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The last decade has seen a diffusion of the Gothic across a wide range of cultural sites, a relative explosion of Gothic images and narratives prompting a renewed critical interest in the genre. However, very little sustained attention has been paid to what we might term 'Gothic television' until this point. This book fills this gap by offering an analysis of where and how the genre might be located on British and US television, from the start of television broadcasting to the present day. In this analysis, Gothic television is understood as a domestic form of a genre which is deeply concerned with the domestic, writing stories of unspeakable family secrets and homely trauma large across the television screen. The book begins with a discussion on two divergent strands of Gothic television that developed in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s, charting the emergence of the restrained, suggestive ghost story and the effects-laden, supernatural horror tale. It then focuses on the adaptation of what has been termed 'female Gothic' or 'women's Gothic' novels. The book moves on to discuss two hybrid forms of Gothic drama in the 1960s, the Gothic family sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family, and the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. Finally, it looks at some recent examples of Gothic television in the United States, starting with a discussion of the long-form serial drama, Twin Peaks, as the initiator of a trend for dark, uncanny drama on North American television.
Popular television drama produced for a specifically female audience has been thought about and discussed in relation to a number of key dramatic genres within British television. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, popular, inexpensive outlets for the female Gothic narrative attracted the female reader. It was presumed that they avidly 'devoured' the serialised fictions of domestic terror, following the fates of a bevy of female victim-heroines. A number of female Gothic adaptations were broadcast on television in the UK. These included three BBC adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and adaptations of Peter Godfrey's The Two Mrs Carrolls and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (Hour of Mystery). Rebecca, as with the other female Gothic narratives, implicitly critiques the representation of the domestic space as ideal home, and in fact expresses an anxiety around the image of the perfected woman or wife.
Made in a transitional moment in the history of British television drama, Armchair Theatre can be seen as an example of an anthology series which pushed the boundaries of television drama production. This chapter looks in detail at Armchair Theatre as a canonical text in the history of experimental television drama, seeks to both acknowledge the series' significant development of a social realist style. The makers of Armchair Theatre produced experimental drama that could sit within the flow of popular television, following on, in the schedules, from Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The chapter discusses two of the most significantly experimental strands in Armchair Theatre's history. Firstly the 'kitchen sink' dramas which have come to represent the whole of the series' output within critical histories of television drama, and secondly, the less famous, though no less innovative, impressionistic mystery thrillers of Armchair Mystery Theatre.
In terms of television production and scheduling, the ghost story offers an entirely different incentive during the festive season, in that it is sold as 'special', season-specific programming, as part of the Christmas television package. Emphasising the importance of sound in this teleplay, the TV Times article accompanying 'The Open Door' unusually focused on the creation of sound effects for the episode. Mystery and Imagination was produced during an innovative time in the history of British television, often referred to as the 'Golden Age' of television drama, and saw the Gothic drama on television being used to 'showcase' new production technologies and the talents of ABC's creative personnel. The remit behind Ghost Story for Christmas was to produce a television version of classic ghost stories, referencing the tradition of oral ghost storytelling at Christmas, and from 1971 to 1975 these stories were the adapted work of M.R. James.
As in Gothic literary studies, it is possible to produce an initial taxonomy of Gothic television in order to distinguish the genre from the other generic categorisations which are applied to its texts. A study of Gothic fiction on television in the UK and US which attempted to be encyclopaedic in its coverage would include consideration of the some programmes, such as A Ghost Story and The Night Stalker. The uncanny is located in the moments in Gothic television in which the familiar traditions and conventions of television are made strange, when television's predominant genres and styles are both referred to and inverted. The chapter presents some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to construct what Umberto Eco might call a 'model viewer' by reading the Gothic television drama's modes of address and by scrutinising its semantic and syntactic elements.
This chapter discusses two hybrid forms of Gothic drama in the 1960s, firstly the Gothic family sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family, and secondly the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. In a sense, both The Addams Family and The Munsters 'worried at' the home lives of their viewers, albeit in a humorous way, thus acting as classic American Gothic texts. An examination of the formation of Gothic television in the US shows that, as with early British television drama, the Gothic anthology series on American television was prefigured by the genre's popularity on the radio. This highlights the relationship between the domestic reception context and the Gothic text. Dark Shadows' particular brand of the 'fantastic-marvellous', the blending of stock characters and narrative events from the soap opera and the Gothic genre, therefore bringing into congruence the ordinary and the supernatural, might be seen to render viewer identification somewhat mystifying.
This chapter investigates the legacy of the representation of family violence and domestic abuse in Twin Peaks. It shows how the Gothic mode subsequently flourished at the turn of the century in a number of long-running Gothic series and serials. For the sake of brevity, this examination of US Gothic television will focus on American Gothic and Millennium as case studies. Twin Peaks and American Gothic offer family-centred episodic narratives which are recognisable as American Gothic narratives, drawing on plots, characterisations and imagery which are easily identifiable within nationally specific Gothic convention. Millennium may initially seem more elusive in terms of generic categorisation. The argument that Gothic serial drama in the US made during the 1990s showcased innovations and changes within the television industry evokes a characterisation of the industry prior to and during this decade. This characterisation has been carefully outlined in John Thornton Caldwell's Televisuality.
This chapter begins by examining the effects-laden anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s which, in their heyday, offered original and adapted teleplays that pushed the boundaries of television production through the visualisation of the supernatural and the grotesque. It turns towards the moment in which grand guignol Gothic was no longer confined to a dim and distant past but was brought up to date, with a shift towards a more quotidian kind of horror. The sense of innovation and experimentation in Harry Moore's instruction is very clearly coupled with the explicit portrayal of gory horror in Late Night Horror, emphasising both the need to display the possibilities of the new technology and the desire to place blood and gore on show in close-up. By comparison television horror is authenticated through its representation of the everyday life of the composer within a recognisable domestic space.
This chapter explores a few of the female Gothic dramas in an attempt to define the particular ways in which narratives of domestic fear and entrapment appear on television. It outlines the ways in which the heroine negotiates her position within the domestic space of the Gothic narrative. The chapter focuses on a topographical analysis of the mise-en-scene of female Gothic fiction on television, and identifies the connection between text and domestic viewer. The television adaptation of Northanger Abbey plays upon the representation of Cathy as a diegetic stand-in for the female Gothic reader-viewer by fully visualising extracts from her reading matter through imagined point-of-view sequences at key moments in the narrative. The Wyvern Mystery alters the generic approach to the heritage location to express the distinct uneasiness attached to domestic spaces within the female Gothic narrative.
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in this book. The book examines the dialogue between the textual domestic spaces of Gothic television and the extra-textual domestic spaces of the medium. In doing so, it argues that structures of identification are laid in place which render the Gothic on television as one of the most affective of genres. It is possible to look to the very fabric of the programmes in question to create a picture of the 'model viewer', who is 'recorded into' the texts of Gothic television. The recent bevy of supernatural serials on US television discussed in the book have a certain self-regenerative quality, guaranteeing that innovation and formal experimentation soon become repetitive and mundane. The anxieties surrounding the broadcast of Gothic television identified in the book might be seen as indicative of broader concerns around the propriety of television viewing as a whole.