by Bob Levy
The Sopranos (1999–2007) was the first successful TV series in American history about a criminal. There had been criminal lead characters in movies for almost as long as there had been movies. James Cagney became a movie star in 1931 playing a criminal in Public Enemy. The Godfather (1972), in the pantheon of most critics’ greatest American movies, is about a criminal. But in its first 50 years American TV had never centered a successful series on a criminal. By earning both enormous commercial and critical success, The Sopranos redefined American television’s rulebook. Upending TV genre conventions was an essential part of its appeal – it felt unlike any show anyone had seen.
The Sopranos offered a revolutionary approach to genre, but not by ignoring it. From a genre perspective, The Sopranos was a cop show from the criminal’s point of view. The Sopranos flipped the script and made the antagonist the protagonist. In a sense, The Sopranos was an inverted cop show, a reinvention of a decades-old TV genre that effectively created a new genre by folding the old genre inside out.9
Success in Hollywood breeds imitation and variation, and development professionals wasted little time. In 2002 The Shield more directly inverted the cop show by making the criminal lead character an actual cop. In 2006 Dexter depicted an ingenious variation on the cop-as-criminal lead, a cop as psychopathic serial killer who only kills worse criminals. In 2007 Breaking Bad took a nebbish character and tracked his journey to becoming a criminal mastermind. Broadcast network television (which has coveted the critical success of cable’s innovations since The Sopranos and looked for ways to appropriate them) finally caught up with the trend in 2013 with The Blacklist – but hedged the genre-flip by making the criminal character a consultant to the FBI, effectively making the criminal a consultant to the cops (the FBI are federal police) or, in other words, taking the new criminal-lead genre and bending it back into the original thing itself, a cop show.
While the first 50 years of TV were marked by clear and compartmentalized genre programming, The Sopranos opened the door to a new era of enormous genre creativity and experimentation that we live in today. Characters, subject matter and concepts that never would have been considered fodder for development in TV’s first 50 years are today not only fair game but in demand.10
A show like Transparent about a middle-aged man undergoing gender transition never would have been developed on American TV five years before Amazon launched it in 2014, let alone 10 or 20 years before. And yet Transparent in many ways borrows elements of the family comedy genre. While its tone and subject matter are light years from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best, two enormously successful 1950s half-hour comedy hits, Transparent tells stories about family relationships just as those earlier domestic comedies did. Another of Amazon’s successful, cutting edge shows, Bosch, while edgy and built around an anti-hero like so many post-Sopranos series, is, at the end of the day, a cop show.
Genre is central to the way TV development professionals think about their work, even in our genre-bending, genre-defying times. What genre does a new pitch fall within? What are the traditional rules of that genre and do we want our new project to hew to those rules or defy them? Does a project fall completely outside traditional TV genres? Is there a new vein of programming emerging that appears to be defining a new genre? These kinds of questions are part of the daily work of development execs, writers and producers in Hollywood today.
A Question
Before I move on to the next section of the book – while I’m still in macro mode – let me pose one last basic question: Why do we watch scripted TV?
As I talk about the steps of TV development it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Let’s not. Let’s zoom out to the widest possible perspective and ask the most basic question: Why do people watch scripted series on TV? What commodity are they seeking when they make the choice to sit in front of a screen and search for a scripted show? Why do we watch TV?
The easiest and most obvious answer is that we want to be entertained. But what does that mean, “The viewer wants to be entertained?” That’s too easy. We can think harder than that: what specific experiences are we referring to as “being entertained?”
I’m going to offer several reasons why we watch scripted television. There are many more, and I encourage readers to reflect on their own personal connection to scripted television. Why do you watch TV? What do you take from the experience? What qualities, what commodities are you seeking when you watch the end product of TV development?
First and most simply, I would argue, we turn to TV for wish fulfillment. We want to see a fantasy version of our lives, a “better” version. This is probably closest to what we mean when we say, “The function of TV is to entertain.” Most TV offers some kind of positive fantasy (there are also negative or nightmare fantasies, and entertainment products including TV sometimes offers those too). At its simplest, most people on TV are like us, but prettier. Most people on TV are like us, but a little richer. They live in houses that look like ours, but are probably a little bigger and nicer. Where most of our lives are simple and mundane and offer few and infrequent triumphs, TV offers a fantasy view of life filled with frequent, regular victories. Life, which resembles our lives, looks better on TV.
Television, as we know, has grown darker and more pessimistic in the last 15 to 20 years, but even edgy, cynical twenty-first-century TV usually offers viewers a healthy dose of fantasy along with its cynicism. Game of Thrones is dark and edgy, but what’s more fantastical (literally) than riding across the sky on the back of a powerful, loyal dragon? Mad Men was a landmark series that helped define the current generation of edgy, sophisticated, adult programming, but, boy, didn’t those 1960s clothes and hairstyles look awesome! Don Draper’s penchant for cheating on his wife with young, attractive women helped define his morally flawed anti-hero character, but among the nearly infinite number of potential flaws to attribute to a flawed anti-hero, it was no accident that creator Matthew Weiner assigned a character flaw to his lead that also serves as a fantasy for many viewers. Breaking Bad depicted a decent man’s moral descent into criminality; it also offered the wish fulfillment fantasy of a 50-year-old nerd overpowering younger, stronger, violent men with his intellect. If we look closely, we’ll see that almost all successful scripted television – dark and realistic as it might appear on the surface – offers some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy. Almost all of us wish to escape our mundane reality by taking a brief flight of fantasy.
Second, most of us look to TV for emotional stimulation. We love going on an emotional roller coaster. We enjoy empathizing with a character, rooting for a character, and then feeling exhilarated when the character is victorious or feeling heartbroken when the character is defeated. Again, think of Game of Thrones and the enormous emotional highs and lows (more often lows) the show takes us on. It puts us through the emotional wringer, and we love it! We love those characters and feel so much when they’re crushed or, on rare, special occasions, when they triumph. To a great extent, scripted television is like an emotional treadmill; we place ourselves in front of a screen and exercise our emotions.
In a sense, TV is a giant rooting interest machine. “Rooting interest” is an important concept in Hollywood entertainment. It’s when a show or movie compels us, the viewer, to care deeply about whether a character gets what he wants or not, to root strongly for the character to achieve her goal. A show might spend scenes, episodes or even seasons ratcheting up our rooting interest like the roller coaster car slowly climbing the long, steep lift hill, inch by inch, foreboding click by foreboding click, before all that rooting interest is flung down the track, careening our emotions around and around and up and down. After the intense emotional catharsis of a well-earned story payoff, we feel as rung out as we are when we stumble out of the roller-coaster car and step back onto solid earth.
Third, TV serves as spectacle. Even before the current era of widescreen cinematic high definition TV filmmaking (again, think of Game
of Thrones), TV thrived on car chases, explosions and beautiful actresses wearing glamorous gowns. Television has always delivered visual spectacle into our homes and into our mundane and mostly spectacle-free lives.
Another quality many viewers turn to scripted series television for is the “process” of procedural shows, the sensation that we’re learning something, that we’re learning how people like cops and doctors do their jobs. Sometimes the procedural elements of TV stories are based on fact, but very often they’re completely made up. A lot of the DNA “science” in shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was completely fabricated for entertainment purposes. Even though it’s made up, viewers still enjoy the entertainment experience of feeling like they’re seeing how something works, that they’re learning something.
There are many kinds of TV procedurals. There are police procedurals, medical procedurals, legal procedurals and even criminal procedurals. Breaking Bad was, among other things, a criminal procedural. The show made a point of depicting, often in explicit detail, how drugs were made and how the show’s criminals avoided detection or defeated their enemies. Creator/showrunner Vince Gilligan chose to provide so many details of the criminal exploits of his characters both because they lent the show verisimilitude, the appearance of being real and true, but also because they delivered a kind of procedural entertainment kick to the show. We’ve all seen lots of police procedurals and enjoyed feeling like we were learning how cops catch criminals. Breaking Bad delivered the unique fun of showing how criminals pull off crimes and get away with them.
One of the themes of an enormous amount of TV storytelling, one central to traditional genres like cop shows and lawyer shows, remains so fundamental to so much TV that it’s worth including in this list. The theme of justice. Most cop show and lawyer show stories are basic morality tales: The social compact is violated, justice is threatened, and ultimately the forces of good and the rule of law wins out and justice is restored. The real world, we all know, is not always just. For many of us there is little fairness in life, and for that reason we find it deeply satisfying to see clear-cut examples of justice depicted in our entertainment. Good guys winning and bad guys getting their just desserts feels so satisfying to us that we turn to TV (and other forms of entertainment) to watch stories that dramatize justice. In addition to shows set in the criminal justice system, other TV series provide that same justice high by telling stories that punish the morally bad and reward the morally good.
Conversely, our current era of dark, cynical programming often plants expectations of a just resolution but then subverts those expectations to deliver the more surprising, and cynically satisfying resolution of justice stumbling and bad triumphing. That kind of resolution feels more “realistic” and more contemporary to many of us, but often, while it seems more honest and truthful, it’s actually just setting us up for a bigger justice payoff later in the series. Consider the number of times viewers’ rooting interest in watching Ramsey Bolton, the baddest of all the bad guys on Game of Thrones, get his just desserts was upset, and Ramsey turned the tables and crushed a rootable “good guy” character.11 While all those justice-thwarted episodes seemed satisfyingly cynical in the moment, they only made us feel even more thoroughly delighted when Ramsey finally did get his brutal and deeply satisfying comeuppance.
Another one of the commodities many of us turn to TV for is what I’ll call “travelogue.” We enjoy discovering new worlds. Television shows us new worlds in a literal “spectacle” sense, but TV also provides a travelogue function in showing us new sub-cultures that we’ve never seen. Sons of Anarchy was about a family in a California motorcycle gang sub-culture. Most viewers of Sons of Anarchy, it’s safe to say, were not motorcycle gang members. They were mostly law-abiding citizens who enjoyed being taken into an unfamiliar world and shown the real-seeming (but no doubt highly fictionalized) world of that sub-culture. The travelogue function of TV can also extend to completely imaginary worlds. The Star Trek franchise introduced viewers to an incredibly highly developed and completely fictional world. Some viewers take enormous entertainment satisfaction from immersing themselves in these worlds, traveling via their screens into the depths of well-developed and thoroughly detailed imaginary worlds. Traveling into a new world is one of the many satisfying and entertaining experiences of watching scripted television.
In many ways, another role of scripted television (and entertainment in general) is to affirm its consumers’ worldviews. We look to our popular culture to examine our beliefs and attitudes about our world, challenge them, play them out in story form, and ultimately affirm them. For decades the central message of broadcast network television was to affirm American middle-class biases and values. Stories served to effectively say to viewers, “You know that view of the world you have? Well guess what? You’re right, that is how the world works. You were right all along.” Today’s expanded marketplace of TV content distribution allows, among other things, for “narrowcasting,” shows designed to target smaller cohorts of viewers, and in many cases they are designed to affirm the tastes, values and beliefs of smaller subsets of American entertainment consumers. Some networks, in fact, are largely branded by their specific and sometimes narrow set of values and beliefs.
There are many more reasons why we turn to TV for entertainment, and I encourage readers to think about more of them. Why do we love TV? Why do we think viewers love TV and what do they look for in the work we provide them? Developers of TV series need to be thoughtful about what their end-users really want, in addition to merely “being entertained.”
I’ll offer one last value that scripted TV delivers, and it’s an important one: We look to TV for validation. This is different from philosophical affirmation. We turn to TV to see people who look like we do, who live like we do and who experience challenges like we do. There is something enormously comforting, something incredibly validating to see ourselves reflected in cultural expressions. Pop culture (scripted TV in particular) has been an important tool for society to provide that. “That’s me! That’s my family! We’re not alone. We’re not that different from other people. See, we’re on TV, too!” These are powerful feelings that people turn to TV to experience.
For a long time American TV validated the majority audience. White middle-class and upper-middle-class America saw itself reflected in TV series and other Americans did not. More recently, the Hollywood TV industry has discovered that American TV viewers are more diverse than it once believed, and it’s now serving to offer validation to people of different ethnic and racial minorities, to people of differing levels of physical ability, different gender identifications and to people of different shapes and sizes, most of whom were excluded for a very long time from experiencing the powerful validation TV can provide. Another way of saying this is that Hollywood’s traditional definitions of wish fulfillment have been in conflict with many viewers’ desire for validation. For a long time many entertainment professionals viewed a traditional Hollywood character type – attractive, tall, thin, more affluent than average, straight and white – as every American’s wish fulfillment character ideal. But many viewers actually rejected that Hollywood prototype, and instead wished for characters who looked and lived more like they did. They sought validation more than they sought Hollywood’s definition of wish fulfillment.
The demographics of American society and its TV audiences have been changing and continue to change. America continues to grow more racially and ethnically diverse. In the past 20 years American TV has entered a new era of greater creative experimentation, including a desire to break traditional rules and definitions. These phenomena, along with a proliferation of channels of distribution that free networks from the business requirements of trying to appeal to everyone by depicting Hollywood’s idea of idealized American types, have aligned to slowly begin to make the world depicted on American TV a more inclusive world that serves to validate more and more of its audience. American TV still has a long way to go, but at
least it’s a start.
Notes
1 For an excellent introduction to the scholarly approach to these subjects see Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004).
2 Dragnet was a landmark series in many ways, which I will explore throughout the book. For a detailed history and cultural studies analysis of the series see Mittell, Genre and Television, 121–152.
3 The distinction is relevant at larger networks and studios that have longform development departments separate from drama development departments. Longform departments typically develop TV movies and mini-series but not continuing drama series. Whether a limited series is developed at a company’s longform department or at its drama development department may depend on how a company defines these formats.
4 Cultural studies scholars tend to group format and genre together under the “genre” rubric. In this approach, one-hour dramas and cop shows are both considered genres. Some scholars, like Trisha Dunleavy, distinguish the larger category of one-hour dramas and half-hour comedies as “meta-genres.” In practice, Hollywood TV professionals approach these categories differently (though the terms they use may vary) and view genre as a subset of format. See Trisha Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television (Routledge, 2018).
5 Mittell makes a compelling case that primetime soaps owe more to “comics, classic films serials, and nineteenth century serial literature” than to daytime soap operas in Complex TV (New York University Press, 2015). I’ll continue my examination of serialized storytelling and its roots in the next chapter.
6 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, translated by John and Doreen Weightman (Plon, 1964).
7 The 1977 movie Annie Hall effectively parodied this idea–concept distinction (albeit in reverse) when it eavesdropped on a “Hollywood player” at a Beverly Hills party: “Right now, it’s only a notion. But I think I can get money to make it into a concept. And later turn it into an idea.”