The Serial Gap in Long-Form Television

This project is currently underdevelopment. Below are a series of broadscale goals and notes on the current project. Please refer to the contact information on the sidebar if you are interested in further discussing this project.

Using distant viewing to compare mystery and suspense programs across four major networks/platforms: HBO, Fox, AMC, Netflix Can we use the Distant Viewing software to track serial gaps and cuts across television programs? Are there affective sensibilities tied to these programs? When does a program usually cut to commercial? When does a program conclude an episode? On what type of affective sensibility does an episode try to leave you on? How does a mystery & suspense episode formally operate with and without commercial advertising?

What are the goals of the project?

• Ideally, this project would mobilize the distant viewing toolkit in order to track the flow and narrative arc of serial programmings with and without commercial breaks. The commercial break is often conceptualized as a rather harmless accumulation of advertisements that come in the wake of specific climactic moments in a serial program. Yet, in the wake of streaming serial programming, we find either the utter lack of commercial breaks or the so-called phantom breaks (that is, the appearance of a scene cutting to a commercial but instead momentarily cutting to black as a placeholder for a potential advertisement that–based on the streaming model–would not actually exist). This tells us that the cut to commercial is more than a simple television practice based on advertising dollars (it undoubtedly is) but it has specific implications for the television serial form. This project, then, would examine four programs (one from each of the major networks or studios delineated above) and, using the distant viewing methodology, explore how the commercial break requires writers to navigate the form in novel ways (by, for example, building multiple mini-cliffhangers into the structure of a program in order to retain audiences to come back after the break) and how this formal interruption is negotiated by showrunners and writers in spaces where advertising breaks do not exist.

What problems are you trying to solve?

• The problem itself is rather modest. I am interested in exploring the relationship between serial narratives and commercial advertising. Further, I am interested in the ubiquity of the serial form and its capacity to captivate audiences interests, attention, and desire. There is, in effect, no problem other than pushing forward arguments in television and seriality studies by using technologies to explore form.

Why are you doing this project?

• To learn more about serial formalism and its relation to narrative. Further, I am interested in further exploring the relationships between network serial narratives and more contemporary streaming narratives.

Which are the resources that you have available right now without funding?

• The distant viewing toolkit is a free, python-based software that helps break episodes into frame and shot compositions. My use of the framework would ask the software to examine shot and color compositions across programs, with specific attention being paid to framings and compositions prior to and after the cut to black associated with the commercial break.

Time:

• Time is always a difficult matter to constitute. The bulk of the time would, I believe, be spent learning Python in order to deploy the distant viewing framework. This, in itself, may be time consuming and may have a steep learning curve but if done correctly the process should be autonomous.

Is this going to count towards your PhD?

• Ideally, yes. My interests are in the relationships between serial formalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In particular, I am interested in exploring the concept of the serial gap and its relationship to narrative. The digital project would function as a stepping stone or supplement to a broader engagement with the mechanisms deployed by the constraints of commercial breaks in serial narratives. The cliffhanger like structure that precedes a commercial break primes a viewer with narratological frustration due to the fact that a narrative scene is interrupted prior to its resolution. The viewer is thereby held in suspense, waiting anxiously for the resolution of this narrative moment. The moment of interruption causes the viewers to “suffer more,” that is feel the gap between narrative and resolution, more acutely than if the scene had simply reached its conclusion. The link to explore then is the relationship between the psychic suffering of dwelling in the interstitial gaps between narrative scene and resolution and the deployment of advertising to occupy that gap. Are viewers more susceptible to advertising when placed in a state of heightened psychical suffering spurred by an unresolved narrative? Why, then, do non-networked, non-advertised television series’ continue to deploy the very same gap as if a commercial break were to appear? And, what is the structure and flow of an episode that does attempt to write as if an exterior gap in the form of a commercial break were to appear? Finally, what are the formal and more precise narrative pacing distinctions between network and non-network television?

Sources would need to be downloaded from the various programs. It may be difficult to secure licenses from the above listed networks and would therefore require perhaps different approaches. All these sources are presumably digitized.