Complex TV by Jason Mittell

Author:Jason Mittell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General, SOC052000 Social Science / Media Studies
Publisher: NYU Press

The Serial Viewer’s Activity

Comprehending a television narrative is both so straightforward as to fall beneath the threshold of analysis and potentially rich in complexity. To understand how we make sense of complex television, we need to take a slow-motion look at comprehension in practice, following Bordwell’s model pioneered by his account of viewing Rear Window.20 But as suggested earlier, the television viewer’s activity is too multifaceted to bracket off the viewing context, as serial texts can be comprehended in drastically different ways depending on what viewers bring to their viewing. To highlight this process, I examine viewing a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode with some self-reflexivity, considering how the particular context I first brought to the episode shapes the comprehension experience, frames knowledge differentials, and structures viewing memory. I am not suggesting that the viewing I trace here is identical to my own comprehension process, as much of this activity operates at the level of preconscious automatic processing that I cannot claim to access for myself or others; rather, by highlighting the contexts that I brought to the episode, I hope to show the microlinks between contexts and cognition. Thus the comprehension activity charted here is abstracted and hypothetical, but the crucial shaping contexts are not. This slow-motion account of the episode’s storytelling and the process of viewer comprehension allows us to see complex narrative form operating at the level of an entire episode, exemplifying many of the poetic aspects explored throughout the rest of the book.

I have chosen to focus on “Vehicular Fellatio,” the second episode of the seventh season, in part because it is a particularly elegant episode of television (despite its crude name) and in part because of my own idiosyncratic context. I first saw this episode upon its initial airing in September 2009, as a longtime fan of Curb but one with an erratic viewing history. I had watched the program’s first four seasons in full when they aired from 2000 to 2004 but gave up after a disappointing fourth season made me less interested in the series, as well as the complication that I lacked HBO during the next two seasons. I returned for the seventh season because it was to feature a Seinfeld reunion as a serialized plotline — as a longtime Seinfeld fan, I was compelled to watch. So my experience watching this episode was framed by the context of knowing the program’s first four seasons well (although in distant memory) but not knowing the next two at all. Prior to watching the seventh season, I read brief online summaries of the fifth and sixth seasons to see what I had missed, but many of the characters and relationships portrayed in the seventh season were new to me. This experience of watching a serialized program with breaks in viewing history and using extratextual information to fill in gaps is certainly not the ideal as designed by television producers, but it is common among viewers, highlighting how serial television’s viewing contexts are far more variable and unpredictable than those for film.

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