Time in Television Narrative

Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First Century Programming

Melissa Ames

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781626744509
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that employ temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time-play in contemporary programming, but also the implications of its sometimes disorienting presence.

Drawing upon the fields of cultural studies, television scholarship, and literary studies, as well as overarching theories concerning postmodernity and narratology, Time in Television Narrative offers some critical suggestions. The increasing number of television programs concerned with time may stem from any and all of the following: recent scientific approaches to quantum physics and temporality; new conceptions of history and post history; or trends in late-capitalistic production and consumption, in the new culture of instantaneity, or in the recent trauma culture amplified after the September 11 attacks. In short, these televisual time experiments may very well be an aesthetic response to the climate from which they derive. These essays analyze both ends of this continuum and also attend to another crucial variable: the television viewer watching this new temporal play.

INDEX

Abbot, H. Porter, 164n1

Abbott, Stacey, 308n4

Abrams, J. J., 100, 112, 308n6

accelerated temporality, 43–44

active viewing, 15, 19, 188, 304

active/passive binary, 188

Adam and Eve, 129–30, 133–34

adolescence, 261

advertisements, 28–29, 162

aesthetics, 6, 32, 65, 71, 82, 259

agency, 197

Akass, Kim, 3

Al Jazeera, 4

albums, 43

Alias, 45–46, 97, 155

All My Children, 275

Allan, Stuart, 20n5

allegory, 7, 19

Allen, Robert C., 29

allusion, 27, 220, 222–24, 293

alternate reality, 15, 18–19, 89, 195, 197, 273, 279–82

Altman, Rick, 261

American Idol, 142, 148

America’s Most Wanted, 289

anachronism, 208

analepses, 22. See also flashbacks Anderson, Bonnie, 20n9

Anderson, Steve, 20n21

Anderson, Tonya, 308n3

Andrejevic, Mark, 20n8

animation, 285, 294

anxiety, 13–14, 74, 111, 139–40, 144–45, 167, 175

apocalypse, 111

appropriation, 267

Aristotle, 5, 20n12, 180

Arrested Development, 6, 14, 92n3, 142, 154–55, 161–64, 218–19, 222–25, 229

art, 156–57

Askwith, Ian, 64, 57, 300

audience, 4, 11, 16–18, 27–28, 49, 51, 56, 58, 60, 62, 83, 86, 142, 179, 190, 195–97, 205, 235, 237–39, 246, 258, 262–63, 265–67, 276, 283

Aug...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. PROMOTING THE FUTURE OF EXPERIMENTAL TV
• II. HISTORICIZING THE MOMENT
• III. THE FUNCTIONS OF TIME
• IV. MOVING BEYOND THE TELEVISUAL RESTRAINTS OF THE PAST
• V. PLAYING OUTSIDE OF THE BOX
• About the Contributors
• Index