Television Narrative

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■ Introduction 70

■ Identification 71

■ story/plot 73

■ structure 75

■ narrative forms – serial 75

■ narrative forms – series 76

■ narrative forms – hybrid 77

■ transmedia storytelling 78

■ Case study: Insecure 79

■ summary of key points 84

■ Bibliography 85

DOI: 10.4324/9781315619675-4

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10.4324/9781315619675-4

Television Narrative

Television Narrative

Introduction

This chapter explores the structure of television narrative, providing tools for its analysis. When we analyse television narrative, we are thinking about how television organises its storytelling. As Chapter 2 showed, aesthetic elements play a role in storytelling. In this chapter we look at how narrative structures guide viewers and help them understand and follow a programme. We look at how tel- evision builds connections with characters, the main formal structures of televi- sion programmes and how seasons and individual episodes are organised. John Fiske explains that narrative is a ‘grand signifying pattern’ that takes character and setting and makes sense of them as a chain of events, ‘[n]arrative structure demonstrates that people and places are not anarchic and random, but sensible’

(1987: 129).

Narrative is often thought of as something employed in fiction, but narrative structure is essential for non-fiction forms like news, documentary and sports.

Consider the breadth of sports and large number of athletes competing in a single day at an Olympic Games. The BBC will set aside hours of each day’s sched- ule for live and ‘as live’ coverage of the Games, across one or more of its chan- nels, along with the iPlayer. But this is still not enough space to cover everything that is happening. The broadcaster chooses which sports to follow on BBC1 and BBC2 and structures those sports into a series of narratives. These unfold as sections within a live broadcast flow, with the movement between events and identification of key narrative threads shaped by presenters in the studio. The quest for the gold medal is the narrative, the home athletes and the international stars are its characters, their lifelong quest to achieve their dream the backstory filled in by presenters, pundits and commentators. Come the evening, highlights programmes feature the key moments and climactic action of lengthy sporting events that played out across the day, structured into short concise story packages by programme-makers.

Where films exist as self-contained narratives unfolding over two hours, seri- ality is a defining element of television. Structured around a repeated return to recurring characters, locations and situations, television enables the telling of a story across multiple self-contained, interconnected episodes. Many programmes introduce and conclude a story within a single episode. However, the narrative space offered by seriality – whether within a single season of six to ten hours or across multiple seasons – allows for the construction of complex story worlds and character psychologies, building an intimate connection with regular viewers. In long-running programmes like soap operas, viewers can watch a character grow up, marry and have children of their own, as they do the same.

narrative an ordered sequence of images and sound that tells a fictional or factual story.

serial a television form where a develop-

ing narrative unfolds across a sequence of separate episodes.

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Identification

Television viewers can make sense of television only by taking up a position in relation to it, constituting themselves as an audience. What the audience is watch- ing must seem to be ‘for them’, and a relationship can then be constructed with it (whether this relationship to television is marked by pleasure, boredom, anger or frustration). So narrative depends on a shifting pattern of identification between the viewer and the programme. Viewers can identify with both fictional and non- fictional performers but also distance themselves from a performer (in order to find him or her funny, for instance, in a sitcom). Viewers can also identify with the studio audience denoted by laughter on the soundtrack (in sitcoms and chat shows for example), taking up a shared position in relation to what the studio audience and home audience have seen. Narrative requires the shifting of the viewer’s position into and out of the television programme, and a rhythm of iden- tification and disavowal of identification. But the positioning and repositioning of the viewer as an audience member might succeed or fail for individual viewers in different programmes or parts of the same programme. We explore the audience’s position further in Chapter 9. Narrative lays out positions for its viewers, offer- ing signs and codes that invite the viewers to make sense of and enjoy what they see and hear, but whether or not viewers actually occupy the position of being- an-audience, and how they inhabit this position, depends on the many variables which compose each viewer’s social and psychological identity.

The psychoanalytic account of pleasure in watching television argues that there are several identifications which viewers make from moment to moment. The first of these is an identification with the television medium, as something which deliv- ers images of other people, places and times. These images offer to satisfy view- ers’ desire to experience life differently, as another person or in another place.

There are also identifications with all the figures who are presented on the screen, the performers who stand in for the viewer and play out the roles which the viewer might desire to play for himself or herself. There are identifications through- out television narratives with the fictional and non-fictional worlds presented in them, just as in a daydream or fantasy we might imagine worlds where we play all the parts in an imaginary story. The movement of television narrative in this way is analogous to daydream fantasies that allow for identifications with different people and things (imagining being a person, a car, a bird, etc.), including iden- tifications with different gender identities. All the possible roles in the narrative are available to the viewing subject: they can imagine being either the subject or object of a look, and can even occupy a position outside the scene, looking on from a spectator’s point of view. The importance of an analogy with fantasy is that the disjuncture of looks and positions in its scenarios appears parallel to the way that television form cuts and juxtaposes different shots and different camera looks. Television narrative holds back complete knowledge and total vision to the viewer, thereby maintaining the desire to keep on looking. These narratives align us with different characters and their experiences, and limit our access to others, this constructs identifications and propels the plot.

Narratives are built around the relationships between events and charac- ters. Events move a story forward and they can ebb and flow in their intensity.

identification a term deriving from psychoanalytic theories of cinema, which describes the viewer’s conscious or unconscious wish to take the place of someone or something in a television text.

gender the social and cultural division of people into masculine, feminine or non-binary individuals. this is dif- ferent from sex, which refers to the biological difference between male and female bodies.

subject in psychoa- nalysis, the term for the individual self whose identity has both conscious and unconscious components.

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Figure 3.1 Fleabag gives the audience intimate access to its unnamed protagonist Narrative theorist Roland Barthes (1977: 93) presented a hierarchy of events, dif- ferentiating between those pivotal for narrative progression and those of lesser importance. Characters have agency, they make decisions and act on them, and viewers come to know them through how they respond to events. The long-run- ning nature of many television programmes allows viewers to get to know char- acters well, so pleasure and fear can come from our anticipation of how they will react to an event. The ability of television narratives to unfold across multiple seasons means characters can shift and change. A fan-favourite character can be promoted from the ensemble to a main cast member. A hero can become a mor- ally ambiguous anti-hero – the trajectory of Walter White in Breaking Bad or June in A Handmaid’s Tale. An antagonist can become a protagonist, for example soap operas can introduce a character as a villain but over time can introduce storylines and other characters that humanise them, transitioning them into a main cast member.

Film frequently centres upon a single protagonist, the hero or anti-hero of a story. The ongoing nature of television’s storytelling makes it difficult to main- tain the narrative drive of a single goal or personal conflict. A single protagonist is usually only seen in a single drama (which will have a runtime of under two hours) or individual episodes of an anthology (Black Mirror, High Maintenance), both of which tell a complete story in an episode. Typically television uses an ensem- ble, although this can be orientated around and support a central protagonist.

Science-fiction Western The Mandalorian is centred on the missions and over- arching quest of bounty hunter Din Djarin, who interacts with recurring sup- porting characters along the way. Dramedy Fleabag uses direct address to give the viewer intimate access to its unnamed protagonist, with her family and romantic partners moving in and out of her orbit (Figure 3.1). Trisha Dunleavy notes that in the high-end serial a lead character’s presence drives and is essential to resolv- ing the overarching story, whereas peripheral characters progress the story or drive smaller story arcs (2018: 102–3).

A programme may be invested in the psychological state and inner life of its protagonist, but viewers might struggle to identify with them or believe in their actions, particularly if they are constructed as anti-heroes. An ensemble cast offers space for multiple identifications and audience entry positions. This makes them particularly important for soap operas and the long seasons of drama and

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sitcoms common to US network television, as characters can take on the protago- nist role at different points in time. Large ensembles allow characters to play lead or supporting roles in an episode’s multiple story arcs. For example, each episode of medical drama Grey’s Anatomy combines up to three medical cases that feature different combinations of its ensemble, whilst interpersonal storylines foreground and develop individual characters’ personal arcs.

Story/plot

Analysing narrative requires the distinction between story, plot and discourse.

Story is the set of events that are represented, whether they are seen on screen or not. The plot is how the story is told, and the information presented on screen.

We will not see the incident that brings a patient to Grey’s Anatomy’s emergency room, but this event is part of the character’s story. The patient becomes part of the episode’s plot once they interact with the surgical staff, filling in their back- story as they are assessed. Narrative relies on the viewer taking narrative exposi- tion and filling in the gaps in their mind to complete the story world (or diegesis).

Reality dating show Love Island airs nightly episodes that condense the story of the contestants’ entire day in the house into a few plots. These feature the events – romantic and conflict-driven – that producers deem important to progress the programme’s narrative of romantic coupling and uncoupling. Exposition is pro- vided by the narration along with the contestants’ conversation and gossip. A pro- gramme’s first episode is all exposition as it is setting up the story and characters for the audience. Discourse is the entire narrating process that puts story events in an order, shaping and directing them, including the arrangement of cam- era shots, sound and music that deliver the story. Narrative time can be shifted through flashbacks, scenes presented out of chronological order, a sports event’s instant replay. The plot doesn’t necessarily follow the events of the story, as plot structure often withholds story information from the audience, to be revealed for maximum emotional benefit.

A story is driven by a ‘problematic’, a question, situation or dilemma that allows for conflict and sustains and fuels the narrative (Ellis 1982: 154). The narrative problematic of The Mandalorian is ‘can Din Djarin keep Baby Yoda safe?’, in Game of Thrones it is ‘who will control the Iron Throne?’. Each season of police drama Line of Duty is a serialised narrative following a single internal affairs case. Here the season’s narrative problematic is ‘can we trust this person, are they telling the truth?’. Each season interconnects to an overarching narra- tive problematic, ‘who is the mysterious H controlling the conspiracy?’ Sitcoms tend to be built on a looser situation, the romantic will-they-won’t-they, or the interpersonal conflict of the workplace sitcom. For example, Parks and Recreation uses different narrative problematics across its run: can the Parks Department officemates be friends? Will Ben and Leslie get together? Will Leslie succeed as a city councillor?

A programme’s plots then progress – within an episode and across a season – through a process of cause and effect. An episode will typically interweave mul- tiple plots of varying importance, which can be self-contained or ongoing. The most important plot is the A plot, the central conflict involving one or more main

discourse a particular use of language for a certain purpose in a certain context (such as academic discourse or poetic discourse), and similarly in television, a particular usage of television’s audio-vis- ual ‘language’ (news programme discourse or nature documen- tary discourse, for instance).

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Figure 3.2 Sex Education keeps its will-they-won’t-they romance maintained in C plots characters to which a large number of scenes are devoted. This is supported by the B and C plots, which are given a smaller amount of scenes. These can con- trast with A plots, providing comic relief or romance, or follow another set of characters within an ensemble. B and C plots are often used to keep tabs on ongo- ing narrative arcs that continue across many episodes. A scene can interweave multiple plots at once. Grey’s Anatomy uses thematic counterpoint where the plot of a patient’s case can echo the plot of a doctor’s interpersonal dilemma. The bal- ance of plots is often shaped by genre, with a police procedural weighted heavily towards an A plot, with small amounts of B and C, whereas a sitcom or British evening soap opera will generally have three or more equal plots per episode.

When a British soap opera devotes an episode to a single plot this serves as a nar- rative event that focuses the audience’s attention.

Narrative arcs inform television’s longer-term, serialised storytelling as they follow plots that extend beyond a single episode and can be foregrounded or mini- mised in any given episode. They can be plot- or character-focused, short-term or long-term. They allow programmes to blend self-contained and ongoing stories and are particularly important to serialised narratives, but are present in the more episodic forms of sitcoms and procedurals. The will-they-won’t-they romance is a key example of a narrative arc, maintained through C plots of individual episodes that develop the larger arc, shifting to A or B status at a climactic moment. In season one of Sex Education the will-they-won’t-they romance between Otis and Maeve remains B or C plot status across most of the season (Figure 3.2). However, a romantic comedy like Starstruck sees the will-they-won’t-they romance main- tain A plot status across a season. Michael Newman highlights how narrative arcs contribute to character development, stating ‘[a]rc is to character as plot is to story. Put slightly differently, arc is plot stated in terms of character’ (2006:

23). Narrative arcs help organise storytelling across soap opera’s ongoing narra- tives, and the lengthy seasons of US network television. As viewers’ brains can- not hold 12 to 24 episodes (the average size of a network season) worth of plots, a programme needs several overlapping shorter arcs to unfold and resolve across a season.

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Structure

The structure of an episode is shaped by narrative beats, the key events and char- acter actions that drive its plots. Television writers build an episode by segmenting its plots into beats, unfolding these piece by piece to intensify audience engage- ment, ‘each beat tells us something new, something we want – need – to know, and amplifies our desire to know more’ (Newman 2006: 18). (The writing process is discussed further in Chapter 8). It is useful to think about television as structured through segmentation. John Ellis set out a segment as ‘a unit of sequential, tightly organised images and sounds which cohere to produce a specific meaning’ (1982:

148–9). A programme can be built out as a series of segments:

■ Beat

■ Scene

■ Acts

■ Episode

■ Season

Segmentation is amenable to the ad breaks of commercial television and encour- ages a flexible style of storytelling that allows cross-cutting between plots. This shows how television’s industrial nature impacted the development of its story- telling style, with acts building to a mini climax at each ad break to encourage audiences to stay watching. In the 1990s Robin Nelson identified an intensifi- cation of segmentation in drama series. This segmentation enabled a complex interweaving between an increased number of plots, a structure he termed ‘flexi- narrative’ (1997: 30–49). This was a response to commercial pressures as well as a bid to reach new audiences demanding a more fast-paced, sophisticated story structure.

Like film, television episodes use the classical narrative structure of three acts, moving through narrative equilibrium, disruption, then restoration of equilib- rium. UK commercial television has three advert breaks and four acts, whereas US network television devotes a larger amount of each hour to advertising, breaking an hour-long episode into a teaser followed by five or six acts. Classical narrative structure shapes televisual storytelling even when a programme airs on a channel or platform without adverts (e.g. BBC1, HBO or Amazon Prime Video) as this drives the audience's desire for resolution. Television’s main narrative forms have different relationships to resolution; a serial will delay story resolution beyond an episode whereas in a series a story will come to a conclusion within an episode.

Narrative forms – serial

The serial form encompasses both the televisual everyday in the soap opera and the event in prestige TV’s high-end serial drama. Both are slow-release narra- tive forms that tell an overarching story across multiple episodes that often end in cliff-hangers. A serial requires audience commitment, they are unwelcoming to a new viewer joining mid-season as they rely on the audience’s knowledge of previous events to interpret the action. Serials can be open or closed in form. The

series a television form where each pro- gramme in the series has a different story or topic, though settings, main characters or performers remain the same.

soap opera a continuing drama serial involving a large number of characters in a specific location, focusing on relation- ships, emotions and reversals of fortune.

prestige Tv critical and industry term to describe high-budget flagship drama and comedy. term aims to remove hierarchical/

judgemental con- notations of the term

‘quality television’.