The Aesthetics of Television: Genre, Auteur, Canon

This introductory chapter outlines the long—(er) history of the television art-form—the problems that it has presented for serious scholarship; the critical emphasis on its sociological, rather than aesthetic, attributes; and the fraught question of canon formation, when applied to what was initially understood as a ‘medium’ designed to sell household products. Reworking those literary-based terms, canon and auteur, Giles proffers a judicious account of an era when British, not American television was considered to be the measure of literary-inflected television, which many saw as taking up literature’s ‘formal and thematic interpretants’ (Venuti, 2007). He takes as his case study the classic English comedy, Fawlty Towers, to argue that it is the ‘television of cruelty’ that has fed most distinctively into the experimental poetics of twenty-first-century comedy, tracing adaptation studies’ ‘non-canonical’ (Leitch, 2017) background alongside television’s adaptation of the literary canon.