As a queer television scholar, I first became interested in Downton Abbey because of the character of Thomas Barrow (played by Rob James-Collier). The show’s treatment of his sexuality became particularly interesting to me in the third season, when he is outed as gay but not banished from the Downton estate. I started wondering through what lens is this character informed? My own research places Thomas, as well as a cluster of queer characters that have emerged on contemporary television set in the historical past, as informed by post-gay ideology. I also have argued that the insertion of gay themes in television programming set in the historical past is a strategy used by showrunners and industry insiders to capitalize on the interests of contemporary “savvy” viewers. I’m also interested in how the Downton Abbey merchandising empire is spared the fate of being equated with “crass commercialism.” Similarly, Downton is rarely compared to the less prestigious television “soap” format (with which it shares much in common). I argue that the show’s appeal to upper class taste aesthetics as well as its role as a form of gay consumer culture has significant impact on its prestige. That said, Thomas has become a fascinating character if not for anything other than the way internet-based fan communities have united to recuperate him from his reputation as conniving evil-doer.

Sponsored by local public television network Twin Cities Public Television (TPT), the series premiere event was also the launch of TPT’s Rewire, “TPT’s spunky new project that loves the internet (and PBS) as much as you do.” During the screening, attendees were invited to participate in the “second screen” experience of Twitter fandom with the “MustTalkTV” hashtag. Although the TPT/Rewire premiere event was straightforwardly celebratory in one sense (of the aristocracy, of the show’s conservative leanings), the attendee’s enthusiastic dual-participation (both on-site and virtual) complexly registered as earnest, campy and ironic. That TPT/Rewire’s rebranding efforts hinged on the uniquely popular Downton Abbey, a culturally elite British import, speaks to the shifting definitions of “popular” and “elite” in today’s post-network television era.

Before the screening of Downton Abbey, a representative of TPT announced Rewire’s new initiative to host monthly television-centered “book clubs.” The event, “Must Talk TV: A Book Club for Binge Watchers,” promotes itself as akin to a previous event series “Books and Bars,” where attendees presumably gathered to discuss books over a couple of beers. But this new event, Rewire assures us, does not require “all that pesky reading.” On the event website the host prompts potential attendees with a suggestion, “Let’s treat these modern day TV dramas like the high art and literature they’ve aspired to be.”

Along with my dissertation advisor and a handful of my colleagues, I attended the inaugural event of the “Must Talk TV” event series focusing on Downton Abbey – future events will feature House of Cards, The Bletchley Circle, Game of Thrones and Mad Men. The event was moderated by a host, who prompted the room with a series of fast-paced questions that had to do with identifying one’s favorite character, recounting why one started watching the show, or concerned with the details about one’s personal viewing practices. I found that it was a difficult conversation to participate in, mostly because I am ambivalent about my role as a Downton Abbey fan. Sure, I love and appreciate Maggie Smith and her one-liners, have a fondness for Daisy and Mrs. Padmore, cried when they killed off Sybil… but mostly I watch with a certain amount of apprehensive distance. My hope is that by tuning in week to week I might better understand Downton Abbey as a cultural phenomenon.

TPT/Rewire’s “book club” event seems to be an attempt to cultivate a particular kind of fan and/or a particular kind of community around television fandom. The kind of fan or fan community where “binge-watching” is elevated to levels of prestige and participants do not have to bother with “all that pesky reading.” As such, the rebranding of TPT/Rewire reveals much about the way public television is implicated amidst shifting questions of quality, worth, taste, class and legitimacy.

One common complaint about sitcom laughter is that it insults intelligence: “I don’t need to be told when to laugh.” But single-camera shows like Scrubs and Parks and Recreation replace the audience laughter with other cues: musical phrases like scene-ending drum fills, conspiratorial glances at the camera. The deeper problem people have with laugh tracks might not be cuing, but undue persuasion and even manipulation. What if stupid TV shows succeed in making us feel we have been entertained by sweetening the audience laughter or adding laughs where none existed? A clip of The Big Bang Theory with the laughter left out circulated awhile back on YouTube, with pauses interrupting the dramatic pace, and the less charitable view was that it showed that sans laughter, the show isn’t any good. Such suspicions tap into longstanding fears about television’s fraudulent nature, part of a wider mass society critique that holds television in contempt for its ill effects on people’s ability to think freely.

These feelings led, in the late 1950s, to a short-lived ban on the laugh track by CBS. The quiz show scandals focused public scrutiny on TV’s deceptive practices, and the use of canned laughter was part of a wider sense that television would do anything to hold onto an audience to be served up to advertisers. The commercial imperative would trump any aesthetic consideration, and creative types were known to loathe the canned laughter. But the laughter — real or canned — persisted, becoming one of the sitcom’s most identifying and durable conventions. Some of television’s most beloved classics, from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld, have been laugh track comedies. Performers might bemoan the device, but networks and producers stuck with a format that was proven to work.

Psychologists offer the laugh track as evidence of “social proof,” a “tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it” (Cialdini, 116). Social proof is one kind of influence or persuasion, and the laugh track is effectively an appeal to audiences at home to respond as audiences in the studio (or for canned laughter, simulated audiences) have already done. TV hardly invented the practice of encouraging an audience’s responses this way. 19th Century French theaters had hired claques and rieurs whose jobs were to clap and laugh. Unlike theater audiences, however, the TV audience is typically in a private, domestic space and the presence of audience sounds can serve not only to coax a positive response, but also to provide a sense of a surrogate or virtual public experience. The contradictory status of television as a private view of public events (see Spigel’s “Home Theater” chapter of Make Room for TV) is massaged by audience sounds.

One reason laugh tracks might seem even more passé and dispensable today than in the past (though I don’t know that they ever have been well received) is that our ideas of television aesthetics have shifted. We have moved far beyond the time when liveness was taken as TV’s essence. Live here means events broadcast as they unfold, but also programs shot live and broadcast later, and performances filmed or taped before a live audience, like many sitcoms. Sitcom laughter may not always be authentic but is generally plausible as the response of an audience present at the performance. But as TV is legitimated, its aesthetics are moving away from liveness and performance and toward textuality. This makes TV seem more like cinema, especially the more legitimated forms of TV like prime time dramas and single-camera sitcoms. DVDs, DVRs, and BitTorrent or iTunes downloads offer us an experience of television not as ephemeral flow, but as a textual object we can possess, can slow down for analysis, can rewatch at will, can treat as a thing rather than the fleeting experience of a moment. TV was once imagined as a medium for transmitting performances to a national audience viewing alone but together. Despite the continued relevance of Super Bowls and similar events, and despite the function of social media to return us to shared moments, TV’s identity has moved away from this ideal. Textuality — the materiality of television shows as objects to to be read and reread, to be studied and preserved — is opposed to liveness. The laugh track perseveres as the product of an old aesthetic of live performance transmitted to the home, but its presence seems to violate our current sense of decorum, and it reads as a product of another time, an earlier era of electronic popular culture.

References:

Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (William Morrow, 1993).

Newman, Michael Z. and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012).

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (U of Chicago P, 1992).