In the episode of Will & Grace titled “Lows in the Mid-Eighties,” the gang spends the night before Thanksgiving waiting to be seated for dinner together. They meet a woman who shares her worries about her current relationship with a dancer-boyfriend, who everyone else realizes is gay. This incites multiple flashbacks to the Thanksgiving of 1985, when Will and Grace were dating. In an effort to postpone sex with Grace, Will proposes marriage, but ultimately cannot go through with it and decides to finally come out of the closet and tell Grace that he is gay. In the following clip we see how Will and Grace dealt with this situation in the past.
In two separate flashbacks, Will comes out to his friend Rob and Grace recounts the story to her friend Ellen, a couple Will and Grace continue to be friends with into the present. The presence of characters we know in images of the past reminds us that despite conflict, the characters are en route to a future that is known. Through what Jeffrey Sconce calls “cumulative narrative”—a series’s accumulation of “nuances of plot and character”—we know that despite conflict within a given episode, Will and Grace’s relationship will last (98). The sitcom’s title itself, Will & Grace, implies a relationship that will endure through the series. John Ellis notes that “the present is a precarious moment for everyone: everything in it is mortgaged in some way to an unknown future” (76). However, here our developed knowledge combined with the presentation of a past with a known future comforts us and allows us to stem our anxiety regarding the conflict at hand.
The knowledge accumulated from this very episode allows us to work through a new conflict presented to us in the present. Jack inadvertently reveals to Grace that Will slept with another woman shortly after their inevitable break-up. Will and Grace react to and address this conflict in a way similar to the past, and this time it is the knowledge of the history of these characters we have gained in this very episode that comforts us and quells our anxieties. Not only have we just experienced the characters work through a similar conflict, but given our developed knowledge of the series, we know that this conflict will likely be resolved by the end of the episode. So we see the series as continually expanding our knowledge, even within each episode, and encouraging us to use it to aid in our investigation of conflict and character relationships, a characteristic which is true of both this series and television as a medium.
While in Will & Grace it is the parallels between the past and present and our knowledge of character relationships that keeps us televisually and epistemologically oriented, in Arrested Development it is the series’s dependence on narration and referentiality that play that function. The title of the series, Arrested Development, describes the very characters that inhabit its world: a dysfunctional family composed of immature adults who are unable to learn from their mistakes. The “arrested development” of the characters is contrasted by the ever-expanding intertextual world developed through narration, running jokes and references that pander to a loyal viewer who is encouraged to engage in the epistemology of the series.
In this episode titled “The Ocean Walker,” Michael has become engaged to a woman named Rita who, unbeknownst to him, is mentally challenged. The narrator makes this fact clear, providing an example of Mimi White’s explanation of “narrativisation” as a way in which “texts function to construct an imaginary unity” which situates the viewer spatially and temporally (White, 62). The narration serves as an embodiment of the knowledge we already have and as a means of mediating our understanding of their reality and the knowledge of their reality that we gain each episode. This mediation through narration sutures the audience with the increasingly self-reflexive and intertextual world of Arrested Development.
This world is further developed through running gags and interprogram referentiality, which illuminate the show’s self-knowingness and train us to interpret and understand its self-encompassing world. When Michael tells his parents that he is engaged to Rita, his mother responds with, “Her?” This reaction refers to Michael’s usual reaction to his son’s love interest, Ann. Whenever George-Michael mentions his girlfriend Ann, Michael first responds with, “Who?” and “Her?” This example of self-reflexivity can only be appreciated by loyal viewers, who Mimi White describes as “the ‘best’ viewers” because they are the ones “capable of deriving the greatest potential satisfaction from any single show” (61).
In a moment of interprogram referentiality, the narrative of Michael and Rita’s engagement is cut off by the running joke of Buster’s missing hand. When Lucille asks where it is, he explains that he is getting his high-school ring put on it and his hook is stuck in the “stair car” (the Bluth family’s means of transportation. We are then directed to an image from the day before that shows how his hook got stuck: Buster sings, “Domo arigato Mr. Roboto” in the car, and accidently gets his hook stuck in the dashboard. This is a reference to an old VW car commercial the actor, Tony Hale, starred in before his run on Arrested Development.
Buster’s hand situation was one of the most foreshadowed and referenced jokes of the series. Due to the show’s self reflexive nature, the loyal viewer will be “on alert” for we are “trained in epistemological viewing practices, and we gain a sense of the show’s history over time” (Hastie, 85). Here, the joke spans across television to include the actor’s former role, and we are provided with a knowledge that not only “functions to produce a self-enclosed world, [but] also branches out to other aspects of popular culture and history” (Hastie, 85). Viewing becomes a process through which the audience comes to know the history of the show and its characters and of television itself.
Additionally, the flashback to Buster in the stair car cuts off the narrative and thus mimics not only the content of the VW commercial but also the flow of the television medium. We develop an epistemological stake in the series and in television itself, for we are reminded that we are watching the fictional world of Arrested Development and, more broadly, television. In its epistemological drive, Arrested Development constructs an all-encompassing world that reflects the world of television, which has become an ever-expanding meta-textual operation. ArrestedDevelopment, like television “becomes simultaneously more substantive and hermetic, as the world it encompasses is one of its own creation…the ‘sameness’ of television becomes, a posteriori, an effect of shared signification: it is the same world after all” (White, 60).
Seinfeld similarly relies on intertextuality and Sconce’s idea of a “metareflexive” way of knowing to lend the viewer a means of investigation. The series is driven by the build-up of short, causal moments that all lead up to a ridiculous end. Loyal viewers of the program are accustomed to this cause-and-effect structure, and use this knowledge of television architecture to speculate on an eventual outcome. However, in the episode titled “The Betrayal,” the events are portrayed backwards starting from the end, when the group is somehow responsible for disrupting a wedding in India, and working their way to the beginning by varying time intervals. This reverses the series’s typical structure and breathes life into an otherwise repetitive sitcom. However, how will this perversion of norms be reconciled by the viewer?
The episode begins with the group in the coffee shop “not” talking about the wedding they ruined. The viewer is situated with Kramer, who is similarly out of the loop and pesters the other three for answers, dying to know the “juicy” story. We are then transported to a shot of India a day earlier.
This is far outside the typical world of Jerry’s apartment and the coffee shop in which most of Seinfeld takes place, and so incites curiosity in the viewer. How did they—a group so set in their ways they won’t even try a new coffee shop when they find rubber bands in their soup—arrive here? Our typical method of investigation through speculating possible futures will not work here where the future is known. However, our accumulated knowledge of the show allows us to reverse our method of investigation. This is an example of what Sconce calls the “metareflexive,” an instance of difference in a typically repetitive series which “depends on the long-term viewer’s knowledge and appreciation of the modes of narration and emplotment characteristic of the series as a whole” (105). Our ability to attempt this backwards investigation is dependent on the Seinfeld way of knowing developed through its typical segmented representation of everyday life.
Whether presented backwards or forwards, John Ellis tells us that “the events cannot be poignant because they are radically incomplete…They demand explanation, they incite curiosity…we need, in other words, to work them through” which allows us to “[come] to terms with what we have witnessed” (80). George says things like, “He betrayed me!” and, “You can stuff your sorry’s in a sack mister!” which have little context or explanation until we are presented with further fragments of narrative. Even more puzzling, Elaine seems to have become “best friends” with her long-time nemesis Sue Ellen Mischke. How did this happen? And so Seinfeld forces us to work through the narrative and speculate using our accumulated knowledge of character relations and narrative structure. The characters even mimic our continual “working through” in their continual neurotic obsessions over various cultural minutiae and daily habits such as bowel movements: an uncomfortable-looking George says, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and we know that we will likely see him obsess over this throughout the episode.
It is interesting that a series which claims to be about “nothing,” could incite such a cult following. In reality, it’s not about nothing, which suggests that by watching the series we are filling our heads with nothing (ironically a stance many have towards television itself). Seinfeld develops a way of thinking about our everyday lives in which we see that what might seem like arbitrary coincidences are actually causal relations between moments. Similarly, seemingly disparate fragments of television itself are all interconnected through reflexivity and intertextuality and Raymond Williams's concept of “flow” that we must work through.
All of these sitcoms, Will & Grace, Arrested Development, and Seinfeld, encourage the viewer to remain loyal to the series through an increasing reliance on intertextuality and reflexivity. Though the nature of the sitcom is repetitive with conflicts typically wrapped up per episode, developed histories and running jokes incite an epistemological and speculative drive in the viewer that is simultaneously worked through by the knowledge we continually seek to expand. As this knowledge spans across television, we see a resonance between various fragments of television that sutures the world of the sitcom with television itself. Like the sitcom, television and our knowledge of it simultaneously become an all-encompassing and ever-expanding black hole and our viewing experience becomes a process in which we attempt to navigate this expanse through historicizing functions on and of television. Television is ever more about and reliant on the “yada, yada, yada…”
Works Cited:
Ellis, John. "Chapter 6: Working Through: Television in the Age of Uncertainty." Seeing
Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000. 74-89. Print.
Hastie, Amelie. "The Epistemological Stakes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Undead TV: Essays
on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By Elana Levine and Lisa Parks. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 74-94. Print.
Jeffrey, Sconce. "What If?: Charting Television's New Textual Boundaries." Television
after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. By Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 93-111. Print.
White, Mimi. "Crossing Wavelengths: The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American
Commercial Television." Cinema Journal 25.2 (Winter 1986): 51-63. Print.
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