The television texts I have selected as the object of my analysis belong to a relatively narrow subsection of television, although one that is disproportionately over- represented in scholarly work: US serial drama. I strongly believe that kinaesthesia as methodology has applicability to all aspects of television – all programmes can be analysed through attention to the meanings and affects attached to the moving body. Comedy programmes exploit the moving body for comedic effect, most notably in slapstick; lifestyle programmes emphasise particular actions such as cooking, gardening, or renovating, in order to make their aspirational narrative seem achievable by their audience; children’s programmes often explicitly address the moving bodies of their audience, encouraging them to move in certain ways or copy particular actions; television news programmes often provoke controversy when changes are made to how presenters occupy the set, such as Kirsty Young’s practice of walking around while presenting the Channel Five news; and the appeal of television sports very obviously lies in the skilled kinaesthetics of athletes and players. The serial dramas I am concerned with, those programmes that are often grouped together under the label of ‘quality’ or ‘complex’ television, also clearly rely upon appeals to the embodied experience of the audience. These programmes share an interest in foregrounding and exploring bodily experiences of violence, pain, sex, death, hunger, travel, dance, exercise, and so on. Quality television, then, seems to be something of a body genre. Here I follow Linda Williams’ influential work on ‘body genres’: those genres such as melodrama, horror, and pornography that deliberately attempt to elicit physical responses from the audience.38 Many quality
television programmes can be positioned at the intersection between each of these genres, although they draw from different aspects to different degrees. Consequently I argue that it might be their shared kinaesthetic preferred reading strategies that gives these US serial dramas coherence as a recognisable feature of the televisual landscape, as much if not more than their ‘complex’ narrational style and their expensive style.
Yet of course, this should not mean that the body is absent when we watch other genres of television. One of the reasons I choose to analyse these texts under the rubric of kinaesthesia (rather than the kinds of corporeal spectacle Williams is concerned with) is to avoid arguing that ‘quality’ television is simply a matter of bigger, more excessive, more spectacular aesthetics and experience. Instead, I want to read US serial drama as television, rather than as something that transcends its televisual trappings. Alongside spectacular forms of body movement and corporeality, these programmes also address the more ordinary dimensions of the moving body: the kinaesthetic meanings of gait and posture, the political implications of spatial occupation, and the empathetic value of corporeal familiarity. It is this appeal – to the familiar, ordinary, intimate dynamics of the lived body – that makes this a particularly televisual reading strategy. Kinaesthesia allows us to bring together spectacular, heightened aesthetics and experiences and more ordinary, everyday ones – a connection that is key to how we understand and relate to television.
I am also specifically interested in serial drama because I believe that the properties of serial narrative have certain kinaesthetic elements. Claire Perkins, in her discussion of what she calls ‘television of the body’, argues that the corporeal excesses of recent US serial narratives create a corporeal and affective form of seriality.39 She suggests that one of the key pleasures of serial television is our increasing familiarity with the corporeal features of performers’ bodies.40 This creates an affective relationship based in embodied connection, one which runs alongside and underpins our investment in more obvious forms of narrative seriality. Like Perkins, I am interested in the ‘physical
dimension of television’s serial form’,41 and the question of whether the ways we live with our serial television narratives might be inextricable from the ways we live our bodies. Indeed, the tight connection between kinaesthesia and The OA’s explicit commentary on serial storytelling – in which telling and consuming a serialised story involves a parallel
39 Claire Perkins, ‘Dancing on My Own: Girls and Television of the Body’, Critical Studies in Television, 9 (2014), 33-43.
40 Ibid., p. 41. 41 Ibid., p. 42.
mode of serialised embodied engagement – implies that such kinaesthetic reading strategies might go hand in hand with serial storytelling. My focus on serial narrative in this thesis aims to draw out these ideas, considering how the serial narration of US ‘complex’ drama may demand to be read and felt through the kinaesthetic body.
Furthermore, as a narrational form, seriality always emerges when the medium is seeking to define or redefine itself. Roger Hagedorn suggests that serials always ‘serve to promote the very medium in which they appear’; consequently, the serial form becomes a particularly useful site through which to identify how television imagines itself and its audience, and the particular reading strategies it invites. This is all the more the case at a time of transition, in which television is increasingly divorced from the broadcasting timetable that has been so integral to its identity as a medium. As more and more television is watched and encountered through digital streaming services – including many of the texts that make up my corpus – one of the things that continues to be used to identify it as television is the presence of serial narration. If the experience of serial
narration remains integral to what we identify as television, then its particular patterns of engagement must tell us something about a preferred televisual experience, or a preferred reading strategy. And if those patterns have, as I will argue, particular kinaesthetic
dimensions, then they become the perfect site to trace how the experience of television might demand kinaesthetic modes of meaning making.
The texts I am concerned with in this thesis explicitly engage with themes of travel, of journeys, of home and belonging. They use the body in often spectacular ways, and often ordinary ways. Many share an explicit concern with questioning the limits of the body, and seem to demand that we find new ways of moving with one another. Yet ultimately, what brings these texts together is the fact that I love them, that they inspire passion and excitement in me, that they seize my attention and my interest. I am not alone in my affection for these serial dramas; any brief glance at the television studies section of a bookshop or a library demonstrates the wealth of scholarship these series are
generating.42 There seems to be a fundamental question hovering over all of this work: why do these programmes inspire such devotion and such output? Why do they dominate public discussion and popular culture? The obvious answer is that these series appeal to those who have the power to set the tone of public debate – highly educated white men. I do not doubt the truth of this statement. What my work aims to achieve is to offer a different way to talk about the appeal of these series, one that remains sensitive to how they fundamentally address and rely upon those elements that stand outside
masculinised taste formations – the messiness of the body, the unruliness of emotions, the tediousness of the ordinary, the mildness of the familiar, and the unnoticed but
undeniable power of movement – all things that, I believe, make television the medium it is.