INAUGURATING THE SEMESTER OF THE TV SHOW

When I was in college I used to have an argument with one of my good friends, a future filmmaker who would not give up his allegiance to the cinema at any cost. I’d annoy him whenever I could with a simple argument: television, I’d tell him, was set to overtake the cinema as the highest form of audiovisual art, the possibility to tell long form narratives with intense character development foretelling a genre that could be as complex as the novel without losing any of the aesthetic sensibilities which the cinema has developed in its hundred year history.
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At the time, I was admittedly a TV newbie, having been deprived of the best American programming from the 80s and 90s while living in a conservative Brahmin household still thanklessly and ineffectively holding on to some type of anti-Western puritanism, which basically meant my early relationship to television was almost exclusively limited to children’s cartoons and sports (both of which I still love dearly). And so, when I finally had the opportunity to watch TV unencumbered by any suspicious family gaze, I devoured anything and everything, binging on Alias, 24, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Beauty and the Geek, and untold hours of a reality TV genre that was just coming into its own and of which I remain a bit embarrassed for having consumed (and continuing to consume) so willingly.

​And now, having traversed a world of television programming I never knew could exist, and feeling vindicated in the afterglow currently associated with the “Golden Age” of television, I think its time for us to bring television into the mainstream of scholarly thought, as worthy of consideration as the cinematic or the novelistic. Shows like the Wire and Madmen are equal parts scathing social commentary and artistic masterworks; Breaking Bad and True Detective are evolutions in the art of cinematography (as I was pleasantly reminded in this recent Grantland article on the latter); the Good Wife and How to Get Away with Murder are challenges to the traditional gender and racial character norms of network television; Luther and Sherlock have taken the detective tale into worlds of audiovisual darkness that re-define how such stories can be told; and, of course, shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of LA, are producing new cultural (and ethical) anxieties about the relationship between living and being filmed, reality and fiction, which was shot-putted into my consciousness after a husband of one of the housewives committed suicide during the taping of the show.

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​This isn’t to say that the cinema is dead or something so melodramatic (although it seems that some cinema studies scholars have been experiencing some version of that crisis, the whole problem founded in the move from analog to digital, from the use of actual film to video). Rather, there seems to be a productive, on-going conversation between film and television demonstrated, for example, in the number of film stars and directors who have migrated, if even briefly, onto the “small screen”. I would argue that one of the best films of 2014, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, reflected the influence of television on cinema, actors being filmed over the course twelve years more akin to how we experience child TV stars who have their growth tracked as we watch their fictional television selves. 
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And yet, there is anxiety within the academy about taking television too seriously. We can talk about it over a drink or at home with our friends and family, but we cannot talk about television in classrooms, during lectures, at conferences or other decidedly “academic” spaces. In fact, even in trying to figure out how exactly we should configure our “semester of the TV show”, our leader, John Jackson, mentioned that “they” would laugh at us; a they which I assumed would be a constellation of scholars from the social sciences and the humanities who would see us as somehow unserious, unrigorous, or unscholarly in our overt and explicit discussion, love, and belief in the value of television. (It’s worth mentioning that John’s new book, Impolite Conversations, is paralleled by short form online episodes; the “episode” being the best way of seeing television’s influence on our scholarly imaginations.)
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As a response, camra sets off the Spring 2015 semester by unashamedly pledging its allegiance to television programming in all its glory. Here’s how it will work: every two weeks one camra member will write a two-to-four paragraph brief on a TV show (or even one episode of a show), current or completed, which has captured their imagination or affected some small aspect of their lived experience. Lets keep them short and sweet, while starting to make in-roads into television-as-scholarship.

​Can’t wait!!!
Arjun