“You’re Nobody’s Mommy”

Chapter 3 focuses on televisual appropriations of broader thematic conventions. It begins with genre and its troubled relationship with intertextuality. Due to its common association with the formulaic, genre might appear to contradict the multifaceted energies of intertextuality. Far from being merely a classificatory framework, however, genre too can be seen as a theory of intersection and entanglement. This chapter carefully teases out an alternative understanding of genre as overlap. It analyzes Damages (FX, 2007–10; Audience Network, 2011–12) as a legal drama that overlaps with the puzzle film and the maternal melodrama. These overlaps, Chapter 3 concludes, also enable reflection on the looseness of genres and their unexpected kinship with intertextuality.

“You See Everything”

Chapter 2 concentrates on implicit cinematic references in serial television, ones that seem to flash up suddenly and perhaps even inadvertently. References are usually seen as synonymous with invocations, which entail the active summoning of sources, whereas this chapter relies on evocative references, which seem more random or unmotivated and often non-canonical. Using Mad Men’s (AMC, 2007–15) myriad evocations—ones that exceed the usual references to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) or Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969)—this chapter demonstrates how a series engages with cinema to talk about a particular era. It concludes with this paradox: the more authored a series, the wider its set of unintended intertextual connections might be.

Epilogue: What Do TV Critics Dream about?

“Your job is to produce shit.” —a CBS Executive to William Froug, quoted in Erik Barnouw, The Image Empire Now visionary auteurs could make the kind of art that no one thought TV could handle in the first place. —Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch...

“How about . . . We Watch a Scary Movie Together”

Chapter 1 explores serial drama’s affectionate relationship with cinema through the concept of homage. Homage has historically been thought of as a gesture of unconditional love; in cinema studies, it is meant to visualize one auteur’s affection for another. But this chapter turns to more recent treatments of homage, which tend to balance admiration with critique. Chapter 1 reads Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–present) as an act of homage to the 1980s. Unlike the nostalgia-driven interpretations of homage, however, here it is read as an act of critical reflection. What this implies is that the series devours its cinematic love objects, thus demonstrating how televisual homage might manifest itself as a desire to embody and replace cinema.

“This Isn’t Some TV Show, Okay?”

Chapter 4 seems like an ostensible contradiction of all that has come before it, as it zooms in on parody. In common parlance, parody is regarded narrowly as a sendup or a spoof. But this chapter repurposes the concept as a displacement paradigm, rethinking parody as a deceptive double that furtively displaces the authority of the original. Playing on eminent existing terrain and interrogating cinematic tradition make parody particularly effective for an analysis of Dear White People (Netflix, 2017–present), a web series that demonstrates how parody works to undermine the cultural authority and assumed whiteness of mainstream American as well as European art cinema.

Introduction

The introductory chapter creates a framework for exploring how serial television has become cinematic. It traces the evolution of television, while interrogating the implications of assuming that television advances when it approximates the features of cinema. Then, it constructs the framework of intertextuality for analyzing the varied ways in which serial dramas borrow from cinema. Some series honor or deride their cinematic sources; others offer homage or resistance not only to specific films but also to the idea of cinema in general. Instead of the standard narrative about television imitating cinema’s aesthetic status, this chapter offers a methodology for investigating how serial dramas absorb and revise (primarily) American cinema. Finally, it argues that contemporary serial television exhibits an archival relationship to cinema, for cinematic moments, motifs, and contours hover around the televisual frame, constantly breaking through. How serial dramas handle such cinematic hauntings is the story that this book tells.