ECREA16-Abstract

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Saturday, November 12

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TVS04

Serial and Reality TV

PP 539

The Earlier Mad Men: Advertising Copywriters in Classic Hollywood

L. Salvador Esteban

Universidad de Valladolid, Historia Moderna- Contemporánea y de América- Periodismo- Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad, Valladolid, Spain

During the golden age of advertising in the US (the 1950s and 1960s), a large number of Hollywood comedies recreated the world of the so-called‘ad men’,

as the Madison Avenue copywriters were nicknamed then. Five decades later, (M)ad Men casts a retrospective glance on a period characterized by change,

when American society was timidly waking up from the American dream of the 1950s and entering the 1960s“age of anxiety”. Created by MatthewWeiner,

the TV series follows the lives of Sterling Cooper’s creative copywriters —the shapers of the American Way of Life and experts in selling the happiness

which, paradoxically enough, they are unable to achieve themselves. The present paper compares the contemporary portrayal provided by the Hollywood

comedies that depicted the heyday of advertising and consumerism during those golden years with Mad Men’s reenactment of that period from a 21

-cen‑

tury perspective. By analyzing the distinct discourses respectively underlying the TV series and the Hollywood movies, we shall assess the extent to which

the recreation of a specific age and a particular narrative context may differ as a result of the historical period in which such a recreation is being performed.

For the purpose of contrasting Mad Men with the above-mentioned Hollywood comedies, our analysis will more specifically focus on the following five

films: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1957), Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), The Thrill of It All (Norman Jewison, 1963), Good

Neighbor Sam (David Swift, 1964) and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (David Swift, 1967). Most of these films were produced at a time

when America was going through a sort of “age of innocence” which the country would not wake up from until the escalating violence that took place in

the aftermath of JFK’s murder in 1963, while Mad Men was born in a period characterized by a widespread crisis that ultimately undermined the American

dream as a collective aspiration —a fact that is reflected in the series’ wistful and pessimistic tone. On the other hand, the retrospective glance taken by

the series furnishes us, fifty years on, with a sounder perspective and a far more nuanced understanding of a major watershed in American history (and

mentality): one which the strictly contemporary portrayal of the Hollywood movies would have hardly grasped in its full depth. Mad Men presents both

the changing world of the 1960s and the America of the 1950s that was being left behind. By contrast, the majority of the Hollywood comedies continued

to reflect the spirit of the“age of innocence”. In those days it would have been impossible to broadcast a show like Mad Men, which unveils the simulacrum

of the“AmericanWay of Life”, since America was at the time a society of advertising believers: a society that was just as enthusiastic as it was naïve.

PP 540

Contesting Frames in Serial TV: Plotting the Pasts, Presents and Transmedia Futures of Mad Men

S. Armbrust

University of Hamburg, Institute for Media and Communication, Hamburg, Germany

John Ellis has described television as a medium that tends to 'mull over”a status quo and 'work through”a 'problematic”until it is exhausted, while closed

forms of narration, like film, tend to transform a state of affairs into a new order. My paper explores how this structural logic can be further explained and

analyzed through a model of serial plotting derived from cognitive narratology. Narratological units and dimensions of analysis, such as the event and

tellability, generally focus on narratives that fundamentally transform their storyworlds. However, these concepts can also be adapted to explore the serial

event as a shift in perspective that leads to the evaluation of a more or less stable state of affairs in a new light. As I will argue, this type of event, achieved

through the evocation of contesting frames of evaluation, can be considered as perhaps the most basic operation of serial plotting. In this way, serial tele‑

vision creates moments that are perceived as surprising, illuminating, and interesting without the type of transformative change that defines other modes

of narration. Instead, this mode of narration draws attention to and negotiates between different evaluative perspectives—or different‘presents’—creat‑

ing complex relationships between different character-based perspectives and different contextual norms. Mad Men offers an outstanding example for this

type of plotting through the juxtaposition of and negotiation between at least five different historical dimensions: (1) the show remediates existing footage

in its portrayal of historical events, but also (2) invents fictional histories for its characters. This creates important present-day contexts of evaluation for

the unfolding story. Furthermore, (3) an intratextual history evolves over the course of the seasons. But most importantly, (4) Mad Men’s presents and pasts

are evaluated from the future standpoint of contemporary creators and audiences, framing the historical period and the fictional storyworld through lenses

of scandalization and nostalgia. Last but not least, (5) Mad Men’s pasts and presents are juxtaposed with contemporary cultural contexts in the professional

and fan-based transmedia practices surrounding the show—that is, when the characters and the historical norms created by the show are evoked in adver‑

tising campaigns for Banana Republic, as personas on Twitter, or in real-life costume parties. In a case study focusing on the close reading of a few selected

examples, my paper will explore the serial plotting and thus, the structural and cultural logic of Mad Men, as a series of re-framings and re-evaluations

across these levels of textual organization, cultural contextualization, and transmedia appropriation.

PP 541

The Peripheral Counter-Flow of Danish TV Drama and the Reasons Behind It: A Non-Anglophone Turn in Global Television?

P.M. Jensen

Aarhus University, Media Studies and Journalism, Aarhus N., Denmark

Lately, Danish public broadcaster DR has not only become a true global exporter of audio-visual drama with series such as Forbrydelsen and Borgen, it is

also setting creative trends within the international television industry. As such, a public broadcaster from a relatively small nation with a language spoken

by only 5.6 million people at the Northern periphery of Europe has created what we could indeed term a peripheral counter-flow. It is a counter-flow that

is peripheral in many senses. Firstly, it is peripheral in a geographic sense. Denmark is on the geographic periphery of if not the entire world, then at least

the Global North. Secondly, Danish is also far from being a world language commanded by larger parts of the world population. Thirdly, the counter-flow is

originating in a public broadcaster in a market dominated by the public broadcasting sector, which also goes contrary to existing theories within the field