Complex television is not a genre. As I argue throughout this book, complex television is a storytelling mode and set of associated production and reception practices that span a wide range of programs across an array of genres. Television genres are cultural categories that discursively bundle texts together within particular contexts, not simply sets of textual conventions.1 This is not to suggest that questions of genre are irrelevant to understanding complex television — to the contrary, looking at genre as part of its growth and circulation highlights how the mode has grown to pervade and influence a wide range of types of television fiction, including both comedic and dramatic genres. Complex television is a site of tremendous genre mixing, where conventions and assumptions from a range of programming categories come together and are interwoven, merged, and reformed.
Likewise, melodrama is more of a mode than a genre, an approach to emotion, storytelling, and morality that cuts across numerous genres and media forms.2 However, when it comes to American television, melodrama is often assumed to belong solely to the important genre of the soap opera, and thus moments of melodrama appearing outside the daytime schedule are often linked to the soap opera genre, as with the derogatory label “soapy.” This chapter teases out the formal and cultural linkages between the complex narrative mode discussed throughout this book and the genre of daytime soap operas and its associated affective style of serial melodrama. Most complex television dramas that proliferate in prime time today are serial melodramas and thus share some traits with the daytime soap opera; however, in terms of formal elements, industrial histories, and critical discourses, prime time serials and daytime soaps have crucial distinctions that need to be underscored. Thus by highlighting complex television’s distinctive take on serial melodrama, I consider how it functions as a “narrative technology of gender,” per Robyn Warhol’s model, and argue against the claim that prime time serials “masculinize” the traditionally feminine realm of soap operas.3
To understand how prime time complex television works as serial melodrama, we need to first consider how both television seriality and melodrama have been historically linked to the soap opera genre. Prior to the 1990s, the primary site of television seriality in America was the daytime soap opera, a genre that precedes the medium with long roots back into network radio, including some individual programs such as The Guiding Light that ran for decades spanning the two media. Unlike most genres, the name “soap opera” refers neither to elements from the television text (like the setting of Westerns or the central topic of cooking shows) nor to the intended audience response (as with horror and comedy); instead, soap operas are a derogatory moniker coined by commentators in the 1930s to mock the juxtaposition of high melodrama with low commerce, condescending to the presumed audience of allegedly unsophisticated housewives. Prior to the term’s popularization, soaps were known more commonly as “daytime dramatic serials,” highlighting their industrial placement on the radio schedule, their narrative form, and their intended emotional affect. All three of these features became culturally linked to the term “soap opera,” as the programs migrated to television in the 1950s, with the genre becoming the primary manifestation of television seriality for decades.4 The stigma of soap operas has remained active for decades, as certainly many contemporary prime time serials benefit from distinguishing themselves from the daytime tradition, and calling a series “soapy” is regarded by most people as a damning insult.
However, it is important to note that daytime soap operas were not the sole or even primary form of American radio serials in the 1930s and 1940s — many emerging forms of radio fiction were commonly referred to as serials, including the most popular and influential early radio fiction program, Amos ’n’ Andy.5 Such early radio serials most resembled daily newspaper comic strips as a model of seriality, with sustained settings and casts of characters dealing with ongoing scenarios but generally avoiding plotlines with open-ended narrative situations demanding resolution. Notably, many of these early prime time series were broadcast daily via the scheduling format now referred to as “stripping” (after daily comic strips), rather than the weekly installments now nearly universal on prime time television. While the plotting and storytelling found on 1930s prime time radio programs such as Amos ’n’ Andy more closely resemble contemporary episodic television sitcoms that we rarely label as “serialized” than today’s complex narrative forms, seriality encompassed a much larger umbrella of narrative forms in the radio era, including daytime soap operas and their ongoing melodramatic plotlines, prime time texts within numerous genres that emphasized consistent and enduring characters and settings, and even ongoing public affairs programming, as Frank Kelleter argues that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” functioned as serial culture.6
As television took over radio’s role as the primary site of fictional programming in American homes in the 1950s, serialized plotting became less common within prime time schedules — while a few prime time radio serials (both dramatic and comedic) made the shift to television, by the mid-1950s they had shifted to daytime or disappeared from the television schedule.7 Of course, sitcoms such as I Love Lucy and dramas such as Gunsmoke were serialized in important ways mentioned in chapter 1, with consistent settings and ongoing casts of characters much like Amos ’n’ Andy and the comic-strip convention. But just as genre labels function as clusters of cultural assumptions, formal labels such as “series” and “serial” carry their own shifting connotations — by the mid-1950s, “serial” came to imply cumulative ongoing, open-ended plotlines, while “series” suggested continuous storyworlds and characters typical of comic strips and radio comedies but not necessarily cumulative plots. Both of these serial and series modes contrasted to the era’s important traditions of “variety” and “anthology” programming, which typically introduced a new set of characters, setting, and plotlines each episode.8 Along with seriality’s shifting signification came an important cultural linkage between the genre that most prominently featured this plot-based serial model, the daytime soap opera, and the serial form itself; thus from the late 1950s onward, television seriality was viewed by many critics, viewers, and producers as synonymous with, and exclusive to, daytime soaps, forging a connection between serial form and the derogatory disdain for the genre.
This discursive link between the soap opera genre and serial form has taken on additional associated meanings, with seriality tied to other aspects of the genre through some slippery chains of signification. I believe that these slippages have led to a frequent assumption: that contemporary prime time complex television has “borrowed” or “evolved” from the daytime soap opera.9 While this claim of generic influence has rarely been made via in-depth scholarly argument, it is frequently mentioned in passing within industrial, popular, and academic realms — I have seen it referenced in journalistic pieces and conference papers alike, with little elaboration or evidence.10 But what is the basis for this seemingly commonsense claim of generic evolution? While contemporary prime time television embraces seriality in a range of ways, I contend that the specific modes of serial storytelling it employs derive less from American soap operas than from other serial modes such as comics, classic film serials, and 19th-century serial literature, all of which have their own connections to melodrama. But since the history of television seriality is so linked to the soap opera genre, the common assumption is that all prime time serials must be reacting to or building on soaps, an assumption that I hope to break apart here. By itemizing some of the specific formal conventions and cultural assumptions tied to the soap opera genre, including the episodic structures, daily scheduling, melodramatic focus, and ties to female viewers, we can have a better sense of how contemporary prime time serials operate differently than soaps and can also foster a better appreciation for the distinctive aspects of soap opera storytelling.
At a formal level, soap opera seriality employs very particular structures and practices, with a distinctive mode of production, scheduling, acting style, pacing, and episodic narrative structure. The redundant narration of soap operas depends on the device of diegetic retelling, as discussed in chapter 5, a device that both facilitates viewer recall and provides the pleasures of watching characters react to past events. A contemporary hour-long soap opera episode follows four to six story threads, intercut throughout the hour, selecting between a program’s dozens of potential ongoing stories active at any one time. At the beginning of an episode, each storyline features one scene to set up that day’s conversation, typically with the characters talking about some recent event and revealing some new information about how that event impacts their relationship or situation. These initial scenes are highly focused on retelling, reminding and catching up viewers about every element in the scene — previous events, relationships, settings, and even characters’ names. As the episode progresses, this process of retelling continues to remind viewers as each scene cycles back from a commercial break but gradually advances the plot by highlighting the new story elements rippling out from past events. The final scene from each storyline typically concludes with a moment of uncertainty, often in the form of a suspense-inducing cliffhanger, that will prompt future retellings when the next episode featuring that storyline airs. Typically, each of an episode’s plot threads progresses with minimal temporal shifts or ellipses (aside from occasional flashbacks that are highly marked as atemporal anomalies), with each of the crosscut scenes typically playing out within a narrow frame of an hour or so of story time. Thus a given daytime soap episode rarely has either self-contained closed plotlines or thematic linkages seen in the majority of prime time serials, as discussed in chapter 1; unlike prime time programs, soap episodes lack titles and are rarely rebroadcast as discrete storytelling units. A soap opera episode functions as an ephemeral daily “check-in” on the storyworld as well as a part of the week’s larger plot and character arcs, rather than a self-contained unit of a larger narrative structure, a distinction highlighted by some fans fast-forwarding through stories that disinterest them.
Soap operas embrace a poetics of slow-paced redundancy — but instead of treating repetition as a necessary evil, soaps raise it to an art form. Robert Allen influentially argues that soap operas, which were designed for both dedicated fans and distracted and erratic viewers, derive their narrative pleasures less from the forward-moving plot of new events and developments and more from the ripple effects of an event across the community of characters and their relationships within the drama, a model he calls “paradigmatic storytelling.”11 A soap opera might portray a key event, but the event itself becomes less narratively important in its initial portrayal than in the chain of subsequent conversations about the event. Thus any single event can be retold numerous times through the dialogue-heavy conventions of the genre, as each character reacts to hearing about the event and we witness each retelling’s impact on the characters’ web of relationships. Through this convention of narrative recall, we are both repeatedly reminded of what happened and guided to focus our attention on the characters’ emotional lives, making redundancy an active pleasure of the genre. Yet this mode of repetitious seriality is by no means the only option for television seriality, as it is quite rare to see such embedded redundancy as part of prime time serials; instead, it is a facet nearly unique to the daytime soap opera.
In large part, this model of daytime soap redundancy and its comparative absence on prime time serials stems from the different material demands of each mode’s production and scheduling. Most network prime time fictions air no more than 24 episodes per year in weekly installments, and cable programs often reduce that order to 13 or fewer episodes, with lengthy gaps between seasons. Daytime soap operas are in constant production, airing five days per week throughout the entire year, meaning that the longest gap between episodes will be over a weekend, aside from rare preempting for special events. The significance of these scheduling differences is enormous, for both producers and viewers. On the industrial side, soaps’ constant demand for the next episode leads to a highly regimented, factory-style production model that depends on conventions, repetitions, and formulas, given that daytime soaps air 10 times more narrative material each year than an average prime time network series. Just as daily newspapers and comic strips differ drastically in form from weekly magazines or monthly comic books, respectively, we must distinguish between the production models and resulting programming of endless daily soaps and seasonal, weekly prime time programs as vastly different textual formats.
These scheduling differences forge vital contrasts in how viewers engage with daytime versus prime time serials. For viewers of prime time serials, an episode can be a regular appointment in a weekly schedule, emerging as a must-see occasion or a routinized time shift through a DVR; in contemporary television, many viewers prefer to bank episodes to watch in quicker succession or even wait for DVD or download release to embrace the boxed viewing aesthetic discussed in chapter 1. Whether episodes are watched in scheduled installments or boxed binges, most prime time viewing practices center on the episode as a discrete unit; this viewing practice matches the narrative form that maintains episodic unity with some self-contained storylines and defined episodic structures and themes. Daily soap opera viewing is more part of the ongoing texture of everyday life than a special event to be scheduled — even the many viewers who time shift their daily soaps, a common practice dating back to VCRs in the 1980s and done via DVRs and online streaming today, find ways to integrate the playback into their everyday routines and schedules, such as watching over dinner or while working out. The sheer volume of episodes prevents a binge aesthetic from taking hold, compounded by the rarity of soap opera reruns or boxed releases; this broadcast model requires soap viewers to be responsible for their daily rituals to keep up with their favorite ongoing narratives. For most soap fans, such a daily ritual is a key pleasure of the genre and even a defining component of the genre.12
While these daytime viewing practices have some parallels in prime time, the contrasting schedule and distribution models make the experience of watching daytime soap operas and prime time serials more distinct than similar, raising doubts about claims that prime time serials are merely legitimated, high-class, or masculinized soap operas, at least in terms of viewing practice. In chapter 1, I argue that the installment-driven structuring of screen time with significant temporal gaps between episodes is essential to the definition of seriality and the specific ways that serial television tells stories. Daytime soaps and prime time serials have vastly different structures of screen time, and the daily schedule of soaps deemphasizes the gaps between episodes by locating them within part of a daily routine. For prime time programs, the weekly gaps, and even longer breaks between seasons, make each episode seem more eventful and encourage fans to bridge those gaps with paratextual engagement and speculation, as discussed more in other chapters — while some soap fans fill daily gaps with paratextual participation via online forums and communities, the different time frame for daily versus weekly installments changes the scope and prevalence of such practices. This is not to privilege one mode of engagement as more valued or effective than the other but to highlight the experiential differences between the two scheduling models and the resulting storytelling strategies that they enable and encourage.
If we look at genre as defined by viewing practices, industrial systems, textual norms, or discursive valuation, soap operas seem clearly distinct from most prime time serials, and thus an analysis of the melodramatic mode of complex television need not be lodged within the soap genre. But the question remains about the role of influence, as some observers claim that today’s prime time programs are retreading ground already broken by soaps. To understand the potential relationship of influence between daytime and prime time serial forms, it is useful to look at three programs that stand as some of the earliest successful attempts to incorporate serialized plotting into American prime time programming, all of which had explicit relationships to the soap opera genre. The first is Peyton Place, the mid-1960s hit that signaled the arrival of serial melodrama on prime time. Although the series adapted a well-known novel and movie, the storytelling format drew explicitly from soap opera precedents. ABC scheduled the series to air two or three nights per week, running in continuous production rather than the “seasons with reruns” model typical for prime time drama, and enlisted the soap opera pioneer Irna Phillips to consult with series creator Paul Monash in making the drama succeed as serial television. Caryn Murphy discusses how Monash was adamant in denying the program’s ties to soap opera, preferring labels of “television novel” and “continuing drama” to highlight more respectable formats than the lowbrow associations with daytime serials, even though the prime time series diverged significantly from the original novel and followed many of Phillips’s suggestions over Monash’s objections.13 There is no question that at the levels of both production and cultural circulation, Peyton Place was deeply influenced by and linked to the daytime soap opera, and the brief wave of failed prime time serials in the late 1960s followed its precedent with the continuous, multiepisode weekly schedule evoking the ritual experience of soap opera viewership. However, no imitator came close to Peyton Place’s success, leading networks to eliminate such serialized dramas from prime time schedules by 1970.14
Serialization and explicit connections to soap operas returned to television outside the daytime schedule through the unusual vehicle of comedy in the late 1970s, with the dual innovators Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap. The former was a highly idiosyncratic hit that emerged from Norman Lear’s successful production team in 1976, explicitly embracing the form, production values, and pacing of daytime soap operas via daily airings. Rejected by all of the national networks, Mary Hartman was distributed to local stations through the system of first-run syndication, airing in various time slots outside prime time but most frequently in the daily stripped late-night spot of 11 p.m. to avoid controversy over its risqué content. The program married over-the-top storylines involving a small-town mass murderer and an elderly flasher with quotidian details of domestic drudgery, most notably Mary’s obsession with the “waxy yellow buildup” on her kitchen floor, creating a unique blend of the outrageous and the mundane. Although the series embraced a dry, absurdist wit and was certainly best understood as a comedy, it featured none of the era’s sitcom conventions of laugh tracks, studio audiences, or even actual jokes; instead, the humor came through its conventional soap opera style of unpolished videotaped staging and melodramatic music cues played straight, but with a quirky small-town setting and an ambiguous tone that most resembles future television innovator Twin Peaks. This allegiance to soap opera was affirmed behind the scenes, as Lear hired a team of soap opera veterans to write the series, led by Ann Marcus, who had previously written for both daytime soaps and prime time Peyton Place but never before (or again) for comedies. Thus Mary Hartman retains much of the feel of daytime soaps in its emphasis on relationships, deliberate pacing, redundant dialogue, and lack of overt sitcom style.15
Through the program’s daily schedule, Mary Hartman developed a strong following from viewers who tapped into the ritualized rhythms of daily serialized storytelling. Although the series certainly did mock many soap opera conventions through heightened absurdity, it also embraced melodramatic takes on relationships and characters’ struggles. While many viewers laughed at its exaggerated characters and subtle jabs at consumer culture, moments such as Mary’s televised nervous breakdown at the end of the first season also delivered intense emotional moments of character melodrama. Reports on the trendy fascination with Mary Hartman focus on viewers’ speculation on potential storylines and the fate of relationships — these are not the pleasures of ironic parody but sincere serial engagement. The parodic frame gave license to audiences who would normally dismiss soap operas to enjoy the pleasures of serial melodrama without guilt, with rave reviews in upscale periodicals such as the Village Voice and The Nation celebrating its ironic sensibility; the program’s writerly intelligence and formal inventiveness was seen as rising above soap opera convention, even if its reported pleasures were comparable to those of daytime fans. Viewers wrote to the program’s producers praising Mary Hartman while being sure to mention that they did not like soap operas — and that they could not wait for the next episode. For its brief two-year yet more-than-300-episode run, Mary Hartman delivered the compelling story engine of serial melodrama, alongside soap opera production style and daily viewing rituals, but viewed through an absurdist, askew lens that tempered the genre’s emotional sincerity and allowed viewers who were skeptical of the daytime genre to shamelessly enjoy some of its pleasures.
The third early prime time serial had the most overtly stated connection to soap operas but the least in common in terms of textual norms, production pedigree, or viewing practices. Soap debuted on ABC in 1977 following the conventional scheduling and production model for sitcoms: weekly prime time airings in a lineup filled with other comedies, shot with a live studio audience whose laughter cues viewers at home, created by veteran sitcom writers and producers, and featuring the broad humor and joke-filled dialogue typically found on the era’s sitcoms. In fact, creator and head writer Susan Harris asserted that the program’s writers had no desire to either mimic or mock soap operas but rather viewed the series title as simply a “shorthand reference” to serialized television storytelling — Harris denied even having viewed soap operas, and none of the program’s key production staff had a background in the daytime format. The program’s cultural reception similarly saw it primarily as a sitcom, albeit one that drew on soapy serial style and mocked the genre’s storytelling excesses. The series featured much-faster-moving plotting than either daytime soaps or Mary Hartman, and the weekly scheduling disallowed the daily viewing rituals common to soap opera viewers. Additionally, internal redundancy and diegetic retelling was far less common, but instead repetition was outsourced to tongue-in-cheek “previously on” segments that both recapped earlier events and mocked Soap’s serial complications. Episodes featured numerous narrative events that grew more and more outlandish, as well as character-driven conversational humor (usually between women) more akin to Mary Tyler Moore than General Hospital.16
I highlight these three early innovators to show what explicit soap opera influence on prime time programming might look like and thus to argue that most contemporary serial programs lack such clear connections to the daytime tradition. In the 1960s, Peyton Place inspired a number of failed imitations that curtailed prime time serial experimentation for many years. In the 1970s, the comparative influence of these dual serial comedies suggests a road not traveled for prime time serial storytelling. Although Mary Hartman received great buzz and cultural validation, it did not spawn imitators in incorporating its soap opera scheduling, production style, and creative pedigree into prime time, marking it as the last time a daily scripted serial attempted to move outside the daytime block and the soap opera genre delineation. Likewise, Ann Marcus proved to be one of only a handful of writers who worked on both daytime and prime time series, while it has been much more common in recent years for prime time series to be staffed with writers and producers from other media such as comics, film, theater, literature, and journalism, as discussed more in chapter 3. Created by prime time comedy veterans, Soap offered a more popular and influential model by grafting serial plotting onto standard prime time genres, a technique seen in subsequent 1980s innovators that became major television landmarks: the sitcom Cheers, the cop show Hill Street Blues, and the medical drama St. Elsewhere.
Even the rise of what are often called “prime time soaps” such as Dallas and Dynasty bear little formal resemblance to daytime soaps in terms of production style, plot structures, and most importantly episodic frequency and use of screen time. Instead, they incorporate serial plotting into tales of family melodrama that are structurally and formally more similar to other prime time programs than to established daytime soaps. The label “prime time soap” persists as a category of weekly serial melodramas that indulge in excessive emotional displays and relationship-focused complications, used to describe a succession of series from Dallas to Melrose Place to The O.C. to Revenge, but they are formally still distinct from the key features of daytime soaps in both episodic structure and viewing practice. It is in the prevalence of melodrama in nearly all modes of serial storytelling that we can find the most commonality between daytime soap operas and prime time serials, but we should not assume that the latter is somehow mimicking or transforming the former; instead, we need to understand melodrama as a much more widespread facet of television narrative that is not unique to daytime soaps or any single genre category.
It is far more important to understand what complex serials are than what they are not. While I question their ties to soap operas, nearly every dramatic program I discuss in this book can be considered a form of serial melodrama, whether the “soapy” excess of Revenge, the adult family drama of Six Feet Under, the weighty political debates of The West Wing, or the realist social critique of The Wire. While few critics would resist framing the first two programs as melodrama, many would bristle with giving the latter two that label, as their intellectual seriousness, measured production style, and claims to authenticity and realism are often viewed as the opposite of melodramatic excess. I was one of those skeptical critics myself, regarding melodrama as the core element that prime time soaps such as Revenge shared with their daytime counterparts, and I differentiated them from the nonmelodramatic, more realist approach of other, more unconventional series such as The Sopranos and The Wire. But I was persuaded by Linda Williams’s call to redefine melodrama away from the terrain of excess: “melodrama has become so basic to all forms of popular moving-picture entertainment that it is futile to continue to define it as ‘excess,’ since these apparent excesses are not necessary for melodrama to do its work nor are they of the essence of the form.”17 Instead of a specific genre tied to women’s films or daytime soap operas, melodrama, she argues, should be construed as a narrative mode that uses suspense to portray “moral legibility,” offering an engaging emotional response to feel the difference between competing moral sides as manifested through forward-moving storytelling.18
This more expansive definition of melodrama as mode rather than genre unites various forms of serial television via a shared commitment to linking morality, emotional response, and narrative drive. As I argue throughout the book, the sustained storytelling time that viewers spend with a long-form serial, as well as the productive gaps between episodes, fosters deeply felt emotional engagement with television characters and their dramatic scenarios, often tied to moral allegiances outlined in chapter 4. Television fiction only succeeds if we care about the drama, and Williams highlights how that caring is mobilized to create a shared moral map: “strong affect combined with moral legibility to create a felt good is what these popular moving pictures do.”19 Williams suggests that prime time television’s melodrama stems from its “shared DNA” evolving from daytime soap operas, but we do not need to follow her evolutionary implication (as I argued earlier) to see the melodramatic mode running throughout the television schedule — in fact, her argument about the ubiquity of melodrama across film genres is more compelling as a shared cultural vocabulary than as an evolutionary tree of influence. But whether or not we want to chart influences or highlight shared modes, recognizing the ubiquity of melodrama throughout complex television is crucial to understanding the medium’s cultural work.
Extending the melodramatic mode to encompass realist narratives that reject many norms of emotional and stylistic excess challenges well-established critical categories. Thankfully, Williams has already done the critical heavy lifting by highlighting how television’s most acclaimed realist drama, The Wire, embraces her new conception of melodrama. The series charts a shared “felt good” in the nostalgic ideal of a functioning, fair city of Baltimore and provides emotional hooks to make us care about what has been lost (even as an ideal, if not an actual lived experience) through a range of injustices such as the drug war, global capitalism, and political corruption. Its melodrama is presented in an understated, often dry tone, but the cumulative emotional responses to the tales of personal redemption (Bubbles climbing the stairs) and institutional failure (bulldozing Hamsterdam) are as affectively powerful as any recognizably melodramatic narrative trope like consummated romance or familial tragedy.20 And once The Wire’s melodramatic core is made visible, then it is difficult to view any other complex serial without seeing its own map of moral legibility, narrative drive, and emotionally resonant characterization all working to create a shared “felt good.”
Expanding our understanding of melodrama into a more pervasive mode instead of a narrower genre has at least two major impacts on our understanding of contemporary television seriality. First, it disrupts a dichotomy that has been posited for decades, pitting the “prime time soap,” marked by stylistic excess and trashy sensibility, against the “quality drama,” heralded as serious, socially engaged, and more aesthetically mature than its lowbrow competition.21 If we separate excess from melodrama, we can see 1980s programs such as Hill Street Blues and Dynasty as coexisting in a spectrum of affective morality and serial storytelling, rather than as polar opposites. We can better understand the multiple facets of stylistic play and emotional engagement offered by hybrid programs such as Twin Peaks and Mad Men. And, of course, we can avoid defensive caveats of why a series is not being “soapy” when it embraces moments of emotional pathos or moral judgment, recognizing the ubiquity of the melodramatic impulse across various modes and genres of serial storytelling, regardless of their stylistic excesses or connections to soap opera traditions.
Embracing complex television’s melodramatic elements also has an important impact on how we see the narrative mode’s gender politics. A frequent critique of many of the programs I discuss in this book is that they are overwhelmingly masculine in focus and appeal and that through that emphasis they deny the traditional links between serial melodrama and more conventionally feminine subject matter, viewing practices, and pleasures. Michael Newman and Elana Levine extend this critique to suggest that “the legitimated serials of the convergence era masculinize a denigrated form, negating and denying the feminized other upon which their status depends,” suggesting not only that prime time serials derive from daytime soaps but also that they actively try to deny those origins as a strategy of gendered differentiation.22 While certainly many prime time serial creators, viewers, and critics do deny links between complex television and soap operas (I contend with good justification) and melodrama (with far less justification), I do not want to focus on this question of differentiation and legitimation, as doing so reinforces what I regard as overly simplified dichotomies between serial and episodic forms, melodrama and realism, and feminine and masculine texts and viewing practices. Instead, I hope to more productively suggest how we can reframe the conversation to see how integrating serial melodrama into other genres has led to more fluid possibilities of gender identification and to the challenging of rigid stereotypes of gendered appeals. But first we need a better understanding of what it means to call a narrative form “masculine” or “feminine.”
I doubt any contemporary critic would claim that melodrama or seriality are inherently “feminine” in expressing a viewer’s biological essence or even a static cultural norm, but rather most would say that such narrative modes have been discursively linked to female practices as to signify a nonessential yet significantly gendered cultural realm. Robyn Warhol productively explores the gendering of serial narrative consumption, suggesting that emotional responses to sentimental fiction, such as “having a good cry,” function as “gendered technologies of affect,” an analysis she develops through case studies of Victorian serials, soap operas, and marriage-plot movies.23 Warhol labels such affective responses as “effeminate,” both linked to and constitutive of behaviors culturally coded as female but by no means determined by or limited to female bodies — by using the term “effeminate,” which more commonly describes gay men’s behaviors than women’s, she highlights the performative aspect of gender practice rather than its connection to sexed bodies. She identifies how such sentimentality is marginalized within both academic criticism and broader mass media, which dismiss melodramatic genres and forms as unserious, manipulative, excessive, and aesthetically barren, especially when compared to more legitimated and masculine forms, arguments that Newman and Levine echo. But Warhol’s emphasis on affect and form allow for a more fluid understanding of the cultural politics of taste and engagement, as effeminate pleasures are not exclusively tied to formats such as daytime soaps; instead, she provides a formal vocabulary of sentimentality that helps demonstrate how it might be evoked within both conventionally effeminate and noneffeminate genres and modes.
While Warhol focuses her account on effeminate responses and textual modes, she also suggests that there are masculinist pleasures and engagements with texts such as Patrick O’Brian’s serial maritime novels, focusing on adventure plots and homosocial friendships.24 Other key facets of serial narrative are conventionally coded as masculine as well, such as the analytic puzzle solving common to mysteries and procedural explorations of systems such as science-fiction technologies and mapping fictional worlds — all responses frequently elicited by complex television and forensic fandom, as discussed more in chapter 8. Again, labeling such modes of engagement as masculinist is not to suggest they belong exclusively (or even primarily) to male viewers, as many women embrace genres such as mystery and science fiction in which such affective engagement thrives, and certainly many forensic fans are female.25 Rather, such practices are culturally coded as masculine no matter who is performing them, just as sentimental crying is regarded as effeminate even (or perhaps especially) when done by a man. These distinctions, at their most reductive, echo the long-standing stereotypical mapping of rationality as male and emotion as female or the gendered dichotomy between thinking and feeling, a set of dualities that map onto the modes of affirmational versus transformative fandom discussed in chapter 4. Warhol’s performative model highlights how such assumptions are reiterated through cultural practice rather than illuminating innate gendered differences, and despite the status of such distinctions as reductive stereotypes, exploring the gendered dimensions of such affective engagements is crucial to understanding the cultural dynamics of narrative consumption.
As explored throughout this book, a good deal of complex television foregrounds narrative elements that invite such typically masculinist analytic, forensic responses, but Williams convincingly argues that melodrama and its “felt good” are importantly prominent in such programs as well. By merging Williams’s and Warhol’s arguments, we can see that the melodramatic pathos that suffuses most television serials can work to evoke effeminate feelings, even outside the traditionally feminine genre of soap operas. Williams’s account highlights how, despite an overwhelmingly male cast and crew, a focus on the world of men at work, and a rational procedural focus, The Wire generates deeply felt emotional responses of pathos and sadness, and I would extend her analysis to suggest that it occasionally elicits a “good cry,” per Warhol — I certainly get choked up at the untimely deaths of a few characters, the suffering heaped on victimized children such as Randy and Dukie, or the understated triumph of Bubbles getting (and coming) clean.26 Such sentimental responses exist alongside the program’s more conventionally masculinist pleasures of procedurality, systems analysis, political critique, and homosocial bonding in the workplace, producing a vibrant mixture of gendered responses that can appeal both to a wide range of viewers and to a spectrum of affective engagements within a single viewer of any gender identity. Thus I reject Newman and Levine’s claim that contemporary serials “masculinize” the soap opera form but rather invert their claim to suggest that the pervasive spread of serial melodrama has added an effeminate layer to traditionally masculinist genres such as crime dramas, espionage thrillers, and science fiction.27
Lost provides a good example of the type of genre and gender mixing prevalent in complex television serials. Few programs are more exemplary of the importance of forensic fandom, the operational aesthetic, and the ludic engagement with transmedia storytelling that I discuss throughout the book, and these facets, along with its central focus on male heroes coming to terms with their “daddy issues” and conflicts over leadership, would suggest that Lost is a resolutely masculinist program in its appeals. Yet Michael Kackman convincingly highlights how it intertwines melodramatic plotlines that evoke both effeminate and masculinist narrative conventions and appeals, mixing the formal narrative complexities triggering forensic fandom with the affective pulls of melodrama to foreground a cultural complexity of morality and emotional engagement.28 We can extend this analysis using Warhol’s seven-part “narratology of good-cry techniques” as a yardstick to measure sentimentality, highlighting the prevalence of melodrama and effeminate pleasures within Lost.29 Warhol suggests that sentimental films use highly emotive acting and cinematic styles, “rendering emotion as something overtly visible” as well as manifested in the emotionally excessive musical cues, all tendencies common to Lost’s dramatic moments.30 In Warhol’s account, sentimental fictions are focalized around the perspective of characters who are most emotionally vulnerable, with Lost’s rotating focalizations via flashbacks highlighting the inner emotional life and struggles of many members of the large ensemble, usually flashing back to moments of peak vulnerability and pathos. Warhol notes that sentimental literature often directly addresses its readers to actively engage in narrative comprehension, although film rarely embraces this device; while Lost’s use of direct address is more implied in moments of reflexivity that call attention to narrative enigmas or plot devices, rather than sweeping emotion or romance, it does “blend its metafictional self-consciousness with sentimental techniques” in a way that is consistent with her account.31
Warhol suggests that “the sentimental plot emphasizes close calls and last-minute reversals, either for better or for worse,” a description that perfectly captures Lost’s penchant for twisty plotting that services both rational and emotional engagement.32 She argues that characters in sentimental texts frequently act against established type at critical moments of emotional payoff, a tendency we can see repeatedly in climactic moments for many of Lost’s characters, including Jack, Ben, Jin, and Sawyer. Finally, she suggests that sentimental fictions balance moments of tragedy and joy, suffering and triumph; given Lost’s multithreaded plot structure, especially with the sixth season’s parallel “sideways” narrative, virtually every character in the ensemble experiences important moments of both suffering and triumph, death and redemption — often within the same episode — with no singular fate overriding the other. Lost hits every element of Warhol’s inventory of sentimental storytelling techniques, highlighting the centrality of melodrama to its appeal and its mixed-genre format that refuses any simple classification that the series “just” belongs to a masculinist genre of science fiction or action-adventure.
Newman and Levine acknowledge that series such as Lost do incorporate “soapy” elements such as these into their storytelling stew, but they argue that these elements are always marginalized and secondary, functioning as an internal “other” to highlight a program’s cultural legitimation in more masculinist terms.33 But as I argue in chapter 10, Lost frequently foregrounds affective over forensic fandom, and the series concludes by privileging the emotional over the rational, much to the chagrin of many of its more masculinist fans. It is telling that the nearly universal choice among critics and fans for Lost’s best episode is “The Constant,” which balances a science-fiction time-travel tale centered around arcane physics experiments with a sweepingly romantic tale of doomed lovers reuniting across time and space. As critic Ryan McGee writes, “ ‘The Constant’ represents the humanist side of Lost better than any other [episode], using its narrative trickery not to create riddles about smoke monsters and glowing caves, but rather a simple, powerful story about human connection.”34 The episode’s climactic romantic moment is among the most affecting of many in Lost when the sentimental wells up to produce tears as an emotional payoff to hours of serial engagement, and it belies any claims that such a program’s melodramatic tendencies are an afterthought meant to “legitimize” it in comparison to soap operas. If anything, I would contend that the series is more of an emotionally focused melodrama, in both the adventure and sentimental incarnations of the form, that uses puzzles and science-fiction trappings to draw in masculinist viewers.
With Warhol’s and Williams’s perspectives on sentimentality and melodrama in mind, we can see the importance of effeminate viewing practices in nearly all prime time serials, and it becomes clear that most complex television offers a blend of gendered appeals. These gender mixtures are a comparatively recent phenomenon within mainstream fictional television, made visible when looking back to a seminal work of 1980s media studies, John Fiske’s Television Culture.35 Fiske frames masculine and feminine television forms as stark oppositions, using examples such as The A-Team and Dynasty, respectively, while acknowledging that (then) newer innovations such as Hill Street Blues and Cagney and Lacey were starting to blur such distinctions. In his dichotomy, Fiske contrasts the feminine facets of open narrative deferment, emotional expressiveness, domestic settings, and character complexity against masculine norms of exclusively male professional spheres, rational actions, and narrative closure. What is striking is how difficult it is to find a contemporary prime time drama that fits neatly into his feminine or masculine paradigms, as the blends of episodic closure and serial deferment, character actions and emotions, and blurred work and domestic spheres are nearly universal. As I discuss more later in this chapter, incorporating sentimental melodrama and female characters into traditionally masculinist genres has worked to validate effeminate emotional experiences for male viewers and helped destabilize television’s long-standing gender hierarchies.
The various ways that new forms of television storytelling and genre mixing have reframed the medium’s techniques of gender representation are far too multifaceted to deal with fully here, but it is worth exploring a few techniques that have emerged as part of this mode of narrative complexity.36 One common strategy places a female protagonist at the center of a highly serialized version of a traditionally masculinist genre story, such as the espionage programs Alias and Homeland, the legal thriller Damages, and the police procedural The Killing. One key innovator of such gender reversals mixed the traditionally masculinist horror genre with female-centric teen dramas to forge the influential (and highly studied) series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Less written about, but arguably just as interesting, is Veronica Mars, which mixes the effeminate teen drama, highlighting romantic and familial relationships, with the neonoir crime procedural, typically framed as masculinist. As discussed in chapter 2, the series opens by positing teenage Veronica as a hard-boiled cynic, solving crimes and condemning romance, while surrounded by a cast of male characters who often surpass her in sensitivity and sentimentality. In terms of narrative pleasures, many of Veronica Mars’s core storylines fit more neatly into the masculinist norm of action and detective drama than into the effeminate realm of romantic melodrama. While Hill Street Blues and other early prime time serials focused their ongoing stories on traditionally effeminate relationship and character arcs, keeping the masculinist crime and professional plots more episodically contained, Veronica Mars typifies the new breed of complex narratives that weave serialization into all realms of their plotting, featuring heavily serialized mysteries alongside character melodrama, blurring gendered appeals into a fictional world that actively questions the presumed gender norms of its characters and, by extension, its viewers, especially when framed within the female-skewing network branding of UPN and The CW.
Gender norms also are blurred within Veronica Mars’s plotting. The self-contained detective stories seem consistent with more masculinist crime narratives, but the low-stakes high school setting and Veronica’s status as a savvy investigator willing to use both traditionally masculine and feminine traits to solve mysteries complicate this simple gender identity. The ongoing serial storylines embrace both the effeminate and masculinist traditions that Warhol discusses — the relationship arcs generally follow serial melodrama patterns typical of teen dramas but often interweaved with detective mysteries, such as the connections between Logan’s budding romance with Veronica and his potential involvement with both mystery arcs of Lilly’s murder and Veronica’s rape. Veronica often applies her hyperrational detective skills to explore her emotional realm, whether by investigating her own paternity, solving mysteries for friends, or implicating her boyfriends in criminal cases. The program’s serialized mysteries offer narrative thrills in a more masculinist vein but tied to the emotional and female-centered realms of rape, motherhood, and soured romance motivating murder. While Veronica Mars clearly embodies both gendered modes of narrative pleasure, it does more than offer parallel pleasures for distinct types of viewers; instead, the program’s storytelling structures intermingle and complicate such neat gendered binaries, inviting all viewers to experience both effeminate and masculinist emotional responses.
If centering a masculinist genre on a female figure can disrupt traditional gender norms, the infusion of serial melodrama into male-centered narrative worlds often calls the dominant definitions of masculinity into question. Certainly the majority of complex dramas (like most prime time television) are quite male centered, focused on men in professional realms of crime, crime fighting, or other professional endeavors, including important programs such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. The cable channel FX has made a profitable brand identity out of complex masculinist dramas such as The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Rescue Me, and Justified, all of which portray mostly hypermasculine worlds using serial storytelling — and notably, FX struggled to find an audience with its female-centered drama Damages. Yet such masculine series are not simply a contemporary version of The A-Team, celebrating male bonding, action sequences, and professional success, but instead use the emotionally foregrounded storytelling style of serial melodrama to cover new narrative ground — such programs are not just male-centric but are ultimately about masculinity itself in crisis and conflict. As Amanda Lotz argues, the multifaceted narrative strategies of “male-centered serials enable these shows to interrogate submerged sentiments about gender scripts that lurk beneath the surface of largely reconstructed masculinities.”37 While few of these male-centered melodramas are overtly feminist in questioning patriarchy, the narrative act of making male privilege an object of dramatic conflict, as well as encouraging male viewers to experience effeminate melodramatic affect, can be regarded as progressive steps within the traditionally hegemonic realm of dramatic television.
As discussed in chapter 4, many complex serials focus on male antiheroes as protagonists, often highlighting the emotional suffering that they both cause and feel as a result of their actions. Breaking Bad ’s Walter White is certainly a unique case, as his character undergoes drastic transformations toward villainy rather than starting out as an amoral figure like most antiheroes. Throughout his journey toward criminality, he rationalizes his actions to provide for his family, following what his fellow criminal Gus tells him: “What does a man do, Walter? A man provides for his family. . . . And he does it even when he’s not appreciated or respected or even loved. He simply bears up, and he does it. Because he’s a man.”38 Such overtly patriarchal rhetoric, contrasted with the hideous actions Walt takes toward others and eventually toward his family itself, articulates the hollow, rotten core of traditional masculinity as portrayed on the series. While we are aligned with Walt and can sometimes empathize with his struggles, he eventually steps over the line to pure villainy and becomes an object of narrative contempt (with the specific point by which he loses sympathy differing among viewers).
Of course, Walt is not alone in his journey, and the role played by his wife, Skyler, is particularly interesting in light of serial melodrama and effeminate responses. We perceive Skyler mostly from Walt’s point of view, which starts as loving affection tempered with growing frustration as she serves as an obstacle to his self-realization as a “real man” via his criminal alter ego Heisenberg. If we regard the series as a gangster drama in which Walt’s success in the drug enterprise is the purported goal, then Skyler may be an obstacle. But complex serials feature multiple story threads that invite us to follow and shift character connections; thus if we retell the series focusing primarily on Skyler’s character’s arc, Breaking Bad becomes a very different type of gendered tale, offering a melodramatic account of deception, adultery, and ultimately an abusive, dangerous marriage.
Skyler starts the series in a content and comfortable place, although not living the life she had dreamed of when she married the older Walter White, an ambitious and successful scientist. But Walt’s professional failings, born of stubborn pride and the challenges of having a disabled son, shifted their life into a more compromised but stable existence: she gave up trying to be a fiction writer to work as a part-time bookkeeper, he became a high school chemistry teacher who had to moonlight at a car wash. A surprise pregnancy changes things, but more abruptly Walt starts acting erratically around his 50th birthday, which is soon explained when he reveals that he has terminal lung cancer and is resigned to die rather than get treatment. In an effort to keep the family together, Skyler convinces Walt to undergo treatment and extend his life. But Walt’s behavior remains bizarre, including a fugue state causing him to appear naked in a grocery store, an odd connection with a drug-dealing former student, numerous unexplained disappearances, strange parenting decisions (such as getting their 16-year-old son drunk on tequila), and hints of a second cell phone that points toward some deception. Despite being eight months pregnant, Skyler goes back to work to help pay for their medical bills, even though her boss’s affections creep her out. And on top of everything, Walt misses their daughter being born, with a shoddy excuse. When Walt undergoes cancer surgery, he accidentally confirms his second cell phone, leading Skyler to investigate his cover stories to find a web of deception worse than she had imagined, and thus she leaves him as soon as he has recovered from surgery.
Soon after their separation, Walt tells Skyler his secret: that he has been cooking crystal meth. He assures her that it is a safe job, with no violence or threat of danger, but she is outraged at how his actions and deceptions risk everything for their family and demands a divorce. Walt refuses, calling her bluff and moving back in despite her threats to go to the police. So she lashes out in the only way that she can think of: having an affair with her boss, Ted, who has his own corrupt business practices that she becomes embroiled in. Eventually Walt does agree to a divorce, but Skyler decides to remain married for spousal legal protection. When her brother-in-law, Hank, is shot and left paralyzed due to circumstances seemingly related to Walt’s crimes, Skyler agrees to pay for Hank’s medical costs, devising a cover story for Walt’s riches involving compulsive gambling and card counting, drawing her deeper into Walt’s criminal interests to help her family. As Skyler learns more about Walt’s business, she uses her bookkeeping skills to launder money and purchases a car wash as a front, rationalizing her decision that helping Walt is better for the family than breaking the law for Ted. Although their relationship is still strained, Skyler and Walt reach a balanced arrangement of mutual benefit, until she learns that one of his drug associates was killed in cold blood. After expressing concern for their safety, Walt lashes out with an anger she has never seen before, as he claims to be “the danger” in a threatening moment. She comes close to taking the newborn Holly and fleeing but decides she must remain to “protect this family from the man who protects the family” — how much she honestly fears Walt versus regarding him as a blowhard out of his depths is uncertain, but clearly she feels like she can still manage him. Trouble with Ted returns in the form of an IRS investigation, which she helps skirt by paying him off and hiring thugs to pressure him. And then a threat to Hank’s life prompts the family to go into protection, which ends when the drug kingpin Gus Fring is killed in a nursing-home explosion.
When Skyler realizes that Walt was responsible for the bomb, this is the first indication she has that he is capable of murder — while viewers have witnessed his procession of increasingly amoral killings for years of screen time, to Skyler this revelation means that Walt has suddenly gone from a meek criminal chemist who seems in over his head to a scheming murderer willing to blow up a nursing home to take out an enemy. We imagine what might be going through her mind, positing what else he might have done that she has yet to discover. Suddenly she is not only aiding a drug criminal; she is an accessory to murder — and she soon learns that her efforts with Ted have led to his near demise and a resulting terrorized paralysis. Skyler is simultaneously repulsed by her murderous husband, who moves back in and assures her “life is good,” and horrified that she too has made moral compromises in the name of protecting her family, taking her down the road that Walt has already traveled. But unlike Walt, she experiences remorse and horror at her own actions, placing her in a state of passive paralysis as a battered spouse, desperate to protect her children from “the danger.” Skyler finally convinces Walt that they have too much money to be able to ever spend, and he quits the business and tries to return to a mild-mannered suburban life.
But just as they adjust to a cash-infused state of seminormalcy, Hank discovers Walt’s secret, tearing apart Skyler and her sister, Marie, and forcing Skyler to help Walt threaten and humiliate Hank and Marie. She gets so wrapped up in protecting herself and her family that she begins to mimic Walt’s rationalizations, even suggesting that Walt murder Jesse to eliminate a threat. When Marie tells her that Walt has been arrested, Skyler aims to reconcile with her sister by cooperating and coming clean to Walt Jr., but she faces a crisis when Walt returns home, apparently having killed Hank — their marriage explodes when she cuts him with a kitchen knife, and Walt runs off into exile with Holly. The relationship culminates with one of the most complex and harrowing telephone calls ever put onto film, in which Walt bullies Skyler in an over-the-top rant that is both a performance designed to absolve her of culpability to the police and an expression of his deep-seated masculinist rage and resentments. The series ends with Skyler broke and broken, paying for Walt’s crimes and having lost everything financially and familially, the tale of a wronged wife destroyed by her husband’s criminal ambitions and emotional abuse.
Of course, it is not Skyler’s story. Walt is Breaking Bad ’s protagonist, so we are invited to see his perspective on his marriage and share his singular knowledge of his actions and motivations. AMC’s branding certainly reinforces Walt’s centrality, as the series was promoted primarily as a crime drama, hyping Walt’s dangerous exploits as an emerging drug kingpin far more than his familial drama or Skyler’s emotional abuse. Yet Skyler’s story is there, creeping toward the narrative center as the series progresses, while Walt’s performative iterations of his patriarchal role and masculine prowess begin to crumble and erode, in our eyes if not his. As discussed in chapter 10, Skyler’s presence serves as an irritant for some viewers, but for others willing to consider her perspective, Skyler’s experiences offer a vital critique of Walt’s damaged masculinity. By considering Skyler’s perspective, Breaking Bad functions in part as a “women’s film” in reverse, told through the rationalizing perspective of the abusive spouse whom we only slowly grow to recognize as the villain.
Many examples of complex television use serialized melodrama to tell stories of damaged masculinity or recenter a traditionally masculine genre around a female protagonist, but some mix genres to portray the intersection of traditionally masculine and feminine spheres with a focus on a larger ensemble of characters. Friday Night Lights overlays the hypermasculine realm of high school football with family melodrama focused both on teens coming of age and on life in the small Texas city of Dillon. While much of the drama involves men trying to use football as a lifeboat to escape their dead-end lives or as an anchor to their past glory days, storylines focused on the gender politics of Eric and Tami Taylor’s dual-career marriage and Tyra’s attempt to succeed academically to escape both her poverty and her sexual reputation decenter masculinity within the drama. Notably, the moments that contain the greatest degree of melodramatic excess focus on football, especially the game sequences suggesting that every game is decided in the final seconds with a desperation scoring drive, portrayed with hyperdramatic slow motion and emotionally wrought musical scoring. Additionally, one of the program’s most harrowing and acclaimed episodes, “The Son,” focuses its sentimental core on Matt Saracen grappling with his father’s death, creating a portrait of a masculine emotional journey so intense that I cannot help but get a bit weepy just writing about it. The much-derided second season embraced more conventionally excessive melodramatic plotting with a contrived murder story, a hackneyed cross-racial adoption, and manufactured romantic complications, while still using performance and production styles coded as realist, creating tonal disconnects that repelled most fans and critics. While Friday Night Lights is erratic in its serial consistency and use of complex poetics, it melds gendered genre norms through ongoing arcs to complicate any clear categorization of masculinist or effeminate identification or narrative pleasures.
Another series complicating its gendered appeals through innovative genre mixing and storytelling strategies is The Good Wife. Explicitly gendered by its title, the premise suggests a melodramatic, effeminate focus: a political wife is humiliated by a shameful sex scandal and forced to both establish her own career and publicly redefine her relationship with her estranged husband. Yet as Alicia Florrick builds a legal career in her old friend’s firm, the series spins an elaborate, highly serialized set of interlocking professional and personal storylines, notably with a huge stable of memorable supporting characters of judges, attorneys, family members, clients, and political operatives. Although The Good Wife retains a case-of-the-week episodic structure, it features as complex a cumulative, multi-institutional serialized storyworld that has ever been seen on network prime time, leading one critic to compare it favorably to cable’s standard-bearer for realist world building, The Wire.39 But unlike The Wire, The Good Wife imbues its complex institutionally grounded serialization with explicit cross-gender appeals, merging the familial, professional, romantic, and political, often within a single story thread, and exploring how these threads connect with the emotional and rational choices of its female protagonist.
A good example of The Good Wife at its most complex is the fourth-season episode “Death of a Client.” Primarily set at a St. Patrick’s Day fund-raising event hosted by Chicago’s Catholic diocese, the episode focuses on the main ongoing political plotline, the gubernatorial campaign of Alicia’s husband, Peter. But as always, politics merge with the personal, as Alicia must present herself as both a doting political spouse and a new partner of her law firm, as well as defending her son against false accusations from Peter’s opponent and juggling a potential family crisis concerning her mother’s inappropriate disclosures to her teenage children. Additionally, her former lover (and still boss) Will’s presence at the party creates tension with Peter, despite the firm’s political support of his campaign — as well as Peter’s offer of a potential Supreme Court appointment to Will’s partner Diane, returning to a long-dormant storyline from the first season. The episodic case of the week emerges in the form of a previously unseen client of Alicia’s being murdered, as the police bring her in for questioning about the litigious client’s numerous enemies; we come to know the client and his connection with Alicia through her recollections, presented via flashback in short nonchronological bursts. But mixed into this professional episodic plot are personal arcs, as the assistant district attorney working the case is romantically interested in Will and asks for Alicia’s advice, prompting Alicia to recall moments of her affair with Will intermixed with flashbacks of her murdered client. The episode is narrated via a temporally complex form encouraging the operational aesthetic and forcing viewers to piece together a more linear account to ensure comprehension; similarly to The West Wing episode “Nöel,” as discussed in chapter 1, “Death of a Client” embeds a diegetic Bach piece that connects to the program’s neobaroque storytelling form. Every storyline in this complex episode (and there are a few others left unmentioned) builds on threads from longer arcs, provokes an array of emotional responses, and intermixes various personal and professional plots, suggesting a highly interwoven cloth of genre and gender mixing via its complex poetics.
Examples such as The Good Wife highlight how complex television has challenged the gendered norms of serial storytelling. The series is far removed from Fiske’s polar examples of feminine and masculine television from the 1980s, and it is distinct from the mixed but separated style of serial romances and episodic cases that typified earlier mixtures such as Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. Instead, the personal and professional, effeminate and masculinist, melodramatic and rational are fully interwoven and inseparable in terms of both storytelling structure and affective viewer experience. While some critics suggest that such mixtures “masculinize” feminine forms and thus marginalize the female basis of much of television storytelling, I contend that these recombinations complicate gender dichotomies in ultimately more progressive ways by inviting viewers to cross-identify and embrace affective pleasures that are typically nonnormative for their gender identity. Male viewers weep at the sentimental melodrama of Friday Night Lights or Lost, female fans celebrate female power and analytic intelligence featured on Alias or Veronica Mars, and all viewers feel the affective interconnections of The Good Wife’s personal and professional realms — such viewing experiences problematize strict gender dichotomies, offering sites of fluidity and empathy, however imperfect and partial, that seem consistent with feminist critiques of gender norms. Warhol argues that narrative consumption is a constitutive practice of gender identity, with serial forms promoting particularly powerful reiterations of affect; I contend that the prevalence of serial melodrama within complex television across a range of genres enables a particularly provocative set of practices to challenge and revise established gender norms.