Abstract
Jason Mittell’s ideas about ‘complex TV’ have been circulating since 2006 (Mittell, 2006), but with the publication of his book, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, we now have the academic publishing equivalent of a television box set. The complexity Mittell identifies is a particular kind of narrative complexity, which places new, greater demands on the cognitive abilities (and often, the patience) of its viewers. Complex TV is presented as a widespread trend – but still, Mittell is careful to point out, a minority one – which emerged in the 1990s in US television storytelling (Mittell’s title probably ought to specify that it is US television with which he is, with the notable exception of Doctor Who [1963–89, 1996, 2005–present], almost exclusively concerned). Key examples in Mittell’s book include Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2013), The Sopranos (1999–2007), The Wire (2002–08), Lost (2004–10), Veronica Mars (2004–07) and Breaking Bad (2008–13).
At the centre of his methodology, Mittell places ‘poetics’, an approach which Jonathan Culler crisply defined as follows: ‘Rather than a criticism which discovers or assigns meanings, … a poetics … strives to define the conditions of meaning’ (Culler, 1975: xiv). More specifically, Mittell employs historical poetics: ‘Historical poetics situates formal developments within specific contexts of production, circulation, and reception, where innovations are viewed not as creative breakthroughs by visionary artists but at the nexus of numerous historical forces that work to transform norms and possibilities’ (p. 5). This provides an excellent foundation for analysis, but Mittell’s approach turns out to be wider still. His account of narrative comprehension utilises another branch of poetics (cognitivist), and elsewhere in his book – for example, when he is discussing fan activities including wiki-editing, spoiler-searching and character-hating – he uses the methods of cultural studies. The range of approaches embraced by Mittell means that scholars occupying either side of the disciplinary borders he crosses will find it difficult to pigeonhole and therefore to dismiss his work.
More importantly, Complex TV is a superb demonstration of how to combine approaches in order to achieve a fuller understanding of an object of investigation. The breadth of Mittell’s methodological embrace does not prevent him from putting the different approaches he uses in their places, so to speak. Mittell clearly believes that, as carefully and elaborately constructed artefacts, the television texts he analyses invite some interpretations and discourage others. However, he uses the example of Internet groups devoted to ‘hating’ particular characters to argue that, ‘We must acknowledge that the ways people make meaning around an ongoing serial do matter, even if they seem to be “wrong” by standards of textual design, authorial intent, moral judgment, or even basic human decency’ (p. 348). In the ‘authorship’ chapter, Mittell sets aside (for the most part) the notion of an individual television author, which ‘does little to help us understand how [a] series was actually created’ (p. 95). Instead, he offers an account of the working practices and routines of television production, plus an account, which draws upon Michel Foucault’s notion of the author function, of how viewers hypothesise authorial agency and use these hypotheses to frame their viewing experiences. In the ‘evaluation’ chapter, Mittell defends the value of evaluation, offering an approach that attempts to sidestep the false universalism of canon formation, the snobbery of some celebrations of ‘quality television’ and the relativism of some treatments of aesthetics by cultural studies.
Not all of Complex TV’s readers will be interested in the methodological debates of television studies; many will be more interested in what the book can teach them about TV – and perhaps specifically their favourite TV shows – and in what they will be able to use the book to do. In both respects, Complex TV delivers. Mittell not only offers us the idea of ‘forensic fandom’ but also exhibits his own when analysing his favourite programmes, providing a wealth of information about textual detail, production history, paratextual material and fan activity. Mittell’s neat and sharp analytical distinctions – for example, between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ complexity (pp. 222–223), or ‘affirmational’ and ‘transformational fandom’ (p. 114), or all the different ways in which complex TV can articulate its characters – are bound to become valuable mainstays of analyses of complex TV from undergraduate level upwards.
Mittell’s approach is admirably broad and inclusive; the type of programming he explores is deliberately and necessarily specific. The main potential danger of Mittell’s book that I can see is that the particular brand of complexity he identifies and defines might be misrecognised by incautious readers as the first and only type of complexity on television. However, we need to remember (though admittedly, Mittell might have reminded us of it a little more often) that Complex TV is exclusively concerned with the complex storytelling of television drama made in the United States. Those of us who wish to identify and champion televisual complexity of different kinds and/or in different places have been offered a model of scholarship and criticism which we may choose to think with or think against, but which we certainly cannot ignore.