Television's World(s), Meet Ours Pt. 2

David Foster Wallace, in his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” writes that television as a whole exists to “ensure as much watching as possible” (DFW 162). To this extent, “television somehow trains or conditions our viewership” (DFW 164), largely by flattering the viewer’s ability to discern irony and tease out embedded textual references. On a smaller scale, as Mimi White notes in “Crossing Wavelengths,” her assessment of television’s interconnected fictional worlds, long-term viewers “are in the advantageous position of understanding the rules of the game” (White 61). The ideal viewer is a dedicated viewer, and the series Deadwood doesn’t hide the fact that it seeks to nurture and encourage long-term viewing. Like Bored to Death, Deadwood consists of a distinct fictional world, governed by its own rules and conventions. One such rule is that characters, especially the central character Al Swearengen, often speak in soliloquies. In Season 2, Al starts to soliloquize with greater frequency, as if he's onstage speaking directly to the audience at a play (which is part of the show's distinctly theatrical quality). In the eighth episode of the season, Al offers an explanation for his practice of speaking to himself.

It turns out he has been addressing neither himself nor the audience, but “chief,” the severed Indian head that he’s been toting around inside an enclosed package. For long-term viewers, this scene reflects on the show’s unconventional logic and provides a facetious explanation for Al’s penchant for monologues. The package is an arbitrary prop, a stand-in for us in the audience, who are the actual addressees of his speeches.

Jeffrey Sconce refers to scenes of this sort as “ ‘metareflexive,’ meaning they depend on the long-term viewer’s knowledge and appreciation of the modes of narration and emplotment characteristic of the series as a whole” (Sconce 106). We are expected to understand the show’s conventional narrative modes, to know its characters and series architecture, in order for this scene’s wry self-reflexivity to resonate with us. Television trains us in this mode of knowledge by fostering a hyper-sensitivity to irony. A large-scale irony is at the heart of Deadwood, residing in the space between the visual and the verbal. In its setting, costumes, and real-life characters, Deadwood visually grounds itself in a specific visual era—1870s Dakota territories.

Yet as the show inhabits that past, it also thrives in another distinct temporal world, the present, as characters, especially Al, liberally pepper their speech with anachronistic modern expletives. Because the show exists as its own fictional universe, we understand that such language (ab)use is part of that universe. The show's conventional look butts up against its unconventional language, resulting in a disarmingly non-realist diegetic world which self-reflexively draws attention to the fact that it exists as an independent unit of fiction with its own rules and logic. By emphasizing irony and conditioning our dedicated viewership, television trains us to recognize its fictional worlds and to comprehend how they function.