FISKE

TELEVISION CULTURE
Chapter 9 Reading Character
television is centrally
concerned with the
representa3on of people

Overview of Theory
Representa3on in TV drama is dierent to that in Film and News
due to the formal conven3ons of TV drama:
series & serials / mid shots, close ups, 2 and 3 shots to establish
iden33es and camera movement to focus on individuals

The actors become physical embodiments of the characters

they play (can be dicult to dis3nguish between the actor and
character) and blur reality
The repeated representa3on of the characters invites audience
members to iden3fy with the dierent characters
Which characters we iden3fy with will depend on our own
social and cultural experience and background
This process of iden3ca3on surpasses TV representa3ons as
simply ideological (repressive dominant ideology) and allows
ac3ve audience par3cipa3on

Audiences make meaning from their reading of characters based upon

their own individual experience do they iden3fy with the
characters? Are they like them or dierent to them?

Idea 1
TV audiences have unique relaFonships with the
representaFon of characters compared to other Media forms
due to the structure of TV series, stylisFc convenFons and
developed familiarity with a programmes characters:
the constant repe33on of a character means that characters live in
similar 3me scales to their audience. They have a past, a present and a
future that appear to exceed their textual existence, so that audience
members are invited to relate to them in terms of familiarity and
iden3ca3onthis oers the viewer a quite dierent rela3onship to the
character from that oered by lm, where the end of the lm is normally
the end of the character.

Idea 2
The representaFon of characters in TV drama is a complex form of
representaFon for it is constructed by:

the text (use of mid shots, close ups, two and 3 shots etc)
the narra3ve (role of the character in the way the plot develops)
the body of the player (what the actor looks like), and
The performance of the actor.

Reading character requires the viewer to negoFatethat boundary

between the representaFon and the real and the ideological
relaFonship between them
This negoFaFon must be conducted in two ways:
1.
2.

the rela3onship between the real world of the player and the
represented one of the character and
the real world of the viewer and that of the character /player they
watch

Idea 2 model
Constructed Representa3on by the writers & producers

THE CHARACTER
Physical
appearance
of actor
playing the
character

Stereotypical
individual
characteris3cs
of represented
character

Social values &

ideology
embedded in
representa3on
of the character

Audience Readings of Representa3on

Idea 3
TV audiences are invited to see characters as real.
Individual characters are given some stereotypical
characterisFcs, they may be like someone we know or
have known and we gain pleasure from seeing how they
experience their lives:
Realism proposes that a character represents a real person.
The text provides us with adequate pointers to the
characteris3cs of the person being portrayed: we, the
viewers, then call upon our life experience of understanding
real peopleto ll out the characteris3cs in our imagina3on
so that we make the character into a real person whom we
know and has a life outside the text

Idea 4

Characters in TV drama are read as individuals but also the representaFon of social
posiFons and the values embodied in them. Audiences are made up of dierent
people with dierent viewpoints so how they read a representaFon of young people
will depend on their own experience of young people.

understanding of character is polysemica character is a set of values

that are related throughsimilarity and dierence to other characters.
Many viewers report that one of the main sources of the pleasure of
television is the opportuni3es it oers to iden3fy with certain other
characters, to share their emo3ons and experiencesImagining how he
or she would have behaved had they been in a characters shoes at a
par3cular moment [is] an ac3ve iden3ca3on that has the reader sharing
the role of the writer.
The viewer is less a subject of the dominant ideology and more in control
of the process of iden3ca3on through his or her own meanings. Finding
pleasure in TV is connected to liking and dislikingthe real and unreal.
[Audiences] judge characters on how real they seemed but the characters
they like appear more real than those they dislike

Idea 5
Any viewer may nd in her / himself a number
of points of relaFonship with the personal /
social and ideological values seen in any
character:
A viewer implicates him / herself with a character when that
character is in a similar social situa3on or embodies similar social
values to the viewer, and this implica3on oers the reward of
pleasure. They allow space for the viewer to read character and
incident as bearers of social value and thus to nego3ate readings
that relate to his or her social posi3on