The chapter “Locating Televisual in Golden Age Television” of Caren Deming organizes television according to five aspects: temporality, spatiality, aurality, femininity, and hybridism. The author analyzes television in its origins, in the middle of the last century, based on the idea that society has idealized that television model of the 50s and feels a certain nostalgia for that type of television. The elements that define the televisual are born during what is called the “Golden Age” of television when the social culture was based on the traditional family model and the female figure was stereotyped: Caren Deming analyzes the series The Goldbergs to represent her theses in the chapter. The author explains extensively what televisual is, defining the term as “a complex of formal tendencies that shape television works and their reception”, focusing on narrative television. It is interesting to highlight how Deming mentions some relevant authors in the explanation of the characteristics of televisual.

The idea of temporality is linked to flow, “real-time” and liveliness. Deming uses several concepts developed by Raymond Williams, such as commercials interruptions that create a series of time units and engage the audience in the television experience. The units of time are sold to the brands to introduce commercials and thus maintain a certain repetition in the programming. Connected to the idea of time, repetition and flow, advertising is an indispensable element in television, as brands have taken advantage of the television screen as a showcase present in all the houses and much more impressive than radio. Speaking of the flow, the arrival of the remote control is taken into account, because it has given more control to the audience since 1950 with “Lazy Bones”, as Uricchio mentioned. From that moment, the audience has begun to have decision power. Deming also addresses the concept of liveliness exposing the fact that live television tries to portray a kind of reality, which ends up being a dramatization of reality. The author also mentions Herberts Zett in his theory that live television is itself an ideology. 

This characteristic of liveliness brings me to mind the philosophical conception of art in Plato, that is not closely linked to television, but it can be compared in some way to the pattern in which human beings have represented reality over the centuries. According to Plato, art aims to imitate nature, but it never gets it completely, so it ends up being something that takes us away from the purest reality. While the ancient Greeks sculpted statue to represent public and popular characters (and that was the art form chosen by them), in our society we know these same figures thanks to television, advertising, and propaganda. Anyway, although we want to represent social reality with all its varieties, we never get it and we end up synthesizing it through stereotypes.

The concept of spatiality is linked, according to Deming, to the idea of depth. While cinema seeks depth, television wants to maintain the two-dimensional plane as if the viewer were watching reality from a window. The depth in television, on the other hand, is replaced by aurality. People who watch television also listen to it, so the sense of hearing is involved: sound depth constitutes the element of aurality according to Deming. Based on the type of flow, television uses different linguistic records and “speaks”, as the author says, in a certain sense.

Since in the 60s (when advertising began to grow) the role of women was largely limited to taking care of children and the house, television commercials were aimed primarily at the female audience. Although the man was often the one who maintained the family from a financial point of view, it was the woman who made the purchases, so she decided which product to buy. The male audience, according to Deming, has wanted to “masculinize” television because it focused especially on women. The term “misogyny” appears in the text when talking about the rejection that women have had to face in the television field. I agree with Deming when she says that the ads are still clearly aimed at women, especially when they want to promote a cleaning or cosmetic product. Women (or the idea of women and femininity) remain, in a way, an object in the hands of consumerism. The idea of “structured polysemy” is seen in the concept of femininity of television since it is governed by meanings that are the most beneficial for those who have political and economic power.

Finally, the concept of hybridism in televisual is what Deming defines as “television resistance to formal categories”. According to the author, television oscillates between reality and fantasy, since although it wants to represent reality, it offers us a representation of it. This concept is also linked to liveliness mentioned above, but it concerns mostly the concept of intertextuality, which is the connection between the texts mentioned by Mimi White.

One of the most interesting aspects of Caren Deming is the fact that she applies the characteristics of televisual to describe The Goldbergs. She talks about domestic comedy and Gertrude Berg, one of the creators of this genre. 

The Goldbergs presented a family with Jewish origins whose central figure was the mother, which in the series embodied the aesthetic and conceptual center. The viewer could notice it by the fact that the only character that could address the public, speaking in front of the camera, was her. At that point, the flow, the integrated advertising and the concept of femininity came into play, because the mother figure announced products to the female audience.

In conclusion, although The Goldbergs embodied ideals related to the era in which it was broadcast, we can find these same cultural references and televisual features on today’s television.

References

Uricchio, William. Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Duke University Press, 2005.

White, Mimi. “Crossing Wavelengths: The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American Commercial Television.” Cinema Journal, 1986, pp. 51–64.

Williams, Raymond. Television Technology and Cultural Form. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.