Small Screen Silents: Ostentatious Sonic Absence and the Neo-Silent Aesthetic in Peak TV

This chapter explores the modalities of silence and wordlessness in contemporary television, drawing much-needed critical attention to the growing corpus of (semi)-silent TV episodes in which diegetic sound—particularly dialogue—is purposefully and ostentatiously pared back. Comparable to the one-off musical episode, and to other conceptual departures from typical episodic forms, silent episodes have featured in an array of well-known “peak” TV shows. Their proliferation not only reflects the maturation of television as a medium, but also the converging boundaries between the televisual and the cinematic, particularly the disruption of TV's vococentric foundations. Although several recent scholarly interventions have focused on contemporary silent (or “neo-silent”) cinema, silence on the small screen remains notably overlooked. This chapter therefore seeks to address the current gap in the literature by examining the phenomenon of the (neo)-silent episode in greater depth, linking its subtractive sonic strategies to the creative impulses that similarly underpin neo-silent cinema, and considering the role of self-imposed stylistic limitation in resurrecting (and reimagining) a supposedly obsolete mode of audiovisual storytelling. Having established these theoretical foundations, two indicative case studies are then analysed in detail—Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Hush” (1999), and BoJack Horseman’s “Fish Out of Water” (2016)—exploring how (and why) these episodes, which bookend the peak TV era, destabilize their expected sonic conventions and offer meaningful insights into the transformation and diversification of TV sound.