A Television Glossary Developed by David Lavery

1. A Television Glossary Developed by David Lavery

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8. Why TV is Better Than the Movies (Entertainment Weekly) 1) Women thrive on TV. 2) We care more about TV characters. 3) TV does better with drama. 4) In TV, the writer rules. 5) TV is more fun to talk about. 6) TV deals with mature themes more maturely. 7) TV is more convenient. 8) TV does better with less money. 9) On TV, you can change the channel. Television Glossary

9. TV Guide’s Fifty Greatest Shows of All Time 1. Seinfeld 2. I Love Lucy 3. The Honeymooners 4. All in the Family 5. The Sopranos 6. 60 Minutes 7. The Late Show with David Letterman 8. The Simpsons 9. The Andy Griffith Show 10. Saturday Night Live 11. The Mary Tyler Moore Show 12. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 13. The Dick Van Dyke Show 14. Hill Street Blues 15. The Ed Sullivan Show 16. The Carol Burnett Show 17. Today Show 18. Cheers 19. thirtysomething 20. St. Elsewhere 21. Friends 22. ER 23. Nightline 24. Law & Order 25. M*A*S*H 26. The Twilight Zone 27. Sesame Street 28. The Cosby Show 29. Donahue 30. Your Show of Shows 31. The Defenders 32. American Family 33. Playhouse 90 34. Frasier 35. Roseanne 36. The Fugitive 37. The X-Files 38. The Larry Sanders Show 39. The Rockford Files 40. Gunsmoke 41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer 42. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In 43. Bonanza 44. The Bob Newhart Show 45. Twin Peaks 46. Star Trek: The Next Generation 47. Rocky and His Friends 48. Taxi 49. The Oprah Winfrey Show 50. Bewitched Television Glossary

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11. act break: In commercial television, a usually dramatically justifiable interruption, often offering a minor cliffhanger, of an episode created in the narrative by an advertisement. Television Glossary

12. activated text: A television program which generates buzz. Television Glossary

13. adaptation: Transforming a story conceived for another medium (a novel, a play, a comic book/graphic novel, a game, a movie) so that it may be retold in a television series or movie. Television Glossary

14. allusion: A conscious, meaningful reference to another work of art or indeed to anything outside the television text. Television Glossary

15. ancillary text: Both secondary (criticism, publicity) and tertiary (discussion and commentary occurring at the fan level) texts. Television Glossary

16. appointment show:  A favorite television program which a viewer schedules to watch, accommodating his or her life in order to keep an "appointment" with it. Television Glossary

17. arc: A segment of narrative that constitutes an identifiable story element or elements for a character or a series. “Where’s my arc?”—”The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” (The Sopranos Season One) Television Glossary

18. auteur theory: The hypothesis, originating in France in the 1950s as the "politique des auteurs" (as formulated by Truffaut and others) that a movie, though a collaboration (Bergman has likened the making of a film to the construction of a medieval cathedral), is given its essential identity by one person: the director. The body of films of a given director--the work of a director like Fellini, for example, or John Ford, and even that of lesser lights as well--say a James Cameron or a Spike Lee--will, according to the auteur theory, exhibit as well the distinctive signature(s) of its auteur and may be profitably studied as such. Only now emerging in consideration of televison. Television Glossary

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20. backstory: Narrative history, revealed retrospectively, of characters and events that have transpired prior to a story's own present tense. Television Glossary

21. basic cable: Those channels available with a "basic cable" subscription, many of which--AMC, FX, TBS--have begun to offer their own original programming. Mad Men Rescue Me Breaking Bad The Walking Dead Rubicon Damages The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Burn Notice Terriers The Shield Television Glossary

22. beat: In a television episode, an emotional or dramatic mini-climax punctuating the larger story. Television Glossary

23. boutique television: A new, 1990s concept of television programming in the cable era in which programs are developed for small niche audiences with ideal demographics. Television Glossary

24. break: The process of plotting out a single episode of a television series, positioning beats, act breaks, etc. Television Glossary

25. buzz: Cultural talk, at the water cooler and elsewhere, about a television series or other pop culture phenomenon. Television Glossary

26. cliffhanger: A dramatic, episode-ending or season-ending, event intended to bring viewers back next week/next year and to inspire media buzz between episodes/seasons. The most famous cliffhanger in TV history was, of course, the "Who Shot JR?" ending on Dallas (1981). Television Glossary

27. closure: In a narrative, the tying up (at the end of an episode, at the end of a season, or at the end of a series) of key narrative strands in such a way as to produce viewer satisfaction. Television Glossary

28. commodity intertext: Both official and unofficial fiction and non-fiction produced to satisfy the often cultic needs of television fans to know more—much more—and imagine more about their favorite programs. Television Glossary

29. continuous serial: "The storylines of most 'continuous serials' . . . [are] deliberately left hanging at the end of each episode; nearly all plots initiated in a continuous serial were designed to be infinitely continued and extended. . . . the individual episodes of a continuous serial have much more of a linear feel, leading regular viewers to believe they 'could not miss an episode.' . . . in a continuous serial, narrative change is all" (Dolan). Television Glossary

30. convergence culture: "The . . . ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media" (Convergence Culture Consortium). Television Glossary

31. co-optation: The absorption or expropriation of formerly oppositional ideas or practices into the service of ideological discourse. Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi, for example, was intended as an indictment of the insanity of modern American culture, but its visual style has now become prominent in contemporary advertising. Television Glossary

32. connotation: The suggestive or associative sense of an expression that extends beyond its literal definition. A second order system of signification which uses the denotation of a sign as its signifier and adds other meanings, other signfiers, often ideological in nature. A picture of Barack Obama denotes the actual person but connotes radically different meanings on the political left or right. Television Glossary

33. continuity: The ongoing logic and order of a narrative. Since television and movies are routinely shot out of order, making certain that props, sets, costumes, mise-en-scene, action, etc. are consistent and seem to follow naturally out of one another is a major problem for a film director or showrunner. Television Glossary

34. credit sequence: That segment of a movie or television episode's beginning in which the credits appear, either as titles overlaying the action or separately, outside the diegesis. • Memorable Credit Sequences: • Buffy the Vampire Slayer • Dexter • The Sopranos • Northern Exposure • Mad Men • Deadwood • Big Love Television Glossary

35. couch potato: "A person who spends much time sitting or lying down, usually watching television" (Dictionary.com). The child of a couch potato? . . . . Television Glossary

36. couch potato: "A person who spends much time sitting or lying down, usually watching television" (Dictionary.com). The child of a couch potato? A tater tot. Television Glossary

37. cult tv: Television which attracts and sustains a usually small but rabid audience, the members of which begin to use the show in cultish fashion. According to Reeves: "By the 1990s, there were generally two types of cult television shows. The first type, in the tradition of Star Trek, is comprised of prime-time network programs that failed to generate large ratings numbers, but succeeded in attracting substantial numbers of avid fans. Twin Peaks is the most outstanding recent example of this category. Shows of the second type first appear on cable or in fringe timeslots and are narrowly targeted at a niche audience. Comedy Central's Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) and MTV's Beavis and Butthead (B&B) exemplify this category of cult programming that was never intended to appeal to mass audience." Television Glossary

38. cumulative narrative: "Like the traditional series and unlike the traditional 'openended' serial, each installment of a cumulative narrative has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. However, unlike the traditional series and like the traditional serial, one episode's events can greatly affect later episodes. As Newcomb puts it, 'Each week's program is distinct, yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its characters' pasts'" (Reeves). Television Glossary

39. denotation: The literal meaning of an expression. The first order of SIGNIFICATION. A photograph of Barack Obama denotes (is) Barack Obama. Television Glossary

40. diegesis: The fictional world of a narrative--for example, a television series; the "actual" world of the story created by a narrative. Television Glossary

41. dramedy: A 1970s programming innovation in which comedy and drama are merged. Television Glossary

42. episodic serial: "[A] hybrid narrative form, combining the dramatically satisfying finitude of the episodic series with the linear narrative development of the continuous serial," presenting "narratives that were limited in length but multi-episodicin form . . ." (Dolan). Tulloch and Alvarez identify a closely related narrative form which they deem the episodic serial. Episodic serials exhibit continuity between episodes but only for a limited and specified number (ix). The subject of their study, Doctor Who, serves as an example, as does another famous British series, The Prisoner. Horace Newcomb uses a different designation for essentially the same narrative manifestation: "cumulative narrative.” Television Glossary

43. episodic series: “In an ‘episodic series’ (e.g., I Love Lucy or Star Trek), an individual storyline almost never stretched beyond the limits of a single episode. To a certain extent, routine viewers of an episodic series watched in the secure knowledge that, whenever something drastic happened to a regular character like Lucy Ricardo or James T. Kirk in the middle of an episode, it would be reversed by the end of the episode and the characters would end up in the same general narrative situation that they began in. . . . The individual episodes of an episodic series tends to have a circular feel to them, always returning back to their given comedic or dramatic 'situation' . . . . in an episodic series, narrative change is minimized . . ." (Dolan). Each episode tells an independent, discrete, stand-alone story that adds little or nothing to the cumulative memory of the show over seasons/years. Television Glossary

44. fan fiction: Stories written by viewers (and often posted on the web) which make use of a television’s show’s characters in new, sometimes improbable situations. See also slash fan fiction. Television Glossary

45. Executive Producer: The title customarily held by a series’ showrunner. Although the credits may list several Eps, the last named is usually the person in charge. Television Glossary

46. fan-scholar. Matt Hills' term (Fan Cultures) for a fan whose interest/enthusiasm for the work he/she obsessively follow exhibits the kind of academic rigor ordinarily expected of an academic scholar. See also scholar-fan. Television Glossary

47. Finales—seasons, series. Television Glossary

48. flashforward:  Jumping ahead to events which will happen in the diegesis' future tense. Television Glossary

49. flashback  Jumping backward in time to an event that transpired before the story's current diegesis. Television Glossary

50. flexi-narrative. The last two decades of television have seen the spread of what Robin Nelson terms a “flexi-narrative,” a “hybrid mix of serial and series forms . . . mixtures of the series and the serial form, involving the closure of one story arc within an episode (like a series) but with other, ongoing story arcs involving the regular characters (like a serial)” (82). The widespread appeal of the flexi-narrative is not difficult to understand, for it “maximises the pleasures of both regular viewers who watch from week to week and get hooked by the serial narratives and the occasional viewers who happen to tune into one episode seeking the satisfaction of narrative closure within that episode” (Nelson 82). Television Glossary