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.

First, a definition: transnational television co-production is the practice through which a producer/distributor based in one nation agrees to contribute up-front funding to a program produced by a company based in another nation in exchange for distribution rights as well as for some degree of creative input into the production.  Often the subject matter of such a production reflects or refers to its transnational roots by self-consciously including elements of cultural negotiation within the narrative situation; other times transnational convergence can be seen in elements of style, structure, aesthetics, or address. It is specific to television, with its strong national basis and its unique serial form, as well as its semantic flexibility enabled by practices such as scheduling, presentation, and promotion.  It is a transcultural form.

Though much attention has been paid to the reality format in the scholarship on global television, my focus here is on prime-time drama and documentary, where issues of national culture, media policy, audience specificity, and authorial integrity are more difficult to negotiate and often become the subject of considerable debate.  This type of production also differs from the more traditional “international co-ventures” that scholars such as Serra Tinic, Barbara Selznick, and Timothy Havens have discussed.  There are important and interesting distinctions to be made here, between a co-venture and a co-production, between co-financing and off-the-shelf sales, between format and fiction, but I will skip over these for now to focus on why and how transnational co-productions come about.

Co-production screen credits for Sherlock.

Most explanations go right for the money: co-production is a way of bringing in another source of finance that can have an immediate effect on the production, enabling bigger stars, better locations, and a glossier production all around.  This usually comes with exclusive distribution rights in a specific territory; so, for instance, when WGBH/Masterpiece puts a million dollars or two into a BBC production it expects to have the first, sole window of distribution in the United States.  BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial sales arm, might be slightly miffed to miss out on chance to sell Sherlock more widely in the States (though in this case they participated as a co-production partner as well) but the existence of co-production funding can be the ticket to getting a high-cost production greenlighted when others are not.

Yet because success on the global market means an ability to address and attract broader- than-national audiences, another rationale for entering into transnational partnerships is precisely the opportunity to think trans-culturally.  Inclusion of characters or production teams from both countries (the easiest technique), narratives and subjects that span cultural locations, properties (like Sherlock) that already have transnational recognition and can work that imaginary identification into their narrative focus:  these are qualities that mark the most successful co-productions, and that draw together transnational publics.

Co-production can also help to support other forms of programming that are necessarily more nationally-specific and often of higher priority.  For WGBH, in this example, the investment of a relatively small amount of money in a co-produced prime-time drama, as opposed to sinking many more millions into an original production, means that scarce funding can go into news, public affairs, and children’s programs that are a more central part of PBS’s mandate.

Rebecca Eaton, Executive Producer of Masterpiece, with Benedict Cumberbatch at a season kick-off event in New York.

However, given the strong national focus of television – particularly for public broadcasters, though commercial channels also have their home markets to please – this kind of cultural negotiation can have its drawbacks.  Most notably on the British side this has involved accusations of cultural dilution, of using the television license fee paid by all British TV viewers on programs made for Americans.  Implied here is that making programs that appeal to Americans somehow weakens their essential Britishness.  This has come out in criticism of the recent transnational hit Downton Abbey (an ITV/WGBH co-production) for its substitution of melodrama for historical accuracy, though it has proved very successful with British audiences as well.  More to the point, both the BBC and ITV (Britain’s two central broadcasters) are specifically charged with producing a high proportion of original British programming in all categories – how much co-producer influence can there be before this claim becomes weakened?

Yet co-production is on the rise.  Changing structures in the British TV industry since the 1990s – from the “outsourcing” mandate of the 1990s to the 2004 Code of Practice that acted something like the fin/syn rules in the US – have greatly increased the number of independent producers and strengthened their hold on program rights (Chalaby 2010).  How can the rise in global partnerships be reconciled with mandates for national specificity?  What kinds of creative practices have been employed on both sides of the British/US co-production nexus to work within these constraints?  I’ll pursue those questions in my next post.

Now, my concern isn’t actually that, the BBC license fee by itself doesn’t, of course, pay for the programme, which is co-produced by PBS’s WGBH Masterpiece series in the USA–much (if not all) contemporary high-end British drama has overseas funding. What concerns me about the close links made between the programme and the BBC’s status as a public service broadcaster relates to something else, namely the problematic politics of representation in the second episode “The Blind Banker”. In this episode, Holmes and Watson investigate a break-in and uncover a Chinese crime syndicate. The representation of Chineseness in the episode hinged on tea ceremonies, sinister villains, calligraphy and circus performers doing uncanny tricks.

Yes, these stereotypical notions of Chineseness need to be understood in the context of the discourses of heritage and tourism that pervade the text, running alongside similarly stereotypical, export-friendly notions of Britishness. And, indeed, these stereotypes can be understood in relation to issues of performance: the tea ceremony is performed by a curator, and the escapology and acrobatics acts are performed by a touring circus. Indeed, with the emphasis on the staging of these moments, of a performance taking place for visitors, a certain performative quality is present, which undercuts the stereotypes somewhat. However, in a text so concerned with updating the Victorian source material to the contemporary period, there is very little else to the representation of Chineseness; it seems that Sherlock Holmes can use SMS messaging and GPS tracking, but Chinese culture is rendered remarkably narrow via such reductive stereotypes.

The final showdown with the gangsters is especially concerning here: while there is still some performativity, there is also an unnecessarily overelaborate scenario, where the gangsters prefer a big crossbow to a handgun when extracting information out of Watson. There is a noticeable sense of pastness pervading Chinese culture: whilst the Chinese characters use contemporary technology such as mobile phones, they are most closely aligned to the past, preferring ancient arbalests to contemporary weaponry and regularly finding time to engage in a spot of origami-making. Interestingly, during the showdown, it seems these professional criminals need to be told about the danger of using a handgun in a tunnel, where bullets could ricochet off the walls. And they are told by Holmes, emphatically presented as master of contemporary technology; while the female syndicate boss is eventually killed when using a laptop, in some laser high-tech fashion I don’t understand. Holmes is the superior mind, the white man of intellect and rationality, and science; the Chinese characters are primarily present in terms of their bodily physicality. The politics of representation become dubious, moving towards an ornamental, exotic, Orientalist Other, and a notion of China as somehow located within pastness, outside of historical evolution and Western modernity, that has run through Western discourses, most famously perhaps Hegel’s 1840 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte.

The question remains whether the use of such obvious clichés is meant to be understood as part of the text’s ironic knowingness. This line of argument could be supported by the fact that Sherlock’s co-creator Mark Gatiss, who plays Mycroft Holmes, had previously starred in a Fu Manchu-parodying episode from 2001’s Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible. However, what strikes me about Sherlock is that, in a text so preoccupied with ironic playfulness, in which knowing jokes about the homosexual subtext between Holmes and Watson abound, I find no ironic commentary about the representational clichés concerning Chinese culture forthcoming, when, surely, the final showdown is begging for Holmes or Watson to make a quip about the presence of the cumbersome crossbow. I’m not saying that such ironic self-reflexive commentary would necessarily render the representational clichés acceptable, but it’s simply not there. There is a tension in this text, in which knowing playfulness sits side-by-side with representational clichés that are presented in a noticeably serious frame.

Sherlock is marked by some problematic representational strategies that are not absolute, but certainly present enough to be troubling. I think one reason for the inclusion of these representational clichés is that they are undeniably stylish. Indeed, when taking the screen shots for this post, I was reminded (not that I needed to) of John T. Caldwell’s concept of televisuality by the fact that nearly every frame looks fantastic. Sherlock is a troubling sign that a public service broadcaster such as the BBC could be shifting away from a sensitivity toward representational matters, preoccupied with the importance of developing distinct visual brands.

And this shift seems to be echoed in mainstream public discourse, where reviews of the series in the British national press were also preoccupied with the stylishness of the show, making no mention of the representational issues I have been exploring (with blogger Laurie Penny being a rare exception), and the question remains what the response would have been if troubling imagery relating to a different national, ethnic or minority group had been used. Certainly, with the current pressures on the BBC, the phrase ‘worth the license fee alone’ is only likely to become more pressing, and in need of critical reflection.

So where are the relationship-invested “shipping” fandoms in Mad Men? Where are the communities devoted to recuperating Don as a guiltless, misunderstood character? Hell, where are the alternative universes that place Peggy and Don (or Don and Pete, or, apparently, based on last night’s episode, Don and Lane) in a Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail type scenario? Why this lack of what we’d usually identify as fandom for Mad Men? And what do these absences tell us about Mad Men, about fandom, or perhaps about fan studies?

Is it that programs posited as “quality TV” instigate different modes of engagement than TV positioned as cult or teen? Or is it that Mad Men doesn’t tap into the same fannish infrastructures—the ready to go networks of community that we’ve seen launch and deploy for Sherlock at record speed these past weeks? Or is it that Mad Men doesn’t offer the same genre structures–most especially, it doesn’t depend on romance or buddy narratives (last night’s unusually heartfelt New Year’s episode notwithstanding)–but rather sets up relationships as destructive forces that threatens already deeply compromised characters? Or is it that Mad Men doesn’t include fantasy elements or familiar character archetype that tap into long-standing fandom traditions?

Some shows (perhaps for the above reasons, among others) just don’t inspire massive, dynamic fandoms, or at least, not fandoms that are visible in the way we often think of and expect to see, recognize, and label as fandom. The Wire comes to mind as an example: yes, many people expressed their deep appreciation and critical devotion to The Wire, and you can find a few vids here and there (apparently, two actually debuted at Vividcon this past weekend). But there’s no Wire fandom-as-entity visible like there is for Supernatural, Merlin, Gossip Girl, and Dr. Who, to name a few.

But Mad Men has a highly visible fandom, if we look past standard expectations of fannishness and fan community. And not only that, but the fannishness on display is both socially-networked and transformative. We could start with the Mad Men twitterverse, We Are Sterling Cooper, which has received attention both for its breadth and dynamism and for its role in demonstrating how television networks can either reject or embrace collective, transformative fan creativity. But we certainly don’t need to stop with the Mad Men twitterverse. For another prime example, there’s the fan turned official artist Dyna Moe, whose episode wallpapers evolved into the Mad Men Yourself transmedia tool, where you can create images of yourself in Dyna Moe’s Mad Men animated aesthetic. And if we dig deeper, and to some less expected places, the network of Mad Men fan expression and community grows. Search for “Mad Men” on flickr. In addition to the many personal and wardrobe remix photos bearing the tag or description “Mad Men,” there’s the “Mad Men” group dedicated to “creating new vintage ads, and Costumes and pictures reminiscent of the show Mad Men.” And there’s the Mad Men Yourself community, where people share their results from AMC’s/Dyna Moe’s interface.

Now, search for Mad Men on the crafts marketplace, Etsy.com, in either the handmade or vintage categories. 1960s dresses, pencil necklaces, ephemera, deadstock bags, mid century modern office furniture, item after item includes reference to Mad Men in its description or tags, and come together via the search function. Yes, these are evidence of artists and sellers (and online marketplaces) capitalizing on Mad Men’s popularity to sell products, but they’re also evidence of the way in which Mad Men has both helped propel and become shorthand for fandom as cultural/aesthetic movement, one that we see play out not only in the spaces of Flickr and Etsy but in the craft, fashion, and cooking blogosphere.

So Mad Men fandom may not look like the expected framework that we see so impressively put into place with the airing of Sherlock, but it’s extensive, its reach is spreading, and it is arguably having a larger influence on cultural/aesthetic movements beyond the series itself. Is this embrace of these characters’ style and aesthetic a simple nostalgia or a more complex negotiation and remediation of a 60s aesthetic? And what are the politics of this embrace of hourglass figures and skinny ties? These are questions that exceed the capacity of this small post, but that bear much thought, and that I hope we can explore in the comments.

The producers (Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, and Sue Vertue) have stated that their inspirations were the most-maligned of the Rathbone films of the 1940s (e.g., Roy William Neill’s Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon), in which Holmes and Watson fought Nazis during World War II. Not intending to create a simple “pastiche” of Holmes, Gatiss and Moffat have both spoken of “blasting away the fog” of Victoriana (which appears to have been quite successful in terms of ratings and appreciation, by the way).

So far, Sherlock has presented several hat-tips to attentive Holmes fans, from references to other Holmes stories (Mrs. Turner, James Phillimore, plus a scene swiped from The Sign of the Four), an explanation of Watson’s wandering war wound, and even hints of Billy Wilder’s excellent The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (through a character played by Gatiss). Moffat and Gatiss attempt to “reclaim” Holmes — they argue that the adventures of Holmes and Watson weren’t nostalgia to those who read the stories in The Strand Magazine, and there is nothing in principle standing in the way of modernizing the Canon (down to specific details, such as Watson’s Afghanistan war injury). The cleverness of this update is in how it dances between an interpretation of Holmes and Watson that stays true to elements of the source texts, while also exploring changes necessary for the 21st century setting.

As we’re in an era of CSI and investigative specialization, Holmes’s skills have been refined to be about making deductions and connections, and less about the forensics that typified many of the original cases. One senses that much has been done to remove the impact of the real Holmes and Watson — that is, as popular fictional characters — in order to make this series work. This manifests in clever and subtle ways; in the aired first episode Holmes and Watson staked out 22 Northumberland St from a restaurant across the street, a spot that is actually the location of the The Sherlock Holmes Pub. Additionally, in shooting the (unaired but included on DVD) pilot, the production carefully framed exterior shots near the Baker St. underground station so the real-life Holmes statue wasn’t visible, leaving one to wonder what they’ll do if they ever film in the Baker St. tube station itself (see below). In the aired first episode, these scenes were re-staged as taking place in a park, perhaps in order to avoid the issue entirely.

One way of thinking about these choices is as as a kind of inversion of “The Game,” or the playful exercise of fans in which Holmes and Watson are assumed to be real and brought into the events of the late Victorian/Edwardian era (Holmes solving the Jack the Ripper murders being a common topic of many pastiches). Holmes scholars are celebrating the centenary of The Game next year, and this new Sherlock sets itself apart from many of other renditions by being forced to address that 2010’s world is one in which Doyle’s stories, Rathbone’s and Downey Jr.’s films, and Livanov’s and Brett’s television performances have all had their mark upon the public consciousness. Rather than insert Holmes and Watson into history, the actual impact of these fictional characters must be accommodated or removed.

There was much sensationalism over the BBC’s decision to not air that 55-minute, £800k pilot. The producers insisted that the switch to a 90-minute format was behind this decision, but having seen a few brief clips from the pilot, it seems that the choice to bring in director Paul McGuigan (Push, Lucky Number Slevin) had an impact as well. That is, the visual style of Coky Giedroyc’s pilot seemed relatively staid, not distinguishable from many police procedurals, and perhaps heightening a sense of Sherlock as a “rerun” rather than a hard “reboot.” If the pilot was visually not very distinct from other recent mysteries, many which owe great debts to Holmes productions, how are we to believe that a Holmes and Watson didn’t already exist in this world, even as fictional characters?

McGuigan relies on a different visual pallette, with lens flares, graphics overlays, deft use of split screens, and, most notably, the presentation of on-screen text rather than cutaways to illustrate the pervasive use of mobile phones and inner thought processes (see below). It seems Euros Lyn (director of episode 2, “The Blind Banker”) will follow the same approach, and McGuigan returns for the final episode of the series. Reminiscent of some videogames (Quantic Dream’s recent Heavy Rain, in particular), this provides a striking, contemporary look to Sherlock. The Holmes and Watson of the 21st century both engage with modern technology, but unlike Rathbone/Bruce also have their inner thought processes represented in manners that remediate popular media. To be a plausible 21st century Holmes, one must be shown as thinking like a 21st century person, within a network of mobile phones, Internet-enabled devices, and even video games.

Sherlock is at once both an update of the classic and a novel creation. As it evolves, it will be interesting to see more of the world in which Holmes is just now appearing for the first time, as well as how this is conveyed through the changing visual style of the series.

And yet I would be very careful not to call any of these films fan fiction (an argument I discuss in more detail here). But even if Sherlock is not fan fiction, it still can be read and analyzed usefully within the AU conversations we repeatedly hold within the fan community. AUs are immensely popular in many fandoms and their respective qualities are often the subject of debate. The principal danger of writing AUs is writers relying too heavily on clichés so that their characters often retain little more than their names and looks. Since the aspects that make the character recognizable to the reader are often the very elements that the media uses to create an easy shorthand, these same characterizations also tend to become overused and clichéd when they are the only thing connecting the AU character to his original counterpart. In Sherlock Holmes fiction, such easy shorthands include Holmes’ hat, coat, and pipe, all three of which appear, for example, at the end of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), thus both signaling an obvious—if simplistic—connection to adult Holmes and giving background for his owning these objects.

Moving a story in time (in the case of Sherlock from the 1880s to 2010) requires certain adjustments and complicates the easily recognizable shorthands. The show has interestingly chosen to keep certain aspects while updating others. And in general, it is the updated elements that make Sherlock the successful AU that it is, whereas those points that mimic the original too closely and those that strike the viewer as anachronistic are the weakest elements. Translating Holmes’ brilliant deductions about John Watson from the pocket watch in The Sign of Four to his smart phone works beautifully. Having Holmes whip dead bodies to understand bruising patterns doesn’t. In a review of the first episode, Thingswithwings imagines a Holmes who is a fully translated and contemporary version: “I want him playing Queen on the violin, I want him making the obvious Princess Bride reference when offered a choice between two pills” (source).

In the end, while individual plot points, objects, and places are important for fans to recognize, the most successful approach seems to come about when the writer extrapolates the character’s underlying identity, exploring those aspects that remain the same in the new setting, and how they will manifest. It might seem important to have Holmes look somewhat similar to the way we’ve always seen him, but given his disinterest in cultural expectations, his brilliant idiosyncrasy might just as easily (and more evocatively) have been translated into subcultural hobbies or interests. But I continue to hope that Sherlock can walk that line successfully between making empty alluding gestures and getting to the heart of who Sherlock and Watson are—by themselves and to one another.