of hearing."
Instead of demanding the sustained gaze of the cinema, Ellis continues, televi -
sion requests on ly that its viewers occasionally glance in its direction, when
summoned to do so by signals from the soundtrack.
Assuming the primacy of sound in soap opera, we can articulate specific
stylistic patterns that characterize the genre's use of dialogue, music, and
sound effects. Of these three, dialogue has proven to be the dominant concern
for those who have written on the genre. Most of this material has focused on
dialogue's preponderance at the expense of physical activity. Ellis's comment
typifies thinking on the subje ct: "It [soap opera] is massively composed of
talk; conversation, specula tion, confrontation, chat." 70 This has been borne
out by content analyses, such as Natan Katzman's 1970 study of "Characters
and Conve rsation s": "Almost everything that happens in soap operas takes
the form of verbal activity.... Toe characters talk, and talk, and talk. "71
Although since the 1980s those soap operas which seek a more youthful audi -
ence have incorporated more adventure stories and less talk, the basic prin-
ciple remains the sarne : characters suffer and discuss their suffering. If we
accept the dichotomy between doing and suffering, action and passion that
Geoffrey Nowel\-Sm ith traces from classical tragedy in his discussion of film
melodrama, then soap opera has inherited the legacy of "passion" from the
cinema. 72 ln our analyzed scene from ATWT, Brad and Katie do not act ually
do much of anything beyond eating a little cheesecake and talking about
whether they sh ould eat that cheesecake - the dessert servi ng as a metaphor
for their on -again-off -again romance. The unspoken subtext is Brad's lave for
Katie, which they'II talk about later in the episode. Toe "actions" they discuss
(Brad wanting to propose) are themselves principally verbal actions rather
than physical ones. In soap opera, talk is the main topic of conversation.
An analysis of the content of soap -oper a dialogue is well outside the
purview of this study, but I would like to offer a few observations on the inter -
depend ent relationsh ip of dialogue style, editing, and syntagmatic narrativ e
form. 73 Dialogue functions as one of the most common and most significant
<levices for overcoming the segmentai nature of television and concate natin g
one scene to another-"hooking" together links in a chain, as Bordwell main -
tain s.74 As a result, it strongly affects the operation of television style. Dialogue
constructs a question-and-answer pattern. It may be as explicitas one charac -
ter asking where another might be, followed by a cut to that character. More
often, a character will simply mention another in a style that suggests there is
some question surrounding what that characte r might do. Dialogue continu -
ally acts as the catalyst for new enigmas in the never-ending narrative chain
that is at the very heart of the genre. This eternally confounded hermeneutic
works its way into soap opera's smallest narrative unit, the single scene . Small
questions are answered whi le larger ones are held in abeyance. Tirns the soap
opera does not so much continuously withhold resolution, as it does pareei
out incomplete pieces of closure. And, as we can see in the way dialogue is
ma11ipulated, those pieces of closur e always construct the foundati ons of new
enigmas.
Melodrama has been as closely associated with music as it has with words.
TI1e term itself derives from the eighteen th-century theatrical tradition of
meios (music) drama. Judging from the parod ies of soap opera such as "As the
Stomach Turns" of 711eCarol Burnett Show, circa 1969, organ music is as
closely identified with the genre as is the mountain of verbiage. In many paro -
dies, the type of music and the style of narrativc are actually those of radio and
1960s television soap opera much more than those of contemporary television
programs. (A sample of 1960s ATWT audio is on the TVStyleBook.com.)
Rising organ and resonant announcer voicing queries (from Our Gal Sunday:
"The sto ry asks the question, Can this girl from a mining town in the West
hnd happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?")7 5 have been
rcplaced by pseudo-rock rhythms, plaintive solo guitars and piano s, and cop -
yrighted popular songs. The music is digitally synthesized and added during
post -production, although until recently the music cues were inserted as
\'/'WTwas shot. Rock musicas performed by its original artists began to be
11sedin narrative television in the later 1970s and our sample week from 1984
does include a Pat Benatar tune. 76 Previously, rock-style music performed by
,tudio musicians had been the standard on the rare occasions when rock
music was necessitated by the narrative- say, when cha racter s visited a
discotheque. Indeed, until the late l 970s soap operas generally avoided rock
music, considering it inappropriate for their older, conservative audience. 77
1hc freque nt use of rock music on today's soap operas, as well as on tradition -
,dly conservative sports programs, indicates that this musical style has
••~hicved general acceptance. It also reflects the interest of the netwo rks in
more youthful consume rs.
Evcn though the style of soap-opera music has evolved, its function has
l,1rgcly rem_ained the sarne. Music, more than any other element of mise-en-
' h,e, is responsible for setting the mood and marking intense emotions. Toe
111,1lyzed ATWT scene begins without music, but it starts under Katie's line,
Oh, that's not fair," in shot seven (Figure 1.8) and then con tinues to the end
111lhe scene. 1t has no distinct melod y in this case, but rather vamps synthe-
1/ l'd notes with a (digitized) electric guitar playing over it. At th e end of the
1 l'IH\ a deep bass note grows louder, mirroring Brad's rising emotions in the
1 l'llC, as he waits for Katie to discover the ring he's hidden in her dessert
11gurc 1.32). Toe music's crescendo at the end accompanies the final shot of
111 .1d conte mplating Katie and serves to heighten the suspense of what will
11.ippcnnext. 1t then continues across the cut to the next scene (Figure 1.33),
11 lwrc it segues into a new musical theme. Toe rising musical theme, a
 , styusuL use 01 lllUSIL, St:lVl:!S a uuai
l:OIIVt! Il llOllal lli:IJ 1auvt: IUII\..L IUII, Mg1111y
ing both the segment 's conclusion (as it gains volume) and d rawing the viewer
into the next segmen t (as it contin ues into the next scene).78 As with the dia -
logue, music generates narrative momen tum-in an attempt to count eract
segmentation. Just as there is ~usic "Jeft over" ~hen ~he scene en? s,
severa! narrative elements remalll unresolved: w1IIKatie find the nng. W ill
:º
she accept Brad's proposal? It is critical to the soap oper a form that emotions
are never quite fully discharged; traces always linger. As Laura Mulvey has
written about film melodrama, a certain excess remains - "an excess which
precludes satisfaction ."79 Some emotion has been drained off, but , as the
music suggests, emotional und ercurrent s continue to flow throughout the
day's program.
Small Oases of C losu r e
In Sandy Flitterman 's consideration of soap-opera commercial_s,she arg~es,
"Far from interrup ting the narrative flow of stimulated yeanu ng for a JUSt
conclusion and perpe tua} indication of its impossibility, commercials are
small oases of narrative closure, homogeneous and systematic units of
unproblematized meaning." 80 Furth er, she ~haracter iz~~ th~ soap-ope~,a•s
"technical execution " of its narrat ives as tendmg toward relat1ve poverty -
or what we have been calling zero-degree style- while commer cials are
imbued with stylistic riches, one might say.81 Flitterma n's insight is an ~port -
ant one that is borne out by ou r sample ATWT weeks, where comm ercials do
indeed offer 30-second oases of closure in vast deserts of narrative aperture.
Toe stylistic significance of commercials is considered fully in a l~ter chapt~r,
but it is worth briefly considering here how the style of commerc1als stands lll
stark contra st to the style of soap operas discussed above.
As Flitterm an notes, commerci als make use of camer a movement and
angles, special effects, and music in ways that are not to be found in the stand -
ard soap-opera dialogue scene and its reliance upon shot-counter shot. What
is particularly intriguing, however, is how narrative commercials use a com -
pressed and maximized articulatio n of classical style- or what Bordwell calls
"intensified continuity'' - to present their didactic stories of a product's success
82
in its alleviation of pain, hung er, low self-esteem, and so on. "Toe new s~le
amoun ts to an intensification of established techniques ," Bordwell argues m
2006, "lntensified continuity is traditional continuity amped up, raised to a
higher pitch of emphasis."83 Because the comm ercial has only 30 seconds or
Jess to make its point, it must do so with extremely efficacious sound a~d
image. Take as an example, a 15-second Pillsbury Crescent rolls comrnercial
that aired repeatedly during the 2008 sample week. (See Table 1.2. Toe com-
mercial itself is included on th e TVStyleBook.com.) It rapidly tells the story of
two girls al a family dinner. They stare each other down over the last roll in a
basket. Ennio Morricone's theme from 111eGood, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
accompanies their competition - a common use of intert ext uality _to signal
quickly the story's meaning. After staring for 11 shots, the first girl shown
bt
- grabs lhe roll, but a moth er figure simultaneously arrives, proclaiming, "I've
got more." A narrator then delivers the pitch over a shot of the product and
the Pillsbury Doughboy: "Pillsbury Crescents. Do you have enough ?" Thus in
~o
15 seconds, we have exposition (the opening long shot, lastfog just over one
second ; Figure 1.43), conflict (the girls staring each other down; Figures 1.48-
1.49), clímax (girl one grabbing the rol!; Figure 1.55), and dénou ement (after
lhe moth er brings more, one girl giggles; Figures 1.56). Further, one need not
dig deeply to expose the "unproblematized" consumerism and sexual politics
of this narrative as it is the mother who serves the rolls and it is her anxiety
that is inv?ked in the ad's tagline, "Do you have enough?" Toe "you" being
addressed 1sdoubtlessly the mothers in the viewing audience.
As Flitterman contends, this commercial clearly features blunt narrative
closure to support its consumerism, but it is more than that. It is a short,
intensified chunk of the continuity system and single-camera product ion
breaking up soap opera's attenuated, zero- degree style and multiple -camera,
live-on-tape shooting. Fourteen shots comprise the commercial, cut so
q~ickly that a ~ne-grained average shot length calculation is necessary- using
vtdeo frames mstead of seconds (based on video's frarne rate of 30 per
,ccon d). Toe commercial's ASL is a mere 32frames (one second, two frames),
\~ith one shot lasting just ten frames (one-third of a second). Roughly four
11111es faster than ATWTs cliegetic scenes, it exceeds the cutting rate of ali the
lcature-length films in CineMetrics', Shot Logger's and Barry Salt's data-
h.1ses.84 Although the editing is much faster than feature-length films or
prime-time television could sustain, it remains a textbook example of con-
11nuityediting. There is no dialogue until the m other's line at the very end
,1nd so the editing is moti vated solely by the looks of the two girls-at each
nthcr and at the rolJ in th e basket. ln shot one, the first girl looks across the
t.1ble at the second, which cues the cut to the second girl (an eyeline match
, 111 ; Figure 1.43 to 1.44). Toe second girl then looks down (Figure 1.45),
whcreupon the camera cuts to a subjective shot of the biscuit (Figure 1.46)-
111sho~ th~ee._What is notabl e about shot three is that it would be impossible
Ili ,1ttam m hve-on-tape, mul tiple-camera shooting. To achieve that precise
,1111 1, the camera would have to be positioned where the second girl is sit-
1111H - right on the axis of action - and wouid th en be visible in shot five of
111,11 girl (Figur~ 1.48), which comes just one second !ater. Toe cut from a
1
, ond subjective shot-the ~tre me close-up in shot 11 (Figure 1.54)-to the
11111Hshot in shot 12 (Figure 1.55) has the sarne issue. Point-of-view (POV)
linl~ such as these are extremely rare in soap operas. Exceptions do exist, but
1li,"c shots must be achieved after the main scene has been shot, making them
•• tly and expendable. Toe analyzed scene above includes a shot that comes
l11w, when Brad arranges th e ring next to the cheesecake (Figure 1.17), but
• 1 ,·n that tight close-up is not fro m his POV. Oth er aspects of this commer-
1li \ ~tyle also do not fit with the craft practices of multiple-camera produc-
'"" As Salt has noted, the extreme close-up of the first girl (Figure 1.54)
1111ld lypically be avoided in multiple -camera shooting, because it would be
.1111,~u lt to frame her eyes so tightly.
 , 'J - .. - - - - ~- ·, - -- , ·- - _ ...........
ing both the segment's conclusion (as it gains volume) and drawing the viewer
into the next segment (as it continu es into the next scene). 78 As with the dia-
logue, music generates narrative momentum-in an attempt to counteract
segmentation. Just as there is music "left over" when the scene en~s, so ~o
severa! narrative elements remain unresolved: will Katie find the nng? W11l
she accept Brad's pro posal? It is criticai to the soap opera form that emotio ns
are never quite fully discharged; traces always linger. As Laura Mulvey has
written about film melodrama, a certain excess remains - "an excess which
precludes satisfaction. "79 Some emotion has been drained off, but, as the
music suggests, emotional undercurrents continue to flow throughout the
day's program .
Small Oases of Cl osu re
In Sandy Flitterman's consideration of soap-o pera commercial~, she ar~es,
"Far from inter ruptin g the narrat ive flow of stimu lated yearnmg for a JUSt
condusion and perpet uai indication of its in1possibility, commercials are
small oases of narrative closure, hom ogeneous and systematic units of
unproblematized meaning."80 Further, she characterizes the soap-opera's
"technical execution" of its narratives as tending toward "rela tive poverty" -
or what we have been calling zero-degree style- whiJe commerc ials are
imbued with stylistic riches, one might say.81Flitterman 's insight is an i~p ort -
ant one that is borne out by our sample ATW T weeks, where commerc1alsdo
indeed offer 30-second oases of closure in vast deserts of narrative aperture.
Toe stylistic signifi.cance of comm ercials is considered fully in a l_aterchapt ~r,
but it is worth briefly considering here how the style of commerc1als stands m
stark contrast to the style of soap operas discussed above.
As Flitterman notes, commercials make use of camera movement and
angles, special effects, and music in ways that are not to be found in the stand -
ard soap-opera dialogue scene and its reliance upon shot-counter shot. What
is particularly intriguing, however, is how narrative commercials use a com-
pressed and maximized articulation of classical style- or what Bordwell calls
"intensified continuity''-to present their didactic stories of a product's success
in its alleviation of pain, hunger, low self-esteem, and so on. 82 "Toe new style
amounts to an intensi.ficationof established techniques," Bordwell argues in
2006, "Jntensified continuity is traditional continuity am ped up, raised to a
higher pitch of emphasis."83 Because the commercial has only 30 seconds or
less to make its point, it must do so with extremely efficacious sound and
image. Take as an example, a 15-second Pillsbury Crescent rolls commercial
that aired repeatedly during the 2008 sample week. (See Table 1.2. Toe com-
mercial itself is included on the TVStyleBook.com.) It rapidly tells the story of
two girls at a family dinner. They stare each other down over the last roll in a
basket. Ennio Morricone's theme from 771eGood, the Bad and the Ugly(1966)
accompanies their competiti on-a common use of intertextuality. to signal
quickly the story's meaning. After staring for 11 shots, the first g1rl shown
....'"""" ", - ,. _ _.............. .... , ...,.b_. .. ,,.., grnv s Ult! rou, but a mother figure simultaneo usly arrives, prodaiming , 'Tve
got more." A narrator then delivers the pitch over a shot of the product and
the Pillsbury Doughboy: "PiJlsbury Crescents. Do you have enough?" 'Thus in
15 seconds, we have exposition (the open ing long shot, Jasting just over one
second; Figure 1.43), conflict (the girls staring each other down; Figures 1.48-
1.49), clímax (gid one grabbing the roll; Figure 1.55), and déno uement (after
the mother brin gs more, one girl giggles; Figures 1.56). Further , one need not
dig deeply to expose the "unproblema tized" consumerism and sexual politics
of this narrative as it is the mother who serves the rolls and it is her anxiety
that is invoked in the ad's tagline, "Do you have enough?" Toe "you" being
addressed is doubtlessly the mothers in the viewing audience.
As Flitterm an contends, this commercial clearly features blun t narrative
closure to support its consumerism , but it is more than that. Jt is a short,
in tensified chunk of the continu ity system and single-camera production
break.ing up soap opera's attenuated , zero- degree style and multiple -camera,
live-on-tape shooti ng. Fourteen shots comprise the commercial, cut so
quickly tha t a fi.ne-grained average shot length calculation is necessary- using
video frames instead of seconds (based on video's frame rate of 30 per
second). Toe commercial's ASL is a mere 32frames (one second, two frames),
with one shot lasting jus t ten frames (one-third of a second). Roughly four
times faster than ATWTs diegetic scenes, it exceeds the cut ting rate of ali the
feature-length films in CineMetrics', Shot Logger's and Barry Salt's data-
bases,84 AJthough the editing is much faster than feature-length films or
prin1e-time television could sustain, it remains a textbook example of con-
tinui ty editing. There is no dialogue until the mother's tine at the very end
a.nd so the editin g is motivated solely by the looks of the two girls-at each
other and at the roll in the basket. ln shot one, the first girl looks across the
table at the second, which cues the cut to the second girl (an eyeline match
cut; Figure 1.43 to 1.44). Toe second girl then looks down (Figure J .45),
whereupon the camera cuts to a subjective shot of the biscuit (Figure 1.46)-
in shot three. What is notable abou t shot three is that it would be impossible
to attain in live-on-tape, multiple-camera shooting. To achieve that precise
~hot, th e camera would have to be positioned where the second girl is sit-
ting- right on the axis of action-an d would then be visible in shot five of
that girl (Figur~ 1.48), which comes just one second !ater. Toe cut from a
,ccond subjective sho t-the extreme close-up in shot 11 (Figure 1.54)-to the
long shot in shot 12 (Figure 1.55) has the same issue. Point-of-v iew (POV)
,hots such as these are extremely rare in soap operas. Exceptions do exist, but
those shots must be achieved after the main scene has been shot, making them
1 ostly and expendable. Toe analyzed scene above includes a shot that comes
do se, when Brad arra nges the ring next to the cheesecake (Figure 1.17), but
1·venthat tight close-up is not from his POV. Other aspects of this commer-
' 1,ll's style also do not fit with the craft practices of multiple -camera produc -
11011. As Salt has noted, the extreme close-up of the first girl (Figure 1.54)
would typically be avoided in multiple-camera shooting, beca use it would be
d1llicultto frame her eyes so tightly.
l lltJle l.k t'II ISO Ltr y \..,[eSLO::lll IUHS <.-Ulll lllt:l l.,ldl ut1.,uuyuie
\/ 101 Number, Figure Sound Action/Camera
Shot Number, Figure Sound Action/Camera 'irn/e, and Length Movement
Scale, and Length Movement

1 [Ennio Ali shots are d ose-up

long shot Morricone's handheld. 11 frames
39 frames theme from ( J/íg ure 1.47)
(Figure 1.43) 1he Good, the
Bad and the
Ugly (1966) ,
begins.
Ambient
sounds of the
dinne r party
can be heard .]
medium shot
2 16 frames
medium shot ( Ng11re 1.48)
26 frames
(Figures
1.44- 1.45)

h
[Ambient
111\'dium shot sounds fade
17 frames out. ]
( Fi,'lllf C 1.49)

, losc- up
3 Voiceover:
, I frames
close-up Flaky on the ( /'lgure 1.50)
26 frames outside, soft on
(Figure 1.46) the inside.

continued
 'J'able 1.2 contmued
Shot Number, Figure
Sound Action /Ca mem
Sound Action/Camera Scale, and Length
Shot Number , Figur e Mov ement
Scale, and Length Movement
12
Mother figur e:
long shot
8 I got mo re.
•18 frames
close-up [Ambient
( fi gure 1.55)
21 frames sound fades
(Fig ur e 1.51) up.]

"
, losc-up
11 frames
9
close-up ( Vi,:rire1.56)
10frames
(Figure 1.52)

11
Voiceover:
l"nH shot
Pillsbury
, 1lr.,mes
10 Small zoom in. Have Enough?
Crescent s. Do
1/ 1g11
rc 1.57)
close-up you have
17 frames enough?
(Figure 1.53)

1hc cconomic and physical impera tives of soap-opera produ ction prevent
11
11 1111111 being able to create a commercial like this, but the aesthetics of soap-
extrem e close-up
16 fram es 'I '' 1,1 lt'nft practices also enter into the equation. For instance, th e comme r-
(Figure 1.54) 1 il ,~ l'nlir ely shot with a handheld camera - signify:ing the tension between
Ili, twn girls, perhaps. Soap operas have access to handheld cameras and there
11111hing econom ic or physical preventing them from using them in every
\ , 111• lndced, on rare occasions, soap operas do use them - including an
i I li /' \CCne within our sample week of Lily and Holden in a hospi tal stair-
11 llul these exceptions merely prove that the ATWT directors are able to
11 · ,1 111 th is manner, but that it does not fit the aestheti c conventions of soap-
1 , 1 , 1,1ft practices for day-to -day shooting . Similarly, ATWT could con-
1hl) shoot scenes with minimal or no dialogue- as in this
.,,11w1da l- but soap opera's aesthetics would not "allow" it. TI1Us,we may
111,11 l'Conomics, pragmatic production concerns, and aesthetics blend
1li1, to fonn the craft practices of the genre .
A Conclusio n that Precludes Satisfaction
Style is a fundamental component of the soap-opera apparatus - a significant
and signifying element. Style validates television's iUusion of immediate pres-
ence and hence certifies the world presented as "natural" and naturally for the
viewer. Soap-opera style also transcends television's segmentalized nature.
Although editing patterns const ruct self-sufficient narrative units, a specific
manipulation of dialogue and music propels the story forward, beyond seg-
After re~iding at the bottom of soap -opera ratings for months, GL sought
lo reverse 1t~bad fortune by adopting a radically different rnode of produc-
11011th~t re1ected fundamental element s of multiple- camera , live-on-tape
production. As of the episode aired February 29, 2008, handh eld digital
• ,lmcras are used to record scenes that are either shot on location (using
i','.1pack, New Jersey, to represent tbe show's fictional town of Springfield) or
11
11 40 newly constructcd , four -wall sets. Toe medium close-ups that are still

mentai boundaries, and beckons to the viewer to stay tuned. Small, almost lhe standa rd on A TWT have been replaced with tight close-ups and frequent
self-contained narrative pieces are revealed, while larger issues rernain in P'<lreme close-ups. And the conven tion s of continuity editing have been so
limbo. ln this fashion, style serves the crit ica! function of nurturing and main- 11
·l,1xcd that they're practically non-existent. Toe 180-degree mie is often
taining the genre's diegetic en igma s. A do se analysis of soap -opera texts luokcn and standard shot -counter shot editing has nearly been eliminated.
reveals a consistency to this style, which I label the multiple-camera (',,•~ sample on _TVStyleBook.com .) 111is radical restructuring of the soap
proscenium schema and summarize in Table 1.3. 11
111:ra s craft practices was done, accordi ng to GL's executive producer, Ellen
Toe future of the soap opera, in general, and soap-opera style, in particular, Whccler, to bring "realism" to the genre: "Now we are able to tel1 stor ies that
is in question. After decades of reliable ratings and income production the 11t' rnuch more real life. People wanted to see the realness and that's what we
88
genre finds itself losing viewers at a rate that alarms network executives, soap- 111·giving them." However, as one perceptive GL fan noted in an online
opera producers and media buyers alike.85 As Rino Scanzoni, chief investment '111/lctinboard, the claims to realism are rather specious:
officer for media buyer, GroupM, commen ted, "Daytime ratings are bleeding
and it's a problern for advertisers." 86 Soap-opera producers have employed a 1 also am getting a headache with your hand held camera work. It's like
number of strateg ies to woo n ew viewers-in cluding increased online offerings Blair Witch Project now. Your camera work is very bad for a soap. Low
(e.g., podcasts) and contests designed for coUege-aged stucients. And CBS exec- angle, extreme dose ups, birds eye view, etc., makes it too stylized for
utives, such as Barbara Bloom, senior vice president of daytime, have reportedly me.• .. Toe new look can be outside, but at least don't have so many jump
advised their lower-rated programs to "'evolve' their production process,"87 or, cuts and extreme dose ups that ignore the mise en scene that is so
in other words, to significantly alter their craft practices. Toe most radical of important. How does an eight year old boy show up ali over the place ali
these efforts in terms of soap-opera style is the approach taken by CBS's Guiding lhe lime. He doesn't get stopped, ever. It is too unrealistic. You have gone
Light (comrnonly abbreviated as GL), the oldest television soap opera and the to less realism, not more. 89
only remaining program to have made the transition from radio.
1l\cd in with the claims to realism are also aspirations for a "more cinematic
1111
1,,•l," which it does if one equates the cinematic with cinéma vérité (as in The
Table J.3 MuJtiple-camera proscenium schema
ll/,111 Witch Project) and not with classical style. Additionally, GL's new
Mise-e11-scene Editing (live-on-tape) • ,l11ingschema owes a good deal to prime -time shows such as 24 (2001- ) and
Interiors and in-studio exteriors Stableaxis of action tlll'il rcjection of continuity ecliting. As 24's cinematographer, Rodney Char -
Limitednumber of recurringsets Shot-reverse shot tc 1 '• t·xplains, "We don't worry about the line [of axis]. We don't believe in it.
Prosceniumset design Gaps; missingaction \\ •· ross the line ~ll the time. "91
Lateral (x-axis)blocking,some limited Theatrical-scenetime
diagonal movement Malleabletime between segments 1hc ongo ing changes in today's soap operas sharply illustrate the pres -
High-key lighting Few POV shots 1111 ·, placed on craft practices and their motivations for change - summed
"Excessive" perfom1ancestyle 111 1
111 Wheeler's defensive comment: "This is nota desperate survival move.
111 1, is •: creative, financially efficient way to move soap operas into the
Videography Sound
Video (not film)recording Dialogueintcnsive 1 ll11H -. GL has always led the way.''9'2ln GL's audacious use of sound and
lmprecise framing Functional music, supports narrative l111 •1Kt: wc _may be witnessing a significant shift in soap -opera 's stylistic
Relianceon mediumshots li! IIM, w1th new implications for how style signifies. Or , we may be wit -
Zoom in for emphasis(especiallyat scene 1 , 111g ª.genre_in its death throes, as could have been observed in radio soap
ends)
Cameras outside fourth wall/proscenium !"''•'' mcludmg Guiding Light in radio format-in the late 1950s.93 ln
Large depth-of-field 11la·1case, the contemporary soap opera offers a telling case study for
1, ll\tll analysis.
 l e lev1s1on anct L..cro-ucg rt!c vLy11:: 1 t!11::v1~10nana Lero-Uegree St yle 65
64
12. At a time when television soap opera, like its radio antecedent, was broadcast in
IS-minute episodes , As tire World Turns was the first 30-minute soap op era and,
No tes . . A · an !ater, among the first pro grams to expand to 60-minut e episodes (in 1975). The
Caldwell Televísuality: Style, Crisis, and Authonty zn meric
l. John Thornton ., U iversity Press, 1995), 56. expansion to half-hour television programs proved to be a crucial development in
Televisíon (New Brunsw1ck: Rut gers n d Derry Dyer Ellis Feuer, Flitterman, the demi se of the radio soap opera . Fifteen -minut e television programs were not
. (
2. See especially cite
• d b l
e ow
) Allen Bnms on,
• ki S . . , ' '
nd Skirrow. And, on a persona
1 cost effective, but 30-minute programs, on a per -minute basis, were mu ch more
K hn Lovell Modles , e1ter , a . . d"
Geraghty, Hea th ' . ' ' th e 61ter of a raduate education m cinema stu ies profitable than radio pr ograms of that era. Consequently, th e expansion to 30
note, I perceive teleV1s1~nthro ugh . l ame !s well as courses on soap opera. minutes was the deaili knell for radi o soap opera. Similarly , the expansion of
and severa! years expenen ce teac~ ng t 1e~ '. the Development of Feminist Tel- popular television soap operas to 60 minutes in 1975 was prompted by industrial
5
3. Charlotte Brunsdon, "The Role O ?ªP d p~raSmp OiperasAround the World, ed. needs. Ratings declined in the early part of iliat decade, lead ing to a decline in
. " To Be Contmue •••· oa . h"
evision Seh o Iars htp, tl d ) _ _ Develop ments m t 1s area profitability. An hour of a popular program could bri ng in m ore reven ue than two
1995 49 65
Robert C. Allen (New York: Rou e ge, d A; nette Kuhn See Jane Feuer, "Melo- medío cre 30-minut e shows.
were docurn ented earlier by Jan_e_Feu~:a " Screen 25, ~o. l (January/Feb ru ary 13. Maryjo Adams, «An Ame rican Soap Ope ra : As the World Turns 1956- 1978" (PhD
drama, Serial Form and ,:1·e1ev1s10,nG y, " Screen 25, no. 1 (January/February diss., The University of Michigan, 1980), 12 1. Moreov er, Adams states, "Today ,
1984): 4- 16; and Kuhn, Women s enres, Mond ay's episode is usually a recap of what happened the week before" {122).
1984): 18- 28. ., 52 5 11. CNET Networks , "As the World Turns Episode Guide," TV.com , www.tv.com/a s-
4. Brunsdon, "Toe Role of Soap Opera, - . in Today's Soap Op era: Notes on a the-world-turns/show/162/episode_guide.html?season =52 (accessed May 29, 2008).
5. Tania Modleski, _"The Sear~h _for To~~:;r;3, no. l (fali 1979): 12- 21. Jncorp o- 1,;_ David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Líglit: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: Univer -
Feminine Narrauve For?1, fr_lm Q~-~ Jengeance· Mass-Produced Fantasies fo r sity ofCalifornia Press, 2005), 4, 15.
rated in Tania Modleski, Lov111gwr a . Ih Adams , "An Ame rican Soap Opera, " 132.
Women (New York: Meth~e n , 1982). " Tabloid 6 (1981): 43. 11 "C BSat 75," CBS, 2007, www.cbs.com/ specials/cbs_75/time line/1960.shtrn1 (accessed
6. Ellen Seiter, "Eco's TV Gurde - The Soaps,a commercials may be analyzed in term s )une 10, 2008).
7. ln thls theore~cal context even ~ºªf1~~t1:r~an's use of Chr istia n Metz's "Lar ge ~yn: 1K Evcn these resources are rather hit or miss . Cu rrently, the networks' websites onl y
of their narrat1ve effect. See Sa? Y "The Real Soap Operas: TV Comme rc1als, prcsent a limited nu mber of past episodes. And SOAPnet, which is owned by ABC,
tagmatic Category"-:-~and~ F_lttt:;"}tpnp, roaches- A n Anthology, ed. E.M . Kaplan , .1rries justa few non -ABC program s.
in Regarding Telev1sron: .ri r~ . 1983) 84-95. 1'1 Adams , "An Amer ican Soap Opera," 140. David R. Jackson has compiled a list of
(Frederick: University Pubhcattons of Ame~1ca, f the,World of Work in Daytim e q11sodcs in arch ives, which confirms the haphazard preservation of the prog ram .
E M G d "Representat1on o
8. See, for exam ~le, ". 1 . ª1 e:rEm loyment Counseling 8 (197 1): 37- 42; Charlott e \n • "ATWT: W here the Old Episodes Are, " Classic As the World Turns, www.
Television Senal s, Journa 0J PS " Sae en 4, no. 22 ( 1981): 32- 7. For 111·ot itics.com/Television City/Studio/ 5 185/ sources/vi dsou rces.ht ml (accessed May
O
Brunsdon , "Cross~oads - No}e:~':m o:~ n t:;•o pera , see Patrícia Tegler, "Bibliog 1
h, 2008).
an annotated b1bhography O
raphy," in Life on Daytime
Mary Cassata and Thomas 5
J~ .
:J~:
T . American Serial Drama, eds.
1(~~~; ; 11 1 1Publishing, 1983), 187-20 2. ln
00
a h ave been written - for exam plc.
11 lhl · initial 1984 stud y breaks down a scene from the July 20, 1984 broadcast.
\lt hough I make few dire ct reference s to that breakdown her e, it does in form my
1ppmac h lo the 2008 scene.
addition, a variety of dissertati on s o_nsoapfoD p er ·me Televi sion Serial Viewer s: an l 1,111us 13.Messmo re, "An Explora tory lnvestigation of Below-the-Line Cost Com -
· "Gratifications o ayt 1 . , 1''"l l'IIIS for Soap Opera Produ ction in New York City'' (DPS diss. , Pace Univer -
Ron ald James Co mpesi, Ali M Children" (PhD diss., Un 1vers1ty oi
Analysis of Fans of the P rogram y t com (publication number AA 1 11), 1988), 20, retrieved from ProQuest Digital Dissert ation s (AAT 8914658).
·1 ble fro m www.proques · 07)
Or egon, 1976) , ava1 a t D" ital Dissertations (AA T 7704 7 . ,-.11·,sinorc also includes a table of actual below-ilie -line costs (40).
7704707; accessed AprU 25, 2 º? ~). P~o't1:~se~~e, and the Soap Opera (New Yort.. \,, 1111 1111 g to Adam s, writing in 1980, "Today, As the World Turns has over 82
9. Charlotte Brunsdon, The Fem11)11st ,t th usefuln ess of ethn ographi c meth od, 1••1111 ,111 1•111scts in the storage shop, though usually no more than nine or ten sets
O xford U_niv~rsity Press, 2??º e;~:r:s (C~ristine Geraghty , Dorot~ y Hobson ", 11\l'd 111a normaJ da y's shooting .» Adan1s, "An Am erican Soap Opera," 148.
by interv1ewmg five teleV1s 10:ilen Seiter) about th eir research expenenc es w1th 11,1111',11111wn, "Tclcvis ion Soap Op eras: What's Been Going on Anyway?" Public
Terry Lovell, Ien Ang, a nd . D . S p Operas· The Power of Ple11 .,111, • ' ,,,,,.,,, C),wrll'rly36, no . 2 (summer 1972): 209.
. S e Watchw g ayt1me oa · . . t li II ln I ll' n y, "Tclcvision Soap Opera: lnce st, Bigamy, and Fatal Disease," Journal
viewers. Lomse pen e • . . p ) develops her own vanati on nn
(Middlet own: Wesleyan U01vers1ty ress, 2005 f t/1 l/11/i-1•11/ty f ilm n11 d Video Association35, no. 1 (winter 1983): 8.
\
ethnograph ic and psychological method s. h on Coronation Street also conu·11 11hl •I
10 The BFI's infonnative, but shor t, m~nograRp_l d Paterson does provid c ~01111 111111 tl,111," ('1111srcuu ls," 34.
· . rrative ,orm. 1c1ar ' .
trates predomtnant 1Y on na . ., f h ·ai but the bre vity of his aru clc dn, li, 1 111h,.111 u· or~cllin g has informcd mu ch work on cinematic melodrama -
•
th oughts on th e sty is ic
r r rheton
.
c o t e sen ,
S R. h d Dyer Chr isti.n e Geragh ty, M,11u111 1 1111111 11~ w11h ·1homos Elsacsscr's obscrvation that certain 1950s melodramas use
• 1 bo ration ee 1c ar , . .
not allow for su Ilicien 1 eª · d Joh n Stewart Corollfr/1011Str, • 1 t 11111 "º
,111dd1·,or a, to rd lcct thc charactcrs' fetishist fixations" (Thomas
Jordan, Terry Lovell, Ri~ha rd Paterson, an ' 11 i! , 1, l ,1k s o i Sound .111dFury: O bscrvation s on thc Family Melodrama ,"
(London: British Film lnstttute ~ 19_81). d 11 0cc 1 "Ncw \'ork '/'imc., (IX• 1 1111 '"'"' 1 l 1'17li 10). 11h,1, ,11'><l111formnl J,1nt· Fcucr's a nalysis of nighttim e
1l. " 'As World Turns ' on CBS W1II Ex:pan r~º uc~tu;om (:u·-,·-."·,l i\ p11\ 2'1, 200Kl .,11,I I' "I" ,,1, ,p1·11hl, III) l>y111nt11 (Fl'Ul'.r, " Mdudrnma , Serial Form," 8- 10).
C11rrenl file), Septembcr lO, 1975:_1\l\ dVWI 1·,P • , ·111 1 1:1111 , .. Ni·w \' ,nk I ""'
1111111 l1l,"11••l1 ,,.1111• d,11t111w\li.l i' npn,1' h,1vt·.1,pl rl'd lo tht· gl.1111 011roi tom picuo ll',
1 111~''
RalphT yc1 r, "Can Soap Actors hn ,O 197• PP ,. w"wp,,,. • 1111 .1111111 •
(,11,rs,111 /\p11
1 ,1 11 111111' 111111
111 111,Ir d1·1111, rlw w 1111·, sc·ll 11111, 1r111,11r1rl'i,11,vdy h,1111:11 u~i1114
(IR57- C11rr e11/jilP), Nowm hcr j ;·. 11 11111,,,,,1,,,11,,,/,/111l,11111, 11y l '1 11 Ih, 11111 llln 111('li ,t 1\1 11,11111,i ll\lll
2008). ' lhl' ,·xp,1n,io1111, h1u1111111µ,rnw, 'l)I•" ,
28. Messmore provides studio schematics for Search for Tom~rrow and Ano!her
World, which illustrate the deployment of sets within the stud10s. Messmore, An
Exploratory Inves tigation," appendix Q. . .
29. ln addition, they have 31 dressing rooms, two contrai rooms and one ed1t suite.
City of New York, "Stu dios and Stages," Mayor's Office of Film Theatre & Broad-
casting, www.nyc.gov/html/fihn/html/resources/studios .shtml (accessed June .3,
2008). " 9
30. Interviewed in March 1978. Adams, "An American Soap Opera, 14 •
31. Herb Zettl, Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics, 4th edn (Belmont :
Wadsworth, 2005), 153.
32. Feuer, "Melodrama, Serial Form," 10.
33. Douglas Sirk's films have this problem . . . . .
34. Toe image of actors/characters in soap opera 1s d1scussed further m Jerem}1 .G.
Butler "T m Nota Doctor, But I Play One on TV' : Characters, Actors and Actmg
in Television Soap Opera, " Cinema Joumal 30, no. 4 (summer 1991): 75- 91.
Reprinted in To Be Continued ... Soap Operas Around the World, ed. Robert C.
Allen (New York: Routledge, 1995), 145- 63.
35. John Ellis, Visible Fictions (Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992), 106.
36. Tbid.,38.
37. Ibid., 106. . " (H Ed. · ]
38. Richard L. Eldredge, "Soap Opera 'Life' Visiting Live Terntory orne 1t1on •
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 13, 2002, Dl, www.proquest .com
(accessed June 4, 2008). . . . .
39. Barry Salt, Moving Jnto Píctures: More on Filrn H1story, Style and Analys1s (London.
Starword, 2006), 337. .
40. In most instances, this eífect is achieved with a zoom in ~nd not ~rough physical
movement of the camera closer to the actor. A dolly-in 1s more d1fficult to shoot
than a zoom in, ma.king it less cost-effective.
41. Feuer, "Melodrama , Serial Forro," 11- 12.
42. For a more detailed explication of film editing and the 180-de~ee sys_tem,see the
chapters, "Space in the Classical Film" and "Shot and Scene" m_Davi~ B_ordwell,
Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Class1calHollywood Cmema . Film Style
& Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia Uni versity Pr~~s, 1985),
50- 69. For a broader application of these film-based concepts, _seeZettl, Struc~ur-
ing the Four -Dimens ional Field: Cont inu.ity Editing," in S1ght Sound Motion,
285- 309. And for an overview of the Holly-woodproduction process, _seeThomas
Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studw Era (New
York: Pantheon, 1988). . 61. Daniel R. Coleridge, senior producer at SOAPnet, attributes the tenu to Mimi
43. ln cinema studies, shot-counter shot has been at tl1e center _ofhighly co~troversial
Lacanian incursions into textual analysis-ultimately evolvmg mto the system of
the suture " Key texts include Daniel Dayan, "Toe Tutor-Code of Class1cal
Cin ema," Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (fall 1974): 22-31; and William Rothman,
"Against 'Toe System of the Suture,'" Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (fa~ 1975): 4_5-~0.A
recent overview of the controversy may be found in Edward Bramgan, Pro;ecting a
Camera (New York: Routlege, 2006), 133- 45.
44. Bordwell et ai., Classical Hollywood Cinema, 58.
45. Bnmsdon, "Crossroads," 35. . The segment is self-contained in TV production partly beca use of the fragmen -
46. See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Tntr_oduct1on, 8th edn
(New York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 231-4. Zettl refers to the ax1s of act10n as the
"índex vector line" (294). . .
47. Bordwell et ai., Classical Hollywood Cinema, 63. lhe elements of classical narra~ve
have been extended into contemporary cinema in Kristin Thompson, Storyt ellmg
in the New Hollywood : Understanding Classical Techn ique (Cambr idge: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
48. Spence, Watching Daytime Soap Operas, 93.
49. 1his is more true of soap operas than another multiple-camera genre, the sitcom.
In multiple -camera sitcoms, the feeds of ali cameras and severa! takes of each scene
are ali recorded. ln post -production, the editors assemble ali that material into the
final product. ln multiple -camera soap operas, the post -production períod is much
shorter and so the editors must rely largely on the scene as switched live.
50. Utilizing a content analysis of "characteristics of form," Gretchen Barbatsís and
Yvette Guy come to a similar conclusíon, but frame it in different terms: "ln soap
opera's similarity to the intensification of live television, it is 'as if there were an
actua) event, existing in real time and possessing a rhythm of its own, which deter-
mined the screen event created from it." Gretchen Bar batsis and Yvette Guy, "Ana-
lyzing Meaning in For111:Soap Opera's Compositiona l Construction of'Rea lness,"'
Journa/ of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 35, no. 1 (1991): 59- 75, Communica-
tion & Mass Media Complete, EBSCOhost, www.ebscohost.com (accessed June 11,
2008).
51. Around 2005, ATW T changed editing systems to the Sony Xpri, a non -linear
editor. This greatly accelerated their editing process and may facil.itatesmall editíng
twea.kssuch as this one. Ken Lewis, "As tl1eWorld Turns Nonlinear," Editors Guild
Magazine (May- )une 2006), www.editorsguild .com/v2/magazine/archives/0506/
features_article02.htm (accessed June 5, 2008).
52. Stephen Heath and Gillian S.kirrow,"Television, a World in Action," Screen 18, no .
2 (summer 1977): 53.
53. Ibid., 54.
54. lhe length of every shot in the sample, along with frame captures from each shot,
is available on Shot Logger: www.shotlogger.org.
55. Salt, "Toe Stylistic Analysis of Television Drama Programs," in Moving Into Pic-
tures, 259-76.
56. CineMetrics, "Movie Measurement and Study Too! Database," CineMet:rics, www.
cinemetrics.lv (accessed June 5, 2008); Shot Logger, "Frame Captures and Stats,"
Telecomm unication and Film Department, University of Alabama, WW'N.shotlog -
ger.org (accessed June 5, 2008).
57. Salt, "Toe Stylistic Analysis," 320.
58. Shot Logger, "TV or Not TV," Telecommuiúcation and Film Department, University
of Alabama, www.tcf.ua.edu/slgaJJery/shotlogger/TitleListDetailPage .php?recordID
=23 (accessed June 5, 2008).
59. Derry, "Television Soap Opera," 6- 7.
60. Ibid.
Torchin, editor-in -chief of Soap Opera Weekly. See his comment to the online
article at "Is the Evil Sheila Returning to Young and the Restless7" TV Cuide.com,
commt 111ity.tvgu ide.com/blog-entry/TVGuide-Editors-Blog/Soaps-News/700000046/
700008741 (access~d June 6, 2008). A Wikipedia article provides numerous SORAS
examples. Wikipedia contributors, "Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndro111e ," Wikipe -
día, 'll1e Free Encyclopedia, en.wikiped ia.org/w/index.php?title=Soap _Opera_
Rapid_Aging_Syndrome&o ldid=217241280 (accessed June 6, 2008).
62. Ellis observes,
tary nature of much broadcast TV (especialJy if it carries spot advertising), but
also because of the attention span that TV assumes of its audience, and the fact
that memory of the particular series in ali its detail cannot be assumed .
(Visible Fictions, 148)
63. Emphas is in original, Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 75.
64. Brunsdon, "Crossroa.ds," 34.
65. lhe erosion of scene-to-scene diachronic causality in soap opera leads to a narra -
tive forn1 quite distinct from (some would say inferior to) classical film and the
 traditional novel. Robert C. Allen has argued, however, that although this syntag- 88. !C. Powers, "Guiding Light Producer Dishes on Changes," The Soa Dis enser
matic structure of soap opera may be seen as one -dimensio11al, the genre articn - ahrch 6, h 2008, ( w,.vw.thesoapdispe11ser.com/2008/03/guiding-ligfu -pr~ucer:
lates a surprisingly "elaborate paradigmatic structure." Indeed, a synchronic d •_ses:on-c anges accessed June 10, 2008).
consideration of character relationships reveals a dense layering of potential 1!9.CVh1ctona ~1kMolov,hin respo11seto A.C. Powers, "Guidi11gLight Producer Dishes on
meaning that is fully decipherable to on ly the most dedicated viewer. (See Robert anges, are 6, 2008 The Soa Di
com/2008/03/ uidin -li 1 _ ' . P spenser, www.thesoapdispenser.
C. Allen, "On Reading Soaps: A Semiotic Primer," in Regarding Television, 102- 3.) 90. A11drewKruk gw . t ?ll produce _r -d1sh:s-on-changes (accessed June 10, 2008).
o ski, L1ght ofReahsm Shmes o11Veteran Soap Opera" T, l . .
Moreover, drawing on Lévi-Strauss, one may posit thematic oppositions structur -
ing these paradigmatic relationships. Richard Paterson and John Stewart, for W eek 27, no · 7 (M are h 3, 2008) : 4- 4, A cademic Search Premier, EBSCOhost
, e .ev1s1011
ww
, ; bsco host.com (accessed April 8, 2008). ' w.
example, maintain that the British soap opera Coronation Street emphasizes three
structural oppositions: inside/outside, male/fema le, and work/no-work (Richard
Paterson and John Stewart, "Street Life," Coronation Street [London: British Film
,;~
·Jb~
Cli°~k Start~ Ti~king on Season 6," Videography, Ja11uary2007, 22.
. ic ae ogan, Ins1de Gwdmg Light's Extreme Makeover" TV G 'd F b
Institute, 1983], 84). 25,. 2008),.c?mro~nity. tvguide.com/blog-entry/TVGuide-Editors -Blo;s~} s~
66. Toe average length of an As the World Turns scene during July 18- 24, 1984 was Ins1de-Gu1dmg-L1ghts/800034134(accessed June 10 2008) p
one minute, 55 seconds. Toe longest scene ran tive minutes, 53 seconds; and the '11· On April 1, 2009, CBS announced that G ·din 1· h' u1 ·
berl8 2009 BillCart "CBST OU!' _tg two dbe canceledasofSeptem -
shortest, 13 seconds. ' · er, ums ut Gwding L1ght'," New York Times A ril 1
67. CBS Netcast, "As the World Turns, " CBS Broadcasting, www.cbs.com/netcast/ 2009b , www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/arts/television/02ligh htmJ? r-2 (acces,sedpSe '
tem er 4, 2009). · ·- - p-
archive/atwt _ archlve.shtml (accessed June 6, 2008).
68. Heath and Skirrow, "Television," 19.
69. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 137.
70. Ibid., 157.
71. Katzman, "Television Soap Operas," 209.
72. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minnelli and Melodrama," Screen 18, no . 2 (summer
1977): 115.
73. Dialogue is also an integral component of Allen's intricate paradigmatic structure
of character relationships (Allen, "On Reading Soaps," 103).
74. David Bordwell, "Toe Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema," David Bord-
well's Website on Cinema, January 2008, WW\v.davidbordwell.net/essays/hook.php
(accessed June 10, 2008).
75. Quoted in Madeleine Edmondson and David Rou11ds,From Mary Noble to Mary
Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (New York: Stein a11dDay, 1976), 45.
76. As late as 1978 and WKRP in Cincinnati, the inclusion of songs by their original
artists was considered innovative .
77. Although 18 to 34-year-olds (the target audience for rock music) also co11stitutea
large segment of the soap opera audience, more than 50 percent of the genre's
viewers are over 35 according to studies done i111970 a11d1980. See Katzma11''Tel-
evision Soap Operas," and Mary Cassata and Thomas Skill, "Television Soap
Operas: What's Bee11Going 011Anyway?- Revisited," in Life on Daytime Televi-
sion: Tuning -111American Serial Drama, eds. Mary Cassata and Thomas Skill
(Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1983), 160- 3.
78. This is what Bordwell refers to this as the "hook." Bordwell, «Toe Hook."
79. Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk a11dMelodrama, " Movie 25 (winter 1977/8): 56.
80. Flitterma11,"Toe Real Soap Operas," 94.
81. lbid.
82. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 23.
83. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells Jt: Story and Style in Modern Movies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 120.
84. Toe six- minute short by Guy Maddin, The Heart of the World, may well be cut
faster. Its CineMetrics ASL is 0.9 seconds.
85. Jennifer Ordonez, "A Real Cliffha11ger,"Newsweek 151, no. 4 (Ja11uary28, 2008):
58- 9.
86. John Consoli, "Soaps 011the Ropes," MediaWeek 17, no. 14 (April 2, 2007): 7, A ca-
demic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 8, 2008).
87. James H ibberd, "Cha11gesPlanned to Save 'Turns' and 'Light,"' TVWeek, Octobe r
15, 2007, www.tvweek.com/blogs/james -hibberd/2007/10/changes_planned _ to_
save_ tums.php (accessed June 10, 2008).
4.
Style in an A ge of Media
Convergenc e
We are in an age of media transition, one marked by tactical dccisions and
unintended conseq uences, rnixed signals and competing interest , and mo st oi
ali, unclear direction s and unpr edictable outcomes .1
(Henry Jenkin,1
A printed book may well be the worst med ium in which to discuss the quic kh
accelera ting and recondite changes going on in television today. A book's lcad
time of a year or more virtually guarantees it wiU be out of date tlie mom ent it
appears. 2 Toe only future -proof aspect of media convergence is what wa,
already evident in 1983 to the "prophe t of conve rgence," lthiel de Sola Poo l
who wrote, "There is no immutable law of growi ng convergence; the proc ess oi
change is mor e comp licated than that." 3 Today , Old Media are flailing about
keening about their precipitously declining revenues while New Media makr
grand claims about the dig ital revolution, but can not seem to make that revolu
tion profitable, to "monet ize" it, in their parlance. 4 Thus, although it is clear th.it
the broadcast and print media are chang ing in ways as significant as the imp atl
television had on radio after World War II, there is little consensus on how tlll·
proc ess will evolve or what the end result will be. Wh en Jenkins assayed tlw
state of television's con vergence with othe r media in 2006's ConvergenceCult,m
he enco untere d a profoundly unclear situatio n and be moan ed, "Wr iting thb
book has been challenging because everything seems to be changin g at once and
there is no vantage point that take s me above the fray."5 Yet even though tlw
endpoint of the process remains unclear, there are irnportant lessons to lw
learn ed from examini.ng how the current process of convergence has histori
cally developed. 'fhe clumsy online efforts of NBC's long -runnin g, old-med ia
pro gram, ER (1994-2009) , in the late 1990s can elucidat e how convergence can
both fail and succeed, semio tically and aesthetically. Most importantly in tlw
cont ext of this book's overarching project, an examination of the show can help
us begin to understand h ow convergence will affect television style. Technol o
gical changes frequently have their greatest impact in the realm of style, as, for
example, the move to color television did in the 1960s. Toe current evolution/
revolution is no exception. We can already see how th e YouTube generati on
ha s different expectation s for the look and sound of visual stories than do
138
prcvious generations raised on television and the cinema , sans fntern et. ER taps
11110
mu ch of that stylistic change, ma king for an illumin ating case study of the
1mpactof technolo gical and cultural change upon stylistic schemas.
í he State of Conve r gence in th e 199Os
ln an attempt to generate media and public int erest in ER's fourth season , the
,kbut was broadcast tive and several o nline events accompanied it. NBC touted
11as more than jus t a television broadcast. It was to be a "cyber-event "- the first
1oint effort ofNBC and Warner Bros. Online.6 "Anyth ing Can Happen On-Air
m Online!," warn ed one breathless press release about this "unpr ecedented"
wason prerniere.7 W e were told to expect spontaneous, perhaps obscene,
,mprovisation and daring, without-a -net per formances . Toe tight hegernonic
, ontrol that broad cast networks exercise over their programm ing was going to
hé rent asunder, we were led to beüeve. Clearly, NBC succeeded in its attempt s
to create a media event with this bro adcast. Toe episode scored a 31.2 Nielsen
1,1tinganda rnassive 46 share-making it the third most watched episode in the
history o f U.S. television dramas, trailing only Da/las'"Who Shot J.R.?" episode
.md the series finale of Magnum, P.l. (from 1980 and 1988, respectively).8
1lowever, the "liveness" of this live event was actually quite limited. Toe actors
11nprovised very little-stay ing remarkably dos e to the script, according to the
person who did the closed captioning-a nd there were few disruptions of the
, taging.9 Moreover, the success of its simulta neous cyber-event was debatable.
11s website offered little more than text-based, behind -the-scenes chats with the
laSt and crew, a "virtual tour" ofits sets, anda few meager RealVideo clips. This
washardly state-of -the-art digital technology for 1997.
What intrigu es me about ER (the program ), "Ambu sh " (the live episode) ,
,md ERLive(the website) is what they can tel1 us about the convergen ce of film,
tdevision, and the digital realm. As the millennium ended we began to see
useful, interdisciplinary investigations into these converging media. Much as
John Ellis' Visible t'ictions mapped the media terrain of the 1980s, so did Mar -
garet Morse's Virtualities and Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on lhe Holodeck
provide insights into film, television, and digital media of the 1990s and
bcyond .10 What I propose to do her e is offer some thought s on ER's use of the
conventions of tl1e cinema, television, and digital, online media in the 1990s. I
.1mmost interested in identifying the stylistic conventions in the program and
ris Web presence and interr ogating their signifyin g functions. How does ER use
,tpparatuses of the cinema , television, and the digital realm to construct an
rmmensely popular , meanin g-bearing cultural ar tifact?
Jean Renoir's Legacy : The Crime of
M. lAnge Comes to P rime, Time T e levi sion
Although man y of its fans would bristle at thc suggestio n, ER's thematic and
narrati ve structur es are virtua lly indistinguishable from the less pr estigious
daytin1e soap operas examined in Cha pter 1. ln both ER and soap opera, a
 large set of charac ters interacts with one another in continuing stories, so mt· 17
1 wall. lnstead, the sets incorporate enough room to aHow the presen ce of cast,
of which take months to resolve. A quick examination of its narra tive thr ead, , l l'W, and cameras within their four walls. Due to the capacious nature of the
leads one to iss ues of birth, death, disease, guilt, innocence, gossip, and ,l'ls, ER sprawls over four sound stages on the Warners lot in Los Angeles-
romance-ali of wh ich have previou sly been iden tified in soap operas. 11Anti 011..upying an enormous amount of studio real estate. One so und stage contains
yet, ER is not perceived as a soap opera or "normal" television. A large pari oi lhl' admitting and trauma rooms. Two are devoted to the operating rooms, the
this perception is due to its "cinematic" stylistic schema. As we have seen in t lcan" space, and the connecting hallways. Toe fourth is given over to "swing
Miami Vice (Chapter 2), ER's mise-en-scene and cinematogra ph y resem blt· ,·1\"- sets which change based on the weekly needs of the story and include
those of a theatrically released film. This style serves severa) functions, but tlll' ln1..ationssuch as the apartments of the characters. These production decisions
most important of these is product differentiation. ER's cinematic single-cam li.1vcevident aesthetic results. With four walls and connecting hallways, the
era schema differentiates it from multiple -camera daytime soap opcr., hlocking does not have to adhere to prosceniwn -based aesthetics. Toe actors
(compare with the contrast between single -camera and multiple -camera telt· 111.iyroam the sets at will (or, rather, at the will of the directors) and action may
vision comedies, as arrayed in Table 5.3). lts particular use of cinematic styk t,,kc place in depth .
helps set it apart from similarly themed prime-time shows such as Chicago ·1his freedom of staging has an impact
Hope,which premiered just one day before ER (September 18 and 19, 1994). 1' 11pon ER's lighting design, a design that
Aside from product differentiation, however, ER's visual/audial style is sign i h.,rkens back to ER's daytime brethren.
ficant as an emb lem of media convergence. Examining ER's articulation of a lk cause the staging moves fluid.ly and
1 1
cinematic schema will thus help us understand how film and television ,Ht' quickly through severa! rooms, the cinema -
approaching one another, and, also, as I will díscuss later, it can help u~ 1ngrapher must light all the rooms relatively
understand how these two media are blending with digital media. ,·vcnly. Lighting a stage is a complicated and
As one might expect from a program named for a particular space (tht• ltmc-consuming task-made even more dif -
emerge ncy room), the design of ER's space, of its set, is a criti cai part of its cinc l1uilt in the case of ER by the inclusion of
Figure 4. l The pilot of ER begins with
matic style. ER director Chris Misiano has said, "Toe space is the through -linl' , l'ilingson many of the sets. ln soap operas/ Mark making his way down a cluttered
for the story." 13 Toe admitting desk and trauma and operating rooms are fund a 11coms, the ceilings are left off so that th e hallway with a visible ceiling ...
mental to the program. They serve dear metaphoric functions as the physical liHhting grid can illumine the sets. ln ER th e
incarnation and objective corre latives of birth, disease, violen ce, and death. l 11 J-11 id is partial ly blocked and lighting must be
this respect, they are not that different from daytime soap operas. What b tlnne from "natural" sources within the
remarkable about ER's set design is its three-dimensional articulation of sp acr
To understand its significance, consider first the schem atic norm in set design
for multiple-camera fictional programs. Daytime soap operas are shot on stan d
11,une; these sources are called "practicals."
\lthough ER is one of the most expensive
,hows 011 television, it would be prohibi -
ü~~
.~ I
.,~r·
'
-.
ing sets on a sound stage (Figure 2.34). Their three-walled sets are typi call) t 1vclyexpensive to light each shot separately,
placed in a row - next to one another , but not connec ted by doorways or halb . " would be the case in a feature film . Con - ~ george cloon ey
1
Toe space of these sets is notably shallow - resembling sets done for live theal c1 l·quently, the lighting in ER is usually high
with a convent ional proscenium . Multiple-camera sitcoms sho t befor e liw 1,l'Yand flat- as was esta blished very early in Figure4.2 ... where his path is obstructed
audiences have developed similar conventions of set design - placing the raiser\ thc program's run. ln fact, this shooting by diegetic maintenance men, replacing
for the audience behind the cameras (see Chapter 5 for more on sitcom "practicals."
1yle was evident in the title sequence of the
schemas). On such shallow sets, the options for actor movement are rath c1 ,l'íies premiere (Figures 4.1- 4.3); featuring a
limited. Dir ecto rs must "sprea d performers out like a dothes line," as Bordwcll ~l'ries of shots that even includ es diegetic
has noted in some early films. 14ln such "planime tr ic" staging, the actors seldo m 111.iintenance men changing a fluorescent
move toward or away from the camera (the term is art critic Heinrich Wõ lfl 111bein one of the ceiling lights, getting in
lin's, borrow ed by Bordwell). 15 Rather, they shuffle back and forth on a planl' ~lark's way (Figure 4.2).
perpendicular to the dominant camera angle . Or, Lngeometric terms, one coul d Zet tl maintains that flat lighting carries
say they principally move along the x-axis (side -to-side) and seldom m ow t hcmatic connotations that contrast with
along the z-axis (back-and -forth) - as is discussed by Herbert Zettl.16 luw-key chiaroscuro lighting. Usefully for
ln striking contrast, ER's princip al sets are constructed with four full walls. 111ypurposes, in Siglit Sound Motion he
Figure 4.3 Toe space of the emergency
Some of these walls are "wild," meaning they may be remov ed for addition al 11"fersto a hospital corridor as an example of room, with its four-walled sets, is estab-
shooting space, but reportedly the directors/producers pref er not to "wild ou l" 11.,tlightin g: lished as the pilot begins.
 ibility, we are now inclined to feel that the corridor and so the entire ho~
pital is clean and germ -free; nothing is hidden in dark corners ... it is ,,
place where we can easily find our way arou11d; and its staff and doct or~
must be equally bright and efficient. 18
Zettl's point is partly borne out by the lighting style employed on ER. Coo l,
County General Hospital (the program's fictional setting) is indeed clean
sanitary, and remarkably well equipped for an indigent care facility, even if il\
staff and doctors are not always so "bright and efficient." As often as not, ER\
literally bright illumination stands in counterpoint to the metaphori c dar k
ness of emergency medicine and the doctors ' flawed personal lives.
,illcgiances. A sequence of shots like this could never have been achieved in a mul-
1lplc-carnera soap opera. Toe fust cut within the "prosceniw11"would reveal the
nther cameras looking 011 from the missing fourth wall of the room. ln this
l11s1ance,the conventional fourth wall, if there were one, would be located at the
doors to the Traun1a One, from which the camera observes the doctors in action-
1hc point ofview shown in Figure 4.4. However, Kwapis reveals those doors and
lhe mother waiting behind them (Figure 4.6) and, more significantly, cuts to a
, ,11nerapositioned from Kovaés POV at the head of tl1e gurney (Figure 4.9),
which shows the entire room from across the I 80-degree line.

ER's Kino~Eye
I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye.. . . Now and forever, I free my seil
from human immobility, Iam in constant motion, I draw near, then awa}
from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them .. .. l plunge and soar with
plu11ging and soaring bodi es. Now J, a camera, fling myself along thcir
resultant, maneuveri.ng in the chaos of the moment, rec ording moveme n t, l·igure 4.4 Director Ken Kwapis manipu- Figure4.5 Kwapiscuts to a shot on the left
l.11csthe 180-degreerule in a complicated side of the gurney, but then cuts back...
starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations. 19
/ 'I< scene where Luka works on an injurcd
(Dziga Vert ov) 111rl.1l1is shot initially establishes the ori-
1•nlation of the axis of action.
ER'sdistinctive sets would be useless if it weren't for the program's cinemat ogra
phy and overall mode of production, which governs its stylistic schema. It is herl'
that the program fumly establishes its "cinematic" character. While the majorit r
of fictional programs on I 990s television were shot using multiple-camera mo ck
of production - as one can see in the decade's daytime soap operas and prin1c
time sitcoms-ER was shot on 35 mm film using single-camera mode of prod ul
tion. Of course, single-camera film shooting is also the standard on all 1980s and
1990s prime -time dramas-from the previously discussed Miami Vice and
Chicago Hope to the critically acclaimed NYPD Blue (1993- 2005) to the era·~
f<'lgure 4.6 . .. to the girl's mother at the Figure4.7 An overhead shot is also atypical
highest rated si11gle-cameraprogram, Murder, She Wrote (1984- 96).2º One could door to the room, where, in a multiple- for multiple-cameraproductions.
ther efore argue that those programs also embody a cinematic schema. Yet EU t ,11ncraset-up there would be no wall (and,
employs techniques that differentiate itself from both its narrative cousin, lhe 111a sitcom, there would be an audience).
soap opera, as well as from other single-camera, prime-time productions.
ln multiple -camera shooting, two or three cameras peer into a set from outsidl'
its (absent) fourth wall-seldom entering the space of the set. It is as if they arl·
covering a basketball game without setting foot 011the court. ER breaks the virtu al
proscenium and positions c.1meras within the set. This has a significant impact 0 11
the way that stories are told. Cutting into the set permits the director to subtly shil1
the point -of-view of a scene. As the visual POV shifts, the viewers' attention anel,
perhaps, their emotions shift as well. Ken Kwapis, the director of "Be Patien l,"
stretched the 180-degree rule to the limit in a "Traun1a One " room scene in which
Figure 4.8 Kwapis returns to a tight shot Figure 4.9 .. . a reverse angle that breaks
Luka (Goran Visnjic) works 011a young girl while her motl1er watches and Mark nf Luka at the head of the gurney, but then the axis of action and reveals three walls of
(Anthony Edwards) barks directions (Figtues 4.4-4.9) . Kwapis cuts arnong tlw ,uts to . .. the set.
 ER's principal visual strategy to avoid problerns with the 180-degree rule Figures 4.10- 4.15 ER's signature style is built on swirlingSteadicamshots. ln this one, the
camera ares 360degreesaround Kerryand a patient showingall four wallsof the set.
and screen direction is to move the camera. When the camera ares around a
character, it quickly establishes new axes of action and reorients the viewer's
sense of screen direction. Kwapis's shot list for the scene above iUustrates the
program's reliance on camera movernent:

STEADICAM/CLOSE on Judy/OTS Wright. PAN w/Wright to find Cleo

who leads us to Benton . ARC to find Greene & Kovac. They switch places
(Greene moves to palpate belly/Kovac moves to the head of the bed).
PUSH-IN and hold as CLOSE TWO -SHOT Kovac & Laura.2 1

Another example from a commonplace, simple scene from "Truth and Con-
sequences" (directed by Steve de Jarnatt) incorporates relatively sophisticated
camera movement arc ing 360 degrees around Kerry (Laura Innes) and a
patient, and showing all four walls ofthe set (Figures 4.10- 4.16), after which
the Steadicam backs up into a separate room and travels through it. These
arcing, spinning camera movements are fundamental to ER's signature style.
Not only did these kinds of movement separate ER from soap operas, the y
also distinguished it from other prime-time dramas, few of which, in 1994,
employed much carnera movement at ali. Even the few earlier programs that
were known for theiI camera rnovement - particularly Steven Bochco's Hill
Street Blues (1981- 7) and NYPD Blue (1993- 2005)-do not resemble ER in
their implementation of it. Bochco's shows utilize overwrought handheld
camera work while ER favors Steadicam shots. Indeed, ER was among the first
television programs to employ a Steadicam everyday, a technique !ater
employed by shows such as Sports Night (1998-2000) and, more prominently ,
The West Wing (1999- 2006).22 A side effect of the aggressive use of camera
movement is that the average length of shots in ER is considerably greater
..,,
than that of contemporary television. Toe camera moves to reframe actors
instead of cutting to a new angle. At a time when, even on sitcoms, the . ..... -
viewer that this is not a normal
broadcast of ER, that the camera
will be acknowledged. But we
average shot length (ASL) hovered around four seconds, shots on ER aver-
aged six or seven seconds, with precredit sequences' ASLs often runnin g
around ten seconds. "Ambush" may have set an ASL record for longevity with . ~.
.º;,·,.;•.·/ -.~~-·~
~ --~. , .· .\.$.~
. ,
. should be clear about this. Toe
camera that is acknowledged is still
its long, moving-camera shots and surveillance-camera simulations clocking folded within the fiction. This is not
in at an ASL of over 80 seconds!23 One shot, in particular, lasts almost thre e
~ · r
. ""-,!.l: ._ '' .•. .
. ..• counter cinema where the televi-
and a half minutes. Toe live telecast of "Ambush" was an aberration, but in sion/cinematic apparatus itself is
some respects it was just the logical conclusion of ER's visual style. Jligure4.16 Toe Steadicamshot ends dose foregrounded .24 Just as the produc -
Steadicam movements are quite different from handheld movements - in to whereit beganits journey. tion assistant is a character within
both the ir appearance and what they connote . ln fictional contexts such as the diegesis, so is the camera that is
NYPD Blue and The Blair Witch Project (1999), the stylistic cliché ofhandheld ;lcknowledged part of the diegetic world. ln this instance, however, a diegetic
camera has come to signify a particular sense of realism rooted in the ciném a camera and the non -diegetic camera (the one positioned by ER director
vérité schema (or, at least, in the common perception of cinéma vérité). Toe 'I homas Schlamme) record the same images. Toe signification process of the
live episode of ER repeatedly takes pains to draw attention to this documen - 11on-diegetic camera is repressed (histoire) while the diegetic camera is
tary signification. ln the very first shot of "Ambush," a production assistan t marked as a signifier of documentariness. Moreover, the focal length and high
adjusts a fixed, wide-angle, surveillance-style camera in the lounge (Figures Lamera angle of the episode's first shot signify a new type of documentariness
4.17- 4.18). He dusts the lens as he looks directly into it-signaling to th e that is currently evolving- nurtured by the surveillance camera footage of
 robberies and employee misbehavi or
shown on nightly news broadcasts and so
called "reality" specials on Fox. 25 Toe
d iegetic production assistant explains thc
function of the break-room camera to
Carol (Julianna Margulies): "Get · some
wide-angles to cut with what the handh eld
guys shoot. For pace, variety ." From this
wide-angle shot we cut to one of thc
"handheld guys'" cameras and the episod c
Figure 4.17 An actor portrays a produc- is off and running - sometimes literally a.~
tion assistant 011the fictional film crew when we see the ca.mera operator's feet as
shooting a documentary in the ER. He he struggles to follow the action. Here, as
checks a surveillancecamera and .. . in "X-Cops," the X -Files episode (Februa ry
20, 2000) presented as if it were Cops
( 1989- ), handhel d camera work has
obvious documentary connotations. 26 To
be precise, however, "Ambush" uses Stead
icam shots posing as handheld ones - wilh
significantly steadier results.
"Ambush" aside, ER's numerous Steadi
cam shot~ do not normally share these con
notations of documentariness with thc
handheld camera . As Jean-Pierre Geu ens
has noted, Steadicam movements m on·
Figure4.18 ... wipes it clean. closely resemb le cinematic tracking shots -
effortlessly gliding around the actors -tha n
they do jittery handheld work. He then takes this argument a step further anti
separates Steadicam movement from dollying or tracking. Toe Steadicam, hL·
avers, "disembodies vision:" "As a made -to-order compan ion, the floating,
impersonal, inhuman presence penetrates space, appropriating it for th<.'
decentered, transnational, postindustrial corporate stat e of the late twenti eth
century." 27 Although I am not prepared to argue that Steadicam shots are somt·
sort of panoptic confi.rmation of the postindustrial corporate state, it seems [()
me undeniable that Steadicams do not move in the sarne way that humans do.
Rather, they move the way tracking cameras associated with the cinema do- as
is exemplified in the opening of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) and thl'
murder scene in Jean Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange (1936). Toe Lange scen l'
consists principally of two 180-degree movements cut together into a 360
degree pan/track/crane around a courtyard . André Bazin calls it the "pu n·
spatial expression of the entire mise en scene."18 ER's Steadicam movem enls
function sirnilarly. With camera movements rooted in the cinematic, sing lc
camera mode of production - and nearly impossib le in mu ltiple -cam era
mode-the all-important space of the emergency room, the progra.m's ra.iso11
d'être, is constant ly re-articulated. Toe Steadicam is a marker of a cinema ti(
aestheti c, of prestige, suggesting the presence of a text that might have been
directed by a Welles ora Renoir. It thus helps differentiate ER as a television
product while also solving the problem of maintaining/modifying screen direc-
tion on sets that encourage staging alon g x -, y-, and z-axes.
One final, subtle signifier of cinematic stylistic schema is the control over
framing that is permitted by a single-camera mode of production . This is true of
stationary shots, but is even more evident in moving camera shots. Consider a
simple "walk-and -talk" scene from "Be Patient" (directed by Ken Kwapis;
Figures 4.19- 4.20). Elisabeth (Alex Kingston) is talking to Mark about a night
out his father has planned. Mark has just learned bis father has lung cancer and
is concerned about him. Note that Kwapis has selectt:d a slightly high -angle shot,
one that makes Mark more prominent in the frame even though Elisabeth has
most of the lines. ln this fashion, the view-
er's attention is subtly directed toward him,
despite his almost total silence. Toe scene
begins with a low-angle shot showing the
ent ire hallway and its ceiling (Figure 4.21; cf.
Figures 4.1- 4.3). Obviously, a multip le-
c:amera shoot wouldn't normally position
Lhe camera that low as it would show the
lighting grid. Although a multiple -camera
Figure 4.19 ln 011e of ER's numerous
production could conce ivably dolly next to "walk-a11d-talk" scenes, the camera is 011a
a pair of conversing actors with an elevated slight high angle, favoring Mark .. .
camera, as a practical matter there would
not be time to set up such a shot. Toe point
is not that multiple-camera productions are
slipshod, but that they have developed a dif-
ierent method for dealing with production
issues. Soap operas are taped much like the
filming of a stage play, in which the director
has worked out an intr icate choreography of
,1ctors and cameras . Toe camera operators
know where the actors will be moving and
Figure 4.20 ... but it is Elisabeth who does
where they should be ata particular point in most of the talking as they move down the
lhe script, but despite those general indica - hall.
lions, the operators must struggle to keep up
with the actors. This results in framing that
is more approximate, and sometimes even
misses action that would be included in a
\ingle-camera production. 29
What is the significance of this approxi -
mate framing? One important result is that
~oap operas appear as if they are being
hroadcast live. ln this respect, they resem -
hle television coverage of sports and other
Figure 4.21 The ER walk-and-talk scene
live events , in which important action is above starts with a low-a11gle establishing
~ometirnes missed . Building on Barthes' shot, showing, once again, the ceiling.
HVHVH V< u puu,v \..U l-1.. l, .l.,lll~ CU 1J.Jlld~ILC~ lClCV l~IUIJ
explored in regard to th e soap opera in Chapter 1.30 He argues that pho111
graphs and theatrical films carry a sign ifier of "this is was," a "pres enu
absence."31 A photograph of a birthd ay party or soldiers raising the U.S. ILI)'
on lwo Jin1a signífies: "this event happ ened in the past and it happened e/."•
where."ln Barthes' words:
lhe type of consciousness the photo gr aph involves is indeed lruh
unpreced e nted, since it establishes nota consciousness of the being-t/ic,,
of the thing .. . but an awarene ss of its having-been-there. What we h,nl'
is a new space-tirne category: spatial immediacy and temporal anter io,
ity, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here 11111,
and the there-then.32
For Barth es, the cinema began to break down the photo effect. For Ellis, lei,
vision goes even further in thís dírection. As Stephen Heath and Gilli,111
Skirrow have similarly argued,
lllUUeUJêlLe pn:senc e, a., 1 tnstance tor the analysis of approximate framin g in live or live-on -tape tele-
1.asts. Because ilie show was broadcast tive twice- once for the Easlern and
Central time zones and once for the Pacific-one can see the small adjust-
mcnts camera operal ors made during the telecasts.36 For instance, Anna
(Maria Bello) assists Doug (George Clooney ) as he treats a baby who has been
hitten. ln both versions , sin1ilar framing is used for a tine of dialogue in which
l>oug asks Ann a for more light- although the East Coast version is framed
more tightly than the West Coast and the baby is crying in the fonner, but not
111the latt er (Figures 4.22, 4.23, respectively). When Anna swings a light over
the bed in the East Coast version we do not see herdo it, although we do see
lhe additional illumination (Figure 4.24). ln lhe West Coast version , we see
hcr arm in the frame (Figure 4.25, contra st wilh the East Coast version in
ltgure 4.24 where there is also less headroom above the father). Although
lhese are obviously minor differences, they do illustrate lhe approximate
nature of framing in live and live-on-tape modes of production. 37

lhe irnmediate time of the [television) image is pulled into a confusio11

with the time of the events shown, tending to diminish the impression oi
the mod e of presenc e in absence characterist ic of film, suggesting a pt•1
manently alive view of the world; the generalized fantasy of the televisirn1
institution of the image is exactly that it is direct, and direct for me.33

This holds true for television soap opera, but what of ER and its appar e111l 1
cinematic pr esence in absence? And what are we to make of ER's cho icc teo
promote presence-presence by broadcasting live, directly to the U.S. víewer?
On September 25, 1997, ER's producers resurrected broadcasting pr actiu ·, 11g11re4.22 ln the East Coast version of Figure4.23 ln the West Coast version of
thc live ER episode, Doug tends to a crying lhe sarne scene, the action is not framed as
from the 1950s with the live telecast of"Ambush." It was hardly the "un preu· 11.,by
's bite wound. tightly (and the baby is not crying).
dented" event that NBC publ icists trumpeted. 34 During the 1950s and earl)
1960s, live telecasts were the everyday mode of productio n for ER's do se rei.,
tion, the soap opera . And even before ER's live broad cast there have bcl'II
instances of convention al, scripted programs shifting to a live format for :111
episode (e.g., Gimme a Break! [February 23, 19851) or even an entire seaso11
(Roe [1992- 3 season]). Moreover, as Ellis and Heath and Sltirrow cont eJHI
liveness and simultan eity persistas television's dominant mod e.35 ER's use oi
liveness , however, was not a simple return to the days of Jive telecasts 111
Guíding Light (1952- ) and Playhouse 90 (1956- 61). ln its own way, it pul k d
the viewer into new forms of confusion . Unlike previous tive drama on tele, 1
sion, "Ambush" did not use multiple cameras in individual scenes. Ew11
though it was shot with 11 different cameras, they were not used in a convc11
tional ili ree-camera configuration on individu al sets. Instead , single vidl'o flg ure 4.24 Anothe r slight difference bet- Figure 4.25 ... in the West Coast version
(not film) camcras shot individual scenes with handheld cameras and Stead1 wccn East Coast and West Coast versions we also sec Anna 's arm as shc adjusts the
ui this scene can be observed afte r Doug light.
cams that evoked cinéma vérité-style videotaping and dr ew altention to tlll
.l\ks for more light. ln the East Coast
television apparatus itself- as when lhe production assistant adjusts the su1 11·rsion we see the light on the mother's
veillance camera (Figures 4.17- 4.18). "Ambu sh" also provides a uni qur , houlder , and ...
 Toe irony here is that the tive broadcast was presented as if it were not live,
as if we were viewing videotape that had been shot previously for a docume n-
tary about the emergency room- much like the "found" film/tape in The Blaír
Witch Project and imitators such as Cloverfield (2008). ln this respect, thc
broadcast also resembles Cops, a show whose viewers recognize that what they
are seeing, despite television's strong evocation of sirnultaneity, is a tape of past
events. The X -Files's mock documentary, "X-Cops," illustrates this confusion
well. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) track a monst er
in Los Angeles while a Cops camera crew tapes the incident. Scully resents the
intrusion and complains to Mulder about being on "live TV." Mulder
responds, "It's not tive. She just said [bleep]"-referring to an expletive osten-
sibly censored by the Cops producers. Or rather, he refers to an e:xpletive cen•
sored by the fictive Cops producers within the X-Files diegesis. Obviously,
documentary telecasts can be tive and, perhaps less obviously, most television
programs carry connotations of liveness, but "Ambush," "X-Cops," and Thc
Blair Witch Project ali suggest that their presents are past. Only in the case oi
"Ambush" does that paradoxically double back onto itself where actors in thc
present - performing at the sarne time that we are watching- pretend to be
characters in a videotape of the past.
Re-Presenting ER on the Web: ERTV and ERLive
l have established that ER is a television program grounded in its fluid visual
style- a style that cuts across media boundaries, linking it specifically with thc
cinematic medium . ER, as with ali television programs since the late 1990s,
also has a substantial Web presence-starting with Warner Brother 's official
website (ERTV) and the site created by Warners and NBC specifically for thc
"cyber-event" of the live broadcast (ERLive). Toe questions I would like to
raise about these sites are stylistic ones: can a program that places so much
emphasis on visual movement translate that kinetic energy to the Web? Is
there an equivalent to the Steadicam on the Web or in other digital media
such as vídeo games?
Mark J.P. Wolf has created a taxonomy of on- and off-screen space in
vídeo games.38 His article provides a starting point for an understanding oi
the articulation of space in webpages, which, in many respects, closely resem
ble vídeo games. Both webpages and video games appear on computer moni
tors. Both contain many images that have been wholly generated digitally,
possessing no "real world" referent. Both contain illusions of movement. And,
perhaps most significantly, the movement in both can be interact ive, it can
depend upon the input of users. Let us consider more closely this matter oi
spatial articulation on the Web as it appears in ERTV and ERLive, within the
larger context of a taxonomy of online space and movement. Toe first and
least revolutionary form of movement on webpages is that which it inherit cd
from the cinema and television: video clips and conventional animation . Ju~t
as spectators cannot control the editing or the Steadicam moves they witnes~
while watching ER, so they cannot control the website's vídeo clips or influ
ence the GIF animation dancing through the banner ads (for exceptions, see
the discussion of online video editing experiments !ater in this chapter). ER's
website's banner ads and pedestrian vídeo clips ofthe cast and crew- as with
the photographs and ER theme music - are positioned on the webpages as if
they were photographs and scraps of memora bilia placed into a photo album.
As Janet Murray argues, "Toe equivalent of the filmed play of the early 1900s
is the multimedia scrapbook .. . which takes advantage of the novelty of com-
puter delivery without utilizing its intrinsic properties." 39 To her filmed plays
we might add the televised plays of the 1950s, which took advantage of televi-
sion's novel delivery system without exploring its intrinsic properties. But tel-
evision and the process of television viewing have evolved significantly since
television's so-calJed Golden Age. ER, with its shattered proscenium arch,
illustrates just how television might differ from the theatrical drama. Further,
the VCR, DVR, DVD box sets of television shows, video iPod, and remote
control have radically altered the viewer's power over the television. As Cald-
well contends, "Increasingly, television has come to be associated more with
something you can hold, push into an appliance, and physically move around
with a controller." ·10 ln short , television has become increasing ly interactive.
Similarly, it is in interactive movement that we will find one of the truly revo-
1utionary character istics of the digital realm.
For Murray, interactivity and movement are inextricably interwoven into
"four essential properties" of digital environments: "Digital environments are
procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic."41 Toe first two proper -
ties, in her view, are what define interactivity. We may participate in a digital
world by clicking buttons with our mouse, manipulating a joystick, or wearing
a virtual reality helmet; and that world will respond with behaviors that are
grounded in certain proceduresor rules. Murray continues, "Procedural envi-
ronments are appealing to us not just because they exhibit rule-generated
behavior but because we can induce the behavior. They are responsive to our
input." 42 Murray's insight helps us understand the unique function of space
and, more importantly, the function of movement on the Web and in other
digital environments. As she puts it,
Toe new digital environments are characterized by their power to repre-
sen t navigable space. Linear media such as books and films can portray
space, either by verbal description or image, but only digital environ -
ments can present space that we can move through [emphasis added ).43
Thus Murray identifies navigable space as one of the key pleasures of Web
browsing or other activities in digital environments.
Returning to our specific examples of ERTV and ERLive, we can see how
significant navigation is. Each homepage presents a navigation scheme, as can
be seen in these details from ERTV and ERLive as they appeared in 1998
(Figures 4.26, 4.27, respectively). Although both seem to be just text, just lists
of words, they actually have a spatial dimension. ln HTML (Hypertext
Markup Language) terminology, they are "image maps;" ERTV's map is ori-
 VEmHD
ented horizontaUy, a11d
ERLive's vertically. They are
WHAT'SH!W! PHOIOI TH! SCIHIS !PISODII not so much text as they are
irnages resembling text. Toe
Figure4.26 A horizontal navigation bar for ERTV is an
imageof text, an "image map" on which users may click area of the image that users
to navigateto other pages. clíck determines what · they
will see next. Or, ín more
spatial terms, we could say that various regions of the text image have become
hotspots, the HTML code determining lhe action triggered by clicking those
spots. Position your cursor over the image of the word «Vídeo," press a mo use
button, and this webpage will be replaced with another one. Thus, ín web-
pages, text is space. Click.ing on an image map or on a regular b it of text that
has been programmed as a hypertext link allows users to "move" metaphoric -
ally to another location, another webpage. But this is not literal movement.
Toe text/graphics of one page do not usually slide off the screen while another
slides on- à la a vídeo wipe. Rather, the space of one page is replaced by that
of another - more like the dísplacement that happens when an editor makes
an Eisensteinian montage of attractions or a television viewer changes chan -
nels with a remote contrai.
During the 2000s, the image map was "deprecated, " to use a term commonl y
employed by computer programmers. It beca.me obsolescent and was largely
replaced by more powerful programming technique s for visual navígation -
specifically, JavaScript, cascading style sheets (CSS), and Flash animation. Toe
fundamental spatial principie of the image map persists (that is, click an area of
the screen and somethi11ghappe11s),but these newer
techniques also permit instantaneous visual chang es
based solely 011the position of the cursor 011 the
screen, which is not possible with a simple image
map. On the official NBC hornepage for ER durin g
lt' s o wrop! its final season, one can find another ho rizontal
Onlno Events
navigation bar (Figure 4.28, as observed on Decem-
RoalVidoo
Photo Gallery
ber 11, 2008), much like the ER image map in
ER Trivia Challenge Figure 4.26. When one rolls over the 2008 11aviga -
Rccovcry Roorr, tion text with the mouse cursor, however, the text
Virtual Scts changes-indicating one's choices if one clicks that
Hospital Loungo
spot. Mouse "rollovers" are co11structedusing a pro -
ER Staff
Thcmc Music
gramming language and are thus an illustration of
Press Relesses the inducing of rule-based behavior. Examining the
Chat Transcrlpts HTML source code of this ER page reveals which
Plug-ins programming technique contrais this drop-dow11
ER Al erts
list: a JavaScript named "11bcDropDown."<HInitially
11bcDropDown displays the word "Vídeo" in the
Figure4.27 ERLive'snav-
navigation bar, but when we mouse over that text, it
igation bar is also an
image map that servesthe changes from black to white, its background color
sarne purpose, but is ori- shifts from white to green, and additional text is
ented vertically. presented to us below ít:
*WATCH FULL EPISODES
*TWO -MINUTE REPLAYS
*INTERVIEWS
*HIGHLIGHTS
This simple user actio11,one that we
110w perform without a second
thought, was not possible in the days
of image maps. No11etheless, both
the image map and JavaScript offer
navigable space to us and both are
governed by rules a11d procedures
that are codified in their program -
ming la11gu ages. Toe "pleasure" we
get from initiating actio11through a
visual 11avigatio11bar is not exactly Figure 4.28 During thc 2008- 9 season, the ER
jouissance, but it is fundamental to website dispensed with image maps and used
JavaScript to create drop-down menus for its
our online experience.
navigationbar.
Displacement and hypertextua l
"movement" are not the only forms of spatial activity on the Web. We can
also iden tify movements in the Web e11viro11mentthat are quite literal. Toe
simplest and most fundamental is the movement of the mouse-co11trolled
curso r across the screen. Let's dissect this simple, but co11sequential, inter -
action. Users move a mouse on a flat surface a11d the on -screen cursor
responds by moving in a corresponding direction. 45 For users who have
grown up 011computers with graphical user interfaces (GUI), it seems un im-
aginable that computers would ever function without the mouse; but , of
course, the GUI is a relatively recent phenomenon. Up until the mid -1980s,
most computer users were staring at text-filled screens and cursors were
mainly controlled by the keyboard 011strict x- and y-axes. Whether mouse- or
key-controlled, the cursor is central to Web interactivity. It is the main
embodiment on screen of what Murray calls "age11cy:""the satisfying power
to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisio11sand choices." 46
Toe placeme11t of the cursor upon the webpage and the pressing of a mou se
button results in the pre domi11a11tuser-co11trolled movements on webpages:
vertical and, to a lesser extent, horizontal "scrolling." ln Wolfs taxonom y of
on- and off-screen movement in computer -based games, he notes the signifi-
cance of scrolling movements. Scrolling video games-as with scrolling web-
pages- move fixed screen elements (text and graphics) up or dow11or side to
side. Early vídeo games from the late 1970s and 1980s tended to scroll 011a
single axis-whether horizontally or vertically. Wolf notes Defender (1982),
Stampede {1981), and Space Jockey(1982) as examples ofhorizontal scrolling
and Skiing (1980) and Street Racer (1978) as examples of vertical scrolling.
Our initial sense of power over the webpage comes from this ability to scroll,
to decide what shall be on screen and what shall be off. This scrolJing is a very
basic form of visual navigation. By ma11ipulating the mouse, touchpad, or
 keyboard we can exp lore the navigable space of the page. This is quite unlik e
anything one can do at the cinema or while watching television, where th e
border between on -screen space and otf-screen is always strictly determined
by the dir ector and th e camera operators. On the Web, that border becomes
malleable.
Toe metaphori cally loaded terms "scrolling" and "webpage" help us to
understand an important property of this movement. 1ust like the turning of a
paper scroll or the movement of a paper page on a desk, the motio n of web-
pages is planime tric-as in Bordwell's discussion of ftlm staging. The space is
flat, with little sense of a third , z-axis poking out at the viewer or receding into
the backgroun d. Planimetric Web movement is like the slidin g of a typewritten
page across a desk. lt is true that webpages can develop a sense of depth, but it is
still planimetric . ln On the History of Film Style, Bordwell discusses planimetric
staging in the silen t film Barbe Bleu (1907) . ln one shot, th ere are two distin ct
planes of action (a woman in the foregroun d and several women , in a line, in
the background), but, as Bordwell notes, "In such composit ions each layer lies
parallel to the picture plane and often to the background planes as well .. . A
sense of depth is co nveyed primarily through comparative size and overlap ping
edges."47 ln the ER webpages there are dim, muted background images that the
text appears to float above. Figure 4.29 illustrates this use o f text, with the text
and graphics hoverin g on top of a liled image of operatin g surgeons wearing
surgical masks, wh ich is shown in detail in Figure 4.30. Thus, just as in Barbe
Bleu, there are two planes, but they do not connect to one another-much like
the animation created by Disney's multi-plane camera.
Toe earliest webpages-constructed solely of text and no images- only
allowed vertical scrolling of the text. There was no hor izontal movement
beca use the width of the text would automatically adjust to the width of user s'
browsers and thus horizontal scrolling was unnecessary. Moreover, the page
usually loaded at its top , which mcant that the vertical movement was only in
one direction -d ownward . Toe introductio n of images and HTML "tables" to
the Web, and the release of the first widely popular browser with a GUI
(NCSA Mosa ic, 1993) created the ability for horizontal scrolling, but only in
one direction. lmage s/text could now extend beyond th e right side of the
Figure 4.29 ln ERTV's main pagc, tcxt and Figure4.30 ... is cnlarged here.
images appear to float above a background
image,which ...
browser and the user could scroli to the n ght tana me ngm UJuyJ LV v 1c w
them. When viewed on a standard sized mo nit or of the time (800 x 600
pixeis), the two ER hom epages o nly permit vertical scro lling because their
grap hics and text are narrower than the standard width .48 Since the entire
width of the ima ge is immediately visible, th ere is no need for scrolling.
However, both pages are longer than the standard heigh t and thus they both
permit and induce the user to move the page downward .
Toe shape of the browser "window," its aspect ratio, is yet ano ther source
of user agency that is quit e distinct from television and film. As the film an d
television indus tri es know from the battles over widescreen and letterboxing,
and now over the 16 :9 ratio of high definitio n television , aspect ratio can be a
volatile subject, with bo th aesthetic, technological, and economic ramifica -
tions.49 But, much like Steadicam movements, aspect ratio is not something
most television or film viewers can influence. 50 Aside from choosing whethe r
to view a letterbox or pan -and -scan version of a film th at's been tran sferred to
video, viewers of television texts have minimal con trol over aspect ratio. It's
somew hat startling, tl1en, to realize that Web users have full control over the
size of their browse r windows. Browser resizing is a form of animation, of
movem ent, over which users hold full agency. They decide if they will view
the Web at 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768 pixels or anywhere in between.51
Users need not even respect th e 4:3 and 16:9 ratios that determines the outer
bounds of standa rd monitor screens. To a large extent, then, the designer's
carefully con ceived use of space must submit to the user's choice. ln some
respects, the evolution of scrolling has been marked by a battle for agency
between user s and designers-with the designers gradually asserting more
and more control. New graphic design software and programming/scripting
languages such as JavaScript, CSS, and Flash animation empower designers
with the ability to determine the spatial layout of the screen and limit users'
ability to change it, but users can still resize their browsers and choo se to view
only a portion ofthese fixed layouts.
Beyond Planimetric Movement: Going "D eep l nside the
Hidden Areas"
ERLIVE.com [take s) you straig ht to the set with our very own Virtual
Reality Sets. Rush into the Admitt ing Area, take a break in the Hospital
Lounge, and visit the hectic Trauma Center- all from the comfort of
your very own computer screen ! Wit h your mouse and keyboard, you
can go deep inside the hidden areas of the ER! Click her e to begin your
tour of the Virt ual Reality Sets!52
Toe history of visual media is littered with promises of full verisim ilitude, of
total television and cinema, of a simulacrum that is indi stin guishable from
reality. Ad copy for Cinerama, for instance, claimed, "you won't be gazing at
a movie screen-you' ll find yourself swept right i11tothe picture , surrounded
 with sight and sound." 53 To prove their point they provi<led images of a man
in a movie seat flying over water skiers in bikinis and a woman levitating in
the middle of a concert bali. Similarly, ERLive promises to take us "deep
inside the hidden areas of the ER." ln short, it promises immersive movement
along the z-axis (i.e., in depth) . lt should be no surprise that Cinerama and
ERLive don't deliver on their promises, but I find their failures interesting and
instructive- helping us to understand what virtual reality is not.
ERLive's "Virtual Tour" consists ofthree QuickTime VR "movies" (as they
are called by Apple):S4 "Admitting Area," "Hospital Lounge," and "Trauma
Figure 4.32 ERLive: a QuickTimeVR of the Figure4.33 . .. and right ...
Center." They are blandly presented on the ERLive "QuickTime VR" page, in trauma room grants the user control to look
a style that recalls Murray's "multirnedia scrapbook" (Figure 4.31). An image left .. .
from the movie entices users to click on the word "Windows" or "Mac" to
load the version appropriate to their platforms. By moving the mouse over
the VR image, they may pan right or left and, to a much lesser extent, they
may even tilt up or down (e.g., the QuickTim e VR movie of the trauma room;
note the objects that persist from one frame to the next in Figures 4.32- 4.34).
Toe only other permitted movement is a zoom, where a section of the irnage
is enlarged or reduced (e.g., a zoom in on the doors and clock in Figure 4.34,
enlarged in Figure 4.35). Thus, there is movement here and the inducement of
human agency, but is it really virtual reality?
ln her chapter on "Television Graphics and the Visual Body: Words on the
Move," Morse describes the "weightless flight" of television spectators as they Figure4.34 .. . around the set. The user may Figure 4.35 ... which results in an enlarged,
watch words and graphic design elements fly towards and "past" them .55 "A also zoom into the image... but visuallydegraded, image, with chunk-y
development began in television graphics at the end of the 1960s," she notes , pixeis.
"when a vortex seemed to puU the v:iewer virtually 'inside' the [television] sei
and into a miniature cosmos occupied by an animated logo."56 For Morse normally forbidden space- although the ability togo into virtual worlds that
these moving, twisting, gyrating textual objects reveal a back side of the text. would be too dangerous or physically impossible for real humans is quite
We are allowed to view "precisely what is forbidden in monocular perspectiv e significant. This ability explains why, for example, the U.S. military has
and, one might add, repr esent a- invested so heavily in flight simulators, which permit pilots to experience
tion in the photograph and the dangerous situations "virtually" without placing themselves at risk. But what
classic fiction film." 57 Toe "hidden truly makes VR a virtual simulacrum of its referent is the illusion of z-axis
areas" of ERLive's "Virtual Reality movement under the control of the user. Toe sense of agency is, of course,
Sets" promise us a similar forbid - paramount. Morse's flying logos are not true virtual realities because viewers
den pleasure. They offer to show have no control over them. 1heir "weightless flight" is piloted by the televi-
us the opposite side of the 180- sion apparatus. Consumers did not become their own pilots (and tank com -
degree line, the reverse angle that manders and race-car drivers) until the arrival of video game arcades in the
classical cinema represses. Toe l 980s. According to Wolf, "Toe first commercial game to offer a first-person
irony of such a promise in ER is perspective of an interactive three -dimensional environment was the arcade
that its directors have already game BattleZone (1980)."59 BattleZone's virtual world is constructed of stick-
revealed ali four walls of the pro - figure tanks and mountains; but despite its crudity it generat es a strong sense
gram' s sets- through the use of of immersion - of being in that world- because of the user's ability to move
60
the Steadicam (Figures 4.10- 4.16). 0 11 the z-axis (Figure 4.36). Toe 1998 remake of BattleZone for the personal

ln a sense, there is nothing new or
58
Figure 4.31 ERLive's menu of QuickTime VR forbidden to see.
moviesarranges its thumbnailimagesas if they were There is more to the allure of
in a paper scrapbook. VR than just the uncovering of
compute r (Figure 4.37) and popular "first-person shooter" games of the
1990s and early 2000s- such as Doam (1993; Figw-e 4.38), Ha1f-Life (1998;
Figure 4.39), and the Cal! of Duty series (2003- 8; Figure 4.40, from Call of
/Juty 4: Modern Warfare [2007))-have progressively impro ved the verisi-
 militude of these virtual realms, but
the princip ie of navigable space
remains the sarne. As the user navi-
gates these computer-generated
realms, a first-person narrative evolves
and it evolves. in real time: ·"I am
moving, commanding, my tank
through this world . A tank shoo ts at
me. I shoot back. A m issile attacks me
and I'm killed." Murray specifies some
Figure 4.36 The early arcade game, BattleZone, of the "pleasures specific to intentional
allows tl1e user to move a tank inlo a primitive navigation: orienting ourselves by
landscape, along the z-axis. landmarks, mapping a space mentally
to match our experience , and admir -
ing the juxtapositions and changes in
the perspective that derive from
moving through an intricate
environment." 61
Morse calls these sorts of environ-
ments "fictions of presence" in tha t the
space and time of the simulacrum is
the sarne as that of the user/viewer/
interactor. 62 Echoing Barthes' phot o
effect and the application of it to televi-
sion by Heath and Skirrow and Ellis,
Figure 4.37 üpdated versions of BattleZone , to she maintains that print and film
be played on the home cornputer, improve the "media represent a world that is past
photo -realism of the original's landscape.
and elsewhere; television and the com-
puter present virtually shared worlds,
unfolding temporally in some virtual
relation to our own, if not always actu-
ally simultaneously." 63 This emphasi s
on the tirne of virtual reality is also
stressed by Lev Manovich . ln The Lan-
guage of New Media, he charts the
genealogy of the screen from the "clas-
sical screen" ofRe naissance painting to
the "dynamic screen" of the cinem n
Figure 4.38 Doom was among the early first- and television. 64 For him the defining
person shooter games, which provide navigable characteristic of the computer screen b
space to the user. its ability to interact with the user in
real time. For this reason, he refers to
it as the "real-time screen ."65
Thus we arrive at what Morse, Murray, Manovich, and others propose a~
the generally accepted axioms of virtual reality:
l . navigable space;
2. movement along the z-axis;
3. user control of that movement;
4 . a virtual sense of shared space;
and
5. a rnatch of the time of the signifi-
cation with the time of the user.
To understand how and why ER's
VR fails to meet these criteria it is
Figure 4.39 1l1e increasing verisimilitude useful to understand a Jittle about
ofvideo games can be observed in 1998's how QuickTime VR movies are
Half-Life and .. .
created . QuickT ime VRs are con-
structed from still photos of a space.
Toe camera is rotated on a tripod
and one image is taken every 30
degrees (more or Iess). TI1e photos
are Ioaded into a QuickT ime VR
program and simj lar points on the
adjoining images are matched.
Based on these matching points , the
photos are then stitched togeth er.
Figure4.40 · · .2007's Cal/ 0! Duty 4: Modem This creates one long continuous
Waifare.
photograph - a panorama that can
be viewed flat (in an aspect ratio even wider than
Cinerama) or looped together into a 360-degree
image, as has been done on ERLive. A Quick -
Time VR "movie" is, thus, no movie at all. Essen-
tially, it is a cylindrical still image that places the
spectator in the center of the cylinder. It is as if
one were inside a zoetrope looking out (Figure
4.41). Toe QuickTime movies, failure as virtual
reality has severa! implicat ions.
First, because these munoving "movies" are
just still photographs they present a digitized
photo effect. They have a very strong sense of
"this is was," of "presence -absence," in Ellis's
words. "These were the sets of the program ER,"
they seem to signify, not "these are the sets, and
you are moving inside them." Toe immediacy
that comes with immersion into a virtua] reality
is absent. Second, there is no true z-ax:is move -
ment. Toe zooms in QuickTime VR do not actu-
ally change the angle of view, the perspective, of Figure 4.41 Toe nineteenth -centur y
zoetrope arranged still images
the spectator. Rather, they simply enlarge the aro und the inside of a cylind er,
image itself-appearing to bring it closer to you much like a Quick T ime VR movi e.
\Vl, Vl 1..uu1:,c, .'>UlUUUlll, il Vi JIIUVUll, H l ll!Ult:I away; r 1gu1t:s ':l •.)'i- 'l . .)::>J. J\ S
Zettl argues, "When zooming in on an event, the event seems to come toward
you .... During a dolly-in, you will seem to be moving with the camera toward
the event."66 ln th e case of the digital medium, this enlargeme nt blows up the
pixeis, quickly lead ing to blocky distortion and the breakdown of the illusion
of reality (Figure 4.35). It's impossible to maintain an illusion of reality when
the constit uent ele ments of the image are mad e so obvious. True, these zooms
are under the contr ol of the user and thus provide some sense of agency, but
they fall well short of virtual reality because they lack the "juxtapositions and
changes in the per spective that derive from moving through an intricate
enviro nm ent." 67 Without th e change in perspective, there is no sense of user
mobility.
Further, ther e are no moving objects or characters ,vithin these sets. This
stands in stark co ntra st to the hectic visual style of the prog ram- where cameras
and actors are co nstantly careenin g toward on e another. Drs Benton, Greene,
Weaver, and the rest are but ghostly presences in these virtual spaces. ln Battle-
Zone, Doom and man y other vídeo games, tanks, missiles, and combatants rush
along the z-axis toward users-interacting with them in ways that th reaten their
virtual tives. A true VR realm based upon ER would take a page from ELIZA,
one of the first artificial intelligences on the Web. Develop ed by Joseph Weizen -
baum in 1966, ELIZA's users typed queslions to "her" and she would respon d
with therapeutic repiles. Blending ELIZA with Doom, one can imagine an ER
VR in which -w ith a palpable sense of real time- the user chooses(agency) to
be a doctor or a patient and moves through (z-axis) hallways and into the
trauma room where virtual lives could be saved or lost. ln the place of Doom's
mon sters, speeding at us with weapons firing, we could find Dr Eliza on a psych
consult - extending a sympathetic hand along the z-axis.
Divergence in Converging Times: the l 990s
In ER, we see the effects of techno-industrial convergen ce and competition
upon contemporary television in the 1990s. It has been obvious since the
adven t of cable television that the old broad cast models won't last forever.
This prospect became increasingly evident at the end of the twentieth centur y.
From 1997 to 1999, the average annual hours per person spent watching U.S.
br oadcast television dropp ed 9.3 percent while online and vídeo-game tim e
in creased 126.6 percent.68 ER's response to the thr eats of compet itors an d
converging technology combined the schema of an old er, more pr estigious
medium (the cinema) with the technol ogies of newer media (the Web and VR
movies) whose prestige facto r inevitably generated curiosity , debat e, and
increased viewership. This pastiche succeeded mor e in its skillful applicati on
of cinematic style than in its pale att empts at virtual reality, but its overall
success cannot be disputed, as ER's high Nielsen ratings attest.
Ratings success aside, ER's attempts at distinguishing itself from the rest oi
television illustrate the stylistic functio n of product differentiation. ln a timl'
of conv ergence, ER stra ined to diverge from the pack, to establish a uniq lll-'
(for television ) visual style, and to incorporate elements of new media. In so
doing, it provides an interesting test case for the signifying function of style.
Unusua1 production practices like the live show, unconventional set design,
and camera movement, and digital media such as Web pages and VR movíes
were all elements in its battle for uniqueness. ER's disturbances of conven -
tional television style allow us to examine anew the significan ce of televísion
style and to gauge its strategi es for maki ng meaning.
Diverg ence in Converging Time s: the 2000 s' Fir st D ecade
A decade's worth o f media convergence has occurre d since this chapte r was
initially conceived. Ouring that time, the broadcast networks have acquiesced
to the necessity of new distr ibution systems - providing miniature versions of
their products through iTunes and websites such as Hulu and Joost. Even
venerabl e ER is offering hours of online vídeo that , in sheer bulk , dwarfs the
material provided on ERLive in the 1990s. Yet after the attempt analyzed here,
ER never again laun ched a new effort representin g the show in a "virtua l
reality" setting, perhaps recognizing that online virtual worlds and games
such as Second Life a nd World of Warcraft (2004- ) would humble anything
its prod ucers could devise.69 A major technological factor enabling new online
vídeo offerings has been th e phenomenal incr ease in the bandwidth available
to home users. When ER debut ed in 1994, ho me access to the Internet was
limited to dial-up conne ctions via telephon e mod ems?> Today's cable and
DSL modems are capable of receiving data over 200 times faster than those
dial-u p modems .71 With higher speeds has come the ability to downlo ad video
over the Internet or to víew it instantaneously. Initi ally, such vídeos were frus-
tratingly smaH, but "high -definition" vídeo is becoming more and more
common , a clear sign of things to come.
If we examin e th e navigation and spatial style with which thcse new offer-
ings are presented, however, we lind quite modest changes since 1997, when the
f:"RLivewebsite was launched . Despite the mid-2000s proselytizing for a new,
supposedly revolutionary, "Web 2.0," many design princ ipies have not changed,
cspecia\ly for television program s' companion websites.72 Hulu, for instance,
carries ER and many other NBC programs and is among the most popular web-
,ites providing online vídeo. Yet its hom epage reHes o n a format that improves
vcry little on Murray's multirnedia scrapbook (Figure 4.42). Sophisticated Java-
Script and Flash anima tion are used to slide images across the frame's top, which
would have been diflicult in 1997, but the rest ofthe page consists of a pedestrian
horizont al navígation bar anda simple grid of thumbnails-no more revolution-
,,rythan paper photographs attached to a scrapbook's page. Users' navigation of
lhe page involves only a mod est increase in their sense of agency, or control, over
1lsvisual space. Hulu's pop-up information about a specific video (Figure 4.43),
lor example, does afford the user more agency over the site's space as it onJy
,tppears when the user elicits it through a mouse-over. However, video sites in
f1Cneraltake great pains to curtail user agency. NBC and Warner Brothers are
dcathly afraid that users will approp riate their intellectual property and distribute
 it illegally. Consequently, a cat-and - video of its Tahoe SUV and
mouse game has evolved in which invited users to recombine
producers endeavor to lock down shots and add text and
t1ieir online vídeo while users (and music as they wished-
hackers) yearn to free those images. resulting in over 30,000 do -
Hulu's vídeo player software uses it-yourself car commercials
various contrais to block the down that were automaticaUy
loading of its video, but comput er posted online. Toe experi-
savvy users can get around them ment backfired, however,
~ -~ - and download the vídeo to thei1 when environmentalists
-- own hard drives.
ER's producers have encoura ged
used fuese stylistic elements
to political elfect. Toe newly
some forms of restricted Intern et cdited "commercials" Figure 4.44 Warner Brothers grants users liinited freedorr
distribution by users. Hulu \ attacked t1ie SUV for guz- to create vídeo mash-upsonline.
Figure 4.42 NBC's Hulu.com still relies on a scrap- 75
z.ling gas. As Chevrolet
system allows users to embed an
book-style layout ofthumbnail images.
ER video in their own websites, a, fo~nd out, user_a?ency and its implementation have become increasingly com -
well as to "share" the vídeo through email, instant messaging, and social-net pltcated as telev1Sionculture and online culture have blended.
work pages like Facebook and MySpace. Toe producers' obvíous goal is to 1he issue of agency and spatial control extends to the aspect ratio and size
turn their product into a "virai vídeo," a video that users, not the produ cer~ of online vídeo p layers. A Web browser, as I note above, is a source of user
themselves , spread through the Internet like a vírus. 73 Conflicting with that ,1gency in terms of the shape of the browser window. Users can make it
goal, however, is the desire to retain control over intellectual property, whicl, narrow or wide, a small rectangle or one t1iat fills the entire screen. Online
is why Hu lu and similar sites do not allow the shariJ1g of the vídeo itsell vídeo players like Hulu's cede some of that power to the viewer, much mo re
Rather, they promote the sharing of a link to the vídeo on their site. Usei , than do es a conventional television set. Whereas t1ie aspect ratio is fixed at
cannot distribute actual vídeo clips, they can only operate as shills for Hu l11 , 16:9 when watching ER on Hulu, the size of the image is not. Viewers can
encouraging their friends to visit that site. make that 16:9 frame 160 pixeis wide or 1,600 pixeis wide, if they choose . In
And yet, recognizing viewers' desire to gain agency over televísion's intelil'( l.ict, one need not watch the video embedded within Hulu's webpage at all:
tual properties, producers and advertisers have experimented váth the onlin,· 11scrs can choose to fill their computer screens with the image, or to pop the
manipulation of their work by users- with mixed results. Warners' site for ih player out of the page into a new window. That window may then be resized
television network, Toe WB, implores users to "Create TV :" "Remix show,, ,,s the user wishes, and positioned anywhere on his or her screen . This degree
start a channel and make Toe WB yours ."74 An online non-linear vídeo edilw nf us~r agency would be impossible iJ1 the conventional livingroom viewing
allows users to "own" Toe WB's content and alter its stylistic schema - reediting , 11uation,and was not supported in ER's online vídeo in 1997. At that time,
select vídeo clips from WB programs and combining them with new caption, t l~crs were forced to view vídeos at one small size.
graphics , and music (Figme 4.44). Toe resulting remix cannot be downlo adcd . Toe development ?fimmersible virtual realities in the 2000s- particularly
but can be, again, shared as a link via email, in which the recipient is invíted 111 wilh11~ th~ realm of v1deo games- might lead one to expecta less planimetric
"Remix, mash and crc;1h 111gamzat1011of space in contemporary graphical nser interfaces, and there
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pi_,o_do_, _ _ __ P...; op;....
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- - - -, Fcatured Video5 your own [video J1 il,1ve been ex~erimental, three-dimensional GUis that labor to bring visual
ThctBicx,esl I oser.Se.aso-n 7 P1emtere
Viewers of WB pro gra111 \ •it'pth, a z-ax1s, to t1ie user experie nce. Some elements of them have even
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potent ial for vídeo pir.1, \ p.1ce (Figure 4.45). And Cooliris, a Web browser add -on, transforms multi-
Ch• nnet RellY too G41M' and vandalism is mi111 111 l'dia scrapbooks into moveable walls of images that glide past users, at their
rnized. Chevrolet was 11111 111
1llrol, and on modified z-axes (Figure 4.46).76 When an image is selected, a
Figur e 4.43 A detail from Hulu.com contains a pop-up box
so fortuna te in its 20111, 11111dowfloats _up toward the user and a video starts playing. Despite these
elicited by user action-rolling the mouse over a thumbnail
image. A drop shadow suggests that it's floating over the experiment wit1i u" , ili·vclopments 111GUI design, the interfaces of the websites that provide ER's
background. agency. It provided 011l111• 1
1dco, Hulu included, still have only a modicum of three -dimensionality .

Figure4.45 Windows Vista's Flip 3D feature floats your documents into virtua l space.
Hu lu's pop -up frames, for instance, do very little spatial "popping" toward thc
user. Small drop shadows outlining them do suggest a minu scule bit of depth ,
but pop-ups themselves still appear to be flat pieces of paper sliding over flat
virtual desktops. Thus, in terms of the organization of navigable space, thc
lack of a movement on the z-axis, and the user's limited sense of agency, ER\
Web presence in 2009 is surprising ly similar to its 1997 efforts.
I have argued above that movement along the z-axis is but one comm on
axiom of virtual reality. Another is the time of the signification matching thc
time of the user- Manovich's real-time screen and Morse's temporal simulta
neity. Has this changed in terms of ER'sonline presence in 2009? Hulu's re
presentation of ER video- as with any of the vídeo scrapbook sites-emphasi zes
the lack of temporal simultaneity. 1t heightens Barthes' photo effect of this i~
was. lt is an artifact from a past time that can be manipu lated by the vicwer.
When watching a video online one can pause it, rewind it, skip ahead or back
wards. Toe illusion of it occurring at the sarne time that you're watching it, oi
Ellis' immediate presence, is extreme ly faint. Toe more agen cy that a user can
hold over the moving image, the less "live" it seems. Were ER episodes to bc
streamed live, with little víewer control over the stream, then temporal simulta
neity would return. Such
streams are extreme ly commo n
online, making ER's lack oi
simultaneity more obvíous by
con trast. A service such as
Ustream.TV , for examplc.
encourages the live streamin g
of video by 11011-professionals -
including "PersonaJ mileston e~
such as holiday gathering s,
weddings, grade school event~,
parties, even births." 77 Ustream .
TV's live events take advanta gc
Figure 4.46 Cooliris attempt s to trans cend the multi-
media scrapbook by portraying thumbnails on a movc- of their temporal simultaneit }'
able wall. Click one and it floats "up" toward the and provide a sidebar or overlay
viewer. where viewers post commenl ~
as the stream is pre sented . Toe interactivity is instantaneou s. There is no photo
effect.
When Ellis wrote about the differences between television and cinema in
1982, years before Tim Bern ers-Lee deve loped tbe protocols on which the
Internet was built, he contended, "Gazing is the constitutive activity of
cinema. Broadcast TV demands a rather different kind of looking: that of the
glance." i8 Online video on a real-time screen demands the gaze, but must
satisfy itself with the glance. When ER or any other television program
appears on someone 's computer screen it is often jus t one window among
many . And it may well be the smallest window on the screen. Until recently,
highly compressed videos from sources such as YouTube degraded rapidly if
they were enlarged beyond a quarter-screen. Such a video presence earns only
a glance from users while they devote their gazes to the instant -message
session for which they are actively typing messa ges or the massively multi-
player online role -playing game (MMORPG) in which they are moving
through virtual spaces, on z-axes, battling evil elves with magic potions. While
it is true that the resolution, and potential on -screen size, of video delivered
online is rapidly increasing and that this vídeo can now fill a conventional
digital television set in a viewer's living room, these developments will not
eliminate the increasing number of distractions drawing us away from the
vídeo screen. Just how televísio n will respond to these competing screens is
still to be determined.
YouTube and MMORPGs, along with the social network Facebook , the
user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia, and other collaborative online
elforts, share a definin g Web 2.0 characteristic that broadcast-era television
utterly lacked: their con tent is created by masses of individuais contribut -
ing small bits to them and sharing a networked experience. Online market-
ers refer to these texts as "user-generated content" (UGC) and one study
found 44.4 percent of ali U.S. Intern et users, 88.8 million users, produce
some form of UGC. 79 Thus, nearly half of these Internet users are also pro-
ducers. Characteristically of UGC sites, the "yo u" in YouTube's name is
meant to refer to the viewers/users themselves. Its website proclaims,
"YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow." 80
UGC emerges from Pierre Lévy's "collective intelligence," which he defines
as "a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantJy enhanced,
coordina ted in real time, and resulti ng in the effective mobilization of
skills." 8 1 ln YouTube's case, the networked collective submits vídeos and it
also rate s them , comments upon them, and distributes them to their
friends, causing them to "go virai." YouTube's phenomenaJ success-it
remains the most popular online vídeo source by a very wide margin - was
bui lt not just on collective int elli gen ce, but also on thousands of copyr ight
violations by its users. 82 YouTube's video upload page emphatically states,
"Do not upload any TV show s, music videos, music concerts, or commer -
cials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you crea ted
you rself." 83 But user s blithely ignore this warning and upload all manner of
copyrighted material. Toe legal implications of this and YouTube's abil ity
to invoke passages in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shield it self mtemgence mat uruaucas LLt1tv1-
from crippling lawsuits are of less interest to a student of television style sion of the network era could
than the impact of YouT ube on television stylistic sche mas. YouTube onl y app roxim ate and never truly
cult ure rewards fragm ent ation, remix, and pa stiche, whi ch serve as main - achi eve.
stays of its stylistic schema . As Lévy notes , "lm age and text are being The future of media conver -
increas ingly subjec ted to samplin g and rearr ange ment. ln cyberculture gence, like the future of the
every image is potentially the raw mate rial of another ima ge."8" YouTub e moving image itself, depends
users are blocked from uploading en tire televí sion episod es as videos must upon media compani es' ability to
be under ten minutes; so ali televi síon -oríginating video is necessarily frag- compete with the real-time
mented. And those fragme nt s are commonl y re-edited or have a new screen's user agency, navigable
soundtrack or g raphi cs laid over them or a user lip syncs his or her own space, temporal simultaneity, and
music vídeo. This radi cal pastiche is what Toe WB's video remix (discu ssed virtual sense of shared space.
above) both asp ires to and can never fully become. It results from user s However, as of January 20, 2009,
taking full agen cy over the television text and Warner's co ncern s over the "superiority" of the real-time Figur e 4.47 Chris Pirillo, homo intemetus, streams
intellectual property wo uld never allow that. O f co ur se, such unauthorize d screen as the moving -irnage's his time in fron t of the comp uter onto the Internet.
use of int ellectua l prop erty is freq uent ly rem ovcd by the YouTube admin - medium of choíce is far from Six hundred and thirty viewers were "tuned in" at
certain. On that date, Barack thi s moment, with three of them offering comments.
istration beca use of it s violation of co pyr ight, but once a video is rel eased
online, it is difficult to reign it back io again. Thus, on YouTube we can see Obam a was inaugurated as presid-
what happens to television stylistic sche ma s whe n they are app ropri ated by ent ofthe United States. Numerous online services provided real-time streaming
the online com munil y. It is mor e d ifficult to gauge the impact of onlin e of the event, challenging conventional television's coverage. CNN .com allied
appro priation and pastíche on th e sty listic schema of a scr ipted progra m itselfwith Facebook and created an interfa ce in which Facebook membcrs could
such as ER. Will its produce r s fight back with ep isodes that are YouTu be- share their thou ghts with their Facebook "friends" and with "everyone watching"
proof in some manner? Or will they develop material that is mor e easil y (Figure 4.48). CNN.com attracted a record number of concur rent live video
appropr iated by YouTube viewers? streams: 1.3 million users. It was a major technological feat and yet it was also a
Co nsider, by way of conclusion , o ne exampl e of a potent ial viewer of ER failure. Toe qualíty of the CNN.com stream - as with the other online services'
online : Chris Pirillo (Figu re 4.47). Pirillo is n ot a typical viewer becau se hc streams-was poor, with the image freezíng and the audio stuttering, making it
hirnself used to appear on "regular" television. He was a frequent contribut or difficult to watch for any extended period 88 Conventional broa dcast television at
to The Screen Savers, a tech nolo gy-or iented program on the cable network , the sarne time was able to handle nearly ten times as many viewers withou t any
TechTV. 85 After leavin g cable television, Pirillo began his own live video deter iora tion in its signal.89 In fact, while CNN.com offered a small, 569-by-320
stream . Twenty -four hours a day, seven da ys a week, he offers a portrait o i pixeis vídeo image, broadcast television presented the even t in high -definition
himself as homo int em etus. 86 He gazes intently at one window on one com - clarity, with com men -
puter screen, but he is surro und ed by two othe r screen s at which he migh t CNl.c om Live - m:::I surate audio. On this
glance . He could easily have ER runni ng in a window o n one of those screen ~,
• ----~---·-•
.. day, it was broadcast

.--- -
but how much attention would he pay to it? And consid er the users that are television that offered a
watching Pirillo watch his screens. According to the graphi c at the bo ttom oi ~ -~-------
.... supe rior screen experi -
Figure 4.47, 630 "viewers " are currently tuned in, a tiny audi ence comp ared to
TechTV's, but still it mcans hundr eds of users have Pirillo's image somewh erc
o===~
.,-~·-_,..
ence and it provided it
to a significantly greater
on their compute r desktop. And three viewcr s- identified as cipher_nem o,
LJGoose, and Granit - are sufficiently engaged with the broad cast that they
____
_
_...,....,......_
number of people. To
retum to Pool' s dictum:
• -------.-- there is "no immutable
have posted comments: e.g., "Hi Brigitte and asasin;". Althoug h their com
ments are not sparklin g exampl es of collective intelligence, they do illustrat c
lhe real -tim e collabor atio n of the group. And , besides, Lévyallows that "col
B law of growing conver-
gence." On inauguration
lective stupidity " is as common online as collective intelligence. 87 ln Pirillo's day, convcrgcnce grew
Figure 4.48 Barack Obama's inauguration was both a
gaze, Figure 4.47 illustrates television 's sought -afte r viewer, fully engaged wilh high point and a low poi nt for online video on social (1.3 million concurr ent
th e moving irnage and available for the pitching of product s. ln the comment ~ networks such as Facebook. Millions conn ected online, streams!) and shrank
of cipher _ nerno et ai., Figure 4.47 presents the interactivity and collectivc but the video quafüy was poor . (stutter ing, distorted
streams paling in companson l U n u lt:lt.Vi.>lvu., . Vv u••-·· •.
years, at the very least. Toe only thin g that is certain is that television's stylistic
schemas will either adjust to the fluctuating characteristics of the contemporary
media environment , or they will wither and die.
Not es
1. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Wl,ere Old and New Media Collide (New
York: New York University Press, 2006), 10.
2. Toe essay on which this chapter is based was written in 1999 and 2000, initially
presented to the Society for Cinema Studies on March 11, 2000, and published in
the winter 2001 issue of Scree11.As I write these words in January 2009, ten years
have passed since I first considered the topic.
3. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Teclmologíes of Freedom (Cambridge : Belknap Press, 1983), 54.
Jenkins dubs h im the prophet of convergence and quotes Pool, Convergencc
Culture, 11.
4. As one new-media marketing website queried , "Is ali of [online video) moneti za
ble?" "Online Video Growth Continues," eMarketer .com, January 15, 2009, www.
emarketer.com / Article.aspx?id =l006868 (accessed January 16, 2009). And thé
mission of Pixsy, a media search platform, is "to dramatically enhance traflic and
monetization for website owners." "Pixsy Corporation," Pixsy, 2007, www.pixsy
corp .com (accessed January 22, 2009).
5. Jenkins, Convergence Cultu re, 12.
6. "Press Releases," ERLíve, January 5, 1998, www.ERLive.com/press.html. "Warncr
Bros. Online" as a distinct entity no longer exists. It has splintered into divisiom
within the Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group: Waroer Bros. Digital Distri
bution , Warner Bros. Advanced Digital Services, and Warner Bros. Interacti vc
Entertainment. Toe WB's website proclaims, "WARNER BROS. ADVANCED
DIGITAL SERVICES provides full-service, cutting -edge interactive solutions foi
Warner Bros. Entertainment subsid iaries. WBADS also oversees ali aspects of warn
erbros.com, which serves as the entry point into, and aggregator of ali things
W arner Bros,»www.warnerbros.com/main/ #/page=company-info/divisions/hom e_
entertainmen t/divis ions_advancedmediaservices.
7. "Online Events," ERLive.com, January 5, 1998, www.ERLive.com/events .htmL
8. Ken Neville, "Minor Wounds, Killer Ratings for Live 'ER"', E! online, February 28,
2000, www.eonline.com/News/Items/O,I,1833,00.html.
9. Jack Spellman, "Re: Captions on live ER episode," e-mail to the author, March 3,
2000.
10. Ellis himself assays television in thc new millennium in Seeíng Things: Television i11
the Age of Uncertainty (New York: T.B.Taur is, 2000).
11. Charles Derry, "Television Soap Opera: Incest, Bigamy, and Fatal Disease," Joum al
of the University Film and Video Associatio1135, no. 1 (1983): 4- 16.
12. Although Chicago Hop e was not on the air nearly as long as ER, it did manage a
respectable six-ycar run. During their first seasons the itwo programs were broad -
cast against one another on Thursday nights, with Chicago Hop e moving off thc
Thursday schedule after losing the ratings battle to ER.
13. Ken Kwapis, telepho11einterview, February 24, 2000.
14. David Bordweli, On the Hístory of Film Style (Cambr idge: Harvard University
Press, 1997),168.
15. Ibid., 306.
16. Herb Zettl, Sight Sound Motíon: Applied Media Aesthetícs, 3rd edn (Belmont:
Wadsworth, 1999), 141- 63.
17. Kwapis, telephone interview.
1~. .u:uga y Ct l V•, , u,.v "'-'1 • · - •
trans. Kevin O'Brien (Berkeley: University of Califoroia Press, l'JMJ, 11.
20. This has continued into the 2000s, as can be seen in long -running programs such
as the Law & Order franchise and newer efforts such as the critically revered Mad
Men (2007-). However, as the decade is coming to a dose, more and more single-
camera programs are shifting from film to high-definition vídeo. Examples include
Battlestar Galactica (2004- 9), Weeds (2005- ) and Dexter (2006- ).
21. Personal correspondence with Ken Kwapis. lt may be noted that the scene as it was
editcd cut this movement into two shots. Nonethe less, Kwapis' plan for movement
illustrates the house style of ER.
22. ER's reliance upon the Steadicam was confinned by Kwapis. Sports Night and 1he
West Wíng were both directed/produced by Thomas Schlamme, who's known to
favor Steadicam movements and was respo nsible for the direction of ER's live
"Ambush" episode.
23. "Ambush," Shot Logger, December 9, 2008, www.tcf.ua.edu/slgallery/shotlogge r/
TitleListDetailPage.pbp?recordlD==21l (accessed December 18, 2008).
24. Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d 'Est", Afterimage 4 (autumn
1975): 6- 17. Reprinted in Readings a11d Wrítings: Semiotic Counter -Strategies
(London: Verso, 1982), 79-91.
25. For more on Fox "reality" programs, see Tarleton Gillespie, "Narrative Control
and Visual Polysemy: Fox Surveillance Specials and the Limits of Legitimation,"
Velvet Ligltt Trap 45 (2000): 36- 49.
26. It goes without saying that handheld shots do not always signify this documenta~ -
ness. Most commonly they're used to signify subjective camera, as may be seen m
innumerable scenes of characters stalking one another. Further, the initial popu-
larity of handheld shots-in the early 1960s under the influence of French New
Wave directors-was also interp reted as emblemat ic of modem disorientation and
angst. . ,, .
27. Jean-Pierre Geuens, "Visuality and Power: lhe Work of the Stead1cam, Ftlm
Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1993- 4): 16.
28. André Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 46.
29. For examples from As tlte World Turns, see Jeremy G. Butler, "Notes on the Soap
Opera Apparatus: Televisual Style and As tlte World Turns," Cinema foumal 25,
no. 3 (1986): 59.
30. John Ellis, \lisible Fictions: Cinema Television Vídeo (New York: Routledge, 1992),
106.
31. Ibid., 108.
32. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of tbe Image," in Image Music Text, ed. and trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 44.
33. Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, "Television, a World in Action," Screen 18, no.
2 (1977): 61.
34. "Press Releases."
35. Heath and Skirrow, "Television," 7-59.
36. Viewers in the Mountain Time Zone saw a tape of the Eastern/Central broadcast.
Toe U.S. DVD release uses the East Coast version for most of the episode, but
shifts to the West Coast version for tbe final ten minutes.
37. For additional differences between the two, see Ken Neville, "Minor Wounds,
Killer Ratings for Live 'ER.'"
38. Mark J.P. Wolf, "Jnventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On - and Off-Screen
Space in Vídeo Games," Film Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1997): 11- 23.
39. Janet H. Murray , Hamlet on the Holodeck: 11zeFuture of Narrative in Cyberspace
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 67.
40. John Thornton C aldw ell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Aut hority in Amerir1111
Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 264.
41. Murray, H amle t on the Holodeck, 71.
42. Ibid., 74.
43. Ibid., 79.
44. The beginning of the navigation code starts with and HTML com ment, "<!- bcgin
nav - >", after which the JavaScript is invok ed with this line of code: <scrip l
type=" text/javas cript " charset="utf -8">nbcDropDown (' ul#er_nav ') ;nbcH ideM ef OI
= 'er _ nav'; </sc ript >.
45. Mechanical mice contai n a bali mechanism which rubs x- and y -axis rollers insitk
the mo use and the cur sor responds by moving along those axes. ln the 2000s, sud 1
mice were mostly repla ced by <levices using op tical senso rs to track the mou sc\
movement.
46. Ibid., 126.
47. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 168.
48. Using a fixed -widt h table, ERTVs main page is set to a width of 500 pLxels whik
ERLive 's width is 600 pixeis.
49. John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambri dge: Harva rd U niversity Press, 1992).
50. Widescreen televisions have changed this marginally. Many of them allow you to
zoom into thc image or chang e your disp lay to/from lette rboxing and windo wbo x
ing. Some, howe ver , force the viewer to accept wh atever aspect ratio is their
default.
51. 640 x 480,800 x 600, and 1024 x 768 were the most common monitor settings in thc
1990s, but 1280 x 1024 and larger /wider displays are widespread in th e late 2000s.
52. "lt 's a WRAP!!!" ERLive, Janua ry 5, 1998, www.ERLive.com/w rap.hlml.
53. Quoted in Belton, Widescreen Cinema, 98.
54. QuickTime VR Authoring, )un e 12, 2000, www.app le.co m /qu icktime /qtvr.
55. Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art , and Cyberculture (Bloomin g-
ton: Indiana Un iversity Press, 1998), 91.
56. Ibid., 71.
57. lbid., 87.
58. ER's "s inuou s z-ax is moves" have been commented on by Morse, Virtualit ies, 224.
59. Wolf, "Invenling Space," 20.
60. Battlezone's wireframe graphics were displayed on a black-and -white CRT
monitor, with green and red overlay s providing some limited color.
61. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 129.
62. Morse, Virtualities, 21.
63. Jbid ., 20. It will be int erest ing to see how the digital video recorder (DVR) affecls
viewers' sense of time and interactivity. Boddy provides an early assessment of the
possible impact of <levices such as TiVo: William Boddy, "Tclevis ion in Transit, "
Screen 41, no. 1 (2000): 67-72 .
64. Lev Manovich, The Lang1wge of New Media (Cambridge: Toe MIT Press, 2001) ,
95- 6. Also available onJine : Lev Manovich, "An Archeol ogy of a Compuler
Scree n," Lev Manovich, www.manovich.net /TEXT/ digital_ nature.html (accesse d
Dccember 18, 2008) .
65. Manovich, 1he Language of New Media, 99.
66. Zettl, Sight So,md Motion, 255.
67. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, l29. Quoted above .
68. "Mass Distra ction: Media Consumption in Dollars a nd Hours", Wired, May 2000,
105.
69. ln Second Life one creates a visual identity, an avatar , that can travei tbrough a
virtual world that is simultaneously connected, via the Inte rne t, with thousands of
other users . Jt's less a game than an environm ent. World of Warcraft:, a massively
multiplayer online role-p laying game (MMORPG), also supports visua l avatars
and online interact ion , but also includes combal with other users.
70. ln 1994, the fastest online consumer access was via a modem transmitting data at
28.8 Kbps (kilobits per secon d).
71. Toe speed of consu mer -grad e Internet access is highly variab le- depend ing on
both technol ogical and cconomi c factors . Nonetheless, it is common for consum-
crs currently accessing the Intern et via cablc modems to achieve download speeds
of 6,000 Kbps.
72. One of the first to idcntify Web 2.0 was Tim Reilly who contend s 1hat principal
among the new online "rules" is, "Build appli cations tha t harness nctwork effects 10
get better the more peop le use them." Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 Compact Definition:
Trying Again," OreiJJy.com, December 10, 2006, radar.oreiJJy.com/archives/2006/ 12/
web-20-compacthtml (accessed January 8, 2009).
73. One notabl e example is the "Dick in a Box" exce rpt from NBC's Saturday Nigl,t
Live (December 16, 2006). Its posting to YouTu be allowed it to go virai. And
among 2008's most virai vídeos was \1/eezer's music vídeo, Pork and Beans, which
ilself features individuai s from homemade virai videos - including Gary Brolsma
(aka the Numa Num a G uy), Tay Zonday (famou s for his rendition of "Chocolate
Rain"), and Chris Crocker (who proclaimed, "Leave Britn ey [Spears ] alone!").
74. "Create TV," TheWB.com, www.thew b.com /wb lender (accessed Janu ary 16, 2009).
75. Frank Rose, "Comrnercial Break," Wired 14, no. 12 (De cember 2006), www.wired.
com/w ired/arc hive/ 14.12/ta hoe.html (accessed )anua ry 20, 2009) .
76. "Cooliris," Coo liris, January 29, 2009, www.cooliris. com (accessed /anuary 29,
2009).
77. Sites such as Ustream.tv facilitate live, interactive õroadcasts" by persons outside
lhe world ofbig medi a. Accordin g lo its website,
[ll ] enables anyon e with a camera and an Internet conne ction to quickly and
easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. ln less than two
minutes, anyone can becomc a broadcaster by creat ing their own channel on
Ustream or by br oadcasting through their own site, empowering them to
engage with their audience and further hui ld their brand .
("Aboul Us," Ustream.TV, www.ustream.lv / about [accessed January 16, 2009])
78. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 50. Some 18 years later, Ellis maintains that "the aesthetics of
television " still demand a "relativ ely low levei of audience attention." Ellis, Seeí11
g
111i11gs,100.
79. Paul Vema, "User-Generated Content: More Popular than Profitable ," eMarketer,
January 2009, www.emarketer.com/Reports / AII/E marketer _2000549.aspx
(accessed )anuary 29, 2009).
80. "Company Histor y," YouTube, January 20, 2009, www.youtube.com/t/about
(accessed January 20, 2009).
8 1. Pierr e Lévy, Collective lntelligence: Ma11ki11d's Emergi11g World i11 Cyberspace,
trans . Rob ert Bononno (Camb rid ge: Perseu s, 1997), 13.
82. ln a report from August 2008, thc Nielsen Company found that YouT ube "broad -
cast" 4,762,883,000 video streams that month and that its nearest competitor (Fox
lnteractive Media) cou ld muster on ly 278,375,000. "Top Online Streaming Video
Sites: Augu st 2008," Nielsen Wire (Sept embc r 24, 2008), blog .nielsen. com/
nielsenwire/online _mobile/top -online-brand s-august-2008 (accessed January 30,
2009).
83. "Video File Upload," YouTube, January 20, 2009, www.yout ube.com/my _vidcos _
upload (acccssed January 20, 2009).
84•. Pierre Lévy, Cybercultur e, trans. Robert 80110 11110 (Minneapolis: Universit y of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 151.
85. Originally known as ZDTV and later as G4.
86. Chr is Pirillo, "Live Streaming Int ernet Broadcast," January 13, 2009, chris.pirill o.
com/ live (accessed Janu ary 13, 2009).
87. Lévy, Cyberculture, 11.
 5.
88. Erick Schonfeld, "Toe Day Live Web Vídeo Streaming Failed Us," TechCrunch,
January 21, 2009, www.techcrunch .com/2009/0l/21 / the-day -live-web-video-
streaming -failed -us (accessed January 22, 2009).
89. Accord ing to a television industry newsletter,
during I la to 1230p, NBC averaged almost 11.5 million total viewers anda 4.0
A25- 54 rating; ABC averaged 11.0 million total viewers and a 3.5 A25- 54 T elevisualit y and the Resurrection of
rating; CNN dre~v_in7.3 million total viewers and a 2.4 demo rating; and CBS
had nearly 7.2 m1lhon total v1cwers anda 2.3 demo rating. the Sitcom in the 2000s
("Cynopsis," Cynopsis Media, January 22, 2009, ww-.v.cynopsis.com/contcnt/
vicw/ 4133/ 53 (accessed January 22, 20091)

ln my consideration of commercial s above, I had occasion to allude to Bertolt

Brecht in that unlikely context. I must invoke him once again - perhaps unad -
visedly- in my explication of style in yet another lowly television context: the
genre of the situation comedy. Toe sitcom is one of television's founding gen -
res-having existed on radio before making the transition to television, mu ch
like the soap opera. And, like the soap opera as well, it is a genre said to be in
declin e.1 Within the past ten years, however, it has radically reinvented itself
and that reinvention has largely occurred within the realm of style. Therefore,
I feel it is not wholly inappropr iate to compare the contemporary situation
comedy with Brecht's revolutionary work in the 1920s and 1930s. And, if l
may paraphrase his notes to the opera, Rise and Fali of the City of Mahagonny
(1930), I contend that the modem sitcom is the televisual sitcom. 2
Many say the sitcom is already dead-killed off by reality television and
the YouTubian anention span of network television's few remaining viewers. 3
Toe genre's ratings have been disastrously low for several years, and the
writers strike during the 2007- 8 season pushed them lower still. ln the two
seasons before the strike, the Nielsen ratings' top-20 programs included just
one lonely sitcom - the critically reviled Two and a Half Men (2003- ).
Looking back over the genre's various peaks in the ratings, we can see that in
1978- 9 ali of the top ten programs were sitcoms and, exactly one decade la ter
(1988- 9), 16 out ofthe top 25 were sitcoms - the highest sitcom saturation in
the history of U.S. television .4 Thc cu rrent low ratings only tel1 part of the
story. W ithin the television industry, there is a pessimism about the genre.
Larry Gelbart, who developed the long-running sitcom, M*A *S*H (1972-83),
expressed it succinctly, "lt is just over." 5
Perhaps the most reliable indication that a genre is becoming moribund is the
frequency with which it is ridiculed, whether gently or not. Some of the more
notable parodies since the 1990s include Weezer's cannibalization of Happy Days
for the Spike Jonze-directed music vídeo, Buddy Ho/ly (1994, available on
TVStyleBook.com) and a 2009 titles sequence of The Simpsons in which the
family appears as if they were in severa! iconic sitcoms, presenting a virtual
history of the genre in just a few seconds.6 A shot based on The Honeymooners
( 1955-6)7 is rendered in black-and -white and casts Homer as Ralph Kramden,
Marge as Alice Kramden and Bart as Ed Norton (Figure 5.1). Toe sitcom, Scrubs

173