Intro to TV Drama Unit

Unit G322: Key Media Concepts (TV Drama)











Textual Analysis And Representation

Introduction To TV Drama

Aims/Objectives

1.Introduce students to the concepts of TV drama.
2.Explain the exam format.
3.Introduce methods of working through blogging

What We Will Be Studying

The purpose of Section A of the Unit G322: Key Media Concepts paper is to assess your media textual analysis skills and your understanding of the concept of representation using a short unseen moving image extract (AO1, AO2).

The examination is two hours (including 30 minutes for viewing and making notes on the moving image extract) and you are required to answer two compulsory questions. The unit is marked out of a total of 100, with each question marked out of 50.

There are two sections to this paper but in these lessons we will be focusing on Section A. The two sections of the paper are:

Section A: Textual Analysis and Representation (50 marks)
Section B: Institutions and Audiences (50 marks)

Section A: Textual Analysis and Representation

In the exam you will watch an extract from an unseen TV Drama, which will be approximately four to five minutes long. The extract will be taken from a contemporary British one-off or series or serial drama programme. You will then need to demonstrate textual analysis of all of the following technical areas of moving image language and conventions in relation to the unseen extract:

Camera Angle, Shot, Movement and Composition
Mise-en-Scène
Editing
Sound

The focus of study for Section A is the use of technical aspects of the moving image medium to create meaning for an audience, focusing on the creation of representations of specific social types, groups, events or places within the extract.

Genre
Genre is a French word for ‘Type’. ‘Genre’ is a critical tool that helps us study media texts, producers, and audience responses to texts by dividing them into categories based on common elements.

Generic Characteristics
The aim of genre is to classify media texts based on shared characteristics. These characteristics, which are known as generic characteristics or generic elements, are the ingredients that make up a particular genre. These elements fall into the following categories:
1.Typical Mise-en-scène/Visual style (iconography, props, set design, lighting, temporal and geographic location, costume, shot types, camera angles, special effects).
2.Typical types of Narrative (story, plots, historical setting, set pieces).
3.Themes (the underlying messages, ideas, concepts the story deals with).
4.Generic Types/Stock Characters, i.e. typical character types (do typical male/female roles exist, archetypes?).

TV Drama Sub-genres
A ‘sub-genre’ is where genres are subdivided into even more specific categories. TV Drama sub-genres include:
Teen Dramas: These depend entirely on the target audience empathising with a range of authentic characters and age-specific situations and anxieties, e.g. Skins.
Soap Operas: These never end, convey a sense of real time and depend entirely on audiences accepting them as ’socially realist’, e.g. Coronation Street.
Costume Dramas: these are often intertexually linked to ‘classic’ novels or plays and offer a set of pleasers that are very different to dramas set in our own world contexts and times, e.g. Sharpe.
Medical/Hospital Dramas: These interplay our vicarious pleasure at witnessing trauma and suffering on the part of patients and relatives with a set of staff narratives that deploy sop opera conventions, e.g. Holby City.
Police/Crime Dramas: These work in the same way as medical/hospital dramas but we can substitute the health context for representation of criminals and victims, e.g. The Bill.
Docu-dramas: these are set apart from the other by their attempts to dramatise significant real events, which usually have human interest, celebrity focus or political significance, e.g. Hamburg Cell.



Narrative Structure
The term ‘Narrative‘ refers to both a text’s story line and the techniques used to tell the story.

Enigma
The word ‘Enigma’ means ‘a problem to be solved’ and dramas are all about solving problems.

According to Cook (1985), the standard narrative structure of a drama should have “Linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution”.

This sounds very complicated but basically it means that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end (linearity), in which something happens (cause and effect), causing a series of problems (enigmas) which to be solved (resolution).

Tzvetan Todorov
In ‘The Grammar of Narrative’, Tzvetan Todorov1► developed a theory of narrative structure, which explains how stories work; basically they have a beginning, middle and end (usually, but not necessarily in that order).

1.Equilibrium
2.Disruption
3.Disequalibrium
4.Resolution
5.New Equilibrium

Stage 1: Equilibrium
Equilibrium means balance, so the first part of a story establishes what is normal for the world the story takes place in. It introduces the audience to the main characters, creates a believable sense of a time and place for the story to take place in and sets up the story.

Stage 2: Disruption
In order to create drama, this equilibrium needs to be disrupted by an outside force, often creating an enigma. This disruption has to be fought against in order to return to a state of normality (equilibrium).

Stage 3: Disequilbirim
The protagonist(s) recognise that a disruption has occurred and must work to overcome the disruption, solve the enigma and return to a state of normality. Goals are set in order to achieve a return to equilibrium.

Stage 4: Resolution
It is only possible to re-create equilibrium through action directed against the disruption so obstacles are overcome in order to achieve a return to equilibrium. The disruption is resolved, the damage is repaired, the enigma is solved or the enemy is defeated.

Stage 5: Establishment Of A New Equilibrium
Everything cannot return to normal however. In the process of working to overcome the disruption the protagonist(s) has/have changed, grown and developed as a character(s). A new state of normality is established but things can never be quite the way they were. Often the change is for the better.

Stock Character Types
Different genres all have specific stock character types but all narratives feature standard character types that are needed to tell a story.

Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Propp► in his 1928 book The Morphology Of The Folktale2 studied the narrative structure of Russian Folk Tales. Propp concluded that regardless of the individual differences in terms of plot, characters and settings, such narratives would share common structural features. These features included the functions of particular character types and these character types can be adapted to study any narrative, not just those of fairy tales. Propp’s key character types are:
1.The Villain: the hero’s antagonist who causes a disruption.
2.The Donor: Someone who provides the hero with an essential object.
3.The Helper: Someone who helps the hero.
4.The Princess: The prize for the hero (not necessarily a person and may be an object).
5.Her Father: The person who rewards the hero.
6.The Dispatcher: May set the hero a task.
7.The Hero: the protagonist who fights against the disruption.
8.The False Hero: a deceptive character.

Verisimilitude And Diegesis
TV Dramas need to create a sense of taking place is a believable, realistic world. The sense of the fictional place and time the narrative takes place in is referred to as the narrative’s diegesis.

The diegetic world the narrative takes place in also needs to appear realistic or believable. The believability of the diegesis is referred to as its verisimilitude (literally – the quality of appearing to be true or real). For a story to engage us it must appear real to us as we watch it (the diegetic effect).

The story must therefore have verisimilitude – following the rules of continuity, temporal (time) and spatial (space) coherence etc.

Creating a believable environment in which the action can take place, is especially important in historical dramas, such as the ◄BBC/HBO Co-production Rome (2005), or science fiction dramas such as Dr. Who where a believable world must be created entirely from scratch.

Action Codes
According to Tilley (1991) ‘Action Codes’ are a short hand way of advancing a narrative. Action codes are part of the ‘Continuity Editing System’ and are used to signal to the audience that something is about to happen, helping the audience to predict what is going to happen next. According to Tilley, for example, the packing of a suitcase ‘signals’ confrontation, panic or escape in a Thriller.

Action Codes are, therefore, a device by which a resolution is produced through the action – fight scene, gun battle, car chase etc. You can see what is going to happen (the resolution) by visual codes presented. Narratives can be shown and developed through the action (often on the part of the protagonist).