Three curious genre features of the American TV-series

 Genres are strongly habitual. As we learn to understand or perform a genre, we also learn to accept any number of conventions as normal that may or may not be rational or true. These things become naturalized to the user to such a degree that he or she can move through the genre repeatedly without ever stopping to reflect on their genre-bound conventionality. Here are three such conventions from a genre my long life as a father of small children has given me amble opportunity to experience: the American TV-series of sufficiently unchallenging character to be consumable when very tired.

The “as you know” conversation

Being about interesting people, and not just ordinary dofuses like you and me, the American TV-series frequently moves in environments permeated by experts. Given that the field in question will be a driving force in the plot of individual episodes and longer story arches, some minimal knowledge of the field is required. However, since the viewer, being in fact an ordinay dofus like you and me, cannot be expected to actually understand the field or fields of expertise involved, there is the “as you know”-conversation.

In this genre of conversation, two experts with a deep, shared, field-specific knowledge will engage in an exchange of 101-level knowledge about it. This conversation will be initiated by one of them saying, “as you know …”, or a variation thereof, to her colleague. The other person will then be nodding with encouragement and otherwise look interested in the extended explanation of stuff she knows already, and might even pitch in with a few pieces of entry-level information herself.

Curious addition: House MD omitted the "as you know" conversation from its genre register. By consequence, it's diagnostic discussions are fast-paced, energetic, agonistic, and well-nigh impossible to follow for a lay person. I love them to death, of course.

The strangely – and badly – kept secret

Contrasting genre interpretation.

In a Russian novel, if a character has personal information or even conjecture that should obviously be kept from her significant other, she will immediately storm into a dinner party where her significant other is present and shout it in his face, adding, “you are a bad person Ivan Ivanovitj, a bad and LOW person. You disgust me!” The ensuing chaos from the untimely reveal will then take up the rest of the novel.

However, in an American TV-series, if a character has personal information that should obviously be revealed immediately to his significant other, he will for some unfathomable reason decide that it is imperative that the information is kept secret. I mean, why tell your significant other that you have applied for a job in another state, have discovered a child from a liaison 12 years ago, or has been diagnosed with a crippling degenerative disorder? The secret will then obviously not be kept but instead revealed at the worst possible moment. The ensuing chaos from the aberrant decision to keep it secret in the first place, will then take up several episodes in a story arch.

The P….-moment

If you are a seventeenth century person, the thing to be is “virtuous”. If you are a modern day researcher or research application, the thing to be is “excellent”. However, if you are a character in an American TV-series, the pinnacle of achievement is to make somebody “proud”. Thus, the P….-moment. The moment occurs at emotional high point of a series. It includes high-strung feelings, and declarations about making people proud. It is expressed in sentences like,

·        “I have always been proud of you”,

·        “All I ever wanted, was to make you proud”,

·        “You have made me so proud”,

·        “Your father would have been so proud of you, if he had seen you today”, or

·        Your uncle Ben would have been so proud of you, if he had seen you today”.

(Ok, that last one is Spider Man, obviously, but you get the idea.)

Apparently, making a significant other “proud” counts as the ultimate validation of a person’s being. It means that you are an excellent person in possession of all the necessary virtues to make your life and your contribution to the world meaningful. The P.…-moment activates that validation as a tension in the plot (the “all I ever wanted”, variety), or as its crowning moment and concluding release.

All these genre features are, of course, intimately connected to the plot. And—as you know—it has been known  at least since Aristotle that the plot is at the core of a narrative text. They are all there to enable the action of the plot, as drivers, informers, motivators, and if you see them as plot devices more than anything, and recognize the enormity of the task of establishing any dynamism in a plot structure that has to move through often more than 100-episodes, they will look much less absurd. At least in this case, there’s a method to the genre convention.

I still want to know about the P....-thing, though. Why proud? What is the cultural significance of the word? Why do American characters need to make people proud more than European characters do?