Cinematic TV: Serial Drama goes to the Movies

by Rashna Wadia Richards

For decades after its invention, television was considered by many to be culturally deficient when compared to cinema, as analyses rooted in communication studies and the social sciences tended to focus primarily on television's negative impact on consumers. More recently, however, denigration
has largely been replaced by serious critical consideration of what television represents in the post-network era. Once derided as a media wasteland, TV is now praised for its visual density and complexity. In the last two decades, media scholars have often suggested that television has become
cinematic. Serial dramas, in particular, are acclaimed for their imitations of cinema's formally innovative and narratively challenging conventions. But what exactly does "cinematic TV" mean?

In Cinematic TV, author Rashna Wadia Richards takes up this question comprehensively, arguing that TV dramas quote, copy, and appropriate (primarily) American cinema in multiple ways and toward multiple ends. Constructing an innovative theoretical framework by combining intertextuality and memory
studies, Cinematic TV focuses on four modalities of intermedial borrowings: homage, evocation, genre, and parody. Through close readings of such exemplary shows as Stranger Things, Mad Men, Damages, and Dear White People, the book demonstrates how serial dramas reproduce and rework, undermine and
idolize, and, in some cases, compete with and outdo cinema.

231 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2021

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've realized over the last few years that I'm much more interested in watching premium serial TV than I am most new movies that come out. The stories are often more engaging, take time to build, and have more effective dramatic payoffs. But understanding the structure of these stories in relation to movies and other long-form storytelling was something I wanted to explore more, and I thought that this book might be helpful. In some ways, it is. There are some very interesting analytical tools put to work here that certainly provide some unique ways of thinking about "cinematic TV" and even digging into how that term might be defined. But I sometimes thought the book took a rather circuitous route to exploring this phenomenon, and occasionally just ignored what seemed like more obvious interpretive frameworks and scholars who might help understand particular ideas. All in all this book is sort of at its best, strangely, when it's performing it's literature review sections and digging into concepts. The analyses offered are mostly interesting, but also go on for too long and occasionally read like a grab bag of references...which is ironically something that the book is trying to critique and otherwise nuance. Still a fascinating, engaging, quick read, but not quite the definitive statement on serial drama and cinematic television that I was hoping it would be.