Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season

Abstract

Broken on Purpose:Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season Sean O'Sullivan (bio) This essay has two goals. The first is to argue that serial narrative, and in particular serialized television drama, is a poetic enterprise. All serials, by definition, are broken; like poems, they are broken on purpose. This prosodic art, unlike the art of nonserialized fiction, calls attention to itself as an array of parts; it is the art of fracture, of separation, and it is the art of the energy required to stitch together those pieces, just as the art of poetry requires a persistent process of breaking and reconnecting sounds, lines, and stanzas. We need to understand the most ambitious serials of our current gilded age—including such shows as The Sopranos, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Mad Men, and Lost—as a significant branch in poetry's genealogical tree. Although prose fiction has been commonly invoked as the clearest precursor to these televisual enterprises, in fact they recall narrative's [End Page 59] earliest traditions; specifically, they echo oral performances—narratives governed by metrical organization, iteration, and variation. Here I address two crucial pairs of terms—segmentivity and numbers, and meter and rhythm—that connect the infrastructure of poetry to the infrastructure of serial television; and I draw particular attention, by way of example, to the role of anaphora and caesura in the construction of serialized television episodes. In using these terms in the present pilot-study, I hope to do more than just demonstrate the pertinence of poetic structures for the study of serial narrative. Beyond this I aim to show what is distinctively different about some of the most compelling art of the present moment—art that has adapted an ancient cultural technology for innovative purposes. The second goal of the essay is to argue that this process of adaptation has produced a new and significant unit of meaning: the season. When asked to think about long-form televisual storytelling, both authors and critics often have recourse to analogies with the novel; by this logic individual episodes are deemed to be like chapters in a long book (see The West Wing 2003; Ayres 2009; McGrath 2000). But the multiplot spectrum of characters, events, and thematic contexts in a single serialized episode far exceeds the ambit of a traditional novel chapter, which typically emphasizes one narrative cluster rather than the juxtaposition of several. A closer ancestor might be the weekly, monthly, or bimonthly installment of the nineteenth-century serialized novel, such as Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, respectively. These installments—called "parts," or "numbers," or "books"—more closely approximate the shape and variety of an episode; but those earlier installments worked together to serve one contiguous instrument, namely the novel as a whole—whose final length was anticipated by authorial convention (in Dickens's twenty-part stories, following the 1836 success of The Pickwick Papers), or by prescriptive announcement (in serializing journals such as All the Year Round). Television, by contrast, operates from season to season—runs of episodes marked off by significant gaps. With each season separated from the next by several, or many, months, the promise of continuation is almost always in abeyance, vulnerable to cancellation or creative exhaustion. And although hourly television drama has long operated through the medium of seasons, until recently [End Page 60] those seasons have been too long, and too irregular in their alternation between new and old episodes, to offer a sustained narrative experience. The last decade, however, has seen the advent of the thirteen-episode uninterrupted sequence, a system that most closely resembles the poetic stanza. I argue that we need to think of those thirteen episodes as lines of verse, and this new model of the season as something like a sonnet— a clear but flexible shape that both hews to established protocols and breaks those protocols when necessary. Consequently, my next section samples from several shows to provide an overview of how metrical structures (including the season) function in television serials, and my final section uses the first of the true "sonnet-seasons"—namely, season 1 of The Sopranos—to provide a more detailed case study. There I illustrate the role...