Lavery Lectures at Trinity College, Dublin

Go here to see photos from the trip.

Abstract

Lavery, David. “’I Only Had a Week’: TV Creativity and Quality Television.” Invited Keynote Address: Contemporary American Quality Television: An International Conference, Trinity College, Dublin, April 1, 2004.

In an interview Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and the short-lived Firefly, makes the following observation:

I think everybody who makes movies should be forced to do television. . . . Because you have to finish. You have to get it done, and there are not a lot of decisions made just for the sake of making decisions. You do something because it's efficient and because it gets the story told and it connects to the audience. And then you've got to do it right and do it fast. I worked in TV before I worked in movies, and I have a better track record at meeting deadlines than some movie writers because you get it done. . . . So TV is a good thing. Obviously it has certain pitfalls and rituals that you fall into, shortcuts and whatnot that when you make a movie you want to get out of. But I think the restriction of just having to tell a story to an audience every week is the best thing you could ask for. Ultimately, you want to move on from that. You just want to say, “Okay, now I want to do something where I have the time to create everything that's in the frame. Everything.” And that's sort of where I'm starting to be. I'm getting to the point now where I'm like, “Okay, I've told a lot of stories. I've churned it out.” I just feel like I want to step back and do something where I can't use the excuse of 'I only had a week.’

Much of television is produced under time constraints that would make the creative work of novelists, painters, composers, filmmakers difficult if not impossible. One year’s worth of an hour program—twenty two forty minutes episodes, 880 minutes/14.7 hours, the equivalent of seven feature films)—is routinely generated in less than a year of frenzied collaborative enterprise. Whedon’s lament—“I only had a week”—must be the frequent lament of TV writers, producers, set designers, composers, and directors. Even more miraculously, Quality Television is produced by the same system.

At this point in our fledgling understanding of television, we know very little about the nature of television creativity. In an often anonymous medium, of course, the question of authorship has been suspect from the beginning. As Robert C. Allen explains, “because of the technological complexity of the medium and as a result of the application to most commercial television production of the principles of modern industrial organization . . . , it is very difficult to locate the ‘author’ of a television program—if by that we mean the single individual who provides the unifying vision behind the program” (9). And yet somehow television is still created, must be created. By whom? How?

Using primary sources, especially interviews with the individuals who make television (Marc and Thompson, Longworth) and DVD commentaries, and drawing on scholarly investigation into the nature of the creative process, my talk in Dublin will attempt to map the complex terrain of television creativity and offer some preliminary explanations of the birth of Quality Television out of the seeming chaos of TV production.

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