Critical Tele-visions
The last 20 years have seen dramatic shifts in the US television landscape: premium cable networks like HBO have done away with broadcast television's singular obsession with ratings, leading to challenging long-form series that allowed themselves to unfold more like a great novel than a formulaic procedural. Streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime (with others such as Disney+ ready to launch around the time that this class will take place) have not only granted subscribers access to TV classics, but also produced original formats that have attained significant cultural relevance and created a completely new phenomenon along the way: 'binge-watching'.
In this class, we will not necessarily binge, but certainly watch a variety of TV/streaming formats, ranging from the traditional series to documentaries and reality TV, to analyze both the medium itself and its products for what they tell us about a changing America. Questions we might ask include: Have the shenenigans of fictional US presidents as seen on House of Cards or Veep set the stage for the shenenigans in a certain real-life (now thankfully former) White House? Is reality TV strictly a Foucauldian 'panopticon' or have recent examples like RuPaul's Drag Race introduced a more positive, empowering spin on the genre? Has online streaming changed the nature of 'the viewer' – and if so, is there more agency now or have we become subordinate to the whims of the algorithm?
This and much more will guide our week-to-week discussions as we attempt to look beyond the mere entertainment and find points of departure that might lead to a fruitful critical engagement with the medium television.
- Kursleiter/in: Matthias Johannes Zucker