Category: Television
Internet Killed The TV Star: The Mutual Shaping of Tech & Culture
A cursory reading of the history of streaming television will paint its inception and effect as techno-deterministic. However, this is not the whole picture. I will argue that not only technological but also cultural conditions of the post-network era (2004 – present) gave rise to streaming technology, empowering some previously underserved television viewers by making their interests more difficult to ignore. This complicates an understanding of social change through a purely techno-deterministic framework by presenting industry and market (expressions of culture) as equally powerful as technology (Lessig, 2006) in determining the state of society. I will begin by briefly tracing how the technological evolution of TV affects content. I Continue reading “Internet Killed The TV Star: The Mutual Shaping of Tech & Culture”
The Dark Dandy: Aesthetic Subversion in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal
There is a certain satisfaction from seeing the good guy catch the bad guy. The tropes of genre allow one to anticipate a certain pattern and find joy when those anticipated elements come to pass (Smith, 2010). But what happens when this logic is subverted? In the current programming-dense “peak” of television, the avid postmodern viewer exhausts genre power, asking TV to be more, do more. In this way, not satisfying audience expectations actually produces more satisfaction. In Hannibal (2013-2015), a genre-defying television show developed and produced by Bryan Fuller, this is accomplished by complicating what is good and evil through careful aesthetic subversion that supports, in formal elements, a plot that with a consumerist morality deifies the bad guy, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). In doing so, such a show
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On the Air Tonight: Music in The Americans
Music is the first thing one experiences in the pilot episode of The Americans. Quarterflash’s 1981 hit, “Harden My Heart,” plays as we get the show’s setting: Washington D.C. No year is announced, but the song, with it’s era-specific “sexy” saxophone, tells us we are in the ‘80s. We aren’t sure that the music isn’t diegetic as we see Keri Russell sitting at a bar leaning into the conversation she is having with a middle-aged man who has deluded himself into believing that a woman that beautiful is incredibly interested in him.
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Visualizing Hindsight: The Semiotics of Halt and Catch Fire’s Intro Sequence
Image courtesy of Art of the Title
Halt and Catch Fire is a show more about time and technological progress than characters, and the intro sequence reflects that. Currently airing its fourth and final season on AMC, the show charts the evolution of digital technology from the personal computer boom through to the creation of our current portal to the web, algorithmic search engines. The main “stars” of Halt and Catch Fire’s opening title sequence are the racing Tron-like blips of light that shoot from right to left as if they are racing towards an invisible finish line. The five or so lights cut through glitchy silhouette’s of our three main protagonists, underlining the show’s priority of documenting tech’s evolution over character development. You don’t see the characters clearly at any point in the opening, which suggests they don’t matter. After watching the show, one realizes this is largely true. The characters exist mostly to drive the story forward, to play tech archetypes. They are as models are to clothes in a fashion show. The timeline tracking tech’s evolution is the main character.
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Cristina Forever 