Academics tune into House and The Sopranos
Popular American television series such as 24 and Desperate Housewives are currently the subject of an academic conference hosted by Zurich University.
The high quality of the writing of these programmes has led some to consider them to be better than Hollywood films. They are also watched by many Swiss television viewers.
“Serial Forms”, which started on Thursday, is gathering together international experts to talk on subjects such as “The Serial Dramaturgy of Death” or “Family, Love and Morality in Thirtysomething”.
“The boom time of these challenging and interesting series started in the mid-1990s,” Robert Blanchet, one of the conference’s organisers, told swissinfo.ch.
“But until now no-one really found the time to deal more intensively with the subject. Cinema studies have mostly concentrated on films, and series have been neglected.”
Serials used to mainly be soap operas. But later programmes have adopted more daring topics and approaches, says Blanchet, who is studying for a doctorate at Zurich University’s Institute of Cinema Studies.
Controversial
This includes 24, in which the protagonist saves the world in real-time, in 24 episodes of one hour, or the biting mafia family drama The Sopranos.
Cable television networks – responsible for shows like The Sopranos – are unfettered by the United States Federal Communications Commission’s regulations and can be more controversial, the academic said.
Some experts have even hailed today’s series as a “golden age of television”. For Blanchet, these programmes, whether seen on TV or via a DVD box set, have certain advantages over mainstream Hollywood cinema.
“If a novel is filmed, a book of hundreds of pages has to be compressed into a two-hour format and many things are left out and nuances lost,” he said.
“A series can be more nuanced and complex and the development drawn out. This is what makes them interesting and fascinating.”
Swiss viewers would agree. The most popular US series on prime time German-speaking television are House, Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.
A look round Switzerland’s other language stations also reveals a smattering of US series, such as CSI Miami.
Off-beat Swiss
“We find that on the whole, our viewers are prepared to accept slightly off-beat series,” Michel Bodmer, head of film and series programming at German-speaking Swiss television SF, told swissinfo.ch.
“Everyone was so surprised at how well House did. It did extremely well in Germany too, but something like Men in Trees did better here than in Germany.”
Swiss viewers can choose between watching in the original English or the dubbed German – a practice not followed by many of Switzerland’s neighbours. A survey showed that one in six Swiss watched in the original language, Bodmer said.
However, although the top US series get around 15-20 per cent of the target 15-49 year old audience, they generally run on SF2, the second channel. The most popular prime time series are long-running German crime programmes on SF1, which has more of an older, conservative audience. These have twice the viewing figures.
Top and flop
“Even [short-lived Swiss hospital series] Tag und Nacht, which was always pooh-poohed as a flop, basically got more of an audience than Desperate Housewives did in the prime time slot,” said Bodmer.
Very often Bodmer has to see which US series are dubbed by German companies, which exercise caution because the rights are costly. He then might face the problem that German and Austrian networks might run a programme first, thereby killing his potential audience.
Another scheduling problem is sport, particularly on Fridays.
Bodmer, who is also speaking at the Zurich conference, agrees, however, that the quality of writing in US series has improved over the past six years.
What’s ahead…
“Six Feet Under and the Sopranos set the tone for attracting a lot of talent and getting a lot of independent filmmakers and character actors tuning into that kind of thing because Hollywood films have become so formulaic and mainstream,” he said.
Bodmer has just been to the annual screenings in Los Angeles, where new pilot series are presented. He saw more of the same – crime, lawyers and hospitals – but also a few quirky ones.
This includes former Friends actress Courteney Cox on the prowl for a younger lover in Cougar Town, and Eastwick, based on the Witches of Eastwick film, which Bodmer compares to a mix of Charmed and Desperate Housewives. But what is eventually magicked onto Swiss screens still remains to be seen.
Isobel Leybold-Johnson in Zurich, swissinfo.ch
The international conference is running from June 4-6 at Zurich University. It is organised by the university’s institute of cinema.
Speakers have come from all around the world, including Germany, Britain and the United States.
It is an interdisciplinary conference, which “takes the recent trend of quality television series as a starting point to explore the phenomenon of serial forms on a broad canvas”. It will focus on serial forms past and present, as well as in other media such as online.
House
A medical drama commissioned by Fox which started in 2004. It follows the fortunes of the curmudgeonly and unconventional genius Dr House and his team of diagnosticians who work on difficult cases.
Grey’s Anatomy
The series debuted on ABC in 2005 and revolves around the fortunes of Dr Meredith Grey at a hospital in Seattle.
Desperate Housewives
The comedy-drama series started on ABC in 2004. It follows the lives of a group of women living in Wisteria Lane in the fictional town of Fairview, and is narrated by their dead neighbour.
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