Nostalgia, Trauma, Retrofuturism : reframing history in serial Neo-Historical TV drama

Abstract

Expanding on a variety of cross-disciplinary theoretical frameworks and discourses around historiography, historical fiction, television studies, seriality, and narrative complexity, the dissertation asks questions about the modes, functions, and effects of contemporary televisual historical fictions: How do the inherent contingencies of the medium television at the brink of ‘Peak TV’ impact the telling of stories set in the past? How do televisual historical fictions employ their serial structure — the narrative possibilities afforded by long-form storytelling, repetition with variation, and vast potential for reflexiveness and recursivity to narrativize pastness? What role can and does narrative complexity with its accompanying features play in this endeavor? And what effect(s) does this have on the concrete ontological and epistemological underpinnings of historical representation in a popular, (post-)postmodern medium and cultural context? When and how are viewers’ preconceived notions of ‘History’ and historical categories like objectivity and singular truth undermined or disrupted rather than affirmed and reproduced? In exploring these questions, I identify a mode of ‘doing history’ (see Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past” 202) in TV series of this era that can be identified as neo-historical in its reframing of the past. Reframing established, reductive notions of history itself, neo-historical fictions self-reflexively “critique, conceptualize, engage with, and reject the processes of representation and narrativization” (De Groot, Remaking History 2). They actuate the affordances of contemporary serial storytelling on TV — including practices of repetition with variation and narrative accumulation — without working against their own comprehensibility. Eschewing deconstruction and dissolution of narrative cohesion and historical meaning, they instead retain narrative coherence and a level of watchability that is essential for their own continued existence in a popular commercial medium. Generically and tonally hybrid, they reflect on issues of time and temporality more subtly than historiographic metafictions and their focus on denarrativization and rejection of historical truths and representation altogether. Narratives engaging in this neo-historical mode are conscious of the problematic ontologies of their endeavor of historical narrativization, yet they acknowledge and pursue the value inherent in the process. The TV series discussed as case studies in this dissertation (Man Men, Peaky Blinders, Halt and Catch Fire) are therefore self-aware of their inadequacies and continue, serially, to explore them, becoming more complex in the process. It is the central thesis of this dissertation that the neo-historical, in its oscillation between realism and meta-fictionality, coherence and confusion, novelty and tradition, subversion and creation of historical narrative(s) — in short: serial ambiguity — finds an ideal form and mode in the serial narrative complexity of contemporary (longform) television drama.