Reviewed by Victor Marsh

Two new books (Defining Visions & Better Living Through Reality Television) from Blackwell focusing on television in American society provide a drastic contrast between approaches to the medium, but one is scarcely worth the read.

Mary Ann Watson's flat-footed 'narrative history' of the medium, was first issued in 1997. The blurb for the new edition claims it is 'newly updated and fully revised' and congratulates itself for extending its coverage all the way to the end of the 20th-century, just three years on from the original edition. Yet the publication date is 2008. Something is missing. The bibliography reveals the focus of the study to be firmly fixed in earlier decades—even the 1990s get short shrift—and the index fails to incorporate some of the more recent listings. The indications are that Defining Visions was dated even in its first incarnation. Worse, the opportunity for revision hasn't produced a re-think, and that's what this pedestrian survey needed.

Alarm bells sound as early as the Acknowledgments, where Watson expresses her gratitude to her editors for encouraging 'historical studies that strive to be explanatory and engaging, rather than arcane' (xi). She finds this approach 'heartwarming' (xi). The title promises a study of television and the American experience in the 20th-century, but this 'explanatory' account, by an 'eminent broadcast historian', pointedly avoids theory, and eschews analysis. Perhaps that would be too 'arcane'. The trouble with such an intellectually lazy posture is that it remains unconscious of the theoretical model on which it rests. The blurb claims the book tells the story of how television 'not only covered history but also actively influenced its course', but the implicit promise of an analysis of interactivity between the two is simply not realised.

A chapter on advertising finds fault for leading Americans to excess and indulgent consumption. There is no analysis of economic contexts or corporate ownership. In Taking the Cue: Television and the American Personality, where you might expect some insight into her interactivity thesis, there are references to: the no-bra policy on Charlie's Angels and large shoulder pads on Dynasty; to MTV as a 'fashion forum for teenagers in the 1980s' (187), and a surge in cigar smoking in the 90s… The list of trivia plods to the banal conclusion that television 'socializes the national personality in sundry ways' (197). Some 'trends' were harmless, apparently, but by the end of the millenium, TV was also defining as acceptable: 'lewd selfish behaviours that diminish and weaken communities' (197). The 1990s were simply too naughty for this author (see below.)

So if we can't expect any startling theoretical insights, what is Defining Visions like as a 'narrative history'?

Typically, Watson's analysis settles for a chronological listing of programs, or leading characters, and trite reflections on changing social attitudes, with tacked-on updates listing recent shows, to freshen it for the second edition. Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl rates a mention, but not Sex and the City. The 'sexual revolution' reaches as far as Ellen DeGeneres coming out—during sweeps in 1997—but does not include Queer as Folk. Cable shows get short shrift.

In a discussion of influence you might expect a full-on treatment of news and current affairs, but there is no account of the influence of 24-hour news channels such as CNN ('the new player in 1981' (248)), nor (of course) the toxic effect of the crass tabloid Fox News Channel. Such tectonic shifts in broadcasting barely rate a mention, and her account fails to explain her feedback thesis.

Watson's imaginary seems to have set early. The 1990s have her lamenting a 'decline in American standards of comportment' (195). Appealing to 'the most base instincts in human nature' (195), American popular culture—apparently 'led by television'—was 'sinking ever deeper in the muck' (192). In place of analytical insight we get a kind of prim disapproval.

Typical of the update-and-revise strategy adopted for this new edition are tacked-on endings to the original chapters that simply list more recent shows, as though the assumptions framing her original chapters are amply borne out by recent developments. Thus, a program like The Sopranos is mentioned only as an example of the industry's 'nonchalance about violence' that Watson finds reprehensible:

Critics raved about the sophistication of drama drenched with 'moral ambiguity', somehow missing the distinction between right and wrong in heartless homicide. (106)

An historian unable to accommodate ambiguity provides a very limited account. I wonder what she would make of Dexter?)

In a new edition, a final chapter with a title like The Webbed Republic might lead a reader to expect an account of convergent cyber-technologies, but the chapter flounders in a typically flat-footed listing of events including the O.J. Simpson trial, the death of Jon Benet Ramsay, and sex scandals such as Clinton/Lewinsky and a Congressman's affair with an intern. The Internet slips in unannounced.

One factor that Watson ignores almost completely is the emergence of so-called 'reality TV', a genre that Laurie Ouellette and James Hay are more than willing to take on. Don't be put off by the title. Their Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship is a serious attempt to contextualise the new genre—'reality TV'—politically, economically and ideologically.

Their usage of the term 'reality TV' differs somewhat from what Australian viewers might expect, to take in what used to be called 'lifestyle' shows, Down Under—a production template taken up only slowly by U.S. television until the explosion of niche-marketed cable channels. This take on the genre is not restricted to fly-on-the-wall voyeurism. Their analysis covers shows that offer various strategies of 'self-help', from do-it-yourself house repairs, to making over one's body image, to problems with intimate relationships. Where you might expect them to be discussing Big Brother, they will be just as likely to include American Idol. Judge Judy and Dr Phil as models of 'self-empowerment' (77).

Ouellette and Hay draw on Foucault's discussions of governmentality, moving beyond the electoral process to focus on 'the regimens through which the conduct of subjects is regulated and regularized' (9). In what they describe as 'a post Welfare state', they see television shows in the reality genre reflecting and promoting a shift to 'self-government'. They say that as Reagan-ite welfare reform policies were being discussed and implemented, reality-based self-help formats took over daytime television. In this shift, the self becomes something to be studied, reflected upon, 'surveilled and recalibrated' (97), through TV. The medium's capacity to enter the home brings the practice of 'makeover' deeply into daily life and for that reason, they claim, is able to circulate its logic and its rules more broadly than books, magazines, and the Internet (102) and takes up an overtly educational role. TV operates as a new form of 'neo-liberalised social service' (18), training citizens to take responsibility for their own fate. Dispersed strategies that guide and shape conduct in liberal society enable individuals to perform the role of self-governance independently of formal state powers and authorities, to produce a new regime of 'privately administered government'. In this context, the technology and procedures of democracy are spread out over daily life, 'shared between public and private enactments of democracy' (216). Electing a state senator works from the same base as voting for an American Idol, or The Next Apprentice.

Dr Phil and Judge Judy, like Oprah and the Supernanny, program interventions that link the care of the self (and the children) to a template of government that draws from residual welfare strategies now actualised within the logic of commerce, they write (98).

Ouellette and Hay do not avoid the nagging question: how does this procedure further indoctrination and exploitation in a closed system, within which 'choice' is only the ability to choose within a prepared realm of weighted possibilities? For the 'self-fashioning' staged through TV is bound up with strategies of corporate cross-promotion. Women are encouraged to empower themselves—by figures as diverse as Dr Phil, Oprah, Judge Judy, and Trinny and Susannah—but there is no oxygen for women who might want to reject femininity or adopt an alternative, 'subcultural' style, or step out of gendered expectations altogether (116).

In addition to the makeover imperative, a discussion of the 'new regime' of 'privately administered government' (171) takes in 'games of group governance' (184)—Survivor, MTV's The Real World and Road Rules and the like—that enact a participatory media culture in which TV itself is being made over, within what they identify as the 'rationality of an active, self-possessive, and entrepreneurial citizenry' (17).

Perhaps the phenomenon is merely 'democratainment', a facsimile of the 'real thing'; a kind of bread and circuses spectacle to distract the population while the levers of real power are being operated off-screen. Ouellette and Hay are quite capable of pursuing such issues. The argument that a more authentic form of democracy exists 'elsewhere' can only be sustained by ignoring the kind of feedback effect between the medium and the culture that Watson might have hoped to delineate but Ouellette and Hay probe with a great deal more insight.


Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience in the 20th Century. 2nd Edition.
(2008)

by Mary Ann Watson
Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9781405170536
320pp

Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship
(2008)

by Laurie Oullette & James Hay
Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9781405134415
264pp