[Note: This is the first of a three-part series highlighting some of Hannibal‘s unique contributions to the television world, to commemorate its final week on NBC. The images and video in this post contain spoilers. Also macabre humor.]

Hannibal completes its third (and last) season this week, despite its critical acclaim and the devotion of its passionate fanbase (known as “Fannibals”). Critics have praised the program’s reconceptualization of the horror series and its compelling version of the familiar Hannibal character, but Hannibal has left its mark in other ways as well. This short series of posts examines how Hannibal has engaged with questions of gender: in remixing the markers of quality TV, in embracing the potential of its position within the fannish archive, and in privileging a complex teen girl character within its narrative.

A common exclamation for new viewers of Hannibal is “I can’t believe this is on network!” This astonishment reflects the dominant cultural hierarchies of value in which television critics have elevated non-network shows as “quality TV” for discerning viewers over network shows largely assumed to be mindless fodder for the undiscerning masses. As Elana Levine and Michael Z. Newman have argued (and critic Noah Berlatsky recently affirmed), such critical divides of taste and value perpetuate inequalities of class and gender in which quality is associated with middle class, male audiences/”masculine” tastes, and non-quality tv with mass, largely female audiences with “feminine” tastes.

This divide has become even more obvious as white middle-class audiences have largely fled the networks, preferring the suburban pastures of original programming on HBO, Netflix, Amazon, etc. In the face of this divide, networks have been even more willing to serve the audiences that remain by developing programming for undervalued viewers such as teens, women, queer people, and people of color, many of whom still watch live TV. In addition, networks have developed more programming from less critically regarded pulp genres (as opposed to “adult dramas”) such as musicals, science fiction, and horror.

NBC’s Hannibal is unusual in its ability to bridge this cultural divide by successfully developing a “class and mass” brand that has provided an innovative, unique model of program and promotion. Hannibal‘s brand appeals to and actively serves both quality TV audiences and an intensely invested fan base, led primarily by young women utilizing social media. The easy co-existence of these seemingly odd bedfellows is particularly remarkable given that the presence of young women is often seen to degrade (“feminize”) the quality bona fides of any media product. Yet just as Hannibal queered its source material, the program’s producers were able to develop a mode of promotional address that combined quality markers with overt acknowledgements of its fandom. Far from “degrading” the text, this integration has resulted in a richer, more experimental, more politically progressive program and a more inclusive viewer experience.

In 2011, amidst the backdrop of reboots, rebranding, origin stories, and sequels, Hannibal seemed to be a perfect fit for NBC. The recent popularity of horror on American television—in series like The Walking Dead and American Horror Story—suggested to the network that a reboot of the familiar character of Hannibal Lecter would allow them to tap into this growing viewer demand. At the same time, NBC sought to establish a “quality” brand for the show. For example, the network committed to thirteen episodes rather than a full season, a break with network traditions that replicated the practices of cable’s prestige programs. The network also chose to skip the pilot stage because of the involvement of the French Gaumont studio group, who purchased the rights to the novel—and thus the characters from—Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, which would serve as the foundation for the series. The inclusion of Gaumont as a producing partner gave the show an international feel; European high-art aesthetics were evoked throughout the series, which included location filming in Paris and Florence.

Gaumont’s CEO Katie O’Connell then hired Bryan Fuller to write the first script and serve as showrunner. As the creator of several critically acclaimed series including Pushing Daisies (2007-09), Fuller brought with him his own auteur brand. He promised to reimagine the source material by altering key aspects of the original books, including diversifying the cast; focusing on character development and motivation; and establishing a signature lush, beautiful, and sophisticated style for the program that would look and feel expensive. Likewise, NBC promoted these “quality” production aesthetics throughout its publicity for the series.

Still, Hannibal struggled to find an audience on NBC, which, unlike premium outlets, needed the buy-in of at least a portion of its mass audience for the program to succeed. In this regard, the network and the program’s producers encouraged the activities of the Fannibals. Demographic research suggested that a significant portion of the audience was “young, smart, well-read women,” which delighted Fuller, who adored their creative production, their appreciation of the show’s dark humor, and their emotional investment in his development of a romance between Hannibal and Will Graham. The network embraced the community, setting up an official Tumblr account for the series and sponsoring a fan art contest (winners below). The NBC Hannibal Tumblr mods have been widely praised for their understanding of the platform and their supportive, respectful interaction with fans.

In addition, Hannibal‘s producers and cast members, led by Fuller (in flower crowns, below), have frequently used Twitter to encourage fan activity, including regularly live-tweeting episodes; re-tweeting fan art and GIFs; and giving fans access to script pages, production details, and set photos. This sense of community between the series producers and its fans generated tangible results in the form of a third season renewal, as network officials and producers have openly acknowledged. This final season has both rewarded Fannibals’ ardor and affirmed quality TV tastes by further shifting the series from its procedural beginnings. Set partially in Europe, this season utilizes an art-house style of filming and focuses on character relationships in even more depth and detail, particularly that between the two leads. By developing program content that appealed to viewers across gender and class lines and by involving and supporting their “feminized,” network audiences, Hannibal constructed both an innovative program text and a series brand that will hopefully inspire television producers working across platforms to explore more ways of blurring cultural hierarchies.

The Knick’s Clinical Style

Andrew deWaard

Poking a Dead Horse

Regarding the original script for The Knick, Steven Soderbergh “knew that if [he] said no, the second person who read it would say yes.” In fact, the critical reception of the show seems to find the only flaw to be the script and clunky dialogue, whereas the directing is considered, by Matt Zoller Seitz of New York Magazine, to be “the greatest sustained display of directorial virtuosity in the history of American TV.” We might consider, then, that perhaps the script itself wasn’t necessarily the attraction for Soderbergh, but the opportunity it presented to channel so many of his cinematic preoccupations and skills into one formal package.

Like his early, then-controversial experiment with a multi-platform day-and-date release for Bubble, a practice that has since become common for indie films, Soderbergh is again innovating at the margins of the industry by fronting all ten episodes of a prestige television series, a method that will now be employed by David Fincher and David Lynch as well. True Detective, a show which shares a production company (Anonymous Content) with The Knick, received much acclaim last year for its similar use of only one director, though not to the same degree of singular vision employed by Soderbergh and his many pseudonyms. As Peter Andrews he is the cinematographer and camera operator; as Mary Ann Bernard, the editor, a system he has employed for more than a decade in his filmmaking, as well as his first foray into television back in 2003 for the underrated K-Street.

Like the color-coded storylines in The Underneath and Traffic, as well as the expressive use of yellow in The Informant!, The Knick presents its hospital scenes in a stark monochrome with (literal) splashes of red, its wealthy interiors in bright, claustrophobic decadence, and its underclass exteriors in drab, underlit earth tones; each color palette plays a representative role. The use of natural light with a digital camera is another aspect of Soderbergh’s cinematography that has been honed over the years, from the early miniDV experiment Full Frontal and the HDNet-produced Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience, to the frank, digital depictions of violence in Haywire and pandemic in Contagion.The reasons are technological (Soderbergh was an early, vocal proponent of the now common RED camera), financial (quicker, less costly setups), and performative (less stoppage means more fluid acting), but at The Knick, the lighting is both a literal and figurative concern, from the electrification of the hospital to the dynamics of power and enlightenment that energize the characters.

This visual scheme is also befitting of Soderbergh’s aim to sully the prestige of the period picture through formal means. Like The Good German, which uses only the filming equipment of the era but none of the constraints of the Hays code to present its tale of post-WWII American duplicity, or Che, which focuses on the day-to-day realities of revolution, Soderbergh’s approach to depicting history is to shine a natural light on the process, rather than the spectacle. The opening scene of The Knick features a child poking a dead horse; the rest of the series will graphically demonstrate in clinical detail how the history of technological progress, and early medical experimentation in particular, is not too far removed from that image.

After The Knick, Television Has No Excuse to Not Make Race Meaningfully Visible

Kristen Warner

A look at the professional and personal lives of the staff at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital during the early part of the twentieth century. Andre Holland and Clive Owen.

Having not noticed the marketing or promotion for the premiere of The Knick, I was unaware of Andre Holland’s presence and was pleasantly surprised to see him on screen in the pilot episode. Holland’s character Dr. Algernon Edwards arrives at the Knickerbocker hospital without much fanfare. The Black Harvard trained surgeon, just returning from a prominent residency in Paris, arrives at The Knick in search of Clive Owen’s Dr. John Thackery who he imagines will heartily welcome him to the hospital. Expecting a clichéd, superficial “race” conversation, I watched the first meeting between he and Thackery with mild interest. However, my mild interest became obsession once I witnessed Thackery realizing he had been fooled into hiring a Black man.

Edwards: I’m beginning to think you weren’t told everything about me. You envisioned something different I take it. Something…lighter.

Thackery: I did. And to be frank Dr. Edwards, I only agreed to this meeting as a courtesy to Ms. Robertson but I am certainly not interested in an integrated hospital staff.

Edwards: My skin color shouldn’t matter.

Thackery: Well if it doesn’t matter why was that information held back from me?

Edwards: You’ll have to ask Ms. Robertson.

Thackery: It’s also nowhere to be found on your credentials.

Edwards: Is your race listed on yours?

Thackery: There’s no need for it to be.

The conversation is a rarity for television because it cleverly allows for race and racial discrimination to exist both at the level of institution and at the individual. Thackery’s reservations about taking Edwards on are not solely bound to his personal feelings but also to the systemic structures that suggested Edwards’ Blackness would operate as an economic hardship for the already struggling hospital. What’s more, that the scene occurs with dark skinned Black coal workers in the background only adds to the layers of privilege Thackery comfortably rests on AND Edwards simultaneously distances himself from.

What’s more, the conversation seeds a larger idea of what Thackery and Edwards’ relationship will be forged upon—economics and efficiency through entrepreneurship. It is only after Thackery discovers Edwards’ underground clinic and learns of the inventions he has created that his Blackness takes a back seat to innovation and he is allowed to exist as more and yet still not enough because his demonstrable title and skill set are only permissible within the confines of the hospital.

Throughout the season we watched Edwards navigate his classed and gendered space between the equally classed and gendered worlds of whiteness and Blackness—because he can never truly belong in either. Cultural specificity as well as questions of racial self-fashioning, repression and respectability are carefully sutured into the text. Where to begin with the richness: Edwards’ Black cohabitants in his hotel whose dignity is tied up in pride and jealousy of what they don’t have, or those he brawls with because he can’t fight the white men, or the Black seamstresses who become surgical nurses (OMG!!) or the Black coal workers who become security for his clinic or his chemistry with my only issue in his storyline: the magically 21^st century, post-racialized yet terribly naïve, white love interest Neely? It is rare—as in NEVER—to have such precision and intelligence and depth with regard to Black folks on television, let alone within one season of a series.

This leads to my final point: watching The Knick, I was reminded of the other television historical drama I watch: Mad Men. Years ago I wrote here that while early seasons of Mad Men may have had justifiable reason to strategically exclude Blackness from its text, I believed at some point the series would explicitly include race as part of its frame. As of yet, that still has not happened. Thus that The Knick, a tale of turn of the century New York City can find ways to make Black bodies visible and their experiences meaningful in a time and space they are not normally represented in media without resorting to hindsight smugness and Mad Men, a tale of 1950/60s New York City would not, is quite revealing.

“Pretty Silver Stitches”: the Sounds of Surgery in Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick

Lisa Coulthard

In his influential The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schafer comments on the phenomenon of disappearing sounds in our acoustic environment — that certain sounds such as leather saddlebags, school hand bells and razors being stropped will someday be extinct and unknown. From the clop of horse hooves and wooden carriage wheels on brick roads to the glass and metal clink of medicine vials and hypodermics, representations of endangered sounds carry with them both a sonic nostalgia and a sometimes uncanny sense of the acoustic dead coming back to life. What is so intriguing about the soundscape of Steven Soderbergh’s circa 1900 New York in The Knick is the way it thoroughly and unambiguously rejects this sonic nostalgia, while at the same time adhering to and celebrating a degree of acoustic historicism. Many have commented favorably on the anachronism of the synthesizer and electronically based music of composer Cliff Martinez (a longtime collaborator of Soderbergh’s), noting that it offsets expectations and avoids clichéd citations of operettas, ragtime, classical or other music one might associate with the era. The complex music for the show instead emphasizes droning minimalism, electronic software synthesizers, and rhythms and tones more resonant of musique concrete than televisual scoring. In particular, the use of the baschet cristal, a mid-century friction ideophone favored by musique concrete composers indicates the musical ties are in not only anachronistic but in direct opposition to the period presented.

But the use of synthesizers and instruments such as the electric guitar or baschet cristal do more than merely distance The Knick  from its historically based setting. Stressing sounds more than distinct musical pieces, and blurring effects into music (via heartbeats or similar rhythms), Martinez’s music weaves through the series in an integrated way that, as Jed Mayer suggests, “does not so much accompany scenes as insinuate itself into them.” With no conventional credit sequence or series song, Martinez’s music occupies a pervasive rather distinct presence in The Knick. And yet, with titles such as “Pretty Silver Stitches,” “Son of Placenta Previa,” “Abscess,” and “Aortic Aneurysm junior,” Martinez’s music tracks stress the particular importance of music in the operating scenes. In the same way that Martinez’s use of electronic music and the physical vibratory tonalities of the baschet cristal highlight organic/inorganic binaries, so does the combination of music and sound effects in the surgery scenes. Heavily scored, these surgery scenes are also acoustically graphic – emphasizing the drainage of blood through hand cranked machines or vacuum suction, the spurting flow of fluids, the thud of blood soaked sponges, the metal and glass tings of surgery implements, the sounds effects of the operating room highlight the coming together of organic and inorganic materials in the act of twentieth century surgery. The anachronisms of the music are thus less shocking than one might think – engaged with organic and inorganic materials, blending sonic rhythms with music, and integrating into the action, Martinez’s music works in concert with the historically accuracies of the sound effects to create a split acoustic space, drained of the nostalgia for lost objects discussed by Schafer, but resonant with the coming together of bodies and machines that define the birth of modern surgery, which is after all The Knick’s central drama.

Clive Owen’s Dirtied Star Image in The Knick

R. Colin Tait

In Emily Nussbaum’s original New Yorker pan of The Knick, she stated that her biggest problem with the series is that it relies on cliches that have come to populate the latest iteration of the Premium Cable era of TV. Most offensive of these tropes to Nussbaum is the antiheroic figure of William Thackery — the brilliant, troubled, (ahem…racist) and cocaine-addicted surgeon played with particular fury by movie star Clive Owen. However, Thackery does not merely represent “more of the same” for TV’s era of “Difficult Men,” nor is this type a recent phenomenon. Nussbaum could just as easily be complaining about Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, Macbeth or King Richard the Third as examples of a well-worn type — complex characters whose moral ambiguity is a draw for both audiences and actors alike. Indeed, tragic complexity is nothing new, nor should it be treated as such.

Owen’s portrayal of Thackery is a revelation within his career for several reasons, partly due to the long-form seriality of the series and partly due to his collaboration with Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh has often coaxed career-best performances from his actors. Since he directs, shoots and lights all the scenes himself, the result is a remarkable sense of intimacy with his actors on the set. Second, the director often employs actors to work against their type – as in Matt Damon’s role in The Informant! where the actor gained forty pounds, or, more recently, where Michael Douglas refashioned himself in an Emmy-winning turn as flamboyant superstar pianist Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. Third, Soderbergh employs open framings, long-takes, and shoots little extra coverage, ensuring that the performance in front of the camera is solely the actor’s responsibility and that they bring their best as soon as the camera rolls.

Owen’s performance of Thackery – ranging from his cocaine-inspired megalomania to his pathetic, desperate moments trying to kick the drug – also conforms to a ‘modernist’ streak within Soderbergh’s work, where the actors effectively work so far against their star persona that it becomes “dirtied.” There is almost something of a Brechtian distanciation effect as we watch Owen perform Thackery, and it is impossible to separate the sensation of watching his performance from the sensation of watching the actor wreck their star image.

For Owen, playing Thackery allows the actor to do something that his film roles only partially allowed him to. Indeed, the most memorable Owen parts are the ones where he plays complicated, flawed characters (think Children of Men and Closer here) or where he was a handsome, blank slate (The Hire, Croupier). These characteristics have not always gelled with Hollywood stardom and have ultimately led to Owen only ascending so high as a leading man.

However, the new emphasis on flawed protagonists within cable television allows Owen to sit in his sweet spot. Playing Thackery affords the actor much more leeway to emphasize the traits that made him famous in the first place, ruggedly handsome, taciturn and intelligent instead of the ill-fitting action roles that he has sometimes been shoehorned into as a result of being a leading man in Hollywood.

What all the roles of the cable drama era have in common with Shakespearean drama – ranging from Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad, to Michael Sheen’s portrayal of William Masters in Masters of Sex, to Owen in The Knick – is they separate the actor from their stardom, distilling each performance down to the specifics of their complexity and allowing the actors and their audiences to revel in the dirt.

Veteran transmedia storytellers Campfire previously designed campaigns for programs such as Game of Thrones and Bag of Bones. In those campaigns, as in the current one for Hunted, Campfire relies on a multi-pronged strategy to spread word of mouth about the program and increase brand awareness of the channel on which the program airs. As such, the campaigns combine an interactive web-based component, a physical object sent to opinion leaders, and, in the case of Game of Thrones and Hunted, targeted, local events. All elements of the campaign synch to provide potential viewers with an immersive experience of the program’s characters and storyworld.

The specific elements that comprise the Hunted campaign have been analyzed by multiple media outlets such as ARG Net, Huffington Post, and by Myles McNutt, so I will highlight only a few relevant features. The online component at ByzantiumTests.com consists of personality tests that supposedly decide if the participant is fit to work for Byzantium Security. As one might expect, it doesn’t matter how one responds to these tests—in the end, all participants are deemed to be part of the 1% that qualifies for employment at Byzantium (nevertheless, it is worth playing through all tests to get to the very last, the baffling outcome of which leads one to ask “but how did they do that?”). I found it interesting that the online component asks viewers to join Byzantium when the company is marked as an antagonist in the series itself, but as I previously explained regarding The Hunger Games, this strategy invites viewers into the diegesis while simultaneously not revealing too much in advance to the program’s premiere.

The physical component of the Hunted campaign takes the form of a wooden puzzle that has a secret compartment for a password-protected flash drive. After solving the fragmented anagram burned into the wood, one has access to exclusive materials. Campfire’s goal of sending out the puzzles to the lucky few—or shall we say, the lucky 1% of television viewers privileged enough to receive mail from Campfire—is also to spread the word about Hunted (full disclosure: I received one of those puzzles, too, and am presumably doing my part by writing this post). After all, as Campfire’s Creative Director Steve Coulson told me, an important goal of this transmedia campaign is to generate word-of-mouth buzz that connects a quality drama like Hunted with Cinemax. The dual goal of the Hunted transmedia campaign is thus not only to recruit new viewers for Cinemax, but also the elevate viewers’ opinion of Cinemax’s brand (Campfire created a campaign with similar goals for A&E and its Stephen King mini-series Bag of Bones).

Photo Credit: Armando Gallardo

So far, all of this is fairly standard in the world of transmedia storytelling. However, the last component of the Hunted campaign stands out. As part of a localized event, posters promoting Byzantium Security appeared in the area around Wall Street in time for the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. In contrast to the online component, which is easily identified as promotional material for Hunted because of its copyright disclaimer, the ads did not have any overt link to the program. Indeed, many people mistook the posters for real ads advertising security for the 1%.

The above photo circulated widely on Twitter and blogs following the OWS anniversary. The revelation that the Byzantium ads were “just” for a TV program didn’t necessarily improve opinions about the ad (see, for example, the reactions on OWS’s Facebook page). One could say that this reaction was a win for Campfire nevertheless since Hunted and Cinemax became part of a passionate conversation. However, seeing the ads either as marketing triumph or terrible co-option of activist language is too simple, especially because the program itself raises the question of what it means to work for a company that protects the 1%.  For me, ambivalence might be a better term for describing this mash-up of activist language and television promotion. While the ads might not promote a security firm for the 1%, they promote a program that targets those who can and will spend the additional monthly fee for Cinemax; a group we might imagine as the “1%” of television viewers. While the actual number of subscribers is larger than one percent, the discourse of quality television depicts viewers of premium cable drama as the elite among TV viewers (as suggested by Michael Z. Newman and Elena Levine in Legitimating Television).

There is also the question of commercial television’s role in contributing to a conversation about the issues addressed by OWS, like global finance. Is television depoliticized, as Alternet’s Sarah Jaffe observes, or is TV another venue in which this conversation happens? The first episode suggests that Hunted will follow the usual approach of commercial television and present the conflicts surrounding Byzantium in a personalized way, namely as a conflict between main character Sam Hunter and Byzantium, her employers, rather than offering a systemic critique of Byzantium as cog in the machine of global finance. Despite this personalization, it seems too easy to divorce a program like Hunted from the larger discourse surrounding OWS. Perhaps the ultimate achievement of the Byzantium ads is that it forces us to look more closely at how both the commercialized rhetoric of transmedia and the activist rhetoric of OWS engage in a conversation about the 1%.

Because the opening two-parter of series six, ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and ‘Day of the Moon’, has been accused in certain sectors of online fandom and in some newspaper reviews of rehashing past successes. The Doctor is killed, but time travel shenanigans mean that the show can go on (or has gone on); monsters have a sight-related gimmick; the Doctor is placed in something of a rom-com context; and River Song cautions against spoilers and appears with her customary introductory line, as well as (literally, this time) diving into the TARDIS. Non-linear storytelling, plot mechanics, and brisk dialogue all tussle for dominance. Now with added ‘perfect prison’ motif.

And as Moffat’s vision for Who moves further out of the long shadow cast by the Russell T. Davies era, contrasts between the two showrunners come into sharper focus. Davies’s authorship twisted industry common-sense into art; he turned down the sci-fi, upped emotional realism, and avoided scaring off the mass audience. He also coded his own voice into a range of tightly restricted formats; the light season-opening romp; the quirky, experimental story; the big, brash finale; the mid-series filler. But whereas Davies’s masterstroke was to write with the restrictions of industry common-sense, Moffat often writes against industrial norms for ‘mainstream’ TV. His authorship is more combative, more assertive, restlessly looking to think the unthinkable and so write what Doctor Who‘s format theorem tells him cannot be written.

To wit – kill the Doctor in the first ten minutes or so of the series, but structure narrative gaps into the event that can be revisited later (what do the astronaut and the Doctor discuss before his death?). Casually throw ontological puzzles into the mix: was it really pre-1967 at Graystark Hall Orphanage? What was the hatch all about? (There might almost have been a Lost reference or gag lurking there). Oh, and end episode one of a family show with the Doctor’s companion shooting a child asking for help. As Paul Kirkley has pointed out, this hardly presses the right demographic buttons or readily hails a target audience. Unlike Davies, who was the consummate integrationist, pulling together storytelling needs and industry contexts and pressures, Moffat pits his wordy cleverness and narrative complexity against forms of ‘mainstream’ industry wisdom. Not wholly, of course; the gambit of a series opener working like a finale does have a certain industrial logic to it, as well as creatively playing with established ways of doing Who. But Moffat challenges the TV industry establishment far more notably than did series one through four. He’s the Tom Baker to Russell T. Davies’s Jon Pertwee.

Just so you know, this blogged argument doesn’t really begin with the sentence “Just so you know” above. Its discussion has a prequel; a response to last year’s season finale for Antenna, where I argued that Moffat’s skill as a writer is to misdirect, and to separate moments of seeing and understanding such that the audience typically experiences a feeling of ‘ah! How could I not have spotted that!’ But the difficulty for fan audiences is that favoured tricks used by a writer can become familiar, anticipated, and rapidly recognised. Ironically, when the Silence are revealed here, after a season-long wait recapped in flashback, they represent the monster as ultimate anti-spoiler; nobody can remember them a moment after they’ve been seen. Though this feels vaguely reminiscent of the Weeping Angels, it is a repetition of authorial vision and distinction; authorship itself as a brand of the uncanny – indeed, as the ultimate anti-spoiler – where the longed-for “reveal” proves to be startling… yet in a somehow familiar, already-known guise.

For, NuWho has been distinguished from its classic predecessor, above all else, by virtue of becoming ‘authored’ television. And authored TV implies – in fact, requires – markers of its vision; iterations of its distinctiveness; variations on its authorial themes. Time travel is the perfect metaphor for auteurism; each involves going back over old ground and making it surprising, showing the work of the world in a new light. Equally, auteurism is the perfect metaphor for time travel, always starting with a new chance, a blank page, and yet finding that history can’t be entirely rewritten nor its patterns of meaning wholly resisted. Moffat, of course, exploits and mines the metaphor until it collapses altogether: this version of Doctor Who gives us time travel as auteurism. And a story arc that seems to be shaping up into a ‘story ellipse’, as Moffat’s nuWho explores new ground by doubling back over Freud’s “family romance”, as per pop time travel staples like Terminator, or Back to the Future. Author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, even includes an intertextual shout out to Moffat’s ‘Girl in the Fireplace’ in Her Fearful Symmetry, acknowledging their twinned authorial territories.

Rather than indicating creative exhaustion, or narrative fixation, repetition has always been essential to NuWho, not just to convey its nature as genre TV, but more than that, as a sign of its ‘quality’, and its status as TV art, even. Impure repetition, like a subtly shifting time loop or a family resemblance, is the sine qua non of any identifiable authorial vision. Becoming repetitive means just this: articulating auteurism and creating ‘quality TV’ within and against the confines of a tightly-formatted, popular series.

Yes, Steven Moffat’s work on Doctor Who is becoming ever more repetitive.

As has been the case in several excellent episodes over the course of the series, a significant cultural event anchors “The Suitcase.”  The title bout between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston provides open avenues for characterization: Trudy meets Pete at the office beforehand, creating an opportunity for Peggy to witness and react to Trudy’s pregnant body.  Even the fact that Peggy would miss the fight underlines her discomfort and disaffiliation with events and practices that are meant to be universal.

The fight also clears out the office, allowing the confrontation/reconciliation between Don and Peggy to take place in isolation.  But most importantly, the fight itself features two celebrities — two constructed images.  And what people say about these images — how they gossip — reveals as much about the speaker of the gossip as it does about the subject.

Gossip — whether about celebrities or prominent figures in our own social lives — allows us a way to work through issues.  Gossip works to socially police beauty and cultural norms, but also speaks the unspeakable, permitting us to talk about things we’re otherwise not comfortable explicitly discussing.  When Don admits his hate for Clay — “Liston just goes about his business, works methodically,” while “Cassius has to dance and talk” — he’s essentially declaring what he values and dismisses in a man.

The cultural environment of 1960s was characterized by the expansion of celebrity. With the star system dead and buried, fan magazines were increasingly turning to a broad range of public figures as grist for the gossip mill, including singers, politicians, and sports figures; Photoplay had declared Jackie Kennedy America’s “Biggest Star” in 1961.  A celebrity was more than just someone who was good at his job.  He also disclosed something about his personal life (his childhood, his romances, his favorite foods), intermingling the public and the private and offering the resultant image for consumption.

In this way, Clay vs. Liston was more than a fight between two men.  Liston was an ex-con, had mob associations, was terse in interviews, and in December 1963 appeared in close up on the cover of Esquire dressed as Santa Claus, looking, according to Sports Illustrated, “like the last man on earth Americans wanted to see coming down the chimney.”  Liston’s handlers forced him to pose for the Esquire cover; he seemingly preferred to keep quiet and do the job.  In contrast, Clay, the self-declared “greatest,” loved the spotlight.  He had a publicity team; he loved to spout bombast.  Clay was the future of celebrity, always eager to provide copy, later intermingling his personal political and religious beliefs (“I don’t have no quarrel with the Vietcong”) with his “profession.”  Of course, Clay won the fight.  And Don lost, both figuratively and financially.

Which brings us back to Don and Peggy — representatives of two approaches to the public/private divide.  Don’s attempts to shelter his past is more than a straightforward attempt to shed the remnants of Dick Whitman.  He doesn’t talk about his past, especially not at work, because, in his conception, it’s simply not pertinent.   Or, as Chuck Klosterman just Tweeted, “Don Draper would hate Twitter.”

Peggy’s past and personal narrative explicitly informs her work.  While she shields aspects of her life — her pregnancy, her relationship with Duck — she is always forthcoming about her family, where she lives, her (lapsed) Catholicism.   She recognizes that the private, whether yearnings or biographical details, are readily becoming available for exploitation and public consumption.  Intimacy — or at least the projection of intimacy — is increasingly crucial for success, as so perfectly embodied by Dr. Faye, whom Peggy clearly admires.  She doesn’t  fully embrace this shift, but also recognizes that she can’t fight it.

Something crucial happens, however, when Don chances upon Roger’s tapes, which disclose the intensely private details of Roger and Cooper’s pasts.  Peggy exclaims “Why are you laughing?  it’s like reading someone’s diary.”  And, of course, it is: a diary that Roger plans on publishing and from which he hopes to profit.  It’s gossip, intended to construct an image of Roger Sterling for public consumption.  The surprise is that Don’s eating it — and loving it.

Here’s our turning point.  In the diner, Peggy returns to the gossip about Bert, this time in giggles.  They each disclose details of their pasts, desires of their futures.  Don ends up in the toilet bowl; Duck exposes Peggy; Peggy watches Don break down and weep.  The episode culminates with an ambiguous yet intimate gesture, one that mirrors a gesture that Peggy attempted early in Season One, when she thought it her responsibility to make herself sexually available.  Don rebuffed her then, but this time, he is the initiator.

Increased Peggy-Don intimacy (romance? closer platonic friendship?) would entail a thorough intermingling of Don’s personal and private lives, and add a very different valence to the ‘Don Draper’ image.  Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston may have been the biggest celebrities of the specific cultural moment, but Don was a celebrity of both Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and the advertising world, and what people thought and said about him revealed a lot about the image of 1960s “the ad man,” anxieties over the future of the agency, and the trajectory of the industry.

Perhaps more importantly, “Don Draper” is a celebrity of our own time.  What each of us think about him and this potential relationship whispers volumes: about ourselves, our own desires, our own acceptance or antipathy towards celebrity culture, and even our conception of how a “quality” narrative should proceed.

So what do you think?  “Open or closed?”