This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Recently Dylan Matthews at Vox pointed out that not many people actually watch Game of Thrones, or Mad Men, or any of the most-critically-important-shows-on-television (TM). Instead, people watch NCIS, or Big Bang Theory, or, occasionally, reruns of Big Bang Theory or NCIS. One Sunday, in fact, a new Mad Men episode got fewer viewers than 8 different Law & Order SVU reruns.
So the question is, why do mainstream sites (like The Atlantic, or Salon, or Slate) cover certain shows obsessively while other, more popular shows, are ignored?
At first this may seem like a question that needs no particular answer. Critical enthusiasms and popularity are often at odds with each other. Critics loathed The Other Woman, but it did fine with the public; everybody it seems hates Justin Bieber except for all those millions of people who don’t. Critical darlings and popular favorites often don’t align; why should they here?
The thing is, though, that mainstream publications are in the business of getting clicks — and, as such, they actually do tend to often cover what is popular. The Atlantic writes about Beyoncé, and Star Wars, and Harry Potter and, Miley Cyrus. As far as films and music and YA novels go, the mainstream is right there with the unwashed, and/or washed hordes. But with television there’s a disconnect. How come?
I can’t answer that question specifically — but I think in general the choices people make about what is important in art have less to do with some sort of absolute critical/popular divide than they do with genre.
Folks usually think of genre as a convenient way to divide up art or literature, but the truth is that genre is a lot more than a categorization system. In fact, as Carl Freedman points out in his book Critical Theory and Science-Fiction, genre isn’t really a subset of art at all. Rather, art is a subset of genre. Hemingway’s novels are literature; Hemingway’s laundry lists are not. A judgment about what something is as genre precedes, and enables, the judgment of whether something is art — or, indeed, whether something is worth talking about at all.
The distinctions between NCIS and Breaking Bad may not look like a genre divide — both are dramas. But genres can actually be formed or coalesce in lots of different ways. The shows that get talked about tend to come from certain networks (HBO, Netflix) and have certain broad characteristics— as Kailyn Kent says, the Golden Age of Television could easily be called “The Golden Age of Gritty Shows About Conflicted Sociopaths.” The genre of television-worth-talking-about may not be specifically defined, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be used as a heuristic to decide what’s worth covering and what is a laundry list.
When you’re looking for it, you can see that genre distinctions actually affect coverage in lots of ways. It’s true that Harry Potter is extremely, awesomely popular — but Nora Roberts is extremely, awesomely popular too, selling twenty-seven books a minute according to a rare mainstream profile in The New Yorker. But you don’t see coverage of the latest Nora Roberts novels excitedly discussed at all the big websites. In part, perhaps, that’s because Nora Roberts novels don’t often get made into films — but that seems like it just begs the question, why don’t these incredibly popular novels get made into films?
There’s nothing innately wrong with using genre as a filter. In the first place, it’s unavoidable. Given the massive glut of culture sliding endlessly past our computer monitors, consumers and journalists alike need some way to sort through it. Genre’s a convenient rule-of-thumb; it tells you what might be of interest and what will make your eyes glaze over. In many cases, genre provides, not just a filter, but a community of like-minded folks, and even a self-description and an identity. To keep up with Mad Men or Orange Is the New Black is to be a particular kind of person, accepted into a certain kind of community and certain kinds of discussions. It’s a fandom. Genre shapes art, but it shapes people too.
The one danger of genre and of fandom is insularity. Again, genre sets the bounds not just of what you like, but of what you see as noteworthy or speakable. In that context, it can be easy to forget that other art, or other communities, exist. That can mean, as Vox suggests, that you start to think everyone is watching Mad Men rather than Big Bang Theory.
It can also dovetail, or reproduce other, less pleasant social divisions, though. Genres aren’t always as starkly linked to marginalized identities as the hillbilly/race records division was in the 1920s. But still, race, gender, and class, are often bound up in genre marketing and consumption, which means that ignoring certain genres in favor of others can have political and social implications. The fact that mainstream publications have so little interest in romance novels seems like it has something to do with the way that women, and femininity, are excluded from critical discussions in favor of more male-or-masculine-friendly genres, including YA novels in which the women heroes at least get to kill people. Along the same lines, it’s not exactly an accident that mainstream best music lists always seem to rate white rock (generally by guys) ahead of soul music or hip hop.
None of which is to say that folks shouldn’t like what they like, or shouldn’t pay attention to what they want to pay attention to. But it’s worth thinking about the way that what we like, and what we pay attention to, is often decided before we’ve really made a conscious choice about it. We like to think of art as opening possibilities. But it’s perhaps just as true to say that art, as genre, can often close us down, and make us narrower.
“The fact that mainstream publications have so little interest in romance novels seems like it has something to do with the way that women, and femininity, are excluded from critical discussions in favor of more male-or-masculine-friendly genres…”
The cases of Girls and Orange Is the New Black seem to suggest otherwise. And coversely, NCIS and Big Bang Theory are certainly male oriented.
At least when it comes to entertainment coverage, I would say gender seems to make less of a difference than class or race.
I’d say it’s complicated, and there’s no one factor…but if you think it’s about class and race, OITNB would rule that out too, right?
I think there’s a bunch of things that can matter. In the case of romance, femininity is seen as trivial. OITNB is about the coded male, serious subject matter of prison, even though the cast is female. I suspect that that’s a big part of the difference.
Upper middle class white woman goes to jail – seems to me OITNB is about as oriented as can be toward the Creative Class. (Something like The Wire may look more like a counterexample, but class orientation is of course a matter of tone as well as of the protagonists.)
Does OITNB get coverage because it’s about the manly topic of prison? Well, maybe, but that still leaves Girls, which gets even more.
Have you watched OITNB? It’s really not that focused on Piper, especially 2nd season (maybe too focused on her, still, but a lot of the discussion of the show is about race and class.)
Girls is definitely much discussed — but also much loathed, in a way that I think is often gendered.
Romance is really gendered female, and it’s marginalization is hard to separate from that. Again, I don’t think these things tend to be one to one, but art associated with women is very often seen as lesser, or denigrated. Romance is the one genre that doesn’t get mainstream coverage, even though it’s hugely popular, and other genre works have largely been recuperated (like sci-fi, mystery, etc.) I don’t think that’s an accident.
First, I like this essay. I think the genre divide may not be the art itself, but genres of discussion. I’m sure there’s a huge crossover between 50 Shades of Gray and Nora Roberts readers, but part of the appeal of the former is that it is controversial in a way which the general public finds interesting to debate, while Roberts sales power is in part due to being packaged like comfort food.
Second, I am bemused by the use of mainstream: in terms of audience, Slate, Salon, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly are not mainstream. At best, they are the HBO of critical media, only mainstream in relation to places like HU. Actual mainstream should include People, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed.
I’m assuming “mainstream” is used as interchangeable with “middlebrow”. Except middlebrow is what the mainstream recognizes but may not consume as cultured discourse. Because they more invoked than read, they may not always conform to mainstream expectations or stereotypes. Salon certainly does as it is more clickbait driven, but The Atlantic is at the edge of enacting middlebrow snob cliches.
Third, while I realize criticism is subjective and doesn’t need to be journalistic or scientific, criticism is still a non-fiction narrative that is most engaging when grounded in plausible, substantial assertions. Thus calling The Atlantic mainstream disrupts the readers engagement.
Fourth, the Trend Piece is the car chase sequence of journalism, people are so used to exercises which can barely pass scrutiny, one rarely sees one with enough substance to work well. That Vox piece is about assumptions vs. reality, but its thesis is an unsubstantiated claim: “If you were to try to judge TV shows’ popularity based on the amount of coverage and recaps, you’d probably conclude…” “Probably” is not “would” let alone a data driven assertion. The one data point comes with caveats: “Nielsen still doesn’t take into account a lot of online viewing mechanisms…but it’s difficult to believe Nielsen is so far off…” Using “difficult to believe” seems out of place in an article ostensibly debunking perception with facts.
It’s interesting what Vox’s truthiness overlooks: First, the audience for shows and critical discussions of shows are different. The show with the most viewers may not be the show with viewers who will read and respond to critics. It doesn’t matter if 23 million people watch Big Bang Theory if they won’t click on Big Bang think pieces.
This difference is also informed by how something is popular. Vox links to an article in which the most well documented theory about Big Bang’s rise is syndication. Popularity can mean consumed because it’s cheap and widely available, not consumed because it’s liked the most. Which is also a case one can make about popular subjects of criticism – is it what people truly find fascinating, or just the most interesting of frequently offered options?
Then again, what’s compelling about popular vs. quality vs. masses vs. snobs discourse is not always the most true. It may be like insisting all fight scenes involve biologically accurate responses to pain and injury.
Well, I’d say that “mainstream” is always going to be a relative and contested term, yes? I honestly don’t know what the Atlantic or Salon’s readership is like compared to Rolling Stone’s. Maybe RS has much more? I’d imagine People does.
It’s possible that Big Bang fans don’t want to read thinkpieces. That doesn’t seem to obviate my points about genre though….?
“Girls is definitely much discussed — but also much loathed, in a way that I think is often gendered.”
Certainly.
I worked many decades in newspapers and magazines … and you’re right, the editorial choices of what is reviewed in arts sections can be a head-scratcher for the unwashed reading masses. There are usually three reasons for such coverage: there is a political angle, the editor (or publisher) personally likes it … or there is ass-kissing ( AKA PR).
I realize you’re mostly talking about how television shows are covered, but Game of Thrones is an interesting special case, since the show and the books get different types of coverage. The New Yorker did an article about the books and GRRM before the show came out, but their angle was about the weirdly antagonistic relationship of the books’ fans to their author. The magazine also reviewed the television series on its own merits, but I can’t really see them writing about the books on purely literary grounds. Despite their seeming openness in recent years to genre material, anything outside of perhaps Chabon and Lethem, who are perceived as crossover talents, is unlikely to get too much attention.
Regarding critical attention paid to television shows in the middlebrow press, I’ve often wondered why King of the Hill never got much attention. It often engaged with issues of race (e.g. Hank Hill’s interactions with the Souphanousinphones — “So, are you Chinese or Japanese?”) and class (Luanne Platter’s trailer park origins were a big part of her character). Too “red state” for the coastal critics? Too many unlikeable characters? Although it had its ups and downs, its best episodes are quite good indeed, I thought.
“art is a subset of genre”
If art is a subset of genre, then there should be some instances of genre that are not instances of art. Name one.
Laundry lists.
Lots of others; letters, emails, tweets, facebook posts, at one point comic books, advertising, and on and on.
Someo of those are sometimes considered art in some situations…but mostly they’re categorized as non-art because of genre designation. Again, Carl Freedman makes the argument in more detail in Critical Theory and Science Fiction.
To which genre do any of those belong, given that the definition of “genre” is
(a) (per wikipedia) “the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or entertainment”;
and
(b) (per dictionary.com) “a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like”
You keep using that word, but etc.
Oh come on, now. You’re scurrying to the dictionary? That’s hardly the resort of a philosopher, it doesn’t seem like. Especially since I just gave you an actual academic citation for using genre in this way. Peer reviewed and everything.
I think referring to a laundry list as a category of literature makes sense. It has all the characteristics of literature, I’d say, except that it isn’t considered literature — but that seems like an issue of genre.
I don’t really get why you’ve decided that the rhetorical tack to take here is to pretend you think I’m an idiot. I presume you don’t actually think that; I don’t think you’re an idiot. I don’t exactly understand what your stake is here, though; to me, seeing genre as preceding literature is a way to get at the fact that what is seen as art is pretty arbitrary, and that judgments about artistic quality tend to be based on genre first, rather than genre itself equating to low quality. So…why do you resist that, exactly? I doubt it’s because you think that the word of the dictionary should always trump the word of philosophical thinkers like Freedman.
Thought: Can the currently greater prestige of, say, comic book super heroes*, compared to romance, be connected to the lack of any predominantly female analog to the predominantly male computer nerd nouveau riche that emerged in the ’80s and metastasized in subsequent decades?
* Sci fi and fantasy of course already had some intellectual respectability before the ’80s.
Or let me put it another way…I have trouble believing that you think my error here is simply misunderstanding a dictionary definition. There’s a real issue here about what genre is, or how we should think about it. Pointing to the dictionary doesn’t change that; trying to trap me with syllogisms doesn’t work either, as I think I demonstrated; the version of genre I’m offering is logically consistent. You seem to be playing a game of, let’s show that Noah is so stupid that he doesn’t know what he’s saying. I don’t get the point of that. I’m interested to hear why you don’t want to look at genre this way, or why you feel that looking at genre this way is a problem. I’m asking you to quit it with the pissing contest and talk to me, because pissing contests are stupid, but I am actually interested in hearing what you have to say.
Graham, that’s interesting. I’m not sure? I don’t think so…or at least that’s not exactly my sense of how these things happened? I feel like superhero validation is somewhat built on a long term push in sci-fi for legitimacy (there’s a lot of fanzine overlap, for example) and by a concerted effort by critics and creators to get highbrow cred.
Romance is tricky because lots of romances are really accepted as highbrow and important (Jane Austen, E.M. Forster, Ian McEwan more recently…just lots of things.) So it ends up being really about the marketing rather than the kinds of stories. If you market it to women, it’s no good; otherwise it’s fine. Or at least, that’s my take on what the dynamic seems to be.
yeeah, sorry about that — don’t know why I was getting so irritated. Sorry for being a dick.
Anyhow — my point was that, on the standard understanding of what a “genre” is, what you said didn’t make much sense. So: what’s the alternative definition (or characterisation) of “genre” that you prefer?
Eh, that’s okay. These things happen.
I don’t think it’s that far away from the usual definition of genre? That is, I think if you say, “laundry lists are a prose genre,” most people would get that. I think that also gets at the way that some things that are widely recognized as genre are oftne *not* considered art. For instance, lots of people, if you said, “Is contemporary R&B art?” they would say, “no.”
I think Freedman is using a definition of genre that would read something like, “any category of writing” (he’s focusing mostly on literature. So that would include things like emails and laundry lists — and would obviously include sci-fi, or mystery, or things that at some times some people might have said was not art.
Does that make sense? The point for me (and for Freedman) is that the categorization actually precedes whether something is considered art or not. There’s an idea that you look at art and decide whether it’s art or just crappy genre. But Freedman’s point is that the categorization in terms of genre happens first; you decide that this is a genre of things that can be art before you make aesthetic determinations (so, laundry lists, and maybe sometimes comics or sci-fi, not art; literary fiction, yes art.)
Part of what’s going on seems to be slippage between deflationary and inflationary senses of “art”. The deflationary sense being something like: artifacts with the right kind of representational content, embedded in the right kind of social practices (i.e. in its creation and consumption); not that I have anything remotely approaching a theory of what constitutes art…
By contrast, the inflationary sense of “art” is, essentially just adding a capital a: Art. i.e. art in the deflationary sense + some degree of cultural/criticial validation.
So when you talk about judgements of genre preceding judgements of art, that sounds like nonsense if you mean the deflationary sense, or true but kind of banal if you mean the inflationary sense.
Well, I think Freeman is arguing that the deflationary and inflationary senses aren’t all that different, and that they work in much the same way. That is, the he’s saying that deflationary art is also formed by some degree of cultural/critical validation; what constitutes art, or is thought of as art, involves cultural/critical decisions or categories. So, for example, advertising isn’t art; is that statement deflationary or inflationary? It depends on how you look at it…which is to say it’s about categorization, or genre.
I’m a week late to the discussion, but I just came across this essay. You’ve mapped out a major issue in television criticism today. Genre and gender play a large role in what shows get the most critical attention. And critical myopia is particularly frustrating for smart viewers who don’t much enjoy “gritty stories about conflicted sociopaths.”
“GSACS” are a genre, just one of many possible genres. But other genres are dying out. I’m particularly interested in the near total extinction of the American-made melodrama. Producers may throw a few dollars at season three billion of Gray’s Anatomy, but for the most part, melodrama has disappeared since the turn of the millennium.
I’m defining melodramas broadly, as TV shows that treat emotions, mood and relationships as being as significant as crime-solving or power politics. They can be as arty as “Twin Peaks,” as ambitious as “ER” or as low-key as “Northern Exposure,” but their tone is substantially different from “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad.” Today, melodrama is represented by relatively few American shows, of declining quality, i.e., season three billion of Gray’s Anatomy.
Imports from overseas are filling some of the genre gap. “Downton Abby” had its viral success in part because it was a melodrama. And, even more indicative, millions of Anglo Americans watch subtitled Asian TV streaming on the internet, because Asian networks are making good shows about non-sociopaths.
Though I think melodrama is a genre for everyone, not just women, I get the impression that TV critics don’t agree. But if Edward Buscombe can write entire books analyzing John Ford’s Westerns, genres like romance and melodrama are equally deserving of serious critical attention.
Regarding romance vs. sci fi in literature, I’ve seen male writers come up with some convoluted attempts to explain why sci-fi can be literary, while romance can’t. Since their explanations don’t hold water, I suspect they just don’t enjoy romance. Jane Austen would probably have something pithy to say on the subject. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of good fortune wants gritty stories about conflicted sociopaths.
Wow, what a great comment. Thanks for posting it.
You might be interested in Linda Williams’ book called “Playing the Race Card”, which is about racial melodrama in American culture. Her definition of melodrama is more expansive than yours, I think, but nonetheless it sounds like might really enjoy it.
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
I’m finally watching Mad Men, and it’s well within the melodrama category, and I love it for that. Don Draper is caddish, but (major spoiler warning) doesn’t kill anybody to advance his agenda (as of midway through season 4). There’s a case to be made that Sopranos is as resonant as it is because it crosshatched melodrama and GSACS.