Primetime Goes Hammerstein: The Musicalization of Primetime Fictional Television in the Post-Network Era

Abstract

Over the past decades, ongoing changes in the way we watch, make, sell, and tell stories have contributed to the continued blurring of the lines of media specificity.As contemporary viewers turn away from once tried-and-true network lineups, they often revel in the freedom gained through the possibility of binge-viewing television shows on Netflix and Hulu, or they tune in indiscriminately to network or cable shows through their DVRs, mobile apps, or new Apple devices.Along with these shifts in viewing and distribution, shifts in television storytelling-often discussed in the context of original cable programming, quality drama, "complex" narratives, and cinematic aesthetics-have greatly altered the very content of once entrenched television genres.Although television scholarship has embraced many of these formal shifts, much of the discussion has been relegated to more in-vogue genres such as the serial drama, cult, and sci-fi programming.Simultaneously, however, scholarship often marginalizes how the more subtle permeation of cinematic and theatrical generic tropes may trend across television content.Since the late 1990s, fictional television characters-dramatic, comedic, animated, supernatural, and soapy-have found themselves bursting into song.Not merely a product of the stylishness of the "meta" or a rise of genre blending, this musical influx reflects how topical and industrial shifts on the Broadway stage and big and small screens created an environment ripe for rousing musical production numbers across television programming.The musical did not suddenly burst on the small screen in the nineties, but shifts in television, film, and theatre led to the cultivation of an environment that invited a renewed musicalization across television forms, one that 1

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