The Velvet Light Trap

About halfway through the first season of the FOX television show Arrested Development the program's narrative abruptly confronted its televisual style. As the Bluth family enters a courtroom, the presiding judge announces that no cameras are allowed, and the doors are closed, blackening the television screen and cutting off the unfettered access to the Bluths viewers have enjoyed all season. This courtroom incident is the first—and only—time Arrested Development overtly suggests there is an actual camera crew within the show's diegesis that is responsible for the documentary "look" of the show. No character addresses the camera or complains about the presence of the crew in his or her car and bedroom. The Bluth family may be gloriously aloof, but they are not so clueless as to fail to recognize they are the subjects of a documentary or reality television show. However, that is exactly what the program looks like. The televisual style of Arrested Development, with its handheld cameras, awkward pacing, and violations of continuity rules, looks a lot more like a documentary than it does a traditional sitcom. Still, this reflexive moment of the slamming courtroom doors is little more than a convenient transition into the commercial break. When the show returns, the cameras will go on unacknowledged, just as before. The observational style will continue to provide intimate access to the unfolding comic travails of the Bluths, with all the visual and aural cues viewers of documentary and reality television programs have become accustomed to.

Arrested Development is one of a growing number of television comedies that look different and are made differently from comedies in the past. This essay seeks to situate this emerging televisual mode of production, looking to the producers of the shows to see how they conceptualize their work and explain the mode of production, as well as mapping out how that work might be read by audiences within the traditions of both television and documentary forms. In his analysis of a number of recent British sitcoms, The Office in particular, Brett Mills has appropriately termed this televisual style "comedy verite." The theoretical contexts of these two forms and the industrial context of contemporary American television, with its need for both product differentiation and standardization of the production process, are both vital to understanding comedy verité as a mode that can be selectively employed within more traditional styles or can even be embraced as a distinct alternative to the standard multicamera and single-camera modes of production. Comedy verité seems capable of reinvigorating the sitcom format because it fits the constraints of the material economy of television, and as a mode of representation its observational style is peculiarly suited to the tastes of contemporary audiences. Indeed, as Jason Mittell recently argued in this journal, we have witnessed since the 1990s an unprecedented trend toward narrative complexity in television storytelling that blurs distinctions between episodic and serial narratives, that exhibits a heightened degree of self-consciousness, and that demands a higher intensity of viewer engagement "focused both on diegetic pleasures and formal awareness" (38). It is within this context that I believe comedy verité can best be understood not as a subgenre of television comedy but as an emerging mode of production that is being adopted for its efficiency, visual complexity, and semiotic clout.

Perhaps the most important and obvious industrial trend in television over the last couple of decades has been the dwindling of the network audience, as viewers are increasingly split between choices of channels and other media entertainment options. One way this has affected programming content is that original narrative programming is now booming on cable, which was once primarily the province of reruns. Cable programs have been willing [End Page 63] to take greater risks, particularly with comedy, since they can appeal to a smaller audience and not abide by the same decency guidelines as broadcast television. In response to this, the networks are shifting toward a year-round calendar of original programming. Scripted programs, which are more expensive than nonscripted, have necessarily decreased in number as reality-based television programs pick up the programming...