Televisuality

Televisuality is a theoretical term coined by John Caldwell in the mid-1990s to characterize a change in the look and practice of television programming. This change began around 1980 and continues to the present day. Describing and discussing television through the lens of televisuality requires one to consider television as a mode of mass communication reliant on popularity with viewers and created in an industrial context whose labor relations affect how shows are produced. Overall, the main identifying feature of “the televisual” is “an excess of style.” Thus, programs produced from the 1980s onward are likely to break with traditional “invisible” production styles and to innovate in ways that call the viewer's attention to the constructedness of the show—that it is a televisual text and that the viewer is watching (or, in a best-case scenario, participating) in the construction of meaning through attraction to or investment in the style of the televisual text.

This excess of style can manifest itself in a multiplicity of ways. On one end of this spectrum are the swooping, highly stylized opening credits and graphic displays of Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood, which have been increasingly co-opted by sports programming and certain unscripted program forms (such as American Idol). The other includes cinematic visual forms utilized first by Steven Bochco in the 1980s series Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. This one-camera, film-inspired form continued into the 1990s and beyond with Dick Wolf's Law & Order franchise and also has [Page 384]been used in the production of genres that were traditionally studio-bound, such as the one-camera sitcoms Sex and the City, Arrested Development, and Malcolm in the Middle. A more recent development is the conflation of these stylistic innovations in programs such as CSI. This would lead one to conclude, rightly, that a further marker of the “televisual” signaled, but not directly addressed by Caldwell, is that it is dynamic—as an activity and an evolutionary strategy, one can expect to see stylistic innovations continue to evolve as television programs continue to seek spectacularity and thus attract viewers with these innovations.

As a theoretical concept, televisuality is useful in that it accounts for the industrial production of television and the economic factors that affect the construction of television shows. It also addresses the consumption of these shows within a culture whose central mass media, until the rise of Internet-based media forms in the late 1990s, was television and whose collective history and experience of events of historical importance had been mediated through this form. Thus televisuality recognizes that the television industry is an industry and subject to the same market fluctuations and demands as other product-producing economic endeavors. It further acknowledges the characteristics that are peculiar to the television industry—that it is a culture industry and that its products differentiate themselves in ways that are much more complex and variant than merely “new model years.” In accounting for the many behind-the-scenes relationships that may have an effect on style, televisuality suggests that a movement toward the spectacular or heightened aesthetic presentation of meaning is a continuing trope and goal.

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