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Final

Over the past two or more decades, television has changed into a new model of storytelling, which is different from the conventional serial forms and episodic that were previously televised. Complex TV is the new model, which infuses multifaceted narratives as the norm television shows that air throughout the developed world. Essentially, it has redefined episodes under the guidance of serial chronicling with a shift in balance. It includes dismissing the requirement for the plot of television show to close inside the scene in way that foregrounds continuing stories in a scope of genres. A plethora of serial practices exist that can be employed based on the supposition that the narrative in the series builds over time. Being unconventional is the most defining feature of complex television. However, there are other features that characterize narrative complexity in modern TV. They focus on the serial as opposed to the episodic. They have an extended depth in the way characters are portrayed. Typically, the script is that of narration and storytelling coupled with an ongoing and constant plot. Characters also shift in perspective with each varying episode. It is also common to come across a commentary in television shows that explore their narrative stunts. Suspense is also a major feature that seems to be part of complex television, and the most active audience speculates about what might become of lead characters or a major twist in the plot (Mittell 20). Collective intelligence between the fans and the film is ubiquitous, and they participate quite intensively from the first to the last episode. This case study focuses on a series of TV shows that are ideal examples in demonstrating the Complex TV phenomenon, and they include Westworld, American Gods, Walking Dead, and Legion.

A lot of people conflate the description of the film as, “Highly Serialized Drama” with long-form episodic examples such as the X-Files and Twin Peaks. For a show to live up to its concept, it should not be predicated on a central narrative enigma not attached to future events triggered by narrative statements (Mittell 19). A show such as Revenge typically embodies complex television because its narrative thrust is simply forward moving, but with a keenness on insights and flashbacks that pop up in episodically so that the viewer understands key aspects about characters. Viewers do not have to grapple with deep mysteries in which they have to piece together hints to understand a character. Therefore, the common feature is that viewers are aware of narrative statements that are accumulated over time so that they have a clear understanding of possible future events that shape subsequent episodes. It is against the same backdrop that viewers and fans of Westworld, American Gods, Walking Dead, and Legion should understand them in terms of complex television. Character portrayal, the plot,  the narrating, and storytelling style is in such a way as to dissuade viewers while maintaining a concrete storyline characteristic of complex television.

Westworld disorients viewers through its robotic characters portrayed as having their lives hanging on a loop. Thus, it means that the show’s storyline takes place over a long time, but it could also appear in a sequence, which further confuses the viewer. Westworld is reminiscent of the Marvel series Legion in which the characters’ bodies are swapped, and the audience is just not sure if the characters are really themselves or their swapped personalities. The common shifts between characters in complex television are thematically triggered by contemporary phenomenon among people whereby they have to constantly interrogate the realities around them. For instance, one might view their perception of an unusual scene as magical, artificial intelligence, psychosis, or just the side effects of trauma. The fact that they are not sure is reflected in complex television through character shifts. With the information age at its peak, it is quite difficult for one to differentiate between what is real and fake. The notions of reality are increasingly being distorted by a bombardment of news from different online platforms. Therefore, the idea that characters in Legion can swap bodies reflects the experiences of a typical contemporary television viewer. Perhaps the confusion created in complex television is the real source of fascination that the audience has with contemporary television shows.

The character swaps in a single storyline of a show and the use of robots show that the two shows mirror the transcending feature of complex television that projects a future that seems quite far but increasingly plausible. Traditionally, television has often been a way to escape reality, but complex television exposes certain ways through which realism gets constructed. It makes the audience to think whereby it is common to come across fans reading online recaps of shows just to understand certain things such as the real character, an actor’s alter ego or a twisted aspect of the plot. Towards the end of Westworld’s first season, for instance, there were already murmurs in its fan base that it had failed to exhaust the themes of humanity and consciousness. Some pundits went as far as challenging the notion that the series portrayed complexity as being equal to ingenuity. Complex television such as Westworld creates another significant platform in entertainment, including dynamic entertainment blogs keen to delve into the complexities of plot, character portrayal, and other nuanced issues.

Complex television is also about an extended depth of characters, and episodes vary from each in ways not contemplated by the viewer. The opening scene of American God, for instance, demonstrates the complexity characteristic. The series is based on an adaptation from one of Neil Geiman’s novels. The show is, indeed, human fantasy, but it is the depth of characters that makes it stand out from the rest of the shows aired around the same period of cable news networks. The audience for American Gods has to be really captivated, and it has to watch quite actively to understand even the first episode. There are soliloquies that are quite overdone. For example, “Technical Boy” in the film, who is the god of technology, soliloquizes, describing language as “a virus”, religion as “an operating system”, and prayers as “spam”. The gods undergo some temporal shifts and change their body shapes.

In one lewd scene, a goddess sucks people inside her by repeatedly having sex with them. Until that point, “Technology boy’s” point about language is evident. There is no difference with Westworld, which portrays a futuristic theme park in which humans have sex with lifelike robots before murdering them. Boston Dynamics and Jurassic Park are quite a phenomenon in the series. There is an enviable depth in character portrayal and the roles they play to advance the plot and set the stage for the next episodes. Interestingly, character complexity may sometimes turn off fans instead of intriguing them. The raping and murder scenes in Westworld might be quite unlikable, but they emphasize the typical feature of complex television.

The opening and closing brackets of each episode in most shows is debatably the most vital feature of the role screen time in establishing a balance between the serial and episodic form. Screen time often defines a specific episode as a distinct part of storytelling and it also entails the break between episodes (Mittell 27). A scene in many shows starts with a critical marker(s), for example, a short recap of scenes in the past episode, an opening title sequence of variable length. Similarly, a scene ends with closing credits that preview future accounts.. The show, Walking Dead illustrates the feature of opening and closing credits quite well. The storytelling in the show’s season finale evokes the events that shaped scenes in previous episodes. At the same time, it makes major and minor references to characters throughout the series. The devices employed to bring up the major theme of zombie survival, which also follows the current trend of narration in complex television. All of the screen-time elements as illustrated in Walking Dead exist outside the story-world and even its narrative. Like in series, the plots are stringed and arced across one full season. Nonetheless, the producers of the show always understand and try to make it such that each episode is a separate narrative that follows the pattern of screen time already set in the previous episodes. However, the first ten minutes of each episode is actually a recap of the final act in the previous scene. The compelling bridge between episodes is manifested in the way fans religiously look forward to the next episode.

Characters in complex television shows have intricate histories, which further convey the same inherent feature. Character complexity tends to compliment character depth. In Legion, for instance, David, the main character, has a complex history that only requires several visits to blog sites to be able to fathom. He is born of Charles Xavier and a survivor of the catatonic Holocaust. The latter was the former’s patient during his earlier visit to Israel. Up to that point, it just seems complicated that David exists in the first place. The viewer immediately becomes curious about his peculiarities. The audience soon realizes that David has telekinetic powers that enable him to make kitchen explosions. Further probes, of course, using online explainers, reveal that his experience is about the process of psychotherapy and treatment, which as the show indicates, is engaging and vigorous.

Complex TV is unique for its cinematic and novelistic features, which are compliments accorded to it by media pundits. However, the medium has significant aesthetic accomplishments that are worth noting. The first one, which is also an artistic breakthrough, is that it has created an active and engaged community of viewership that has an equally ubiquitous online presence. Although other modes exist to be used in television storytelling, complex television functions majorly within the several choices of locating story-worlds, characters, time, and events in continuing serial and episodes. The goal is to reflect a world where the imagined and the real are not so far apart.

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Assignment

5. Describe and evaluate an episode from a TV crime series. What are the principal themes of the episode? What are its chief formulas for plot and characterization? Try to identify themes, techniques and structural features that have been shaped by the TV medium. Be sure to discuss the "political" assumptions - notions about order, authority, social institutions - that are embedded in the episode.

CSI relies on extraordinary techniques of visual reconstruction to relay evidentiary support for the investigators’ findings and to convince “outsiders” of the nature of the crime and its perpetrators. Crime scene investigators can see what other cannot see, while outsiders need to be enlightened and persuaded. Importantly, the role of outsider includes not only a string of law enforcement officials, jury members, lawyers, and judges, but also the show’s viewers, who at the very least expect to be entertained as well as being simultaneously integrated into the investigative process. On aspect of CSI’s display of mastery is its focus on forensic technology and the “CSI shot,” a term used to describe the way the camera often zooms into body of the victim, graphically replaying the impact if vital organs. Sue Tait elaborates that the CSI shot “render the effects of violence within the body. What happens within the body as violence occurs has previously escaped visual representation” The CSI shot allows viewers to see things that are not apprehesible with normal vision, explicitly marking television’s capacity for representing the unrepresentable. Of course, any visual medium with imaginative capabilities, including art and film, can represent things normally invisible or inapprehensible to the naked eye; fiction, especially when paired with digital technology and computer-enhanced graphics, offers up an infinite pakette for rendering new worlds and otherwise impossible points of view. However, the CSI shot is persistently affiliated on the show with notions of visual truth and desire. Its recurring use renders it a mode of viewing, a way of seeing; the CSI shot represents not a one-time trick o the camera, but a special intellectual skill of CSI’s investigators. By employing trademark techniques such as the CSI shot; montages of complicated scientific procedures and the close examination of evidence; and continuously-repeated images of investigators looking, peering, staring, and squinting at crime scenes, down microscopes, and  across metal interrogation tables. CSI urges its viewers to imagine not only what the human eye can see of we would only look but also what television can be, what it should be, and what it can show us if we would only watch.

On CSI, visual mastery is usually only extended to the forensic specialists, who can see beyond the surface of a crime scene and beyond the flesh and bone confines of the human body, whereas the police and the criminals themselves may be blind to evidence beyond the obvious. So, where do we locate television viewers in this hierarchy, viewers who can see that this “truth” is not always what it appears to be? CSI positions the spectator at the apex of its hierarchy of visual mastery: eventually, the spectator sees everything seen and unseen. This is not an arbitrary formulation. In fact, in order to envision this tripartite hierarchy of gazes evinced by the crime procedural. CSI, like many crime procedurals, achieves this eventual impression of absolute knowledge through repetition. CSI relies heavily on the visual reenactment of its own primal scenes, violent crimes and deaths, as a central facet of its narratives. This persistent re-envisioning suggests that repetition will lead the investigators closer to the truth and thereby closer to providing justice for the victims and punishment for the criminal.

In CSI, recurring, mutable flashback sequences offer alternate interpretations of the hows and whys of each crime. As investigators find evidence and interview suspects and witnesses, these objects and testimonials shift their understanding of the nature of each case. These shifts are explicitly illustrated for the television viewers as visual reconstructions of the crime which change depending on the evidence at hand and how the investigators interpret that evidence. The crime procedural’s repetitive working-through of evidence functions as a strategic progression towards an ultimately unknowable but imminently inferable truth. CSI’s repeated promises of visual truth and mastery reveal how its intersection of investigative gazes underscores the communal spectatorship inherent to the concept of the televisual gaze.

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Assignment

4. Critically analyze a single episode of an older drama or crime tv show, emphasizing its visual style, its treatment of character, its strategies of storytelling. How does it compare with a more contemporary equivalent show?

CSI, which began airing on CBS in 2000 and has sparked two spin-offs, follows the lives and work of an ensemble cast of forensic experts. In its first nine seasons, consummate scientist Gil Grissom leads the CSI graveyard shift in Las Vegas; his near-obsessive rapture with evidence and the stories it has to tell is both tempered and supported by his team, from the empathetic Catherine Willows and boyishly eager Nick Stokes to the no-nonsense Sara Sidle and a wry, hard bitten detective Jim Brass, to name a few. Each episode showcases another unexplained death or deaths which the CSIs scrutinize and explore from every angle. The superior interpretative capabilities of CSI’s investigators and their heightened ability to visually reconstruct each crime scene are contingent upon an empirical hegemony: the accuracy and dependability of forensic equipment and the scientific method. CSI enforces this idea through the “magical property of photography: a visualization technology associated with the idea of unmediated truth.” As each investigator discovers new pieces of evidence, visualizations in the form of flashbacks walk viewers and other investigators through a revised version of the crime, showing what might have happened and how the evidence supports each theory. New evidence begets new flashbacks, new version of the story that are ostensibly truer with every tellin. Rarely, if ever, does the evidence in CSI lie - although occasionally a clever criminal is able to planet evidence slyly enough to trick even the eagles eyes of the inexorable Grissom, at least for a little while.

CSI’s sixth season episode, “Rashomama”, a direct riff of Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, notable for its differing perspectives on the same crime, serves as an eloquent illustration of interchanging modes of spectatorship, the flexibility of interpretation, the ambiguity of televisual truth, and the process by which criminologists work through by repeatedly re-visioning death. When the episode begins, the CSIs are in the middle of investigating the murder of criminal defense attorney Diane Chase, killed at her son’s wedding. A pit stop of a local diner turns their usual process upside down; while Nick’s truck is stolen and with it all the evidence collected at the scene-evidence which now is not only missing but hopelessly compromised even if recovered. This opening diner scene sets the tone for the episode in more ways than one; before the truck disappears, Nick, Sara, and Gredd argue about the social importance of and their personal feelings toward wedding until their waitress, having overheard them ,asserts, “Weddings are a Rorshach; everyone sees what they want to see,” simultaneously settling the argument and foreshadowing the rest of the episode.

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W1_Thu

p2. 

First of all, in my opinion, kids and grown-ups can learn their increasingly shared obsessions. Too often we imagine the blurring of kid and grown-up cultures as a series of violations. I really agree with the author’s idea that smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share. Parents should stop forcing other media which they think make smart children, instead, they should see television as an opportunity, not a crisis. The television shows were selected based on merit. Not just any old show will do. All of the above shows won various awards in their first seasons for everything from writing to directing to acting. These shows all deal with complex social relationships and character arcs. The viewer’s mind is working the whole time to try and pick up on cues for shifts in relationships, and to try and determine what may happen next. In other way, television is a source of entertainment as it helps in viewing different types of channels according to different tastes of people. The television should not be blamed for the violences shown in movies as they are showing just to amuse us or the one who likes action movies not for the purpose of chasing the same thing they had shown. Its just for the awareness not for implying in their real lives to overcome the problem. People should use their wisdom not violence. Watching crime files and horror shows and make us violent and tempt us to perform the action scenes of heroes and hurt ourselves. In this point, the author’s idea can not be made sense.

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W1_Thu

p1.

 On Jan. 24, the Fox network showed an episode of its hit drama "24," which is thriller genre and known for tension and violence. But the explicit violence and the anxiety are not the only elements of "24" that would have been illogical on television network 20 years ago. For decades, we've worked under the mass culture that follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, because the masses want dumb, simple pleasures and most of media companies try to give the masses what they want. According to the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like "24,” you have to make assumptions, track shifting relationships, and pay attention. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass deviation turn out to be nutritional after all. I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the only most important new force adjusting the mental development of young people today. But the negative message in the mediasphere is not the only way to evaluate that television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just the important point is the kind of thinking you have to do making sense of a cultural experience which is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible. Televised Intelligence considers demands that televised narratives place on their watchers, but another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise in the way of think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading. According to television history, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of "Hill Street Blues". Critics generally says "Hill Street Blues" as the beginning of "serious drama" in the television contents, but the structure of a "Hill Street" episode is the structure of a soap opera. Multi-threading is the most acclaimed structural feature of the modern television drama, and it certainly deserves some of the honor that has been given out to it, and it is the only part of the story. Flashing arrow is parody, but it's little an exaggerated of a device popular stories use every time. They diminish the amount of analytic work to make sense of a story. By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. In pointing out some popular culture, it has improved in our heads. I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to their children to amuse themselves. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not indecency and violence as its classification arrangement for the world of mass culture.