Television and the Genetic Imaginary

Sofia Bull

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE

Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture

Series EditorSherryl Vint

Department of EnglishUniversity of California

Riverside, CA, USA

This book series seeks to publish ground-breaking research exploring the productive intersection of science and the cultural imagination. Science is at the centre of daily experience in twenty-first century life and this has defined moments of intense technological change, such as the Space Race of the 1950s and our very own era of synthetic biology. Conceived in dia-logue with the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this series will carve out a larger place for the contribution of humanities to these fields. The practice of science is shaped by the cultural context in which it occurs and cultural differences are now key to understanding the ways that scientific practice is enmeshed in global issues of equity and social justice. We seek proposals dealing with any aspect of science in popular culture in any genre. We understand popular culture as both a textual and material practice, and thus welcome manuscripts dealing with representations of science in popular culture and those addressing the role of the cultural imagination in material encounters with science. How science is imagined and what meanings are attached to these imaginaries will be the major focus of this series. We encourage proposals from a wide range of historical and cultural perspectives.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15760

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15760

Sofia Bull

Television and the Genetic Imaginary

Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular CultureISBN 978-1-137-54846-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54847-4 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54847-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-tional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature LimitedThe registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Sofia BullUniversity of SouthamptonSouthampton, UK

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54847-4

For my daughter, Nova

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This book is a descendant of my PhD dissertation on forensic crime televi-sion. Everyone who provided input during my doctoral studies has there-fore contributed some genetic material to Television and the Genetic Imaginary, in particular my supervisor Anu Koivunen and my external examiners Karen Lury and Helen Wheatley. The idea for this book was first conceived during my year as a postdoctoral researcher the University of Warwick, which was generously funded by Sven and Dagmar Salén’s Foundation. During that time, Helen was again instrumental in the shap-ing of this project and I’m also forever grateful for the way she invited me into her family whenever I visited Coventry. I’m much indebted to David Martin-Jones, Jussi Parikka, Malin Wahlberg, Kristoffer Noheden, Katie Dow, Malcolm Cook, Elke Weissmann, Fran Bigman and Tim Bergfelder for valuable feedback, and to all my colleagues at the University of Southampton for their kind support. Anne Bachmann provided much needed motivation and cheer at the final stages of writing, and my parents have, as always, gone above and beyond to make my life easier. Most of all, I’m grateful for having Lawrence Webb by my side throughout this pro-cess, during which time we also started a family together. He has patiently read this book multiple times, helping to make it far more polished.

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Praise for Television and the Genetic Imaginary

“Bull tells a fascinating story about the often overlooked but crucial ways that contemporary television has constructed the cultural meaning of DNA.  This unique book uncovers the complex and unexpected ways that televisual depictions have shifted the genetic imaginary away from a conventional view of DNA as deterministic towards a more uncertain perception of DNA as an object that is malleable and that actually complicates our notions of kinship.”

—David A. Kirby, University of Manchester, UK

“This thoroughly researched book sharply exposes the pervasiveness of genetic essentialism in television, even as it also probes many instances of ambiguity, con-tradiction, and insight across a wonderfully expansive range of fictional and non-fictional series.”

—Everett Hamner, Western Illinois University, USA

“Sofia Bull’s exploration of the ‘genetic imaginary’ is a fascinating analysis of the representation of genes on 21st century television. Bull’s insightful investigation of the aesthetics and language that articulates concepts of complexity and kinship positions television as a key site of cultural debate where the anxieties and fears, but also hopes for post-genomic societies can be explored. Television and the Genetic Imaginary is an important addition to the study of contemporary television.”

—Mareike Jenner, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

“Sofia Bull’s Television and the Genetic Imaginary is an absolute delight. Wide-ranging and astute in its analysis, it reveals the complex ways in which TV pro-grammes engage with and modify the cultural meanings of the genome. Its emphasis on the recent shift from genetic essentialism to a dynamic postgenomic view of the genome is particularly refreshing and makes this an important and distinctive intervention. Essential reading for scholars and students of film and television.”

—Clare Hanson, University of Southampton, UK

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1 Introduction: A Cultural Forum on Genetics 1

Part I Complexity 31

2 Microscopic CGI: Imaging Molecular Worlds 33

3 Complex Seriality: Genetic Science As Narrative Device 77

Part II Kinship 117

4 Genealogical Intimacy: Materialising Genetic Kinship 119

5 TV Families: Normalising Assisted Reproduction 159

contents

xii CONTENTS

Part III Epilogue 205

6 Televisual Clones 207

Index 221

1© The Author(s) 2019S. Bull, Television and the Genetic Imaginary, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54847-4_1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Cultural Forum on Genetics

This is a book about television and the complex ways in which TV pro-grammes articulate and negotiate cultural ideas about the genome. More specifically, it examines the televisual genetic imaginary of the early twenty- first century and traces the post-genomic sensibilities that have gradually joined more firmly established essentialist notions about DNA on US and UK television. In order to offer new insights about television’s distinctive engagement with molecular biology, I consider a broad range of television content to show that the DNA molecule looms large across numerous genres, programmes and images, extending far beyond straight-forwardly ‘scientific’ material. While the book is focused on the last 20  years, I want to acknowledge that television has a long history of engaging with different genetic frameworks of understanding, and my analysis includes some important historical comparisons. Television’s fas-cination with the genome dates back to the early 1960s, a time when numerous science documentaries, science fiction dramas, current affair shows and even religious programmes reflected the growing scientific and cultural emphasis placed on the molecular world after James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. But the frequency and magnitude with which genetic discourses figured on television increased explosively in the 1990s and the early 2000s in the wake of a number of widely publicised advances in genetic science, most famously the initiation of the Human Genome Project in 1990 (which was

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subsequently completed in 2003), and the birth of Dolly the sheep (the first successful cloning of a mammal from an adult somatic cell) in 1996. It would be reductive to understand television as simply ‘responding’ to scientific developments. Examining the increased saturation of ideas about DNA on twenty-first- century television in more detail, this book positions television as a key site within a wider ‘genetic imaginary’ (Franklin 2000, 198): a ‘fantasy landscape’ (Stacey 2008, 96–97) of discursive formations moulded and negotiated by diverse cultural texts, practices and institu-tions. The genetic imaginary encompasses medico-scientific practices and media texts, as well as literature and art, and educational and legal practices.

Cinematic contributions to the genetic imaginary have received a par-ticularly high amount of scholarly attention. In fact, the term ‘the genetic imaginary’ was first used by Sarah Franklin when studying how the pro-duction and reception of the feature film Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) impacted the genetic framework for understanding life itself by ‘imagining the future, and re-imagining the borders of the real’ (Franklin 2000, 198). A majority of the studies that have followed in her footsteps have analysed science fiction and horror films, many with a particular focus on how these genres depict cloning or gene manipulation (e.g. Kirby 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007; Kirby and Gaither 2005; Nelkin and Lindee 2001; Gonder 2003; Haran et al. 2007; O’Riordan 2008; Powell 2015; Flynn 2015; Hamner 2017a, b). Cinematic cloning narratives have been covered comprehensively by Jackie Stacey (2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010), who has presented a highly convincing argument as to why the clone has been a particularly prevalent cinematic figure (2010, 181), and has identified cinema as taking ‘pride of place in the genetic imaginary’ (2010, 270). I generally agree with Stacey that the figure of the clone has had an especially arresting existence in cinema, but there are also a few evocative examples of cloning narratives on television, most recently in the Canadian science fiction show Orphan Black (Space/CTV, 2013–2017).1 Focusing on the distinctive elements of television’s contribution to the genetic imaginary, I have prioritised the study of other genres and narra-tives in the main chapters, in order to highlight that alongside the ‘pro-foundly cinematic figure’ of the clone (Stacey 2010, 270), there are other, profoundly televisual, figures that have played equally crucial roles in the negotiation of ideas about the molecular world and genetic science. In the epilogue, however, I will return to the clone’s prominent status within the genetic imaginary and ask whether we might understand the clones in Orphan Black as a particularly televisual take on this generic figure.

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Plenty of scholarly work has identified the genetic imaginary as a ‘mosaic of images’ (Åsberg 2005, 341) that encompasses numerous cultural expres-sions and formations beyond the cinematic cloning narrative, including literature (Nelkin and Lindee 2001; Hanson 2007, 2015; Bloomfield and Hanson 2015; Hamner 2017a), art (Anker and Nelkin 2004; O’Riordan 2010; Wald and Clayton 2007), newspapers (Haran et al. 2007), popular science magazines (Åsberg 2005), scientific cartoons and advertisements (Haraway 1997), comic books (Hamner 2018), digital media (Haran et al. 2007; O’Riordan 2010, 2013, 2017), radio (Haran et al. 2007) and television (Franklin 1988; Haran et  al. 2007; O’Riordan 2010; Kruse 2010; Bull 2014, 2015; Hamner 2017a, b). In particular, my work builds on a few earlier studies of the representation of molecular biology, DNA tests and cloning technology on television. These have tended to focus on individual programmes with an educational address. For example, more than ten years before publishing her piece on Jurassic Park, Sarah Franklin (1988, 100) wrote an article on the Horizon biopic docudrama episode Life Story (Mick Jackson, BBC, 1987), arguing that its ‘biology and biog-raphy’ obscured ‘science as culture’ and that ‘we need more programmes which explore the cultural and historical origins of the genetic commodity fetishism evident in contemporary society’. Almost two decades later, Joan Haran, Jenny Kitzinger, Maureen McNeil and Kate O’Riordan (2007) examined a two-part drama-documentary titled If … Cloning Could Cure Us (BBC, 2004), as well as the Newsnight (BBC, 1980–present) studio debate that accompanied it. Kate O’Riordan’s book The Genome Incorporated (2010) subsequently included a chapter on the one-off real-ity-style documentary A Killer In Me (ITV, 2007), in which four celebri-ties were offered DNA tests determining their genetic risk of getting serious diseases. Recently, there has been a flurry of academic interest in Orphan Black (e.g. Greene and Robison-Greene 2016; Hamner 2017a, b; Wilbanks 2018; Sheldon 2018; Lieberman 2018; Hamner 2018; Dillender 2018; Frankel 2018). Everett Hamner has provided a particularly insight-ful analysis of the Canadian show’s contribution to the wider genetic imaginary in his book Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age (2017a), in which he also discusses literature and film, as well as the Canadian science fiction show ReGenesis (TMN, 2004–2008), which por-trays a North American Biotechnological Advisory Commission that mon-itors public health, disease outbreaks and new biomedical technologies across Canada, the USA and Mexico. These analyses suggest that televi-sion has started staging more complex negotiations on the moral and

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philosophical implications of advances in molecular biology, but they also imply that the gene still remains something of the ‘fetish object’ Franklin (1988, 92) identified when discussing 1980s television. To more com-pletely capture the complexity of the televisual genetic imaginary of the twenty-first century, it is time to move beyond the study of single pro-grammes and instead examine a larger material from a range of different genres. Highlighting that the genetic imaginary extends well beyond tra-ditional scientific discourses, this book considers science documentaries as well as crime dramas, hospital dramas, science fiction serials, family history programmes, family reunion shows, sitcoms and several types of reality shows.

On a fundamental level, this book identifies television as an important site for the articulation and formation of a set of ideas traditionally under-stood as ‘medico-scientific’. This affiliates it with a growing body of work that analyses the relationship between media and science. In particular, it follows a recent wave of academic studies examining audio-visual repre-sentations of bioscience and medicine.2 Researchers in this interdisciplin-ary field have often asserted that media and science are locked into a collaborative relationship, which, amongst other things, results in a recip-rocal exchange of power that needs to be mapped and scrutinised (Friedman 2004, 4–5; Reagan et al. 2007, 2). Reagan et al. (2007, 2) have provided the following condensed description of this relationship: ‘Medicine provides media with reliably popular content and expertise while media provide medicine with modern communication systems for the powerful delivery of its messages’. While this type of transaction undoubtedly exists between the scientific community and the media, I want to map a more complex set of processes. Rather than simply under-standing television as a means for secondary dissemination of scientific knowledge or representation of medico-scientific practices, this book pro-poses that television actively and independently constructs and re- negotiates the genetic imaginary.

As this introduction will make clear, my analysis bridges two different theoretical traditions: (1) television scholarship focused on questions of medium specificity, and (2) cultural, social and historical studies of genetic science. As a television scholar, I will be engaging in greater depth through-out the book with the theoretical frameworks I use for understanding the television medium’s distinctive characteristics in terms of its visual form, narrative structure, production, distribution and reception. This introduc-tion will therefore start by discussing the theoretical structures that shape

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my understanding of television’s cultural role and how it negotiates ideas about the genome. Following this, I will outline some key concepts from the medical humanities that have helped me understand shifts in the wider genetic imaginary—in particular, the historical shifts that have led to a recent move from essentialist genetics to a post-genomic framework for understanding life itself.3

Television As A CulTurAl ForumMy approach to studying the televisual genetic imaginary is underpinned by a pivotal theoretical construct in television studies outlining the medi-um’s general cultural function, namely, Horace M. Newcomb and Paul M.  Hirsch’s (1983) model for understanding television as a ‘cultural forum’. Written over 30 years ago, this classic piece of television theory was constructed in opposition to older forms of ideological television criti-cism and their tendency to assume the medium has one monolithic mean-ing: typically the dominant ideology of a particular moment (45–46). Newcomb and Hirsch offered up a more nuanced way to consider the politics of television texts and forcefully argued for the cultural value of the medium. Most importantly, their framework understood television as par-ticipating in processes of public thinking, simultaneously representing, negotiating and constructing social reality in tandem with other media, art forms and cultural expressions (47–48). A key feature of television, they proposed, is its multiplicity of meanings, and the complex and often con-tradictory ways it deals with ‘our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas’ (47). This is a medium that expresses oppositional meanings and perspectives both in individual programmes and across its wider flow: highly traditional, repressive and reactionary viewpoints, as well as more subversive and emancipatory affinities, are simultaneously ‘upheld, exam-ined, maintained and transformed’ (47–48). One of the fundamental insights revealed by my analysis of a diverse set of television programmes is the contradictory nature of their contribution to the genetic imaginary. More specifically, the way in which long-standing discourses on DNA intermingle with newer, often completely oppositional ideas is striking, particularly when comparing different programmes and genres.

Newcomb and Hirsch’s description of television as a cultural forum is not the only attempt to theorise the multiplicity and contradiction with which the medium treats a wide range of topics. For example, the concept of the cultural forum is in many ways comparable to the framework John

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Ellis proposed in his influential book Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (2002), almost two decades later, although his theoretical influences are markedly different from those of Newcomb and Hirsch. Briefly comparing the two can help pinpoint some of the elements of the cultural forum framework that I find particularly fruitful. Ellis argues that the Freudian notion of ‘working through’ (a psychoanalytical technique whereby forgotten or repressed memories are repeatedly returned to) can be used as a model for understanding the role television plays in contem-porary society by continually examining and re-examining different ‘expe-riences’. While many aspects of Ellis’s explanation of television’s cultural work are highly productive and convincing, there is a risk that the central-ity of the concept of ‘working through’ reduces television to primarily a representational practice that mediates a range of original experiences from the surrounding world. Ellis proposes that television repeatedly returns to the same pre-existing events, moments and ideas, displaying them from different perspectives in attempts to deal therapeutically with the traumatic feelings that have allegedly arisen in the audience as a result of being placed in such a position of ‘witnessing’ in the first place (10–11). In other words, the medium confronts the audience with unfamiliar images of the world, which causes a trauma that then has to be worked through by returning to these images.

Furthermore, as Helen Wheatley (2005, 149; 2006, 24) points out, the concept of ‘working through’ also suggests television is attempting to pro-duce a ‘sense of conclusion’. Ellis (2002, 79) does emphasise that this process is a ‘multifaceted and leaky’ endeavour, ‘not a straightforward process that takes in hunks of meat at [one] end, and parcels them out as sausages at the other’, but its Freudian roots still imbue the term ‘working through’ with a sense of purpose that would be misleading if used to describe television’s contribution to the genetic imaginary.4 As a therapeu-tic method, working through holds the promise of treatment. Freud (2001, 155) saw it as a technique for overcoming repressed and traumatic experiences. Admittedly, some of the ideas tied to DNA might indeed be anxiety-inducing, and Jackie Stacey (2010) has argued that cinematic treatments of genetic manipulation and cloning are saturated with cultural multiple anxieties about gender, sexuality and technology. However, to classify scientific developments in genetics as a ‘traumatic experience’ that requires working through, runs the risk of producing an analysis of the televisual genetic imaginary that is both generalising and reductive. To do so would downplay television’s role as an active agent that produces

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events, moments and ideas, and might fail to capture the medium’s multi-faceted engagement with wider cultural discourses. In comparison, Newcomb and Hirsch’s (1983) framework identifies television’s process of public thinking as one that is distinctly open-ended and unpredictable. This encourages an understanding of the televisual genetic imaginary as a complexly indeterminate conversation, rather than a linear process of development working towards a specific endpoint. According to Newcomb and Hirsch, the emphasis of television’s cultural forum is ‘on process rather than product, on discussion rather than indoctrination, on contrac-tion and confusion rather than coherence’ (47–48).

An exTended viewing sTripThe method of this book has been influenced by Newcomb and Hirsch’s approach to studying television, but I have also taken into account more recent critiques of the ‘cultural forum’ framework. Writing in 1983, Newcomb and Hirsch asserted that ‘almost any version of the television text functions as a forum in which important cultural topics may be considered’ (48), and they included an analysis of the sitcom Father Knows Best (NBC/CBS, 1954–1960) as an example of how multiple viewpoints on a topic could be articulated in one single episode of a programme, thus suggesting that multiplicity could be found on the level of individual epi-sodes and programmes, as well as across entire genres and the television medium as a whole (48–49). However, when suggesting a methodological approach for studying television, they emphasised that complexity would always be ‘heightened’ across a larger body of text (49–50). Referencing Raymond Williams’s (1974) writing on the ‘flow’ of television, they argued that the most useful tactic would be to study what they called a ‘viewing strip’ (Newcomb and Hirsch 1983, 50) consisting of multiple programmes from a range of different genres. This approach was produc-tive, they argued, because ‘the rhetoric of the soap opera pattern is differ-ent from that of the situation comedy and that from the detective show. Thus, when similar topics are treated within different generic frames another level of “discussion” is at work’ (50). Newcomb and Hirsch’s belief in the effectiveness of this approach was based on the assumption that it is ‘more akin’ to actual viewing behaviours (50). By selecting mate-rial that more resembled ‘the range of options offered by any given eve-ning’s television’, the researcher is supposed to get more ‘accurate’ results insofar as their analysis will be more likely to reflect the experiences of

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actual viewers (50). As this emphasis on the viewing public suggests, this methodology was part of a wider attempt to consider the reception of television content. Using Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ model (1980) as a stepping stone, they acknowledge the importance of not mak-ing assumptions about how television content is received by the viewers and argue that one must consider a ‘range of varied responses’ (Newcomb and Hirsch 1983, 52). At the very end of the article, Newcomb and Hirsch remark in passing that their ‘model is based on the assumption and obser-vation that only so rich a text could attract a mass audience in a complex culture’ (53). This nod to a particular socio-historical reception context—the American network-era television landscape—was part of a wider move to consider the experience of the viewers and the impact of television on its audience. Yet, despite this admirable attempt to avoid generalisation, Newcomb and Hirsch’s anchoring of their theory to a specific national and historical viewing experience has also meant that as time has passed, and the medium has developed, the cultural forum concept has become less generally applicable.

Amanda D. Lotz (2004, 2007) has conducted one of the most exten-sive and influential considerations of the cultural forum’s relevance for contemporary television studies. In Lotz’s view, the increased audience dispersion of the current ‘post-network era’—the move towards niche programming and the subsequent redistribution of audiences into highly specialised homogenous groups—poses the question whether television still performs a type of public thinking that makes individual viewers aware of contradictory perspectives on a topic.5 If Newcomb and Hirsch’s theory is built on the assumption that television is watched by a heterogeneous mass audience, whose different ideological convictions must be negoti-ated, it might no longer hold up when it is ‘increasingly unlikely that ideologically polarized audiences will be watching the same series’ (Lotz 2004, 429). Rather than completely rejecting the notion of television as a cultural forum, Lotz asserts the importance of reflecting on the type of programming one is examining and how it might differ from the material examined by Newcomb and Hirsch. In her book Television Will be Revolutionized (2007), Lotz specifically proposes that the cultural forum function might now be primarily fulfilled by occasional examples of ‘phe-nomenal television’: ‘a particular category of programming that retains the social importance attributed to television’s earlier operation as a cul-tural forum despite the changes of the post-network era’ (33, 37). Her argument for why, in some cases, the cultural forum function is still

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retained at the level of individual programmes is straightforward and con-vincing: even in the post-network era, there are still some programmes, typically those broadcast on one of the traditional networks, that address a relatively large, heterogeneous audience (38).

Taking this into account, some of the key case studies in this book are examples of such ‘phenomenal’ programmes that articulate multiple con-tradictory ideas on DNA, even at the level of individual episodes. One such programme is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–2015, henceforth abbreviated CSI), which I discuss in Chaps. 2 and 3. Although CSI never reached the exceptionally high viewing figures of network-era programming such as Father Knows Best (that Newcomb and Hirsch ana-lysed), it played a significant role as one of the flagship shows that signifi-cantly raised CBS’s viewing figures in the early 2000s, broadening its demographics and retrieving some of its old prestige as one of the original ‘big three’ broadcast networks.6 Throughout its first ten seasons, CSI gained and retained a domestic audience that, in relation to contemporary standards, was very large and heterogeneous. Such a wide audience address differentiates it from other contemporary shows more clearly marketed to niche audiences.7 Although Lotz is specifically writing about US televi-sion, I would also argue that some of the BBC’s flagship programmes retain a similar status. One example of this is Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC, 2004–present, abbreviated WDYTYA), which figures prominently in Chap. 4. WDYTYA has achieved viewing figures of between 3.48 and 7.22 million viewers in the UK, with a majority of its episodes being the most-watched programme during the 9  pm prime-time hour, with between five and six million viewers. Furthermore, the audience size and heterogeneity increase significantly if we also take into account these pro-grammes’ global distribution. Both CSI and WDYTYA have been exported widely, and the BBC show has also been highly successful in the global market for television formats. This suggests that people from different backgrounds and cultures, with different lifestyles, political affiliations and religious beliefs, can find points of interest and enjoyment in these pro-grammes.8 Today’s increasingly transnational television landscape (Parks and Kumar 2003; Bielby and Harrington 2008; Oren and Shahaf 2011) encourages producers to create complex, even contradictory, texts with a wider audience address. Expanding on Lotz’s argument, I argue that the transnational movement of a show is another industrial aspect that should be taken into account when identifying individual shows as examples of phenomenal television.

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However, such individual examples of ‘phenomenal television’ are by no means the sole focus of this book. Rather, I have consciously attempted to examine what might be called an extended transnational viewing strip. My study therefore includes programmes from several different genres across two national contexts, and spans two decades. As my analysis of this material will show, television still articulates multifaceted perspectives across its wider flow. But this raises the question whether we can still understand television as a cultural forum when individual viewers might not perceive any of this multiplicity. On this point, Lotz argues that the cultural forum model has become meaningless for studying anything other than individual examples of phenomenal television, because indi-vidual viewers are unlikely to perceive the multiplicity that still exists across different types of niche genres and programmes. When Newcomb and Hirsch proposed viewing strips of weekly network fare as a means for studying viewing experiences in 1983, they could be fairly certain that a considerable amount of viewers would encounter this material. To even call my material a ‘viewing strip’ might then be somewhat misleading. I cannot as readily assume that many actual viewers will have come across this extended material, and, furthermore, because my main aim is to study television’s contribution to the wider genetic imaginary, I am not primar-ily trying to provide insights about individual viewing experiences. For the purposes of attempting to map discourses about genetics circulating across television as a whole, studying such an extended body of material still makes sense. That said, while I agree that television probably retains less of a cultural forum function in terms of introducing individual viewers to multiple ideological viewpoints on ‘hot’ political issues at a particular point in time, I still believe that Newcomb and Hirsch’s model remains a representative way of understanding television’s cultural contribution over time.

A rarely discussed element of Newcomb and Hirsch’s (1983) theory is their argument that the serial nature of many television programmes ‘shifts meaning and shades ideology as a series develop’ (49). The ‘change over time’ that Newcomb and Hirsch note on the level of individual series is even more significant on the level of genre or across the television flow more generally. I propose that in the post-network era, the temporality of the television’s cultural forum function has been extended. Contemporary viewers will primarily perceive the cultural forum over a longer period of time, as programmes and genres slowly develop to express shifting ideas. This makes it all the more important to study an extended viewing strip

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that enables us to take into account historical shifts. While this book might, at first glance, appear to be part of what John Corner (1999, 126) has called the ‘frantically contemporary agenda’ of television studies, I am continuously mindful of historical changes and my approach can be defined as textual-historical in nature.9 Textual analysis serves as my main analytical method, but I aim to execute what Helen Wheatley (2006, 21) has called a ‘close and sustained critical analysis of television texts, dwell-ing on illuminating moments in the history of television programming’.10 The historical impulse is most clearly detectable in the instances where I genealogically trace how formal and thematic aspects create linkages and discontinuities between my main material and a number of audio-visual texts from earlier historical moments.11 I partly incorporate this historical perspective because I agree with Corner’s (2003, 275) argument that ‘[an] enriched sense of “then” produces, in its differences and commonalities combined, a stronger, imaginative and analytically ener-gised sense of now’. But more importantly, these historical comparisons serve to illustrate the temporal function of television’s cultural forum: how its contradictory contribution to the genetic imaginary changes over time.

An emergenT sTruCTure oF FeelingJason Jacobs (2003, 30) has described television as able to ‘anticipate and articulate quite amorphous trends, feelings and attitudes that only emerge concretely later on’, and this goes some way to capture the complex cul-tural work television does over time. In this vein, I have found Raymond Williams’s (1961, 1977) writing on the concept ‘structures of feeling’ fruitful for capturing television’s gradual articulation and negotiation of a new set of cultural ideas about DNA. Williams is, of course, famous for his work on television, but this particular concept was developed to describe cultural shifts more generally. When he initially described the concept in The Long Revolution (1961, 64–65), he called it ‘the culture of a period’, which is why, as Alan O’Connor (2006, 79) has pointed out, subsequent usages of the term often take it ‘to describe something like the ordinary meaning today of the word culture: shared experience’. However, the idea of a ‘structure of feeling’ makes a fitting addition to the model of televi-sion as a cultural forum because, as Williams continued to develop the concept, it more specifically came to describe the gradual emergence of a new experience. In Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams specifically uses the concept structure of feeling to distinguish between ‘dominant,

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residual and emergent’ aspects of a culture at any given moment.12 This results in a more precise understanding of the term, which is important for my own analysis. Williams (1977, 123, 131–132) describes a structure of feeling as an ‘embryonic phase’ where ‘new meanings and values, new practices, [and] new relationships’ are first being expressed and experi-enced, before having become fully defined and built into institutions and other formations.

Although Williams didn’t specifically mention television in his writing on this concept, he did argue that it is important to study cultural practices and products, as this is where structures of feeling first become tangible (1961, 64–65; 1977, 129). He underlines the creative potential of cul-tural texts to be a driving force in wider discursive shifts:

The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures—which, in art and literature, are often among the first indications that such a new structure is forming. [As] a matter of cultural theory this is a way of defining forms and conven-tions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process: not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms, but as social for-mation of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely experienced. (Williams 1977, 133)

More specifically, Williams’s concept encourages an approach where shifts in form and convention are traced over time, as this can indicate how a new set of experiences is slowly and implicitly becoming expressed along-side older ideas and perspectives. This book therefore pays attention to genre development and takes particular notice of how certain visual and narrative tropes have changed.

Williams’s concept can bring a more specific definition to the function of the cultural forum. For Newcomb and Hirsch, the cultural forum is a model for understanding television as simultaneously articulating a multi-tude of ideas, often contradictory in kind. This has often been understood as something similar to a political debate, but, drawing on Williams, I sug-gest it is more useful to understand television as a forum that drives and facilitates discursive shifts over time in much more implicit ways. Williams defines the structure of feeling as an experience ‘in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’ (1977, 133–134). It’s only a feeling, not yet a fact or knowledge. This can help recast television’s

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cultural forum as a temporal negotiation between long-running perspec-tives and newly evolving ideas. Doing so, it is crucial to understand the structure of feeling as a discourse that is still in an uncertain state of mani-festation and assert that this is not a linear process of development that will necessarily lead to a new set of ‘dominant’ meanings. I think of it more as a process of negotiation without a set outcome.

The posT-genomiC redeFiniTion oF liFe iTselFThis book focuses on television of the twenty-first century because this is a period when a new structure of feeling has become more clearly articu-lated within television’s cultural forum on genetics. I argue that television participates in a wider shift within the genetic imaginary, which Sarah Franklin has theorised as an ‘emergent’ move, from genetic determinism towards ‘new genetics’ (Franklin et al. 2000, 14; Franklin 2000, 198) or ‘post-genomic’ sensibilities (Franklin 2007, 33). This is the latest trans-mutation in a longer sequence of significant discursive changes impacting how we understand the human body, biology more generally, and, indeed, ‘life itself ’. Franklin aptly summarises this longer development as a process whereby ‘nature becomes biology becomes genetics, through which life itself becomes reprogrammable information’ (2000, 190).

As both Franklin (2000, 2007) and Nikolas Rose (2001, 2007) have discussed in some detail, the historical process whereby life has come to be understood with a new vocabulary of genetics has been mapped out by Georges Canguilhem (2000 [1966]) and Michel Foucault (2002 [1970]). In a 1966 essay, Canguilhem began examining how the very concept of life had been transformed from antiquity to the present day (303–320). This line of inquiry was also picked up by Foucault in 1970 when attempt-ing to trace a particular epistemic shift taking place in the eighteenth cen-tury, when Darwinist biology emerged as a framework for understanding ‘the facts of life’ (2002 [1970], 136–179).13 Foucault argued that the category of ‘life itself ’ only came into existence in its modern meaning when the representational models used for understanding nature shifted from the ‘non-temporal rectangle’ (which sorted things according to their position in God’s creation) to the framework of biology (139).14 Canguilhem’s research points to the next building block in this epistemo-logical history, proposing that a new major shift was taking place in the 1960s: life was becoming redefined by the scientific field of molecular biology (2000 [1966], 317).15 Discussing the discourses emerging

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from the discovery of the structure of the double helix in 1953, Canguilhem argued that the conceptual construction of life was now dropping ‘the vocabulary and concepts of classical mechanics, physics and chemistry […] in favour of the vocabulary of linguistics and communications theory. Messages, information, programmes, codes, instructions, decoding: these are the new concepts of the life sciences’ (316). This inauguration of a genetic era reconfigured life so that it became understood in terms of information (312–317). As Franklin (2000, 194) has pointed out, Canguilhem’s prediction that ‘if we are to understand life, its message must be decoded before it can be read’ (Canguilhem (2000 [1966]), 312) has since been more or less literally realised in scientific practices such as the Human Genome Project, which aimed to ‘decode’ the entire sequence of human DNA.

Alongside Franklin (1988, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2007), Evelyn Fox Keller (1990, 1991, 2005), Dorothy Nelkin and Susan M. Lindee (1995, 1998) have done significant work to analyse how the gene became a major cultural icon in the latter half of the twentieth century. The cultural ideas about the gene during this period are familiar to all of us. Variously described as a dictionary, a library, a recipe, a map and, perhaps most com-monly, a blueprint of life, the gene came to be understood as harbouring firm facts about our past, present and future. It was frequently seen as a comprehensive and unbiased resource, an orderly reference work that, once deciphered, would be clear, reliable and easily understood (Nelkin and Lindee 1995, 8). As my analysis will show, the televisual genetic imag-inary of the early twenty-first century is still heavily saturated with genetic essentialism (Franklin 1993, 34; Nelkin and Lindee 1995, 149–168), which Nelkin and Lindee define as ‘a deterministic tendency to reduce personality and behaviour to the genes’ (2001, 84). Donna Haraway (1997, 148) has called this ‘genetic fetishism’: a belief in the gene as ‘a nontropic thing-in-itself ’. The gene fetishist, Haraway explains, ‘forgets’ that bodies are ‘nodes in webs of integrations’ and therefore mistakes ‘het-erogenous relationality for a fixed, seemingly objective thing’ (142). Such a viewpoint has been prevalent during the twentieth century (particularly its second half), which Evelyn Fox Keller has called ‘the century of the gene’ (2000), and it remains prominent today. However, television has also begun to express a new structure of feeling, contributing to a wider emer-gent post-genomic imaginary that voices ideas beyond the more traditional deterministic and essentialist understanding of the gene. As the cultural drive towards ‘geneticization’ (Franklin 2000, 189) or ‘molecularization’

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(Rose 2007, 5, 11–15) has continued, things have seemingly become pro-gressively more complicated. For example, the Human Genome Project and other similar scientific undertakings have not resulted in all the expected revelations of the genome’s hidden secrets about life itself, but have rather produced more questions and uncertainties. Furthermore, this new framework has enabled what Franklin terms a ‘literal and meta-phorical prospect of reprogramming biology’, which has resulted in a sig-nificant shift from explanatory to experimental scientific practices (Franklin 2000, 190; see also Rose 2007, 15–22). With molecules becoming understood as building blocks of life that can be repro-grammed and recombined, the spotlight is now increasingly directed onto biomedical technologies that can interfere in biological processes in complex ways.

Two interconnected tendencies are characteristic of the wider discur-sive shift towards post-genomic sensibilities. Firstly, a cultural process has emerged through which concepts such as truth, cause and effect, identity, body, reproduction, kinship, emotions, nature, life and death are being redefined.16 This cultural reconfiguration has the potential of allowing for more uncertainty and complexity within the genetic imaginary. Secondly, there has been an increased instrumentalisation of molecular science that intensifies the wider process of redefinition by seemingly making bodies and biological processes modifiable.17 As Franklin has argued, in the ‘age of biological control’, new unconditional biologies are emerging, and these are ‘primarily imagined as plastic, flexible and partible. They no lon-ger work to a logic of a fixed structural system, but to that of flexibly reengineered functionality’ (Franklin 2007, 33). While scientific practices have been crucial for engendering this gradual questioning of genetic determinism, other cultural expressions have served as equally crucial sites for this process of redefinition and negotiation (Hanson 2007; Stacey 2010; O’Riordan 2010). Television is one such cultural expression.

As indicated by previous work on the genetic imaginary, this cultural negotiation spans across national boundaries, at least encompassing the West (Nelkin and Lindee 2001; Anker and Nelkin 2004; Åsberg 2005; Hanson 2007, 2015; O’Riordan 2010; Stacey 2010). In adopting a transnational approach that considers both US and UK material, this book continues in the footsteps of earlier studies that have analysed genetic discourses across British and North American cultural texts (Nelkin and Lindee 2001; Anker and Nelkin 2004; O’Riordan 2010; Stacey 2010). As a television scholar working in Britain, where a majority

1 INTRODUCTION: A CULTURAL FORUM ON GENETICS