The Single-Series Monograph: A New Approach to TV Studies

Reading Walter Metz’s disagreements with other interpreters of Bewitched (ABC, 1964–1972), I found myself smiling at how nuanced and granular the professional study of television has become, not to mention how optimistic many publishers seem to be about the commercial prospects of books devoted to a single TV series. The monographs from three different press series considered here all reflect (to differing degrees) a level of seriousness and specialization in TV studies that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. All aim to understand the institutional contexts of television production, and all recognize that television shows are ambivalent, multivoiced, sometimes contradictory expressions of their culture.

Formatted with attractive modesty as general introductions, the Milestones volumes aim to appeal both to students enrolled in TV courses and to a popular audience interested in favorite shows. But it’s difficult to believe the three titles under review will satisfy either audience. Imagine a fan’s encounter with this sentence from David Scott Diffrient’s book on M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–1983): “The rise of Alda’s star status and its eventual decline during the Reagan years thus marked a paradigm shift in the epistemological terrain subtending masculinity studies.”¹ As this discouraging sentence suggests, Diffrient’s prose is often imprecise and jargon ridden; he speaks of the “motivic focus” of the series and sometimes relegates the substance of his argument to parenthetic clauses in meandering sentences that turn into entire paragraphs.² This verbal imprecision mirrors and surely intensifies a recurring conceptual imprecision, in which suggestive and potentially significant arguments come to seem simplistic or overly general.

But if these limitations make it an unlikely choice for fans or for teachers considering texts for their courses, the book nonetheless has value for scholars and serious readers. Its most original contribution is its treatment of the series’ ambiguous relation to the Korean War. As Diffrient notes, despite its ostensible setting during that conflict, the series was widely seen—even by its writers—as a response to the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, M*A*S*H ’s third year on the air.

Diffrient recognizes that the show’s antiwar sentiments reflect the Vietnam era. But he also claims that the program “did more to inscribe the idea of ‘Korea’ in America’s collective unconscious than any other cultural production of the twentieth century.”³ The unprovable grandeur of this assertion—which he first makes in his introduction and then repeats verbatim ninety-five pages later!—may feel excessive, but Diffrient’s chapter on the Korean elements in the series is instructive and levelheaded. Drawing on a range of scholarship on the representations of Asians in American media and on his own readings of specific episodes, Diffrient demonstrates that M*A*S*H was “simultaneously regressive and progressive” in its treatment of Korean characters and culture.⁴

His narrative of the general evolution of the series emphasizes the way in which its central characters deepened as the program itself became less satiric and antiauthoritarian, the high jinks and antiwar satire yielding to a focus on personal relationships and multicultural pieties. Diffrient’s background in ethnic and gender studies explains what’s valuable in his book but also its limitations; his readings are essentially thematic and ideological, and even his perceptive account of the series’ growing interest in character underestimates the significance of the cumulative, accretive power inherent in the series format, a power that M*A*S*H was among the first television programs to exploit seriously.

Metz tells us early on that...