Introduction: Recentering Television Performance

there is little dispute that television was a performance-centered medium when it emerged in postwar popular culture. Vaudeville-cum-radio stars such as Milton Berle, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Lucille Ball, and Jackie Gleason figured prominently as TV’s first brands and ambassadors, drawing audiences in the process to the new medium’s capacities for conveying their layered acting labor on a weekly basis. Viewers encountered in these often-spontaneous performances movements between expressive coherence and incoherence that respectively masked and called attention to the actor’s labor. Their popularity indexed television’s theatrically derived origins and provided these performers and performances subsequent currency in the medium’s early years. Given that it is a descendant of the actor-centric medium of the stage, it should come as little surprise that many of television’s first stars hailed from the same performative background.

Despite TV’s initial reliance on live—and increasingly recorded—performance, it has largely been perceived as a writer’s medium, whereas actors have been aligned with theater and directors with film. Scholars have historically been complicit in these exclusionary categorizations. They validate certain classes of above-the-line television contributors—namely, writers and directors—as auteurs while subsuming the labor of others, most notably actors, to often-anonymous pools of collaborators. Such elisions give the illusion of actors’ agreement with the creative vision of the television showrunner or director, reifying a skewed picture of screen labor disconnected from performers. Only within the past three decades have scholars moved in earnest to counter this trend, and even then the interventions have focused almost exclusively on film. James Naremore, Sharon Marie Carnicke, Cynthia Baron, Philip Drake, Diane Carson, Lisa Bode, and others have respectively called for performance and performers to be recentered in theoretical and historical analysis of cinema. The Journal of Film and Video, Cinema Journal, and other publications have devoted significant space to articles, bibliographies, and dialogues about the analytical and ontological complexities of film acting. These incisive, paradigm-shifting interventions constitute a crucial bulwark against the erasure of screen performance, yet they have continually overlooked the small screen for its larger cousin.

It is not entirely surprising, however, that scholarly recuperations of film acting have not fully extended to television. In fact, it seems a logical outgrowth of both the long critical omission of screen performance and TV’s tenuous legitimacy. Midcentury stage and screen shifts toward naturalistic performance styles, for example, likely played an important part in acting’s enigmatic status. Though the medium initially favored the theatricality of its stage- and radio-based talent, the evolution of comedic performance failed to generate much critical attention or respect. At the same time, the naturalism already permeating theater and film infiltrated television to become its de rigueur mode of dramatic acting. The implications for television here are significant, given its relative infancy when this occurred. If, as James Naremore asserts, naturalism “conceal[s] the fact that actors produce signs,” then the proliferation and perception of this heralded performance style early in TV’s popular existence both “disguise[d] the workings of ideology” and obscured the relevance of performance and performer on broader sociocultural, critical, theoretical levels (49).

In the meantime, efforts to recuperate TV have focused on its axiomatic linkage with writing rather than the possibilities offered by acting and actors. Institutional, critical, and scholarly validation has thus often rested on narrative complexity, redirecting potential explorations of performance toward discussions of storytelling, character development, and representation. Even when television is praised, the very notion of “good” or “quality” TV is often predicated on a program’s exceptionality in a televisual landscape broadly conceived as contemptible. Such discourse routinely overshadows TV acting’s connections to its stage predecessors, consequently devaluing the skills and labor necessary to produce content and distancing the significance of performance from its larger contexts of reception.

Though television studies scholars have recuperated certain aspects of the medium, critical accounting for TV has yet to take up performance in any substantive fashion. Jeremy Butler, Roberta Pearson, Karen Lury, and Sue Turnbull are among...