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This thesis investigates the use of documentary style in contemporary American comedy series and its implications for the sitcom genre. Through analysis of key texts and scholars, it argues that the new form of sitcom offers a fresh perspective on communication and text, and is a valuable contribution to television as an artistic expression. Relevant to both American and European contexts, this study explores The Office (UK & US) and Arrested Development as examples of this emerging genre.
Typology: Summaries
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Institutionen för studier av samhällsutveckling och kultur – ISAK LiU Norrköping
Linköpings universitet, LiU Norrköping, 601 74 NORRKÖPING
Masteruppsats från Masterprogram i Kultur och mediegestaltning
“New Style in Sitcom - exploring genre terms of contemporary American comedy TV series through their utilization of documentary style”
Abstract: Through exploring the use of documentary style in a selection of contemporary American comedy series, this thesis closes in on the question whether texts that stylistically differ from traditional sitcom can still be regarded as part of the sitcom genre. The contemporary American TV series that are being analyzed are The Office, Arrested Development, Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Michael J. Fox Show****. As the series’ place within sitcom becomes apparent, the analysis ultimately leads to a critical investigation of the term “comedy verite.” Questioning the concepts applicability for the American series and their development leads to the investigation of new definitions. This analysis of contemporary televisual styles reveals a myriad of deeper issues and elucidates how stylistic developments point towards broader developments of the TV medium – towards a medium more and more defined by, or even drenched in, “reality.”
0 PROLOGUE Whilst I was studying film theory I got more and more drawn towards television both as a medium of delivery and a content provider, as well as to the increasingly more complex serial narratives displayed in it. In writing my bachelor thesis “Hamlet on Bikes” I was interested in narration and adaptation. In my magister thesis “The television series Community and Sitcom” my focus was on modern genre definitions. But in both I felt boxed in and limited by film theory. This is why I‟m now, in this master thesis, making a deliberate difference between the fields, and want to highlight that television is best analyzed with tools aimed at this specific medium. What leads me into the subject of style, and documentary style sitcom in particular, is my analysis of Community in a genre context. This series diverges strongly stylistically from sitcom and adopts the styles of completely different genres, such as western or documentary. This made me realize the importance of style as this surface we meet before the text unfolds. One chapter of my thesis on Community is concerned with that series employment of documentary film style and narrative features. In a documentary-concept episode of Community , one of the characters even refers to other documentary style television comedies as useful and easy storytelling devices for this actual episode. Rather than looking at it as a storytelling device however, I‟m more interested in the presumption of the existence of a coherent group of documentary style comedy series. Therefore, this thesis will be concerned with exploring the coherence of this presumed new group.
1 INTRODUCTION It is noticeable that contemporary American television comedy series have started using documentary-film devices more frequently this past decade to tell their fictive stories. This has changed the style of the series to a greater degree than ever before, as the new style is applied to the whole series rather than just an episode. It is this extent that is new rather than the combination. Additionally, the new style sets them consciously apart from the sitcom genre in general. Merging a documentary aesthetic with a fictive story has often and since long ago been used in dramatic stories, such as for example in the radio-play adaption of The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1898) by Orson Welles‟ Mercury Theater Group in 1938. Back then the way that the invasion of earth by aliens was portrayed, interrupting regular entertainment with urgent news broadcasts, resulted in a public panic that would be close to impossible to reestablish today considering our constant connectivity with each other and all news channels. Another reason for why this probably would not be possible again is also the way we view and trust media today, as constant media consumers we do not take everything we are shown or told instantly as pure truth, even if delivered in a form that has conventions implicating truth. We accept and are always aware that for instance films such as Zelig (Woody Allen,
largely occurred within the realm of style.”^5 A resulting approach of the genre‟s reinvention is a style that is based upon the conventions of documentary film. It seems that this form of presenting comedy has come alongside of documentary films regaining commercial success throughout the past ten years, leading back into what has been called a New Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking.^6 During the 90s docusoaps became hugely popular on British TV followed by “the global rise in reality programming,”^7 and with the advent of the 21st^ century, documentary films have reentered the cinema and been popularized through such films as The Kid Stays In The Picture (2002) and Bowling for Columbine (2002). In comedy series today we find the format of documentary storytelling and visual style not only applied in single episodes such as on several occasions in, for instance, Community (NBC 2009-), but also to the concept of an entire show such as The Office (US NBC 2005-2013) or Modern Family (ABC 2009-). Academic exploration of this specific stylistic evolution has essentially been limited to the inception of a narrowly analyzed term. In a 2004 edition of the journal Screen, Brett Mills offers in an analysis of the British series The Office (UK BBC 2001-2003) the term “comedy verite.” It is based on the for him evident connections of the series, and other similar British and Australian programs, use of documentary conventions with the Cinéma Vérité tradition.^8 Mills goes in fact so long as to proclaim that these signal “the point at which the traditional sitcom form died in Britain and Australia.”^9 Taking what Mills had developed as his foundation, Ethan Thompson applied and evolved the term for the US market into a mode of production.^10 Overall, Thompson‟s reapplication of the term to American series has been merely accepted but not further researched. “Comedy verite” is applied as truth to all American documentary style series, albeit only in an academic context, without the term itself having been researched further. Even Thompson himself has not worked further with it.^11 When Mills‟ comprehensive book about sitcom was released a year after publishing the above referenced article, it seems that he is taking a step back as well. “Comedy verite” is rarely mentioned and not applied during his analysis of The Office. Here he goes so far as to say that to truly see the implication of the new form of sitcom and its significance (“as both an
(^56) Butler, Jeremy: Television Style (Routledge, 2010, New York), p. http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/academys_rise_of_non-fiction_film_golden_age_of_documentary_embracing_distr1)^ Hanna, Beth:^ Academy‟s Rise of Non-Fiction Film: Golden Age of Documentary, Embracing Distractions, Oprah Wong;^ Indiewire; (read 2013-04-18);^2011 -^10 -^27
industrial product and the focus of academic analysis,”^12 and, might I add, as a general term of product identification also applicable for audiences) there first needs to be an example produced that is truly popular and mainstream, uniting “audiences in the ways sitcoms from earlier decades did.”^13 Considering the success of Modern Family ,^14 I believe this form of comedy now warrants a reexamination. It is not my aim to inquire why one show or another has more or less success, neither do I want to claim what the implications or significance of the new form are; instead I‟m curious about the current state of affairs. How do contemporary American sitcom series of more recent years (2009-2013) make use of documentary conventions? How do they look, how are they structured, where are they set and what themes do they address? Through analyzing the style and structure of a selection of contemporary documentary style American comedy series, I aim to explore their relationship to both sitcom and “comedy verite.”
1-1 AIMS The aim of this thesis is to further explore the development of television genres with the example of a certain portion of the evolution of the sitcom genre. “Contemporary sitcom offers a useful case study for these debates, precisely because sitcom is one genre whose characteristics are often assumed to be comparatively rigid and clear;”^15 the sitcom is also a rich ground for analysis due to the limitations of the term sitcom in today‟s much broader style of televisual comedy series and the limited research on the subject. Especially the only marginally explored term “comedy verite.” Exploring the genre relations of contemporary comedy television series to traditional sitcom through their specific use of the documentary style, the concept of “comedy verité,” as well as the concept of New Comedy, shall thus also serve as a case study in approaching questions of genre development through TV style.
1-2 QUESTIONS My main questions are regarding what unites this group of series that announce themselves to use documentary style and whether that could define the advent of a new (sub)genre. How do contemporary American sitcom series of more recent years (2009-2013) make use of documentary conventions? How do they look, how are they structured and where are they set? What are the most prominently featured elements? How does their look relate to earlier
(^1213) Mills, Brett: Television Sitcom (London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2008), p. 14 iSandler, Kevin: “bid,^ p.^66 Modern Family: Product Placement”, in: Mittell, Jason; Thompson, Ethan (eds.): How to watch Television (New York: New York University Press, 2013) (^15) Mills, Brett: “Contemporary Sitcom (Comedy Vérité)”, in: Creeber, Glen (ed.): , p.25 (^3) The Television Genre Book (London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, 2nd edition, 2008), p.
style, but only two of them are relevant to my analysis, they can concisely be summarized as follows: descriptive studies of style aim to describe - to thoroughly explore how a program is structured, looking closely at for instance camera movements, length and frequency of cuts, setting and so forth. Analytical studies of style place the style in an imagined or concrete context, for instance in the context of the TV medium, of the narration, of a genre or a particular program. This type of analysis asks what the meanings and functions of the style are. Combining the two answers thus both how and why the style is employed. I will however not describe the minutiae of the texts, but through these methods of analysis highlight key characteristics of the texts. As the aim of this thesis is to explore the generic relationships of contemporary sitcom series, I will within the method of analytical stylistics draw upon two theories that concern precisely this recent development of the genre: the style specific “comedy verité” and the notion of New Comedy. In devising his New Comedy hypothesis Antonio Savorelli uses structural semiotics, thus straying from the in TV studies established path based on socio- psycho-economic paradigms, focusing instead on the series as texts. Also, his choice of employing tools from semiotics is, as Savorelli himself explains, rather uncommon in the field. Thus debunking a common doubt on the role of semiotics by stating that the purpose of structural analysis/semiotics is not (solely) to take texts apart layer by layer to reveal their deeper structures, but rather can also illuminate the texts use of other levels in the production of meaning. When applying structural semiotics to audiovisual media it has to be paid attention to the fact that tools such as the generative model or theories of enunciation were originally developed for verbal/literary texts and only later extended to visual texts, which means that these tools differ slightly based on which type of media they are being applied to.^20 Most noticeable is this in the fact that in studies of literature, semiotics are used to reveal deeper underlying structures and meaning, but applied in television studies structural semiotics is more often and meaningful used to reveal structures stretching over several texts/utterances within the medium. Rather than, what is often criticized in the semiotic approach, getting too caught up in taking apart a text layer by layer to reveal its meaning, I see structural semiotics as enabling to realize the aim of finding connecting patterns and overlaying structures. A general as well as my main critique of the semiotic approach is its tendency to finality or definitiveness, not fitting TV due to the mediums multiplicity, variety of semiotic systems and open ended nature. Thus, for me structural semiotics aims not necessarily to find deep underlying
(^20) Savorelli, Antonio: Beyond Sitcom New Directions in American Television Comedy (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010), p.10f
meanings of a text, but rather repetition of elements, form and structures across (different) texts and thusly connecting them due to it being less tied to the finality of language systems in the context of film/TV-theory.^21 I want to emphasize that television texts of course aren‟t following a static or rigid set of rules but rather are made up of a “language”(=sign system) that is continuously developing. Thus the aim here is not to find a definitive set of structures employing documentary style in comedy, but rather to explore how these structures look and develop. So even though structural semiotics might be limiting (restrictions are for instance the sole focus on the internal qualities of the text) they are certainly the most obviously helpful method in defining style and structures that can be compared to others, making genre conventions more obvious. I aim to find the repetition as well as the grander connection structures through dividing the texts into their different elements. Consequently, my analysis will be a combination of structural semiotics employed in correlation with Butlers descriptive as well as analytical study of style, thus through comparative textual analysis connecting the singular texts to the greater discourse constituted by the entirety of the considered group. In the text of this thesis the predominantly visibly employed analysis will be the method of analytical style studies combined with comparative textual analysis, approached from a structural semiotics point of view. To simply describe the elements would not be fruitful, but this also means that the thesis will not be a detailed account of the entire descriptive analysis made but more of a concise version, functional to the goals of this research (i.e. none of the statistics and stylometry used to choose the exemplifying sequences and determine key elements will be shown in this text). Both Mills and Thompson draw on a differentiation between sitcom and televisual sitcom (televisual ~ non theatrical, abandonment of displaying theatrical origins of the sitcom form). This is thoroughly described and defined by Butler through poising multi-camera and single-camera sitcoms against each other in a stylistic analysis.^22 Even though this distinction based on mode of production is helpful, it is not sufficient, as it does not account for the content of the texts but simply its technological inception. Through the concept of New Comedy Antonio Savorelli delivers a further distinction of a new type of comedy series (as separate from traditional sitcom) that focuses more on several levels of communication and on the text rather than mainly on the mode of production. Thus functioning as a complement to the above mentioned distinction. New Comedy is mainly defined through its heightened metatextuality, meaning the series within it employ several levels of metatextual enunciation as defining traits of form, style and structure as well as metatextual components being
(^2122) (see Stam Introduction to film theory on Metz and film language) Stam, Robert: Film Theory - An Introduction (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 2010) Butler, Jeremy: Television Style (Routledge, 2010, New York)
different types of television genres (or formats), but the specific genres of TV-series. Additionally, I am in this text making a conscious distinction between TV and television, where I in this paper designate television to mean the technical device whilst TV refers to the content (more often this will be used the other way around, but the abbreviation TV will be more useful to my purpose here as it provides a good way to save space and time). TV can be delivered through several different platforms, the contents on these platforms however are provided through TV; which is why even for instance a Netflix original series still should be called a TV-series even though it never airs on the apparatus we call television. TV is a style and format as well as a production industry, television one of the technical devices able to show us these contents. The delivery system will be of secondary to no importance here as I will view the texts for themselves and separate from the flow established as typical for TV- television (i.e. my viewing does not contain commercials and no period of waiting in between episodes etc.). But television is the medium through which all the texts analyzed here are supposed to be originally presented or for which they are produced, meaning that they were produced for television in the sense of by the TV-industry for network broadcasting. They were all later syndicated as well as available on DVD and different streaming services. My main form of consumption for this analysis will be through DVDs, my DVR and the Swedish streaming distribution through the services Netflix and HBOnordic. Similarly to the navigation within these distribution platforms, the episodes of the here analyzed series will be referenced with their title and/or a number. The number indicates first the season and then the episode within that season, for example the very first episode would thus be 101 “Pilot”. I chose to limit my material for analysis to contemporary American comedy TV-series to keep continuity and focus in my examples, especially considering the differences in production practices between countries and the fact that the American TV industry by far produces the internationally most widespread content and thus is the most influential over all. “The popularity and comprehensibility of American comedy programming across the globe can be tied into debates about globalization and imperialism.”^26 American TV-series are relevant even in a European context, mainly because the American television industry has been the beacon which all television (in the western world) follows ever since they gained an extreme lead during the 1950s.^27 In Sweden this is especially visible in the structure of the bigger commercial channels, such as kanal5 and tv6 where most of the content consists of US productions (the schedule of the latter is dominated by American sitcom series). Thus the American TV-series get a lot of space to define the Swedish TV culture and discourse. In fact,
(^2627) Mills, Brett: Television Sitcom (London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2008), p. Bignell, Jonathan; Fickers, Andreas (ed.): A European Television History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008), p.
only a year after the emergence of television in Sweden did the first American sitcom series air: I Love Lucy in 1957. As to choosing which specific series to include, the first criteria are that the series will be defined as comedy through the intentions of their production, the intention of all the productions is to evoke emotions related to laughter. Equally important is that the entirety of the series have documentary style as a main element and are introduced as such by the intent of production, thus being utterly representational for the style and known for their style. The series selected to represent the employment of documentary style are also chosen based on their critical and commercial success as those generally are the most influential texts. Critical success shall primarily be defined as the series earning critical recognition through winning television oriented awards such as the Golden Globe or Emmy. Commercial success is determined through the industry‟s own ratings system, which also influence the longevity of a series (i.e. how many seasons will be produced). I believe that even though TV studies generally focuses on critically acclaimed rather than commercially successful programs, an exploration into the questions of contemporary genre development should take commercial success into serious account for the choice of which textual objects to study. History has proven that the commercially successful programs do shape the TV landscape as long as the industry is primarily dependent on an advertisement economy system. The restriction of the for analysis chosen material to broadcast network content is largely dependent on the difference of the business model of production between network and Pay-TV. So, whilst HBO has created some of the earlier entries into the documentary style sitcom group with The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999-), their inception and measurability of success is not compatible with that of network television series. Nielsen ratings do not apply to Pay-TV channels like HBO and thus the longevity of their productions is not as dependent on ratings numbers, additionally Pay-TV channels do generally not divulge viewing numbers making it hard to compare mainstream popularity. Also, channels like HBO are not as accessible to a wide audience due to their subscription based business model. The chosen series shall be produced for a mayor channel of the US broadcast network with an original first air date of the pilot either between 2000 and 2009 or between 2009 and the end of 2013, to enable comparison of recent historical development of the style. Due to its critical acclaim and the many successful remakes in different countries, The Office is usually the first series that comes to mind when mentioning documentary style in TV-comedy.^28 Both
(^28) Mills, Brett: Television Sitcom (London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2008), p.
The dominance of series produced by/for NBC within the here for analysis selected series should not be surprising as it is one of the networks that orders most scripted serial content overall and especially comedy. Additionally, it has traditionally been the giant of comedy – home to the “Must See TV.” The NBC Thursday night block has for many previous decades been iconic, once dominating the Thursday night ratings with sitcoms like The Cosby Show (NBC 1984-1992) , Cheers (NBC 1982-1993) , Seinfeld (NBC 1990-1998) ,
networks viewing numbers are dwindling due to a partially involuntary development of a narrow brand of cult comedies; the network has made itself visible in the critics‟ circuit through creatively challenging comedy series, giving more screen time to innovative single- camera comedies. Additionally, a lot of the dominant comedic talent both behind and on the screen has been and is employed at NBC through the long lasting, acclaimed and popular sketch show Saturday Night Live (NBC 1975-). Many of those writers and actors are part of the here analyzed series. Comedy is traditionally the network‟s strong suit.^30 Therefore it is only reasonable that several of the here explored series stem from NBC. As previously explained, series from HBO shall not be explored here due to the difference in production practice to network series, it is however important to mention that HBO features several comedy series that employ the documentary style as these are part of the possibly emerging genre, for example The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Comeback (HBO 2005). Other examples of series that could have been included in this paper are Better Off Ted (ABC 2009-2010) or Death Valley (MTV 2011-). The latter could also be argued to belong in the fantasy or horror genre, only employing comedy as a mode which makes it an inherently difficult example for a broad genre study, possibly deserving its own separate analysis. Additional similar series, often based on less scripted material, are for instance Comedy Centrals‟ Reno 911! (2003-2009) which is a parody of law enforcement themed Reality TV such as COPS (FOX 1989-), or the travelogue Gerhard Reinke's Wanderlust (Comedy Central 2003). Other channels employ a quasi-reality approach, such as MTV‟s My Life as Liz (2010-2011), a series that centers on the life of semi- fictional character Liz Lee and employs real people in their real environment. So whilst multiple scenes are planned, the events and relationships are “true.” Similarly reshaping Reality TV is Real Husbands of Hollywood (BET 2013-), following series creator Kevin Hart along with other married celebrities playing a comical fictionalized version of themselves. Telemundo and truTV chose to reenact real events in Operation Repo (2007-) and Southern (^30) Schneider, Michael: NBC Boss Why We‟re Tweaking or Comedy Brand; TV Guide; 2013- 11 - 14; http://www.tvguide.com/News/NBC-Comedy-Changes- Office-Spinoff-Up-All-Night-1056218.aspx (read 2013-11-14)
Fried Stings (2010-), both of these are however marketed as Reality TV despite being reenactments. The children oriented Nickelodeon channel depicts in The Naked Brothers Band (2007-) the daily lives of a rock band in an exaggeration of their real lives, and the fictional presence of a camera is often acknowledged. Even Netflix has followed up its success with the fourth season of Arrested Development with a new series by Ricky Gervais, Derek (2013-). This small selection is exemplifying that there are many more comedy series on all types of channels employing the documentary style beyond the series analyzed in this paper.
1 - 5 DISPOSITION
The remainder of this thesis is divided into four sections. Firstly I will present the historical, methodological and theoretical backbone of the analysis through providing background context from research in the field. Chapter 2 “Background” shall thus serve to not only place this thesis in its field but also to provide the reader with essential knowledge about TV, the sitcom genre, its history, conventions and definitions. Following this, the analysis of the series‟ is divided into two main sections, spanning chapter 3 “Previously On” and chapter 4 “Next time on.” The first one considers the series whose Pilot aired between 20 00 - 2009 and acts also as a presentation of the theoretical concepts of “comedy verite” and New Comedy. Thereafter I will explore the series from 2009 forward. The final chapter summarizes and expands on the analysis‟ results of the two preceding chapters by relating them to 1 ) sitcom, 2 ) “comedy verite” and 3 ) Reality TV, thus presenting conclusions as well as offering suggestions for further research.
similar arguments can be found in for instance Jeremy Butlers book on TV-style.^38 This practice of defense is also common in texts about the sitcom, as exemplified in Mills‟ Television Sitcom.^39 Lotz and Gray expand on the necessity for TV-studies today: “while patterns of use and the screens we use are changing, the need to understand the relationships of television as a business, cultural storyteller and object of considerable popular interest remains as crucial as ever.”^40 Possibly more so, due to greater accessibility and possibilities for audience involvement. The mediums, and especially TV-series, power of persuasion has most recently been demonstrated by the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign to which over ninety-thousand fans from around the world donated. Their financial commitment made possible the production of the movie based on a series that had been off the air for about six years. If done right, the stories and characters stick with the audience long beyond their actual on-screen live, thus also serving functions beyond entertainment. Besides a heavy cultural studies background, television studies spring partially from film studies, to set aside a clear difference and with hopes of lifting up their medium from the low status it held/holds, scholars would focus less on the mediums aesthetic values and more on its importance for society, the cultural and political contexts of the programming. Traditionally television is defined in context to other communicative media: Academic studies of television have attempted a range of definitions of the medium, primarily based on how the medium communicates, which have mainly involved distinctions between television and cinema or radio. The subject‟s analytical methodologies have derived from disciplines including film studies, its methods of discussing audiences and television institutions have come from sociology, and overall these ways of describing the development of television can amount to different ontologies and histories of the medium.^41
In academia there has been a dual tendency towards defining television in which the medium is either treated as a medium like any other or a medium like no other. Similarly a split has happened in how the medium is researched in its modern history. Whilst media studies often focus on television as “new media” and elevate technical advances (but thus neglecting history, content and industry production), other branches have solely focused on content neglecting the technical side. This split is also apparent in the research around televisual serial narratives, where technical developments generally are explored completely separated from textual content, or rather not at all. Gray and Lotz ultimately define the field based on the following parameters: “we distinguish television studies as an approach to studying television
(^3839) Butler, Jeremy: Television Style (Routledge, 2010, New York), p? 40 Mills, Brett:Gray, Jonathan; Lotz, Amanda D:^ Television Sitcom^ (London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2008), p? Short Introductions: Television Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. (^41) Bignell, Jonathan; Fickers, Andreas (ed.): A European Television History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008), p.
or other media that typically references at least two of the program, the audience and the industry. Regardless of focus […] television studies takes great effort to specify the context of the phenomenon of study in terms of sociocultural, technoindustrial, and historical conditions. […] It may be too much to ask of prospective researchers that they analyze programs, audiences, industries, and context in their project. Nevertheless, television studies not only asks, but requires, that researchers be well-read about programs, audiences, industries and contexts.”^42 Television series, especially American contemporary series, have become a more popular field of research in the past decade, letting expressions from the TV medium become valuable outside the context of the mediums impact on the consumer. In fact, TV-series are slowly on their way to being treated more equally to films, as a narrative and artistic expression valuable to explore on its own merits, even though research on style and aesthetic is still underrepresented.^43 Generally in studies of TV there is a tendency towards exploring the mediums importance for society, the cultural and political contexts of the programming, this is also true for research within TV series. Straying from the by cultural studies inspired “established path of television studies based on socio-psycho-economic paradigms”^44 does mean to grant the series autonomy. To focus on their aesthetic and narrative value through textual analysis (and structural semiotics) recognizes the texts “necessary autonomy to produce meaning independent of an audience‟s presence. This is not to say that a text doesn‟t need a receiver, or that the audience is totally irrelevant in the process of televisual communication,”^45 but rather acknowledges that TV, just as film and literature, has the capacity to produce autonomous meaning found in the text itself and not solely dependent on the receiver.
2-2 STYLISTICS: TV-STYLE AND METHODS OF STYLE ANALYSIS In the previous chapter the duality of TV-studies became apparent; in looking at TV-style the negative implications of the long standing disregard of the autonomy of TV texts and their aesthetic values becomes evident. Jeremy Butler begins his book Television Style^46 with explaining that the study of TV style for a long time has been hindered by the claim that TV cannot add to style since it is simply a transmitter. This has shaped television studies in the way that for example cultural studies rather looks at the recipient (who and why rather than what). Since most studies of TV take stance in film studies, the notion of auteurism has been
(^4243) Gray, Jonathan; Lotz, Amanda D: Short Introductions: Television Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p.24f 44 Butler, Jeremy:Savorelli, Antonio:^ Televi Beyond Sitcom New Directions in American Television Comedysion Style^ (Routledge, 2010, New York)^? (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010) (^4546) ibid Butler, Jeremy: Television Style (Routledge, 2010, New York)
