I have found investigative television preferable to watch mostly because although I will be put on edge all through the episode, television finds a solution by the end of the episode. The criminals are found and imprisoned, and the sick people have successful surgeries. It all ties up nicely, and I do not have to wait for the next episode. I have found the ways of television’s “working through” to be very interesting. In my second paper, I wrote about a clip in Castle where television’s way of working through the given mystery was very much like ours as described by Freud- the character repeated a blocked memory as an action. Now, I would like to look at the ways through which television uses itself to work through its problems. By itself, I refer to the very form of television- its screenic nature, its programme line up and its multiplicity.
In his essay Working Through: The Age of Uncertainty, John Ellis writes that the process of working through, for television, is not a straightforward process but rather a multi-faceted and leaky process involving a constant process of making and remaking meanings, and exploring possibilities. The characters try to solve the crime with the evidence they have gathered, creating different scenes and making them fit in the jigsaw. Where it doesn’t make sense, the pieces are moved around or new pieces are found. Television, in the clips I have chosen works through this messy and multi-faceted process using what I have come its very form.
In the ‘Elevator Love Letter’ from Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Shepard proposes in an unusual yet very romantic way using CT scans of patients from surgeries he had performed- with Meredith or because of Meredith.
In her essay, Guided by TV, Lynne Joyrich talks about a habit of collecting TV guides, something I thought was disturbing but as she argues, schedule and flow are not one and the same, but that the schedule yields a certain understanding and awareness to the complexity and implications of the flow (215). In his proposal, Derek presented what would be the ‘schedule’ of his relationship with Meredith with the CT scans. Meredith is a very emotionally complicated character who would be very hard to propose to, and Derek must present a coherent argument as to why they should get married to get past her defenses. It resonates directly with what Joyrich says about TV Guide when writes, ‘That is, in its efforts to make television coherent, TV Guide doesn’t just arrange, but rearranges TV, transforming the characteristic flow of commercial television- that flux of textual bits which, paradoxically, creates a sense of continuity precisely through the discontinuity of interwoven program segments…’ The CT scans in the ‘Elevator Love Letter’ are not the relationship. Not exactly. They are evidence of the relationship, each CT scan representing a part of the flow; their first surgery, another after which he ‘kissed you in the hallway’ and another where ‘Dr. Bailey kicked you out of surgery because she caught us in the car.’ This seemingly continuous collection of scans, very much like screens, is the evidence that the Derek presents to Meredith to work through the relationship and decide that it was worth going to the next step.
In Castle, the characters usually work through their cases using a board in their offices that then serve as a visual aid, a flow chat or just a ‘work-through’ board. In the ‘Double Down’ episode where the team solves two murders, they create a timeline for their murderer. (up to 0.20)
Joyrich talks about a responsiveness that is created when watching TV. She writes about the television viewers not being passive. In both clips from Grey’s Anatomy and Castle, the experience is shifted to the other end of the television screen. Naturally I do not expect any form of passiveness from the television characters, but their responsiveness and critical responsibility is a result of looking at screens that are like program line-ups in the case of the clip from Castle and a collection of schedules to give coherence to flow in the one from Grey’s Anatomy. Heidi Rae Cooley in her essay It’s all about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision talks about this kind of responsive relationship and calls it screenic seeing, as opposed to window-ed seeing where the viewer would simply see through instead of looking at the screen (143). In viewing the screenic devices like the board in the NYPD offices, or the CT scans from patients, the characters ‘enter into a relationship with the screen’ (143) since they converge and fuse with that which they look at. The screens are not films or boards anymore in the encounter with the characters but exist, separate from their frames, as evidence of a relationship with marriage potential or a murderer’s schedule. In the clip from ‘Smoked’, episode 10 from the fourth season of NCIS, we see the interaction that Cooley explores between the hand, device and the screen.
Dinozzo and Ziva, use the remote to access different slides on the screen as they displayed evidence they had found and collected to Special Agent Gibbs, their boss. Here, there is a participating hand accompanying the seeing and this is the tactile vision (145) that creates the fit helping the characters to work through their case. Television uses this visual lay out- on the screen, on the board, and on the CT scan film to link together discrete scenes merging them to work through to one final solution at the end of the episode.
In all three clips, we see use of different screenic devices that television utilizes to put together discrete scenes to create a flow in each of the series. Mimi White in her essay, Crossing Wavelengths: The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American Commercial Television explores how explicit discontinuity is threaded together in diegetic brilliance through inter-program referentiality in televisual texts. Here, television is still a multiform body that somehow manages to find continuity in its multiplicity- except this time not with other televisual texts but with other screenic devices.
There have been many times, for several people, that they have sat and stared at their television sets looking for ‘clues’ from discrete scenes, probably even different texts, to find a solution. They enter a relationship with it and collect evidence to work towards a solution to their problem. It seems that the experience is the same on either side of the television screen.
