What Is Television? Two Auteur Series in Literary Contexts

In this analysis of how historical poetics helps to illuminate the contexts of production, Britt demonstrates how ‘auteurship’ can be adapted from film to television through recent crime-drama series by David Lynch (Twin Peaks: The Return) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Too Old to Die Young). The literary values that these shows espouse, argues Britt, are articulated through the notions of freedom and commitment—both the freedom given to TV creators in the new dispensation and the distinct value placed on freedom within the plots and the way that Lynch and Refn’s adaptations of the crime drama subgenre correspond to Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of committed writing. Taking a loose interpretive stance on adaptation and using Sartre’s philosophical reading of literary poetics, Britt sees a framework of freedom, commitment, and other existentialist values as highlighting the literary shortfalls of Refn’s show, rather than lending it integrity as a radical or editorial adaptation; and as giving Lynch’s reworking of his iconic TV venture a multi-media countenance that expands the formal properties of the television platform.