Fig. 1 — Mad Men from first …

Fig. 2 — …to last.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands

In a manner befitting a series that flourished on its reputation for visual elegance, the finale of Mad Men, “Person to Person,” rewarded attentive viewers with an ending that subtly called upon the pilot episode. The opening of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was a gentle right-to-left tracking shot across a crowded bar, which ends with a dolly-in to the back of Don Draper’s head (Fig. 1). The close of “Person to Person” also begins with a right-to-left tracking shot, across the cliff-top lawns of what is supposed to be the Esalen Institute, and in the final moments there is again a dolly-in – but this time to a frontal close-up of the enigmatically smiling Don, eyes closed (Fig. 2). It is tempting to read the shift from rear to front view as a reification of narrative closure: in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (and in the opening titles of every subsequent episode) the over-the-shoulder shot of Don draws us into the world of Mad Men, into what lies before us and before him. The frontal shot conversely seems to evoke finality; it acts as a caesura, sealing off behind Don all that we have witnessed in the last eight years, compartmentalizing the series as something done and complete.

If such a visual metaphor was intended, it was perhaps the only way of drawing a clear line under Mad Men, a series that was never going to lend itself stylistically to dramatic resolution in the same way as, say, its AMC sibling Breaking Bad. Mad Men begins and ends with Don Draper, and as the frequently reiterated over-the-shoulder shot from the pilot suggests, his experiences willy-nilly offer the dominant point of view for the audience. Yet Mad Men is not Don’s story: it has always been a ensemble piece, and a resolutely untidy one at that. Some characters have abruptly disappeared (Sal Romano, Paul Kinsey), some others have wandered in and out of focus (Ken Cosgrove, Trudy Campbell, Bert Cooper), while six protagonists apart from Don (Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty and Sally Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway) have remained in, or somewhere near, the spotlight throughout. No recurring character had an “arc” in the conventionally understood sense of the word, for Mad Men has remained fundamentally skeptical about its characters’ capacity to grow and change according to some Save The Cat-type screenwriting logic. It is unsurprising, then, that the final few episodes seemed to be casting more lines than they reeled in, with Peggy and Roger embarking on new romantic relationships while Pete and Joan embrace or create new business opportunities. Given what we have seen of these characters over seven seasons, there is no good reason to envisage any of these new departures as “happily-ever-after” scenarios. Indeed, the only real certitude offered by the finale is that of Betty’s impending death from lung cancer. Even the closure of Don’s narrative is provisional: though the narrative does not make it explicit, that final smile seemed to many commentators to suggest that the series ends exactly as Don is dreaming up the famous “Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad that served, appropriately, as Mad Men’s coda. (Showrunner Matthew Weiner has since confirmed this.) Earlier in the episode, Stan Rizzo pointed out that Don’s going AWOL is a recurring pattern, while Peggy, in her person-to-person call with Don, underscored the fact that he could easily return to work at McCann. With these cues in mind, the road trip ending with his Esalen revelation should surely be read not as culminating catharsis but as yet another interlude.

Fig. 3 — Spaces of Madernity

So, if dramatic closure of character storylines was not on the cards, what exactly is it that became complete with the finale of Mad Men? Or, to put it another way, how can we understand the series’ structure in retrospect? One obvious way of answering this—perhaps the only incontrovertible way—is to note that the series’ story spans almost exactly a decade: starting in March 1960, the Mad Men narrative apparently ends in late October or November 1970. Mad Men in toto is thus an encapsulation of the Sixties, a fact that is likely to be remembered long after its narrative twists, recapitulations, and volte faces have faded from the memory of all but the most devoted fans. The “Sixties-ness” of Mad Men is in part marked by historical events that variously affect the protagonists’ work, emotional life, and attitudes, from the 1960 presidential election to the 1970 Newsweek gender discrimination lawsuit. More obviously, and from certain vantage points more potently, Mad Men is defined by the 1960s in terms of visual style. Quite apart from offering a much publicized parade of vintage fashions, period props and stylish environments, the show visually evokes late Fifties and Sixties films in its cinematography, and especially its lighting. Evocation is clearly not the same thing as reconstruction, pace detractors who have raised complaints about narrowness of focus or lack of “authenticity.” A good deal of commentary—some neutral and some adverse—has focused on the fact that Mad Men is a show about the Sixties created by a man who is, as Robert Lloyd succinctly put it, “too young to really remember them.” In itself this claim isn’t particularly useful.  It would be hard to mistake any scene from Mad Men, with its wonderfully stately, stylized dialogue, as an attempt to recreate Sixties mass-media vernacular, however sumptuously persuasive the visual recreation of the period might seem. Indeed, the claim that Weiner is “too young” has curiosity value precisely because he was born in the Sixties: observing that Julian Fellowes is too young to recall the era of Downton Abbey would hardly have the same piquancy.

Fig. 4 — Symptoms of Madmenalaria

That said, if the show did not in any absolute sense espouse period authenticity it seems hard to overstate its Sixties-philiac tendencies. Visual pleasure in Sixties styling looms large, as a key part of Mad Men’s identity, not just in the “raw” text of the episodes but also in its astonishingly consistent, cumulatively powerful paratexts, most notably the documentary videos on the Mad Men section of AMC’s website. “Making of Mad Men” and later “Inside… Mad Men” featurettes have appeared on the site throughout the series run, increasingly focusing on the micro-narrative of each episode and the characters’ motivations, as explicated by the actors portraying them, and by Matthew Weiner. After four seasons the “Fashion File” feature that accompanied each episode was replaced by a second regular video, “Fashion and Style,” based around interviews with the costume designer and property master or set decorator. If the “Inside …” videos speak to Mad Men’s “depth,” which is to say the ways in which it can be recognized as quality TV, worthy of the multiple awards and plaudits it has won, the “Fashion and Style” videos correspondingly speak to the importance of “surface.” Mad Men has reworked and mobilized the so-called “mid-century modern” to generate not just media buzz but an extraordinarily influential brand. The series’ fetishizing of Sixties clothes, hairstyles, accessories, cars and interior decoration has spawned an array of imitative or broadly competitive programming in the US and overseas, from Magic City via The Hour and Masters of Sex to Vegas and Aquarius. Mad Men has made a somewhat improbable style guru of its costume designer, Janie Bryant, it has begotten clothing lines for both men and women at Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers, and more broadly it has produced a fad that one commentator drily named “Madmenalaria.”

As Mad Men coalesced into a whole in the only way that television series can, by ending, then in so doing it underscored the fact that like Don Draper it has always embodied—even depended on—a duality. Other film and television texts may have de facto thrived on a tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness on one hand and preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures on the other, but Mad Men is perhaps the first in which this dichotomy has been so smoothly reconciled into a branding strategy. The final ambivalent meeting of inner worlds at Esalen—with Don either/both finding spiritual peace and/or dreaming up the basis for a career-defining ad—could not more perfectly have encapsulated the obverse and reverse of the Mad Men coin.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands

As I started planning this post, a few days before the general release of the second Avengers movie, issues of authorship and creative control—and attendant problems of narrative cogency in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—already seemed to offer a fruitful basis for comment and reflection. Not for the first time in his career, Ultron’s writer-director Joss Whedon was telling stories of conflict between himself and studio executives. At first remarks were notionally at his own expense: he jokily characterized the development of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as his misunderstanding of the studio’s brief for his three-year contract. Apparently his abrupt withdrawal from day-to-day creative involvement in the ABC series was the result of Marvel’s primarily wanting him to focus on the Avengers sequel. In the wake of Ultron’s release, in a podcast for Empire, Whedon painted a starker picture of creative differences that apparently opened up during production of the movie. He claimed that Marvel executives held to ransom the more surreal and intimately personal passages in Ultron, namely the vignettes of the heroes’ troubled visions brought on by Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and the sequence at a secluded farmhouse, owned by Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), which allowed for various ruminative two-handers between the principal characters. These are arguably the most “Whedonesque” segments of the blockbuster. According to Whedon, the Marvel team was preoccupied with scenes that tied into, and teased, future MCU movies, viz., those showing the mantic Thor bathing in the Waters of Sight. In short, Whedon offered a narrative of conflict between authorial sensibility and industry logic – Age of Ultron as an internally coherent, emotionally resonant text versus Age of Ultron as an iteration in a cycle – and thus a de facto preview of forthcoming attractions underscoring the fact that the MCU is “all connected.”

Almost at once this narrative of authorial conflict was overshadowed by a more immediately newsworthy one, which again spoke to tensions between individual entries in the MCU super-franchise and the avowed interests of Whedon as a writer and director. On May 4^th Whedon terminated his Twitter account, immediately exciting speculation that this was a response to an online “backlash” against Ultron’s portrayal of Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). During the subsequent week a wide array of commentary centered on Whedon’s avowed feminism, and whether or not his treatment of Romanoff in Ultron upholds or (as was more widely opined) undercuts his claims to be a feminist. Objections to Whedon’s treatment of Black Widow focused on a series of plot elements, and one specific line of dialogue. Among other things critics objected to Romanoff’s being romantically paired with Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), to her being cast as the stereotypical caregiver—taming the Hulk with a lullaby, “cleaning up” after the “boys” in the team, etc.—and to her “domestication” in the scenes at Barton’s farm. While at the farm she discusses with Banner the possibility of their settling down, and we learn that she was rendered sterile in a particularly nasty graduation ceremony at her assassins’ academy. According to Todd VanDer Werff’s transcription at Vox, the line runs as follows:

They sterilize you. It’s efficient. One less thing to worry about, the one thing that might matter more than a mission. It makes everything easier — even killing. You still think you’re the only monster on the team?

The line is ambiguous in its import: at best, as VanDer Werff speculates, it is a clumsily constructed attempt to suggest that Romanoff is a monster by virtue of her whole career as a spy and assassin; at worst, as many claim, it atavistically reinscribes notions of a woman’s humanity being defined solely by her capacity to bear children.

I don’t want to dwell on the various positions in the Black Widow debate per se, but I do want to reflect on the fact that I did not myself experience the film as sexist in its portrayal of Romanoff. Structurally, scenes that showed her domestic side or stressed her emotional vulnerability did not strike me as out of balance with the scenes that showed her as single-minded, rational, intensely courageous and supremely competent in her professional life. Nor did the manifestations of her self-doubt and uncertainty about life choices seem to me egregious in comparison with the corresponding treatment of her fellow (male) Avengers. However, there’s no doubt that my neutral-to-positive reading of her portrayal at large, and the “monster” line in particular, was determined by my willingness to give Whedon the benefit of the doubt – which in turn is based largely on my prior knowledge of his television work. In other words, in spite of my scholarly interest in the MCU as brand, by default I read Age of Ultron primarily as a Whedon text, not a Marvel text. The same seems to be true of his detractors: in spite of the odd attempt to read the furore in the context of Marvel’s endemic gender asymmetries, excoriation of Ultron’s sexism has for the most part been couched in terms that presuppose Whedon’s primary authorship.

So has Whedon’s self-identification as a feminist, and his reputation as at least a would-be feminist writer, served perversely to obfuscate larger patterns of authorial bias, drawing attention away from Marvel Studios’ problematic representations and exclusions of women? In the short term this may be the case, but probably not over the long haul. While the billion-dollar success of Ultron will likely do little in production terms to encourage reevaluation of storytelling strategy and values in the MCU, from a reception standpoint this latest cause célèbre seems almost certain to be historicized as part of a pattern. If we compare the sluggish, scattered responses to the undermining and cheapening of female characters in the last Bond movie, Skyfall (Mendes, 2012), the groundswell of frustration at Marvel’s institutionalized sexism—articulated most recently by one of Ultron’s male stars—suggests that Marvel’s new breed of tent-pole movie is likely to be a prime locus of critique on issues of balanced and diverse representation for some time to come.

Figure 1: Texturally rich costuming of Matt Murdock character in Daredevil.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands.

How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing? This question seems worth pursuing in relation to Marvel’s Daredevil (Netflix, 2015), which has already been critically positioned as divergent from prior entries in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” super-franchise. All the MCU films since 2008 have been rated PG-13, while the ABC television series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Marvel’s Agent Carter (2014-15) are consistently anodyne, even at their darkest. Daredevil, by contrast, is already notorious for its frequent and intensely graphic violence, which earned it a TVMA certification, and for the conflicted nature of its anti-heroic protagonist. This shift in tone is not the only departure from the prior Marvel norm. Much more assertively than Agent Carter, and even more than the DC offerings on the CW, the new show emphasizes that its protagonist is one of Marvel’s “street-level” superheroes, with the action never straying beyond Hell’s Kitchen and the narrative focusing heavily on the socially disadvantaged and marginalized. While it is not the first Marvel property to introduce comic-book characters without their familiar costume trappings and idiosyncrasies of grooming, Daredevil has arguably gone further than its predecessors in this regard. For example, the series reduces the comics’ hirsute, flamboyantly coiffed and green-ulster-clad Leland Owlsley (Bob Gunton) to a deceptively avuncular elderly man with thinning hair and a short back and sides, dressed in earth-toned tweeds. Indeed, Daredevil even deprives Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) of his red superhero suit until the climax of the final episode.

Showrunner Steven DeKnight has underscored the ways in which Daredevil differs visually from network series like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., noting that he and his D.P., Matt Lloyd, “wanted to be able to do a show that was literally darker than what you would see on a network,” where series tend to be “very bright, very evenly lit,” and further that they “wanted to take more of the color palette of the classic movies of the ’70s, the Dog Day Afternoon and French Connection and Taxi Driver.” The series’ production designer, Loren Weeks, also emphasizes Daredevil’s departure from the sleek, well-appointed and technology-rich environments that typify Marvel’s cinematic tales of billionaire playboys, demigods and super-soldiers. Tellingly, Weeks claims: “We’re more The Wire than other Marvel movies. It’s not the stuff you see in Agents of SHIELD, it’s the stuff you see every day.”

Stress on the quotidian, invocation of the ultra-realist Wire, insistence on chiaroscuro lighting (with its inevitable noir associations), and reference to the subdued palette of dour seventies thrillers all serve to distance Daredevil not only from other Marvel properties but also from other broadly cognate television shows. They rhetorically position the series as something “grittier” than the quasi-realist narratives of street-level superheroes in Arrow (CW, 2012–) and The Flash (CW, 2014–). Indeed, if there is a DC comparison to be made, it is with the notoriously tenebrous and bleak Dark Knight films. So, if we are to take Weeks’ and DeKnight’s remarks at face value, how does the visual style of Daredevil fulfill the branding imperative of offering variety within identity and novelty within continuity?

A number of recurrent or repeated visual motifs both in Daredevil’s paratextual materials—posters, publicity stills, and so on—and in the episodes themselves serve to weld strongly to Marvel’s other film and television, and to its comic-book lineage. Use of strong color in Daredevil represents the most interesting variation on established Marvel brand elements. MCU style in toto is defined by chromatic intensity and richness (in contradistinction to the DC film and television “multiverse” that has gradually developed since Batman Begins). Dominant color values have varied, with Phase Two movies and the second series of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. frequently exhibiting lower values and lower-key lighting than Phase One. Even so, selective, punctuative use of high-intensity colors is endemic to Marvel’s television and film offerings. Only the environments and personnel of S.H.I.E.L.D. are stripped of high value and saturated color; otherwise, the heroes and villains and their worlds are as bright as the Marvel logo, and the comic-book pages we glimpse in the animated version of that logo that heads each film and television show from the MCU. In most cases, focal points of vibrant color are typically located one way or another on the bodies of the protagonists, from Iron Man’s scarlet and gold livery to Peggy Carter’s blue suit, white blouse and red hat (used so extensively in publicity materials for Agent Carter), and from Thor’s flaxen hair to the Hulk’s green skin.

Figure 2: Superficially neutral costuming of Wilson Fisk character in Daredevil

Daredevil largely displaces intense color from bodies, except in the case of the saturated red costume worn by the “ninja” villain, Nobu (Peter Shinkoda), in a watershed fight scene. As befits a faux-realist television series, and especially one that unfolds over thirteen instantly reviewable episodes, the devil is in the details in Stephanie Maslansky’s costumes; bold gestures are correspondingly few and far between. Thus Matt Murdock’s suits are mostly mid-value monochrome but his clothes are texturally rich—shirts, for example, are nubby oxford rather than smooth poplin—suggesting the blind man’s heightened reliance on tactility (Fig. 1). By the same token, wisecracking Foggy Nelson (Eldon Hensen) is also superficially neutral in his dress, but the printed shirt fabrics and animal-motif ties reward leisurely, close inspection and add a “quirky but not flamboyant” note – and so on. Unmodified strong color is eschewed in inverse proportion to the dominance of all these surface nuances, a choice that is most notable in the reimagining of principal antagonist Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). The white suits and ascot of the comic book Kingpin are relegated to an “Easter egg” joke in the fifth episode, while Fisk’s open-necked silk shirts and mohair-tonic, three-piece suits for the series are either black, gray or muted blue, the surface of the latter sometimes broken up with self-stripes that further mitigate saturation (Fig. 2).

Figure 3: Vivid lighting in Daredevil.

Vivid color is mainly a property of environments, and more specifically the illumination of environments, in Daredevil. Murdock speaks of experiencing “a world on fire,” and in addition to a couple of livid-red POV shots simulating this for the audience, the idea is echoed each episode in the opening credits, which show New York landmarks and finally Daredevil himself forming viscously out of a red haze. A no-less insistent leitmotiv is the acid yellow and green light suffusing the panes of the picture windows that are endemic to the various warehouse and loft spaces in which so much of the nocturnal action takes place — including Murdock’s own apartment (Fig. 3). This sickly glow can in most cases be rationalized as light pollution from neon signage and street lamps (the now celebrated hallway fight from the second episode is one of the exceptions), but this is ultimately beside the point. The device is surely used chiefly because the grid of glazing bars in these windows provides a strong, stylized, quasi-graphic backdrop to action – and perhaps because both the strong color fields and insistent linearity recall the simplified backgrounds beloved of comic-book inkers and colorists (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Example of simplified backgrounds of classic comic books.

Figure 5: Netflix’s posters for Daredevil.

Very little of this disembodied color creates as potent an effect as Netflix’s Hopperesque banner and posters for Daredevil (Fig. 5), which feature a cityscape bathed in the super-intense blue that hyperbolically represents nighttime in screen media as well as some comic strips. It is in these paratextual images that the “Marvelness” of Daredevil is perhaps most economically and powerfully expressed. Even so, and notwithstanding analogies with The Wire and Dog Day Afternoon, Daredevil’s imagery consistently reflects the fact that, as Loren Weeks puts it: “We didn’t want to be too literal with the real. It is the Marvel universe, after all.”

In particular, I want to reflect on the fact that when we talk of the aesthetic of a particular text or textual set—e.g. “the Mad Men aesthetic,” or “the Sherlock aesthetic”—the word aesthetic is really just a conventionalized alternative to the term style. Looking back on recent scholarship on television aesthetics (including my own work), I find unacknowledged tensions between the adjectival form of “aesthetic”—used in formations such as aesthetic judgment, aesthetic attitude, aesthetic object and aesthetic category—and the singular nounal form, which connotes the cluster of formal and stylistic properties that define a particular text or textual set.  These two usages are now routinely yoked to one another in the literature of television studies—as in the recent collection Television Aesthetics and Style—in spite of the fact that they represent very different kinds of engagement with texts, and have very different academic histories and profiles. In television studies and elsewhere, the adjectival form of “aesthetic” almost invariably points to an evaluative project that has its roots in Enlightenment debates about the nature of taste and the ontological status of art.  Such debates, which not only address the difference between categories (such as the beautiful and the sublime), but also account for the pleasures of art and distinguish art from non-art, have had considerable influence.  Over the last two hundred years, Enlightenment aesthetics has profoundly affected the critical study of literature, music and the fine arts in the academy, as well as journalistic artistic criticism and the rhetoric of the art markets.  One of its most enduring effects has been the formation of artistic canons – and corresponding exclusions.  Of late, scholars such as Jason Mittell, Jason Jacobs, and Sarah Cardwell have championed this kind of evaluative approach in television studies.[1]  Thus, Cardwell feels able to claim that certain television programs “are more likely than others to proffer aesthetic qualities valuable to the television aesthetician,”[2] while Mittell more bluntly speaks of identifying a given program not only as “great” but also “better than others.”[3]  This approach has inevitably been controversial in a discipline historically driven by the imperatives of cultural studies, which does not recognize absolute or transcendental values and always seeks to locate value judgments in discursively specific contexts.

The nounal form of “aesthetic,” on the other hand, tends to be used in analyses of different formal and stylistic elements within a given medium and text, not in arguments concerning excellence or its absence.  Engagement with “an aesthetic” in this sense ought to be less contentious for television studies than evaluative aesthetics à la Cardwell and Mittell.  Articulating elements and principles of design and style, and considering how or why they might be discernible in a given text or cluster of texts, does not per se constitute a value judgment about that text’s relative status.  Indeed, I would argue that formal analysis should not be considered a function of aesthetics at all: connections between formal analysis and aesthetic judgment were only ever historically contingent, not inherent, in humanistic disciplines such as art history and literary studies.  My initial academic formation was in art history, where analysis of form and style has always been a crucial disciplinary tool.  Its usefulness as such has not dwindled as old models privileging connoisseurship, narratives of “great men,” and the autonomous history of style have given place over the last half-century to studies informed by Marxist social history, feminism, semiotics, reception theory, and so on.  At no point, from the time of Wölfflin and Riegl to the present, has formal or stylistic analysis in art history required aesthetics as a justificatory prop.

“Judgement of Paris,” Joseph Hauber (1819, Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

So why do some scholars of television feel the need to invoke aesthetics, rather than being content with the less portentous terms form and style?  I wonder if the urge does not stem from a collective desire to lend gravitas to a project that for some is still a questionable distraction from the “real” work of television studies.  Perhaps we are too used to the now-automatic legitimation conferred by the politically informed, latently activist ethos of cultural studies, and feel exposed when we fear we are operating outside its ambit.  If so, the irony is that by taking refuge under the aegis of aesthetics, scholars of television risk creating a false dichotomy.  When formal and stylistic analysis are lumped with aesthetics, as opposed to being understood as tools in their own right, it is easy to lose sight of the fact they can inform a wide array of interpretive engagements with television – including the work done by those of us whom Cardwell would class as “aesthetics skeptics.”  In other words, unlike aesthetics-as-evaluation, formal and stylistic analysis need not cut and cross with the longstanding concerns of television studies.

I’m grateful to Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson and Paul Booth for the conversations, critique and suggestions that helped shape this post.

[1]  See, for example, the introduction and the chapters by Cardwell and Mittell in Jacobs and Peacock. [2] Jacobs and Peacock, p. 38. [3] Ibid., pp. 3-4.

Compared to the decidedly impressionistic recreation of past Doctors’ outfits by James Acheson and Colin Lavers in “The Three Doctors” (1972) and “The Five Doctors” (1983) respectively, Howard Burden’s costumes for the “Name” cameos show considerable attention to detail. This is particularly striking in the case of the First Doctor, who appears in the pre-credits sequence on Gallifrey and again at the climax. The body double here is seen only in long shots, which alternate with close-ups and medium close-ups digitally incorporating footage of William Hartnell. Each shot of Hartnell is tight and short enough that in fact only the most general costume correspondence was needed to make the body double a credible match. Yet Burden was evidently taking no chances; his homage to Maureen Heneghan’s original costume design was remarkably precise, at a stroke establishing “authentic” costume as a key value for the anniversary season. This use of costume as a marker of authenticity was to play out in unexpected ways, with various ramifications for Who tradition and canon, in both “The Day of the Doctor” and “The Night of the Doctor.”

John Hurt as The War Doctor in “Day of the Doctor.”

The culminating moments of “Name” introduced a past Doctor who was, from the audience’s point of view, not a past Doctor at all – the “forgotten” incarnation of the Time Lord played by John Hurt. While this brief, tenebrous sequence allowed little opportunity to see the details of Hurt’s richly textured costume, unofficial photographs from location filming had already revealed that in the fiftieth anniversary special Hurt would be wearing a leather “U-Boat” jacket similar to that chosen for Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. The likeness was enough to provoke speculation well before “The Name of the Doctor” aired, and even before Hurt himself had disclosed that he was playing “part of the Doctor.” Fan interest was further piqued by the fact that Hurt’s double-breasted waistcoat bore more than a passing resemblance to the one worn by Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV movie. All this led to the quite reasonable supposition that Hurt might be “another version of the Eighth or Ninth Doctors.”

As it turned out, the melding of sartorial images is a function of Hurt’s playing a missing incarnation between McGann and Eccleston. The logic of Howard Burden’s costume choice in terms of branding and affect is easy to discern. The leather jacket, which is the dominant element of the outfit, reinforces the New Who aesthetic and allows the war-ravaged Hurt incarnation to stand in for the absent Eccleston. For the observant fan, the secondary detail of the waistcoat helps subtly to bridge New Who with the TV movie and thus Classic Who. (Hurt’s “sawn-off” version of the Classic-era sonic screwdriver represents another such visual bridge.) What’s particularly noteworthy about the War Doctor’s costume is that rebranding is achieved through a strategic break with Who precedent. Hurt’s outfit situates his Doctor “authentically” within the canon precisely by subverting the tradition that each Doctor’s costume should be unlike his immediate predecessor’s. Nor, as it turned out, was this to be the only such breach of this tradition in anniversary productions.

Paul McGann as The Eighth Doctor in “The Night of the Doctor.”

Among the biggest surprises of the jubilee season was the Eighth Doctor’s scintillating return and regeneration into Hurt’s incarnation in “The Night of the Doctor.” For this “minisode” Howard Burden designed an entirely new outfit for McGann. At one level this was no doubt a response to the actor’s well-known dissatisfaction with his original costume and wig. However, as with Hurt’s costume, the main function of the new ensemble was surely to form a bridge, this time between the War Doctor and the Eighth Doctor’s own prior image in the TV movie. For “Night,” McGann once again wears a frock coat and patterned silk waistcoat, but this time more muted, the coat being earthier in tone than the TV Movie original and made of a soft, matt, woolen fabric rather than flashy panne velvet and satin. In other respects the costume tends “prophetically” toward the militarism of Hurt’s outfit. Thus the canvas soldier’s leggings worn by the War Doctor are prefigured by the Eighth Doctor’s leather gaiters, the War Doctor’s khaki field trousers by his predecessor’s tobacco brown twill work-pants, and even Hurt’s tattered scarf by McGann’s casually knotted silk neckerchief.

Paul McGann as The Eighth Doctor in the audio drama series “Eighth Doctor Adventures.”

The Eighth Doctor’s costume for “Night” was also interesting for what it was not. In 2012 Paul McGann secured approval to introduce a new outfit, satchel, and sonic screwdriver into publicity and packaging for the Eighth Doctor audio dramas he records for Big Finish Productions. The new costume was very close to Eccleston’s: leather pea coat, tee shirt, and jeans. Clearly it was too close for the purposes of the anniversary specials, with their sleight-of-hand sartorial “retcon” of the War Doctor incarnation. There is slight irony in the rejection of the 2012 costume, given that one of the most discussed aspects of “The Night of the Doctor” has been the name checking of the Eighth Doctor’s Big Finish companions, which effectively established his audio adventures as canon. Yet brand logic evidently required that this new inclusiveness apply only to the aural component of Big Finish’s work, not to all its “televisual” trappings.[1]