Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

7. Soderbergh and Television

197 Following on from the intertextual contexts of Soderbergh-directed feature films, this chapter examines his limited work on television series, a format routinely distinguished from cinema in its textual characteristics and mode of authorship. Soderbergh’s work in television affords the opportunity to consider a different range of critical issues. The television programs Soderbergh has directed or produced merit scrutiny in particular for their narrative appeals, stylistic experimentation, and improvisational performances. Eschewing artificial distinctions between media forms, however, I wish to emphasize the continuity of style, content, and address among Soderbergh’s projects in film and television, as well as his consistent role as producer across the two media. Central to this chapter is a case study of the 2003 HBO series K Street, an experiment in rapid television production. Remarkably for prestige television, episodes of the part-reality, part-fiction series were aired the same week they were filmed, and they incorporated within their plotlines breaking national news and the ongoing primary campaigns for the 2004 U.S. presidency. K Street embodies what I term the parafictional form, identifiable also in other Soderbergh efforts such as Traffic and Bubble, though to a lesser degree. Relying on television’s more intimate address and serial-narrative possibilities, K Street generates a semi-fictional commentary on Washington, D.C., political culture while participating in curious ways with that culture. The portability of the parafiction mode is evidenced by the production of a subsequent HBO series, Unscripted, executiveproduced by Soderbergh and directed by his Section Eight partner George Clooney and Clooney’s other producing partner, Grant Heslov. Substituting L.A.’s entertainment culture for D.C.’s political milieu, Chapter 7 Soderbergh and Television 198 Soderbergh and Screen Industries Unscripted follows the staged but partly improvised activities of a real group of aspiring Los Angeles actors. In addition to demonstrating Soderbergh and Clooney’s cross-media investments, the two series further showcase the hybridized narrative modes that form part of both men’s creative signatures as directors and producers. As such, this television work highlights continuities of authorial activity as well as distinct provisions of the television medium. Soderbergh and Clooney both began their professional media work in television. The son of a longtime broadcast host, Clooney enjoys a professional profile that owes much to television. His five seasons on the NBC television series ER (1994–2009, with Clooney starring from 1994–1999) refine his performance style and, viewed retrospectively, position him for feature-film stardom. Soderbergh, meanwhile, worked during the 1980s in well-below-the-line television production. In the 1990s, his television work consisted only of two episodes of Showtime’s noir-inspired series Fallen Angels (1993, 1995), which imported a range of creative talent from independent-cinema as well as studiofilmmaking sectors. For both Clooney and Soderbergh, the return to prestige television via HBO series represents an expansion of their respective creative profiles. Feature-film work continues to carry the greatest cultural cachet of screen-media forms. However, affiliations with prestige television offer opportunities for experimentation with serial narrative, clearly of interest to Soderbergh, whose penchant for long-form and multi-protagonist narratives becomes evident with Traffic and continues with the Ocean’s series and Che. Specialized television production, and K Street in particular, enables production practices not available to feature filmmakers, most prominently a condensed work flow that allows a narrow window between filming and release. Significantly, too, the return to television profitably extends both Soderbergh’s and Clooney’s industrial reputations. Allen Scott argues that contemporary Hollywood labor practice privileges a model of advancement based not on “firm-specific human capital and seniority” (i.e., rising up an organization’s ranks over time) but on “reputation as the main currency of worker evaluation.” Consequently, he continues, “[w]orkers adopted as far as possible the strategic imperative of planning their credits and experiences across the entire entertainment industry in the quest to mold their reputations.”1 Soderbergh’s and Clooney’s reestablishment of cross-media creative profiles accords fully with the imperative Scott identifies. Meanwhile, the specific production methods and formal strategies of the HBO series enhance their creators’ artistic signatures. In terms of arcs of Soderbergh and Television 199 creative practice and authorship, K Street in particular demonstrates collaboration and experimentation around narratives of politics and interpersonal relations, features strongly evident in much other screenmedia work with which Soderbergh has been affiliated. K Street’s...