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  • Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling by Jason Mittell
  • Sarah Kozloff (bio)
Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling by Jason Mittell. New York University Press. 2015. $89.00 hardcover; $27.00 paper. 416 pages.

By “complex TV,” Jason Mittell is referring to a narrative style popular in American television series since, by his calculation, the early 1990s.1 “Complex” is the opposite of the excessively obvious style of narration that David Bordwell identified as the hallmark of classical Hollywood cinema.2 In excessively obvious media texts, viewers are almost never confused about time and space, who characters are, what their motivations might be, or what is happening on the screen. In recent decades all these certainties have been scrambled, particularly in complicated mixtures of episodic and serial story structures, so that story lines and unsolved mysteries persist throughout a show’s season, or even throughout its entire run. What Mittell sets out to map are the contours of a newish mode of television narrative, a mode that makes viewers turn to one another and say, “Wait—who is that?” or “Wait—what just happened?” and go running to look up episode recaps online.

By “poetics,” Mittell signals that for the most part his intent is to identify and describe the formal properties that create such textured narratives. This contrasts with his earlier textbooks, Genre and Television and Television and American Culture, which cover broader subjects in less depth.3

Complex TV reminds me most of Seymour Chatman’s seminal Story and Discourse by offering a vocabulary that helps identify a series’s [End Page 159] distinctive narrative features.4 As with Chatman, Mittell has gathered some of these terms from previous theorists, while others are his coinage. For instance, Mittell terms the Wikipedia recaps I read “orientating paratexts.” Another term I find particularly useful and intend to coopt, “narrative special effect,” occurs “when a program flexes its storytelling muscles to confound and amaze a viewer.”5 Just like Story and Discourse, which is both accessible and wise, Mittell’s study will be a boon to both scholars and students, providing the tools to grasp the particular ways these television programs work. In its breadth and insight, this study provides the answers we’ve been searching for about what makes contemporary television so rich and satisfying.

His chapters follow one another logically and neatly: he begins with “Beginnings” and concludes with “Ends” (which includes a bravura discussion of the much-debated, black-screen ending of The Sopranos [HBO, 1999–2007]).6 I find his chapter “Characters” particularly salutary for the field as a whole, which does not often acknowledge viewers’ intense parasocial attachment to characters.7 Mittell brings in Murray Smith’s helpful terminology concerning “alignment” (focalization) and “allegiance” (which implies a moral judgment).8 Mittell is correct that series characters don’t often truly change; instead—through repetition, elaboration, and backstories—viewers merely get an impression of change because we learn more about them. Mittell offers another exceptional analysis when he tackles the appeal of television’s famous antiheroes Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), and Walter White (Bryan Cranston). He sees this appeal as stemming from viewer fascination with the dark side, from the protagonists’ relative morality in comparison to other characters, and from their charisma, arguing that, of the three, Walter is the most intriguing because he breaks the pattern by actually changing throughout Breaking Bad’s run (AMC, 2008–2013).

“Serial Melodrama” is another chapter that I hope will reorient the field.9 Here Mittell discredits the theory that complex TV merely co-opted the format of daytime soap operas and seduced male viewers by adding grittier subject matter. As he notes, daytime soaps relied on a great deal of narrative redundancy (and, from my viewing, leaned heavily on dialogue, close-ups, and studio shooting) to crank out five episodes a week. By contrast, the programs Mittell examines in this book showcase none of those formal characteristics. Jumping off from the work of Linda Williams and Robyn Warhol, however, Mittell insists that we recognize the underlying emotional pull of prime-time shows.10 Along with providing puzzles to...

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