An Anglo-American Debate

In the last decade, a new debate has emerged in Anglo-American TV studies on a subject that has been little treated and is somewhat controversial: aesthetics. This debate culminated in the publication in 2013 of Jason Jacobs and Stephen Peacock's collection of essays with precisely the title Television Aesthetics and Style. Having explored the historical and industrial background for the emergence of a body of quality public service TV series in Mexico in the previous chapter, in this sixth chapter I go on to sketch the theoretical outlines of this trend (which could not be further from the traditional approaches of cultural and media studies) and transpose the debate on TV style to the Mexican audiovisual field (where it has had as yet no response).

As we shall see, this new debate treats very general questions in relation to the philosophy of aesthetics and the medium of television (such as the nature of the work of art and of its contemplation), identifies formal characteristics appropriate for this kind of analysis (for example, complexity), and treats with special attention the rivalry of television with a medium previously granted greater cultural distinction (namely, cinema). In the second half of this chapter we will examine two examples of this hypothetical “cinematic television” in the current Mexican context (Canal 11's Soy tu fan and Pacientes), suggesting that they also merit the stylistic analysis and aesthetic evaluation proposed by Anglo-American theorists, who confine themselves to the analysis of now canonic English-language titles.

In her opening essay in the volume, Sarah Cardwell, previously known as a specialist in that “quality” TV genre par excellence the British literary adaptation, acknowledges that the mere scholarly interest in television aesthetics, beyond the sociological and ideological context, constitutes a “provocation” (23). Indeed, this theoretical proposal has already given rise to “anxieties” from other specialists who accuse such research of being “pre-Structuralist” (that is, believing in the existence of an inherent value in certain texts) and “regressive” and “reactionary” (hostile to the popular or mass culture championed by cultural studies) (24). The supposed elitism and desire for canon construction attributed to the aestheticians are thus linked to an adherence to criteria derived from literary or fine art studies, held to be essentially formalist (26).