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.

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.

In the slower-moving world of TV Studies, meanwhile, scholars have been theorizing different stages in television’s history. One way of contrasting TV’s past and present is offered by John Ellis in the (2000) book Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. Ellis contrasts an earlier age of “scarcity” with the contemporary phase of televisual “plenty” (2000:39).

Bringing these two worlds together for a moment: what can the re-discovery of previously lost Doctor Who tell us about different moments of TV? Today’s Who is readily available, whether via iTunes, or illegal downloading, on DVD or through TV repeats – it’s not so much on-demand as always-there. The notion of this version of Doctor Who being ephemeral, or being lost after its broadcast, seems absurd. By powerful contrast, 1960s and 1970s Doctor Who wasn’t just part of an era of scarcity, it was sometimes worse than scarce, becoming effectively non-existent in some cases, other than as telesnaps, audio tracks, and fan-made reconstructions. In the era of digital plenty, Doctor Who‘s participatory audience can mash-up, remix, and create fanvids… but even in the age of scarcity, fandom was already a pre-Internet participatory culture. Amongst other things, analogue fandom could involve making reel-to-reel tape-recordings of an episode’s audio. Yesterday’s fans didn’t typically mash-up or remix; instead they recorded, archived, and preserved the TV culture of the day even when broadcasters themselves failed to do so. So although the re-emergence of two episodes of 1960’s Doctor Who dramatically brings different ages of television into collision, the conjunction also highlights how today’s participatory audience culture had its own analogue forty or fifty years ago. Scarcity versus plenty: it sounds like a binary, but it’s one which hides shared patterns in fan activity as dedicated audiences pursue ways of replaying and commemorating their beloved fan objects.

At the same time, the discovery of old Who also illuminates vital changes in audience activity. For it is not only television itself which has shifted from “scarcity” to “plenty”, or from what Mark Bould (2012:148) has recently termed “good-enough” TV (complete with William Hartnell’s “billy-fluffs”) to “quality TV” (single-camera, composed, ‘perfected’ drama). Audience interactions have also mutated and shifted; 1960s and 1970s fandom would itself have been scarce and “good-enough”; some fan knowledge was later proved to be wrong, as people mis-remembered story details and repeated them in print until they became fan lore. Fan interactions were also relatively scarce – restricted to slow-moving print culture or arranged meetings, shepherded by fan clubs and  similar fan institutions. Today’s fandom is a web whirl of “plenty”, a 24/7 always-on digital experience. On the day of the official announcement that more episodes had been returned to the BBC – Sunday 11^th December – I encountered this news via Facebook status updates and comments, and through the iteration of many, many tweets: fandom was buzzing with developments, minute-by-minute. Real-time speculation and anticipation of a 5pm BBC announcement meant that fans were on tenterhooks – just like today’s television of plenty, there was a similar abundance of audience chat, debate, squee, and swirling rumours.

The irony is that while a flurry of fan comments circled around ‘Galaxy Four’ and ‘The Underwater Menace’, always-on social media was absorbing into its orbit two episodes of black-and-white Doctor Who which once belonged to a very different culture: an on-off TV world, where after it’d been viewed then a programme was gone, perhaps never to be repeated, never to be seen again. By surfacing online in Facebook and Twitter feeds, ‘Galaxy Four’ and ‘The Underwater Menace’ were travelling in time, in a sense, staging a clash of two cultures: today’s always-on social media versus yesterday’s on-off, here-today-gone-tomorrow telly.

But perhaps this tendency to create eras, and narratives of change, is itself somewhat misleading. Fans like to do this just as much as TV Studies’ academics, of course (instead of scarcity/plenty, we could just as well debate “the Russell T. Davies era” or the “Hinchcliffe-Holmes years.”) All these narratives, these ways of seeing television (and its audiences) are only partly true  – they blind us to the fact that culture is always somehow time-travelling, always rediscovering the past in new and old ways, always threading continuities through historical, technological, creative changes. Yesterday’s analogue fandom was perhaps even more crucially participatory than today’s digital fandom; and yesterday’s “good-enough” TV, errors and all, finds itself mirrored in the fact that even today’s “quality TV” is marked by occasional continuity errors, blind spots, and inconsistencies. Eras are forever impure, marked by their predecessors and by traces of the past which can’t be exterminated. “Lost” Doctor Who is never entirely lost. And newly found episodes are never simply “found”, for that matter, instead being read through and in relation to pre-established fan knowledge.

The tantalising return of two episodes of early Doctor Who deserves celebration. But perhaps the tempting notion of two cultures or past/present eras of TV deserves a measure of critique.

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.

So far, the similarities are striking, and one would expect continuous comparison between the two, and yet their genre, pedigree, and network associations make these shows seem as far apart as The Wire and Gossip Girl. Oddly enough, I gave True Blood (TB) a second chance when Jason Mittell and Louisa Stein praised its politics and narrative complexity during a Flow conference Wire panel two years ago. In contrast, I tried The Vampire Diaries (TVD) again after my online fan friends praised its strong female characters and intricate plotting. Both shows contain complex plots with often unexpected surprises and fast turnarounds. TB follows a variety of plot and character lines to create an expansive set of stories while TVD remains more singularly focused and thus tremendously fast paced. Both shows take more than a couple of sentences to retell a single episode, with ambiguous characters and repeated betrayal as constants.

And yet one is quality TV on HBO, watched by men and women alike, and names such as Alan Ball and Anna Paquin all but guarantee that it be taken seriously as an artistic engagement–even if we may just watch it for the bloodied sexual encounters and the melodrama. The other is firmly defined as teen TV, runs on the CW and its stars are more likely to appear on the cover of the online Portrait magazine than Rolling Stone. Part of this difference in perception between the two programs is clearly gendered: TB’s extreme sexual violence and voyeuristic viewer position invites male viewers even where the initial topic of a female protagonist and her vampire lover might not. Moreover, the amazingly artistic and political trailer promises a depth that I personally feel the show fails to deliver. TVD, on the other hand, is clearly geared toward young girls with its high school protagonist and two male hunks who desire her. The high school setting and teen tropes mark the show as a typical CW show, with its melodramatic aspects foregrounded rather than hidden. Likewise this allows for viewers’ identificatory potential in a way that TB doesn’t: TB instead establishes a more distanced view position that profits from its visual spectacle.

Part of me wants to like TVD simply because it seems more honest in its range, goals, and intended audiences. But I can’t fault a show for its paratexts nor for its reception. So why do I ultimately enjoy and prefer the teen show over its more sexy, adult, quality counterpart. I don’t particularly like Elena better than Sookie (faux Southern accent notwithstanding) nor do I find Somerhalder that much more attractive than Skarsgård. Plots in both are a fast and crazy ride, and while the production values are clearly better in the HBO show, both are sufficiently glossy and visually enjoyable. I do find sexual and racial politics more problematic in TB, but my reasons for liking TVD are actually about themes and characters: I enjoy the teen characters as a way to explore coming of age and adulthood anxieties via supernatural metaphors, and I like the way I can identify with the characters rather than merely observing them on their wild rides. Television certainly doesn’t need to be edifying, but I more often feel like I want to explore the moral dilemmas and interpersonal conflicts in TVD. If I were to pick a worthy successor of Buffy’s Sunnydale, it would be Mystic Falls rather than Bon Temps.