I’ve always been fascinated by the AUTHOR and his (?!) authority–I know that in fanfic I tend to write only of WRITERS, partly because we aren’t JKR but also because we purposefully eschew the level of authority the former term invokes.

The author-function interests me precisely for its conceptualisation of authorship (and its linkage to cultural power). As a fan I might have views on the genius or otherwise of media producers, but I don’t see it as part of my scholar-fan work to import these value judgements wholesale into TV Studies. So perhaps Foucault is my current scholarly insulation from my lived fandom…

And I think that the industrial, paratextual focus on single authorship and ‘the TV auteur’/showrunner *does* very much call for a type of critical reading or response which the author-function can offer (as will other concepts and theorists, of course!). So, yes, I’m very much in agreement with your last paragraph. Likewise, the control of a contemporary TV brand (or franchise) means that creative processes are opened up paratextually like never before, yet at the same time paradoxically closed down in a series of ways — something that the author-function may also be able to contest.

Following your invocation of Foucault on Freud and Marx, I especially like the idea of showrunners as “founders of discourse”, though this may also run the risk of naturalising industrial hierarchies and reinforcing forms of cultural power held by showrunners. I may very well toy with the notion in a subsequent blog post 🙂 But I guess my concern in this week’s entry was predominantly to use the author-function to highlight how not all professional TV writers are paratextually and industrially granted the status of “authors”. I’d suggest that these franchise-led or brand-led absences in authorship can be problematic, to put it mildly.

As for Thompson mediating showrunners Gatiss and Moffat on Sherlock, I find this a very interesting idea, though it troubles me that the symbolic result is, again, to place Thompson “in the middle”, as it were, rather than him having a more primary creativity. If he ends up mediating Gatiss and the Moff, then isn’t he symbolically subordinated albeit in a new way? (Though perhaps that’s inevitable, playing the third man to a showrunner double act!).

On the subject of why I’m taking authorship (repetition/rehashing) as a route into these blog posts, I’d say there are a number of factors. Matthew’s touched on one motivation, I see: to reclaim repetition from the value systems of sectors of online fandom *and* press coverage of the show, where Moffat “repeating himself” is assumed to be a problem.

But I’m also interested in two major differences between classic Who and nuWho, which I’d set out schematically as follows:

1) Authorship is no longer the preserve of fan readings. So while Holmes signatures, or Bidmead signatures etc have been debated for many years in Who’s fan culture, nuWho is markedly different, I would say, in the way that discourses of authorship circulate in mainstream press coverage, and are industrially promoted via paratexts. Richard Curtis got a promo trailer during S5; Robert Holmes never did (but should have done!). Authorship’s meanings, contestations, and attributions thus have a very different place in Who now compared to, say, the JNT era. By contrast, RTD and Moffat have raised some related issues — e.g. I note RTD’s championing of MacRae as a point of comparison with Moffat’s support for Thompson (certain writers were also notably absent in Confidential during the RTD era, e.g. Matt Jones on ‘The Impossible Planet’ and ‘Satan Pit’).

2) Authorship tends to be *decidable* in relation to Classic Who — documentation and testimony reveal conflicts between writers and script editors, for instance, or indicate just how much Terry Nation did or didn’t write of “his” stories. But nuWho, as a going concern, renders processes of authorship undecidable in some cases, even while purporting to show us behind the scenes. As such, I’m interested in how paratexts like Confidential manage and construct their “access” to industrial creativity. Because, for me, Thompson’s absence and the indeterminacy of whether this ep was Thompson emulating Moffat, or Moffat guiding Thompson, partly destabilise authorship discussions. If we attribute the ep to Moffat’s control as showrunner then we close down meaning and exnominate Thompson and his situated agency. But if we try to restore Thompson’s position as writer then we potentially miss Moffat’s industrial control as showrunner. And there are, at present, no extra-textual or paratextual guides to accurately or meaningfully addressing these processes of authorship — in marked contrast to Classic Who.

Anyway, hopefully some of that gives a little more explanation for the path I’ve taken with these two S6 blog posts. There are also major authorship issues on the horizon, I’d say: what degree of fanservice and revisionism will Neil Gaiman introduce? Can Matthew Graham redeem himself in fans’ eyes after ‘Fear Her’, or will TRF/TAP be ‘Fear Her’ II? And to what extent will the mid-series cliffhanger be readable as distinctively Moffatesque?

Oh, and like you, I’m very much interested to see what Thompson makes of the Sherlock S2 finale! It’s surely a step up for him in industry terms.

The author function is a weird animal indeed. Your invoking of Foucault moves it immediately into a conceptual position rather than one focused on the purported genius of one writer or another. And as such, it’d make sense that these author function auteurs can be multiple, right? Because it’s a collection of attributes and texts and ideas as much as a live body generating them. Freud and Marx aren’t their 19th century bourgeois selves as much as they are the founders of discourses. I guess here we’d translate that as generator of tropes and themes and characterizations (that easily can be written and repeated by not!live body Moffats?)

Of course then TV has always been the multiauthored text, so it’s only recent obsession with auteurism in television that even makes it necessary to disavow the single-body authorship and replace it with a more abstract conceptual auteur function, right?

On the wider question of authorship, after the breakdown of the script editor-as-head writer supervising/anonymously rewriting other people’s work model in the 1980s/90s(?), there seems to have been a trend in series drama (particularly in genres perceived as difficult) to entrust every episode to one writer – such as Charlie Higson’s domination of the first series of the remade ‘Randall and Hopkirk [Deceased]’. Authored drama was perhaps perceived as a badge of reliability within the industry, and promotable as ‘quality’ to the outside audience. Hence the expectation that Russell T Davies would write the final version of almost every episode of ‘Doctor Who’ in his tenure; and that the authorial signature on ‘Doctor Who’ now should remain very much that of Steven Moffat.

So, I’ll just say it — I really don’t mind rehashing and repetition, and don’t understand the focus on this in your two blog posts to date. I don’t mind seeing Moffat’s concerns come up again and again, because, well, I suppose I genuinely like them. If Doctor Who in the Robert Holmes era was consistently about the Doctor and his assistant battling the machinations of some deformed villain living underground, then I’m fine with Moffat re-using bits from earlier stories. It’s a showrunner putting his mark on the series, and that’s to be expected.

But back to my point of agreement with you — what did bother me a little with this episode was the tonal shift from last week’s episode. There was the attempt at the end of “Day of the Moon” to form a “hey, let’s all go have fun!” bridge into this week’s episode, and there’s a similar bridge out of “Black Spot” to the big arc points (Amy’s pregnancy, the Doctor’s death). This was handled rather poorly in both cases, IMHO, but the intervening story had plenty of elements I enjoyed, regardless of their originality — the ripoff of Star Trek Voyager was cute, the second ship element was better handled than “Girl in the Fireplace” in some ways, and the resolution with the pirates struck me as a fun set-up for a later appearance. Two other elements struck me as clever foreshadowing — “There are lots of universes nested inside one another” might be hinting at where the series is going this year (the Schrödinger’s fetus inside Amy implies a Many Worlds Interpretation, perhaps), and the aliens (with “D.I.H.S.” on their shoulders?) seem like a nugget that could be followed upon later (like last year’s proto-TARDIS in “The Lodger”).

I enjoyed “Black Spot” just fine, and rather than see it as a second data point indicating how awful Thompson’s work is, I see it as a point of improvement over his abysmal “Blind Banker.” If anything, I’m now encouraged that his version of “The Final Problem” might be passable, and that Moffat is providing us with interesting pieces that will fit together later.