STUDY OF TELEVISION
Introduction
Television as a medium for entertainment is something which is not new. We have seen countless of television soap operas to amuse and entertain us. The combination of the spoken word and the visual presentation of stories and shows (as opposed to listening to the radio and reading a book) have been most intriguing and alluring to the viewers.
The extension of color television and further usage of ultra-high frequency program transmission and reception should add to the stature of television as an entertainment medium. Cable television allows for the transmission of shows to the viewers from other parts of the globe for them to be updated.
Although television does have its strong points, it also has some setbacks. The first is, it is of a very high cost of television programs. It is very costly indeed to make a television show. Although we see too many shows on television, we must also think that those who made these shows are either very wealthy or is being supported by individuals who have money.
The second is the uncertainty of a reliable pattern of consumer use of television receiving sets. Unlike radio which requires only part of the listeners’ attention, television demands that viewers must concentrate solely upon it; they must cease all other activities at the same time.
Evidence suggests that viewers will scan television guides/announcements to programs quite carefully and select only those programs that appeal to them, leaving their sets turned off the rest of the time. This is generally true for small households where the members do not share one television.
Television viewing can also affect the lives of the viewers and shape their everyday experience. People use television to entertain themselves everyday. Viewing television is by far the single most time-consuming home activity. It is also the dominant leisure activity of most individuals. Television has much impact on the lives of the viewers. At worst, viewers even imagine themselves as the characters of the show.
Shows that are being aired on television are being regulated by television regulatory boards. But sometimes these regulatory boards are not sufficient by themselves alone. That is why some shows have to have parental guidance. With many shows to choose from in networks, parents also have to be aware and be responsible of the shows that their children watch.
There are also matters of geographic and interest selectivity, flexibility, and identity of the audience in viewing of television shows. This paper will attempt to discuss how these television shows go about using one specific example. For this paper, the example will be the television show ‘Desperate Housewives’ which has been a phenomenon from all over the world.
Context
“Desperate Housewives” has become network television’s biggest out-of-the-box hit in years, reviving the fortunes of ABC, which drop-kicked longtime ratings juggernaut NBC.
Desperate Housewives, part trash TV, part soap, part mystery, part comedy, part satire, follows the lives of five housewives in sub-urban America. Desperate Housewives is Martha Stewart who meets Miss Marple with an acid twist of Twin Peaks. Viewers follow the fortunes of five glossy women through their everyday lives of yoga, conspicuous consumption, domestic suffocation, sex with the gardener and a little light arson.
In the first series of the hit television show, viewers who followed it saw that the super-splendid casts bring the story to life starting, of course, with a death of a woman. Brenda Strong portrayed the role of Mary Alice Young, who committed suicide in one of the first scenes. Although she died by hanging herself, the story of her friends followed after her death.
Susan Mayer, played by the actress Teri Hatcher of ‘Lois and Clark’ fame, is a divorced woman who fell in love with a mysterious plumber named Mike played by the actor Jamie Denton. Susan has one daughter from her first marriage and is living with her. Mike in the later parts of the first series was found out to be a murderer.
Gabrielle Solis, played by the actress Eva Longoria, used to be a model before she married a millionaire named Carlos played by actor Ricardo Chavira. The couple had no children and Gabrielle lived comfortably, soon she had an affair with the neighborhood teenage gardener John Rowland played by the actor Jesse Metcalfe. Towards the end of the series, Gabrielle’s husband Carlos was investigated by the FBI on fraud charges.
Nicollette Sheridan plays the part of the seductress Edie Britt who at the start of the season had her house burning down and she later on progressed through a string of love interests in the series. She is the serial divorcee in the series.
The character Bree Van De Kamp was played by the actress Marcia Cross. She is a neurotic and has had the biggest year of her life in which she nearly divorced her husband Rex played by the actor Steven Culp and discovered her teenage son might be gay. But even through all of these, she still managed to keep her hair in place and their house spotless. She is like an obsessive compulsive woman who just needs to get things done right.
Lynette Scavo played by actress Felicity Huffman, used to be a power figure in the work world. When she got married and had kids, she quit her job and became a full-time mom. She discovered that motherhood was her toughest role yet.
Some of the women in ‘Desperate Housewives’ are very knowing and wise, and the more you know them, the more they are likely to long for escape from this unnamed town somewhere near a big and so-far unnamed city. The street is named, though; and for the record, it’s Wysteria Lane. The town, incidentally, seems just this side, or maybe just that side of your typical Backlot Village, something constructed entirely on studio property the way spotless neighborhoods were for years on TV shows like “Leave It to Beaver” and “My Three Sons,” yet not really looking the way those shows did, even allowing for the requisite updating (, 2004).
One of the things that make “Desperate Housewives” unique is the fact
that the show is propelled by women, by their relationships, their points
of view. The women are the suns; the male characters revolve around them
like planets. Since prime-time network television is driven by female audience
(60 percent), this seems like an obvious choice. But flip through the TV
guide: Male-led sitcoms, macho reality games and endless “procedurals”
(the “CSI” clones) dominate the airwaves (, 2004).
Other than the fact that the show is propelled by women, their relationships and point of view; what drives people to view the television show is that it mirrors real life. We see a group of women friends in real life who are more or less in the same situation. Some female viewers may even see themselves in the shoes of the female characters.
Any discussion of the audience that will view television shows like ‘Desperate Housewives’, then, must look more closely at the specific appeals that such shows make to specific viewers. As we have seen, televisual exhibitionism can be defined as a self-conscious process of stylistic individuation (, 1995). ‘Desperate Housewives’ has its own individual style which drives the audience to get more of it.
The individuation and semiotic heterogeneity evident in televisual excess means that such shows are from the start defined by, and pitched at, niche audiences who are flattered by claims of difference and distinction. A celebration of audience specificity rules the world of televisuality (, 1995).
What exactly appeals to viewers about the television series is already written – it’s ability to mirror real-life situations. And not only that, the superb portrayal of the characters by the actors also brings interest to the audience.
The characterization and story lines in ‘Desperate Housewives’ interact to maintain audience interest and ‘loyalty’ by depicting scenes which people can really relate to. As written in the previous paragraph, the characters seem very real and the way the actors acted makes you think it is really comparable to real life. The story line is also a mirror of real life. Although there are times when viewers think it is a bit exaggerated, on the whole, it still mirror the things which we see in real life.
In the series, we see housewives gossip, talk to other women about their husbands, tell a lie in order to save their skins, quarrel with each other, get jealous, fall in love and so forth. The list is endless. This is what we see in housewives of typical communities.
The mystery added just made the whole storyline interesting and keeps viewers waiting for the next episode. Indeed, there is a mystery to be solved — not only why our faithful narrator blew her brains out, but whether, in fact, this really was a suicide and not a homicide (we don’t see it happen on the screen, I hope you will be happy to learn). That hunky plumber isn’t really a plumber, unless maybe in the Nixonian sense, and though what meets the eye is very comic or very dark or both, there’s clearly more going on for these ‘Desperate Housewives’ than that. Even the use of the term “Housewives” is obviously meant to carry some irony with it (, 2004). The humour in it also keeps viewers interested; it makes the story more real and also gives the viewers a good laugh.
The costumes of the actors in the series also depict their characters. The way they dress suited their characters well. Take for example Gabrielle the former model, viewers can see by the way she dresses that she indeed has been a model. Bree’s way of dressing also mirrors here perfectionistic self.
‘Desperate Housewives’ also has visual style, witty language, borderline surrealism and overall mad attitude, all the more making viewers wait for their episodes.
Television engineers have often acted as closet artists. From the very beginning, developers of production technology have seldom shied away from offering aesthetic theorizations about their new and constantly developing technologies (, 1995). Advancements in technologies play a big part in the scenes created for ‘Desperate Housewives.’
The production style of series as a whole is done well. The camera seemed to be taking the right angles and is used well. Space and settings, lighting, and editing were works of art. They make viewers feel that they are really the mirror images of the real world. The use of this style assists with storytelling, and with the symbolic or metaphoric meanings of storylines. The sub-urbian setting matches the characters in the story and makes viewers feel that the story is very much the same as real life.
In essence, ‘Desperate Housewives’ has a script that never sleeps, and it’s not the kind of show you can watch with your eyes at half-mast or a magazine on your lap. You have to sit there comfortably doing nothing while watching it. There’s a sleek, sly, sardonic quality to the production that maintained down to the teeniest detail, and the happiest example of a female ensemble clicking and quipping since “Sex and the City” (, 2004).
Despite of the television series’ popularity, ‘Desperate Housewives’ has been condemned by feminists. They were accused of featuring every bad female stereotype, as well as demeaning the very essence of motherhood. The show breaks many taboos, not least that ordinary women see younger men as delicious morsels to be sampled at will, just like older men have always seen younger women in real societies.
Many advise that parents and youngsters shouldn’t watch the program. There is fun mystery and great characters in the show that keeps the audience glued. It’s great to see women interacting – viewers especially women can feel the support, friendship and interactions that they saw in ‘Desperate Housewives’ episodes.
When a desperate housewife attempts a locker-room seduction of a Philadelphia Eagles star, the network has been scolded by the American Family Association, which encourages a boycott of sponsors. It will offend those with squeamish tastes. It was designed that way. Feminists with no sense of humor complain that it’s post-feminist, a throwback to the sizzling sex hidden behind the facades of Peyton Place (, 2004).
‘Desperate Housewives’ continues to be one of the most popular shows on primetime television and a pop culture phenomenon. It has even gone as far as creating games for the computer. That’s how addicted some people are. Buena Vista Games, Inc. (BVG), the interactive entertainment arm of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), announced in March 2006 that it will publish Desperate Housewives, a lifestyle simulation PC game based on the top-rated, Golden Globe-winning ABC-TV series, produced by Touchstone Television (, 2006).
The PC game is the latest extension of the successful global Desperate Housewives franchise, joining a recently announced fragrance launching this fall, a best-selling Season 1 DVD, a board game, a high end line of apparel, a Desperate Housewives online store, mobile ringtones, graphics, personalized application, and an upcoming cookbook.
The show also paved way for the actors and actresses to be noticed of their superb acting talent. Felicity Huffman even won an award for her role in the series and has given her a chance to appear in the big screen.
Television viewing can shape the everyday experience of individuals. Viewers can identify with the characters of the show. Viewers may often go to lengths of copying the characters of their favorite television shows. And it will also not be surprising when mothers would name their newborn baby girls of Susan or Bree.
This isn’t bad at all. Although it does have some setbacks sometimes, the entertainment one gets from viewing television shows can somehow get some people through their daily lives. People will use the television characters as their role models and in some ways do strive for the best. On the contrary, television shows can also be bad especially if teenagers will learn so many things from there that they shouldn’t at their age.
Television has influenced a lot in our society today. People usually follow what they see in the television, sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. People also get their fashion sense in the characters they see in the television. They follow how the actors and actresses dress in their roles. Some even imitate the way these characters get through life.
This isn’t bad but we all have lives separate from these boob tubes. The bad side of too much television is that sometimes some people forget to attend to their duties and responsibilities in real life because they are so caught up in the imaginary world they have created by their constant television viewing.
The ladies of “Desperate Housewives” who live on Wisteria Lane are more surreal than real, but share enough of a comic-tragic mix to render the social commentary funny and painful in a sub-urban theatre of the absurd. As in the ’90’s movie, “The Big Chill,” the leading character – the most desperate housewife, you might say – has committed suicide and all those who knew her have to speculate why. This brings out the brutishness of men, the bitchiness of women and the brattiness of their children. The red badge of courage for these desperados of the kitchen sink is drawn from blood, strawberry jam or a spilled Bloody Mary (, 2004).
Conclusion
The hit television series ‘Desperate Housewives’ is the newest show to capture the attention of the viewers. It has a witty and mysterious plot and mirrors real-life situations. The production is very well done and the storyline and characters are very much a representation of things and situations we see in reality.
The casts of the series are also very good in portraying their respective roles. They portray their roles as if they have been in such situations all along. Aside from the casts, the setting of the series is also very fitting for such story.
Television can shape the lives of the viewers. Viewers imitate what they see in television whether it is good or bad. The choice though is in every individual.
References
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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