Post by T.J. West, Syracuse University

If we are, indeed, living in the Golden Age of Television, we can also be said to be living in the Golden Age of Tudorphilia (or at least a golden age, as the Tudors seem to bubble to the surface of popular consciousness periodically). From the runaway success of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl to Hilary Mantel’s award-winning and critically lauded books Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, the exploits of Henry VIII and his six wives, as well as everyone caught in the crossfire, have re-entered the popular cultural landscape with a vengeance. We seemingly cannot get enough of the Tudors. In this essay, I would like to explore some of the aesthetic and ideological functions of two particular iterations of this obsession with England’s most (in)famous dynasty, Showtime’s The Tudors (2007-2010) and the BBC and Masterpiece Theatre’s Wolf Hall (2015), the latter based on Mantel’s two books on the life of Thomas Cromwell. However, rather than chiding these films as mere escapism or condemning them for distorting Tudor history (both of which may be true to some degree), I would like to argue that they can actually tell us a great deal about not only how the early modern appears in contemporary popular culture, but also why it appears and what it can tell us about how we engage with the historical past.

Of course, both The Tudors and Wolf Hall partake in a long tradition of re-imagining the Tudor court for the contemporary imagination. Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) solidified the image of Henry as a villainous glutton who devours both chicken legs and wives with the same abandon (this image is due, in no small part, to the corpulent persona assiduously cultivated by Charles Laughton). Other actors would bring different levels of complexity to the role, including Richard Burton’s brooding and Byronic persona in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Eric Bana’s gruffly and dangerously handsome interpretation in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008).

Cue Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who strides onto the set of The Tudors chewing scenery and shedding clothes. Exuding his signature mix of sultry sexuality and brat prince antics, Henry as Rhys-Meyers portrays Henry as less the erudite and thoughtful scholar-king and more the unruly id that constantly threatens to overwhelm the bounds of the narrative designed to contain him. His excessive and sometimes capricious sexual desires cause chaos at the personal, social, and political levels, leading to more than one ignominious death on the scaffold.

While men do certainly fall victim to Henry’s mercurial changes of temper, it is the women who truly bear the brunt of his sexual whims. While The Tudors contains many scenes of female nudity, the camera often focuses just as intently on the anguished expressions of Henry’s various consorts, particularly Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn (portrayed by the immensely talented Maria Doyle Kennedy and Natalie Dormer, respectively). The first two seasons in particular draw conspicuous attention to the ways in which female bodies and sexuality serve the double-edged function of allowing access to power while also becoming their weak points, for in the world of The Tudors—as in so many other dramas that appear in the cable television world—women’s bodies remain a commodity that can be easily acquired and just as easily cast aside once their “usefulness” is expended. The many close-ups of Katherine’s face registers the emotional and mental anguish she encounters as a result of her own eclipse by Anne, and the camera also focuses on the latter’s face after her eventual fall from grace. While the series alludes to the momentous political and social changes that surround the events of Henry’s court—the annulment, after all, eventually became part of the broader Protestant Reformation—these momentous changes are mapped onto the suffering female body.

If bare flesh, sexual romps, and the anguished female body stand as the aesthetic markers of The Tudors, dim lighting, claustrophobically tight spaces and sinister whispers are those of Wolf Hall. While less explicitly concerned with the rampant sexual escapades of the Tudor dynasty, this latter drama remains just as invested in digging into the grim, dark underbelly of Tudor glamour. Death and a general precariousness of life are a consistent feature of this tightly-plotted vision of Henry’s reign. Death here can come in many forms, whether as the sweating sickness that claims the lives of Cromwell’s wife and daughters within the first episode or the despair that takes hold of Cromwell’s mentor Cardinal Wolsey as he tumbles out of Henry’s orbit and into ignominy.

While Damian Lewis may not have the smokey, pin-up good likes of Rhys-Meyers, he does have his own brand of handsomeness, and it is worth noting that he actually looks like Henry was supposed to have looked, with his fiery-gold hair and fair skin. Likewise, Lewis makes for a more charismatic and likeable Henry, not falling so easily into the realm of sultry camp that always threatens the seriousness of The Tudors. However, it is precisely this charisma that makes this Henry so dangerous and that makes him serve as the perfect foil for Mark Rylance’s more dour and dark Cromwell. This Henry can turn from laughing and light-hearted to dangerously lethal in the blink of an eye, his radiant and sunny personality a mask covering a truly sinister persona just awaiting its chance to strike. As the series progresses, we see that caprice strike down several men and, while Cromwell has so far managed to rise above the bodies, anyone who knows their Tudor history knows that, inevitably, Henry’s sexual desires will once again destroy one of his most faithful councilors.

Clearly, both The Tudors and Wolf Hall remain invested in depicting the Early Modern world as dangerously and exotically other than the world that we currently inhabit. In their own ways, each of these series attempts to tame that dangerousness—to render it intelligible and contained—through the moral codes of melodrama (The Tudors) or the explanatory power of narrative and “literary” historical fiction (Wolf Hall). At the same time, however, they also contain within them a (perhaps unwitting) acknowledgment of the perilously undisciplined nature of both the past and sexuality. While both appear to have been tamed by the discourses we have designed to discipline them and to render them intelligible, there always remains something about them that slips away from us, unknowable, ungraspable, and ultimately ineffable. It is precisely these elements that make the Tudor period so unquietly pleasurable to watch, reminding us of the perilous Quixotism of history.

Hagai Levi on the cover of Haaretz weekly magazine, with the accompanying headline, “Curse of Success” (Leora Hadas’ translation).

Post by Leora Hadas, University of Nottingham

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor is Leora Hadas, PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies in our department, a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies in our department who begins teaching film and television in the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication at Shantou University in China in January 2016. 

The multiple-award-winning The Affair (Showtime, 2014–), now airing in the UK, has once again placed Israeli television on the global stage, although most viewers may never know it. The series was co-created by Israeli writer-director Hagai Levi, previously responsible for Be’Tipul/In Treatment (HBO, 2008-2010). The show’s purchase and adaptation by the major cable channel has since become a model for success to which creators throughout the Israeli television industry aspire. Israeli television shows and formats are enjoying a remarkable reception not only in the United States, but across the globe. Dramas such as In Treatment and Homeland (Showtime, 2011–), as well as successful reality television formats such as Rising Star (HaKokhav HaBa), have led to the New York Times calling Israel “a kind of global entrepôt for creative TV.”

The reach of the Israeli television industry is disproportionate to its tiny size and relative youth, but according to Georgia State University’s Sharon Shahaf, originates in just these qualities. Small budgets force a focus on storytelling and characterization, and an inexperienced industry has more leeway for personal and innovative creativity. Israeli dramas seldom employ a writing team, and are often written entirely by their creators. The convergence of creator and head writer, while fraying in the U.S., adds to the status of Israeli drama as essentially personal form of storytelling. As chief executive of Keshet Broadcasting Avi Nir says, “Israeli dramas are very much driven by auteurs, by people who have their own unique story and own unique voice to tell it.” Yet Levi left the Showtime production of The Affair, citing creative differences, telling Israeli news site Ynet that the show “started out as art, and there was a specific moment when I started to recognize that it was moving away from that.”

Title card from Israeli TV series Fauda. The show’s tagline is “In this war, everything’s personal.”

Levi’s experience in the transition between Tel Aviv and Hollywood reveals the contradictory position of scripted-series creators in Israeli television. Like their U.S. counterparts, creators in Israel are cultural legitimators, whose presence validates their shows as works of art and personal vision. Many of them work in multiple media, and enjoy a broad presence in more legitimate cultural spaces such as film, novels (Ron Leshem, Ta Gordin), theatre (Reshef Levi, HaBorer) or even political criticism (Sa’id Kashua, Avoda Arvit). Others are actors who star in semi-autobiographical shows, drawing on nationally specific experience – as IDF soldiers (Lior Raz, Fauda) or as minorities within Israel’s complex social mosaic (Maor Zegori, Zegori Imperia).

At the same time, the possibility of selling a show to Hollywood slots well into the “making an exit” narrative of the Israeli IT industry. The dream scenario pitched by Alon Dolev, founder of the TV Format Fund, is that of a start-up: an idea that is successfully sold on abroad, giving its originators “a regular, sometimes lifelong income” (my translation) while the buyer undertake the task of further management. To sell a show to the U.S. specifically is to “make it” in an industry that is increasingly oriented outwards, aiming for the international market from the get-go.

The reality behind the discourse is, naturally, more complex. Shows might “make an exit,” but creator seldom will. If episodes of HBO’s In Treatment were often taken verbatim from the original Be’Tipul, further Israel-drama adaptations usually borrow little but the initial idea, which loses much of its cultural identity in the process – as when Hatufim, or “Abductees,” was Americanized as Homeland. A growing focus on the selling of formats often means a complete dissociation between creator and show, even for the most reputedly personal of dramas. Distributors such as Keshet, Dori Media and Tedy Productions, though representing Israeli performers, do not deal in behind-the-scenes talent. Normally, their modus operandi is to get complete control over distribution rights and leave production companies out of the loop, a practice that continues to generate fierce public debate.

There results a paradox, in which the ultimate success is a personal Israeli story sold in Hollywood to an entirely new creative team. As Israeli television increasingly thinks in global terms, drama creators are in a curious split position between auteur and, in the uniquely Israeli term, “startupist.” They are expected to represent a locally and culturally grounded authenticity, yet end their role when the local goes global. Perhaps also as a result of its youth, Israeli television is not familiar with the figure of the showrunner: the writer-creator who also function as producer and as the main face of and power behind his or her show.

An Israeli-US co-production, Dig advertises Israeli producer Gideon Raff’s involvement. In Israel, creator names never feature in poster or trailer content.

For all their cultural presence, the discussion around format sales and resultant power struggles between producers and distributors almost entirely excludes creators. The fact is that the only means for an Israeli creator to receive either royalties on creative control over a show is to be directly hired into the adaptation’s writing team – a practice that remains very rare, going as it does against distributor interests. Essentially, while Israeli television drama is celebrated for its auteurial quality, Hagai Levi is but one among many creators who prefers to be, in the words of the Hebrew theme to Hatufim, “coming home.”

Amanda Ann Klein: I started watching Twin Peaks when ABC aired reruns in the summer of 1990, after some of my friends started discussing this “crazy” show they were watching about a murdered prom queen. During the prom queen’s funeral her stricken father throws himself on top of her coffin, causing it to lurch up and down. The scene goes on and on, then fades to black.

I started watching based on that anecdote alone and was immediately hooked. Twin Peaks was violent, sexual, funny and sad, all at the same time – I was 13 and I kept waiting for some adult to come in the room and tell me to stop watching it. My Twin Peaks fandom felt intimate, and, most importantly, very illicit.

One month before I turned 14, Lynch’s daughter published The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a paratext meant to fill in key plot holes and offer additional clues about Laura’s murder. But really, it was like an X-rated Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret. The book was far smuttier than the show and my friends and I studied it like the Talmud. That book, coupled with  Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack, which I played on repeat on my tapedeck, created my first true immersive TV experience.

Jason Mittell: If may interject briefly to share this, you’re welcome…

AAK:   I’m aware that my resistance to a Twin Peaks Season 3 — just typing the words makes my stomach knot up — is due to my selfish desire to seal up that special TV viewing experience like a time capsule. The series holds up in 2014, but what made it particularly special to me in 1990 was how I had never seen anything like it before. Will Twin Peaks feel derivative in a television landscape populated with so many other campy, wonderful TV series (Sleepy Hollow, The Strain, Scandal, American Horror Story Freak Show, to name just a few)? Maybe I’m just a romantic, but I think Twin Peaks is best screened under the soft glow of nostalgia. Paging the TV historians!

JM:  Not at all. There have been weird TV shows before Twin Peaks, but with the one exception of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, they did not attract a crowd. You’re right that Twin Peaks fandom felt like an exclusive club, but it was an enormous one (and I reflect on my own romantic memories of watching the series below). What made it so special was that it was so unique and yet so popular, at least for the first season – it wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan oddity (like Frost & Lynch’s follow-up series, On the Air). Its popularity was why we got a second season, Secret Diary, and Fire Walk With Me. Had it been ignored at the time, it would be more like Freaks & Geeks or My So-Called Life – short lived perfect seasons that make us rend our hands at the failures of networks to know when they have something special. Instead, we have an object lesson on being careful what we ask for, which seems like a relevant thing to keep in mind today.

Dana Och:  As the Leave Twin Peaks Alone meme implicitly acknowledges, you (and all the others bemoaning the return) know that you are overreacting.

First, the back end of the second season (ok, most of the second season) would have already “lessened” the impact of the brilliant first season if we seriously believed that the mere existence of more episodes sullied or contaminated. Second, and much more interesting to me, you are highlighting the struggle over whom the show belongs to now. If that meme was originally about critics being mean to Brit Brit, here its use signals a feeling of helpless outrage over a cult object that has belonged to the fans for almost 25 years. But to claim ownership over the show in this moment is to demand dominance over the creators themselves, creators who have become synonymous with the quality television authorship mode.

My larger questions deal with whether the panic button is being pushed because people may have to reconsider how and why Twin Peaks became such a central text in defining “quality television” and the ways in which its history has been reconstructed and revised to fit a very specific narrative. Will that narrative falter if the third season sucks or goes more toward the elements (such as soap opera) that were always there but often have fallen by the wayside when current reviewers and critics invoke the series as a sign of genre, authorship, or quality?

In the hours after the announcement was made, many critics and sites started to retweet and post links to articles about the show from its original run. I found this trend remarkable, actually, as my twitter stream reflected the struggle between those who regard the show primarily as a cult object that was personally important to the development of their identity and taste parameters, and those who invest in the show as a sign of a larger industrial or generic shift in relation to television, journalism, and perhaps even the relationship between the two. My cult relationship to Twin Peaks will not shift for the fact that a potentially awful third season will air; the show will be different, as I am different. (On a rewatch a couple years ago, I was horrified to realize that I am now older than Nadine. This realization was perhaps one of the most depressing moments of my life.) What could be threatened, though, is an investment in the series as signifying a shorthand for criteria with which other shows are compared, or the nostalgia for the series as an originary moment that allowed for a shift in the mainstream imagination of the medium.

Though, to be honest, my tune may change once the conspiracy theories start proliferating online about how there is one grand message that can be decoded across all Lynch texts.  Twin Peaks to me is not about encyclopedic knowledge, drilling, and mastery; it is Lil walking in place offering signs and clues that go nowhere. It is experiencing a full range of affect and realizing that knowledge takes place in innumerable forms. The shift in the public cult object is the thing that will potentially be most interesting–and frustrating–to me about the new series. Though I am well aware that early message boards were used to discuss this show (as discussed in this edited collection, the first book on media studies that I purchased back when I was still a 19-year-old Biology major), I was at least a decade from regular computer use and even further from crowdsourcing knowledge and theories. And, just like both of you, my viewing context plays a role in my response to this news: I was a teenager in nowhere Kentucky watching the show by myself in the basement of my mom’s house on a tiny black and white television. I never had a community feeling associated with the show. The show and later the prequel were intensely personal, which may also be why I don’t feel at all threatened or worried about a third season.

Or, perhaps I am just drinking the Kool-Aid, but chug-a-lug, Donna.

JM:  Maybe I’m midway between your two positions – I am really excited about Twin Peaks returning, not because I have a deep, quote-driven relationship to the text, but because my relationship is so experiential and contingent. I watched the first season while a sophomore in college at a time that I didn’t really care much about television (yes, I’ll admit that I used to not care about television!). But each week a crowd of students would gather in a dorm lounge to marvel at what the fuck we were watching on television. For me, Twin Peaks will always be those moments of collective disbelief and bewilderment – that the crowd dissipated for the second season, that most of us found Fire Walk With Me frustratingly disappointing, and that the narrative never “paid off” in any satisfying way, none of these belittle that initial experience and wonderment over what television can do.

AAK: Fire Walk With Me broke my heart.

DO: Fire Walk With Me is one of my favorite things in the world.

JM: Do I expect that the return to Twin Peaks will generate similar experiences? Of course not. But I anticipate that it will be interesting. For me, the biggest disappointment that could occur is if the Showtime season is boring – I’ll embrace an interesting trainwreck much more than an obvious attempt to remake the original’s originality. And I’d contend (per Sean O’Sullivan) that seriality thrives in the anticipation for more, not the satisfaction of that more being what you want. I fully expect that much of Showtime’s season will be unsatisfying and disappointing, but I’m fine with that as long as it gets us all talking about Twin Peaks, going back to rewatch the previous seasons, and imagining possible futures for Agent Cooper et. al.

One last context for my excitement: I’ve written about David Lynch and seriality before, considering how the achievement of Mulholland Drive is predicated on its failed serial status, and Lynch’s own creative reimaginings during the 18 month production hiatus. After less than two years, the Mulholland Drive pilot appeared to Lynch as if a dream to be radically rethought and transformed. Imagine what might have happened in the minds of Lynch & Mark Frost over a 25 year serial gap?! Such anticipation is killing me.

AAK: Lest I come off as a purist, I want to note that I’m generally a fan of sequels, reboots, remakes and all other manner of multiplicities. As a kid who grew up with the Star Wars franchise, I prepared for the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace by going to see the rerelease of the “digitally remastered” trilogy as Lucas rolled each of them out in theaters (“remastered” Jabba the Hutt, I can’t unsee you). I bought my tickets for Phantom Menace months in advance and drove, via caravan, an hour out of town to see it in a THX-certified theater. That was a very sad ride home indeed.

Phantom Menace was disappointing, yes, but far worse is the damage these prequels did to the Star Wars series as whole. My students refer to it (gasp!) as the “first Star Wars,” and many of them have never seen the original trilogy. By making crappy prequels, Lucas did real damage to the franchise—he opened up that perfect time capsule and sullied its contents with Jar Jar Binks and needless digital chicanery.

So unlike Dana, I do fear that my cult experience will shift once season 3 of Twin Peaks airs. Opening up a text that had previously (however unsatisfyingly) been closed will retroactively impact that text, and, by extension, its cult fandom. I don’t want the history of Twin Peaks to be rewritten the way the history of Star Wars has been rewritten. I want it to stay in 1991, with its floppy, pretty boy hair and jean jackets, forever. I realize that this isn’t rational but the cult heart wants what it wants.

JM: But don’t we need to raise the figure of authorship here? After all, whom do you trust more with a beloved serial text, George Lucas or David Lynch? The biggest sin of the Star Wars prequels was what I raised above: they were boring. Mind-numbingly, soul-deadeningly boring! (This is triggering flashbacks to the interminable “romance” scenes in Attack of the Clones.) The precedent of Mulholland Drive leads me to expect that Lynch is not going to offer us the midichlorians of the Black Lodge, but rather take us down another level of mindfuckery via the pacific northwest equivalent of Club Silencio.

AAK: You’re right, of course. George Lucas and David Lynch are very different directors with very different goals. And truthfully, I’m not concerned about the potential quality of a Twin Peaks season 3 (I have faith in Lynch’s ability to, at the very least, make something interesting). In fact, given the disappointing way that season 2 ended, not with a bang but a whimper, I imagine Lynch and Frost will provide a more definitive sense of closure for the series.

But for this fan, the birth of the series, its unexpected critical and commercial success, ABC’s insistence on revealing Laura Palmer’s killer midseason and the consequent loss of the series’ impetus for existence, and then its meandering final episodes, are all part of the holy Twin Peaks narrative I’ve been telling myself for the last 25 years. The way the series played out speaks to the way I watched and understood TV in the early 90s. Of course, an argument could be made that reopening the text and giving Lynch and Frost  a chance to do it all over again, this time on a premium cable channel, speaks very much to the way we watch and understand TV today. Beloved gone-too-soon shows like Arrested Development and Veronica Mars were given a narrative reprieve and, while I was delighted to have these reunions, the results were ultimately disappointing, like going to your 20th high school reunion and seeing that your senior year crush is bald and 50 pounds overweight. So yeah, I’ll have a cocktail with Twin Peaks when it returns to Showtime in 2016, but I don’t think I’ll feel the old sparks fly.

JM: Maybe I’m strange, but I want to see what Twin Peaks looks like bald and overweight!

DO: And with high cholesterol!  As with the fandoms that surround the cult shows that you mention (and my other favorites, the Whedon shows), the discourse often romanticizes the series and the author by blaming the network (TPTB, The Man) for squashing the promise and brilliance of the show. I wonder how that narrative, for which Twin Peaks is often invoked as an example par excellence, plays out with the move to Showtime, especially as Fire Walk With Me has established a precedent of distrust with a portion of the fans.  It is true that I am personally excited for the third season (as I would be excited for any Lynch show), but my larger intellectual curiosity is how the show functions discursively and as a marker or sign.

AAK: Now you’re talking about two different things though, Dana. There is the scholar and then there is the fan. Sometimes those positions overlap for me and sometimes they don’t. In this case, they don’t. As a media studies scholar, I can’t wait to see how viewers (veterans and virgins alike) react to season 3 of Twin Peaks. But as a fan, it makes me feel like the internet is about to take a dump in my junior high diary.

DO: Yes, I am talking about two different things, but I do not see how scholar and fan are not overlapping, especially as the show serves as a text that thrives in the academic and popular imagination as a place where the two converge. The problem of authorship and cult are inevitably going to collide here, with the core audience facing that its “stable” cult object will shift, potentially challenging our sense of mastery and ownership over the text and our understanding of its larger cultural signification.

JM: With Twin Peaks, I feel like I’m less of a fan of the show itself than the idea of it, and the reflective analysis it triggers. What I’m most looking forward to is the conversation around the show – especially given that Twin Peaks helped inaugurate the online forensic fandom that I’ve argued is central to contemporary serial television consumption, I’m curious to see how the series plays in the digital era. We weren’t live-tweeting, building wikis, and writing/reading online episodic reviews back in 1990 – what will Twin Peaks viewing culture look like today? And like with all revivals, how much of that consumption will be about the new object versus our memories of how we watched and cared about the old version? So while everyone is watching Twin Peaks, I feel I’ll be spending a lot of time watching everyone watch Twin Peaks too. I can’t wait…

At the end of the day, though, they highlight the fact that the Emmy Awards are a broadcast event, and therefore must be concerned with keeping the attention of broadcast viewers. And in the current televisual age, that means organizing the show in ways that emphasize what wide audiences are actually watching or interested in. Accordingly, the emphasis on presenters (as opposed to what they were presenting) in these on-screen prompts fits in with a larger strategy of making a niche celebration of television production culture seem like a celebration of capital-T Television that viewers across the nation can relate to.

The challenge for Emmy producers is that they are forced to complete this same task with different nominees every year, which requires certain adjustments. In recent years, after the era of The West Wing and The Sopranos, the drama categories have been dominated by shows that most people aren’t watching, with the little-watched Mad Men winning four straight Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series and Lead Actor seeing similar domination from Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. By comparison, comedy has exited a dark period where niche or low-rated comedies like The Office and 30 Rock walked away with the trophy, as Modern Family offers a populist hit with comparatively mass appeal (although its total viewer numbers pale in comparison to the sitcoms dominating its category a decade earlier).

Accordingly, comedy categories opened and closed this year’s Emmy telecast, despite the fact that the only interesting story was happening in the dramatic categories. For those who actually follow the awards, and for whom the evening is a suspenseful reveal after months of speculation, Homeland’s win for Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor and Actress in a Drama Series, and Writing in a Drama Series was the story of the evening. Not only does it dethrone Mad Men after its four-year reign and mark the first time since 1993 that a series has won Series, Lead Actor and Lead Actress in a single year, but it also signals Showtime’s first ever Series win at the Emmys, becoming only the third cable channel to win a Series award (after HBO and AMC). But Homeland draws a small audience, limited by access to premium cable, and so Modern Family’s predictable win for Outstanding Comedy Series closes the evening as a celebration of television that people watching have actually seen (and, not entirely coincidentally, television on the broadcast network that happened to be airing this year’s Emmy telecast).

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing discourse surrounding the current era of television, which is often heralded for its serious dramatic programming—most often on cable—by those who suggest we are in a golden age (a notion Damian Lewis echoed in his speech, making me reach for the bingo card I drew into the back of my copy of Newman and Levine’s Legitimating Television); However, while the very existence of the Emmys as a judgment of art would seem to offer proof of this claim, the Emmys telecast can actively work against the exclusivity of those definitions. Although no broadcast series made it into the Outstanding Drama Series category, eight made it into the montage of eighteen series that marked the beginning of the drama period of the telecast, only one of which was nominated for a single award given out during that telecast (CBS’ The Good Wife, with three acting nominations). And yet House, Once Upon a Time, Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Revenge, Smash, and NCIS all have something in common: more people have probably seen them than any of the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. Heck, more people watch NCIS weekly than the six shows nominated in that category combined.

These montages may not seem as important as the winners, and they certainly aren’t likely to be part of news reports or historical records regarding the telecast, but they capture a different way in which the Emmys serve as a discursive space for the contested meaning of television quality. Although we normally think about winners and losers, or even nominees, as the primary space in which the Emmys reinforce or establish certain hierarchies of quality, we also need to think about the broadcast itself as a push back against those hierarchies, particularly given the ongoing battle between the broadcast networks and the Academy regarding the Movie/Miniseries category (which privileges HBO, who won four out of seven awards in the category, with the other two going to basic cable programs). Next year, the Supporting Acting categories for Movies and Miniseries are disappearing, leaving more time for genres that remain part of the industrial structures of broadcast television, and therefore genres that the networks paying to air the awards are more invested in.

In other words, it wasn’t a coincidence that only three of the eighteen series featured during the broadcast’s comedy montage were from cable networks (and all of them from HBO, with no representation from nominated series from Showtime—Nurse Jackie—and FX—Louie—within the evening’s broadcast). It was a statement that comedy is and always will be a broadcast genre, even though they could have easily selected another six great cable comedies to achieve the relative parity they sought in drama series. Like the choice to lead and close with comedy, it’s the broadcast networks’ way of marking their territory: while the battle for drama might seem lost, the war for comedy wages on, and it will be fought in the editing bays and production booths as much as in the voting ballots.