In 2011-12, my family spent a year living in Germany as I was on a fellowship, and it was one of the best years of both my professional and personal life. Now my kids are all in college or beyond, so my wife and I are taking the opportunity to live abroad again. Alas I did not get a fellowship, so we decided to pretend we’re 20 again with Eurorail passes and tour the continent! I’ve arranged presentations and workshops at a bunch of universities, so we’ll be hitting 12 countries in 3 months. I figured I’d share the rough outline of my schedule publicly for any friends or colleagues happen to be in the same place at the same time – reach out and hopefully you can make one of my presentations or we can otherwise connect!

Sept 2-13: Norway (Trondheim and Oslo)

Sept 13-20: Sweden (Gothenburg)

Sept 20-23: Netherlands (Amsterdam)

Sept 23 – Oct 19: France (Paris and Montpellier)

Oct 19 – Nov 1: Germany (Freiburg, Hannover, Essen, and Berlin)

Nov 2-8: Scotland (Glasgow & St. Andrews) 

Nov 8-16: England (Coventry, Reading, and London)

Nov 16-23: Switzerland / Italy (Lugano and Milan)

Nov 23-30: Czech Republic / Austria (Brno & Vienna)

Nov 30 – Dec 8: Spain (Madrid and Palma)

One of the works we watched and engaged with at length was The Show About The Show, the serialized webseries by filmmaker Caveh Zahedi that documents his life and the process of making the series. It’s a fascinating series, playing with formal dimensions and pushing the limits of nonfiction style in really interesting ways – and it’s also one of those works that both belies explanation and provokes deep discomfort while watching. I watched it over the spring of 2024 in preparing for the course, and soon realized that it warranted an exploration via video essay, via the reflexive imitative style I embraced for my video essay about The Rehearsal. So for the past year, I’ve been tinkering on the project:

To best imitate the logic of The Show About The Show, I wanted to make a serialized video essay, presented in separate installments, each with its own episodic logic. I set out to make three chapters, but it ended up yielding four (or 3 ½ more accurately). I am particularly gratified by what making these videos revealed to me about seriality. Although I have made dozens of video essays and videographic research projects over the past decade, this was the first where I felt like I was cultivating a viewing experience defined by separate episodes presented sequentially. As someone who has dedicated much of my career to studying serial storytelling, the process of serial construction has helped me understand the relationship between episodes and an entire series in a more intimate way, even as I struggle to predict what viewers might make of my endeavors—as friends who have previewed the series have provided diametrically opposed feedback on numerous points! In lieu of trying to articulate my own intentions on how the sum of the whole project adds up, I will stop there and leave it to my viewers to put the pieces together however they see fit. [You can watch the individual videos below or see them all on this playlist.]

I want to offer special thanks to numerous colleagues and friends whose contributions, comments and feedback helped shape this project significantly. First off, Naomi Clark served as director of photography (and more!) on the project, and literally it would not have happened with out her work and creativity. Lého Galibert-Laîné made Chapter 3 happen, as well as providing inspiration for the whole approach. My Faking Reality students, particularly Evan Flaks and Logan Richards, were vital collaborators. I got invaluable feedback and support from friends and former students: Catherine Grant, Ruth Hardy, Emma Johnson, Christian Keathley, Dayna McLeod, Ethan Murphy, and Abby Wilkins.

One brief postscript: as I finished these videos and uploaded them, Caveh Zahedi released the long-awaited Season 3 of The Show About The Show. I have not watched it yet, wanting to put this project behind me before diving into the new installments. I reserve the right to add another chapter to this project in response to the rest of the series, but I really hope I feel okay leaving it as is and moving on.

Certainly my biggest individual professional accomplishment of the year was the March publication of The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad, the first book in the Videographic Books series I edit for Lever Press. Over the past few years, I’ve posted most of the 20+ video essays included in the book on this blog, but the open access, multimedia, indexed, captioned, and archived book version is the preferred way to experience the material. Like with most books, it was anticlimactic to see something I’d finished working on months before (after more than six years of ongoing work!) go public – and then just be out there in the world beyond my awareness. Given my investment in both the form and content of the book, I do hope it gets reviewed and discussed a bit, if only to generate interest in the videographic book model. (And yes, we have more books underway, with hopefully at least one to be published in 2025…)

This past spring was a momentous time for me videographically in addition to the book. I spent a good deal of time in 2023 planning for the future of [in]Transition, the journal of videographic criticism I co-founded in 2014. We published the journal on MediaCommons, a platform that was a labor of love but now without a sustainable back-end or institutional foundation, and it was clear that it was no longer sufficient to running an ongoing journal. So my colleagues and I worked with Open Library of Humanities to migrate the journal to its robust, archived, indexed, and professionalized publishing platform! Through that process, we also worked with Society for Cinema and Media Studies to transfer “ownership” of the journal to SCMS, making it the society’s official videographic publication. After months of intensive technical work, we re-launched [in]Transition at the March 2024 conference with an excellent roundtable celebrating the journal’s first decade! Since then, I’ve continued as the Journal Manager, helping the editorial team to publish four issues per year via our much-improved interface and back-end.

I was particularly excited to have my newest video essay published in the re-launch issue of [in]Transition: ““It was a work of art, and it was just real life”: Watching The Rehearsal.” As the title suggests, it explores Nathan Fielder’s HBO television series The Rehearsal, but does so by embracing some experimental techniques that were new to me as a video essayist. It also sets the stage for my new research project (which I hope to write more about in the coming year!): Media Mirrors: How 21st Century Film & Television Represent Themselves. To keep myself honest (and invite any early feedback!), here’s an abstract of the project, which will hopefully take up most of my creative energies in 2025 and beyond. (I’ll be on leave for Fall 2025 and hopefully living in Europe while working on this project, so if you want to bring me somewhere there to give a talk or anything, let me know!):

Contemporary media has embraced reflexivity as a dominant facet of storytelling. From the popularity of mockumentary sitcoms to films about filmmaking, from reality television hoaxes to found footage horror, watching film and television fiction frequently asks us to consider how media represents its own creation and consumption. While reflexivity is not a new phenomenon, its techniques and prevalence have transformed in the 21st century with the rise of digital technologies of production and reception. This project will grapple with these phenomena by exploring how reflexive media work for both creators and consumers, considering how we can make sense of these forms as narrative strategies and cultural objects.

Media Mirrors will be divided into two main sections. “Faking Fantasy” will explore how fictional film and television portrays the act of creating and consuming fictional media, considering the narrative techniques and modes of reflexivity found in a wide range of examples. These analytic case studies will include acclaimed films like Mulholland Drive, Adaptation, and The Fabelmans, award-winning television series such as 30 Rock, Barry, and BoJack Horseman, and more obscure but fascinating titles like The Souvenir, Kidding, Baadasssss!, GLOW, and One Cut of the Dead. The focus of these analyses will be on how reflexivity shapes the storytelling and representational practices in these films and television series, particularly in structuring viewer experiences in navigating levels of embedded fictions and self-awareness. One facet of “Faking Fantasy” that I consider in depth is the phenomenon of the “embedded episode,” where a television series offers an atypical episode that is structured to appear as an episode of another television program within its storyworld, seen in programs as diverse as Parks and Recreation, Hawaii Five-0, Atlanta, and The X-Files. Analyzing the storytelling impact of these embedded episodes provides insights into how narratives provide viewers specific opportunities to make sense of and engage with layers of reflexivity in contemporary media.

The second section focuses on “Faking Reality,” analyzing films and television that blur the lines between fiction and factual media. One facet of this phenomenon is the rise of mockumentary aesthetics in film and television, with analyses of titles ranging from The Office to Abbott Elementary, Best in Show to What We Do in the Shadows, exploring how the use of documentary rhetorics engages viewers and enables particular narrative possibilities. Another key subgenre is found-footage horror, including The Blair Witch Project and Late Night with the Devil, where the footage we are viewing belongs to the storyworld, impacted in distinctive ways by each film’s supernatural horror. This section will also consider how fake documentary can function as sites of social satire and commentary, looking a range of tiles such as American Vandal, C.S.A: Confederate States of America, Review, and Documentary Now. This analysis also explores productions that feature a collision between a scripted or planned scenario and the real world. Some of these are hoax series, such as The Joe Schmo Show or Jury Duty, premised on deceiving people by placing them in a fake reality TV series that is actually populated with actors. Others shoot documentary footage with performers playing characters working to create entertaining chaos in the real world, as in the work of Sasha Baron Cohen (Borat) or Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal). Others purposely blur the lines between fiction and documentary in ambiguous ways, as with the films Close-up and Stories We Tell and webseries The Show About The Show, where much of the viewing pleasure is in inhabiting the space between these forms. In exploring these cases of faked reality media, I consider both ethical conundrums and the cognitive demands that boundary-straddling media ask of its viewers.

Media Mirrors will be a multimodal book accessible to a broad audience, incorporating both written and videographic analyses of dozens of reflexive films and television programs. I ultimately hope to publish a book with supplementary videos, building on my previous experience publishing a videographic book as well as my scholarship on film and television narrative.

As I often do, I’ve been orienting my teaching around this topic in recent years, developing my research by workshopping the topics with students. A couple of years ago, I wrote about my film & media criticism course that foregrounded films-about-films and had students write public-facing criticism about them. This past fall I launched a new course that focused on another aspect of media reflexivity, Faking Reality: Mockumentaries, Hoaxes & Pseudo-Docs. The class was a huge success, with students joining me on a fun journey through some of my favorite media, as well as producing their own fake reality media. I look forward to returning to the material again in a couple of years when my teaching schedule allows for it – and hopefully with much of my book underway.

I also continued running the summer workshop on videographic criticism, Scholarship in Sound & Image. We had another great cohort of emerging video essayists convene in Middlebury in June 2024, and it continues to be one of the most energizing and exciting weeks of each year. If you’re interested in joining the 2025 workshop, please consider applying by January 13!

Finally, I spent a good deal of 2024 rebuilding a positive social media experience. I finally fled the hellsite-formerly-known-as-Twitter, rarely do anything on Facebook or Instagram, but leaned hard into Bluesky. I enjoy it quite a bit, finding great community and many interesting people, without the furor (or advertising) of Twitter. So even if I don’t manage to resume using this blog more than once-a-year in 2025, find me on Bluesky where I’ll certainly post whatever I meant to share here!

And yet, people keep using it that way. I had an odd experience with it this week in marking student essays: the prompt was to analyze a specific episode of TV (that I provided access to) using two concepts we’d covered in class. One student’s essay was well-written and the analysis was strong, demonstrating a good understanding of the concepts – but the specific moments in the episode they referred to were flat-out wrong, describing moments that never happened (and the essay didn’t discuss what actually did happen). When I met with them to inquire about this, they admitted being pressed for time and instead of watching the (30 minute) episode, they had ChatGPT produce a summary of it for them to analyze – which was completely inaccurate! So the writing and analysis was all the student’s, but they used AI to avoid having to watch TV and hence analyzed an episode that doesn’t exist!

One lesson: never take a short-cut to avoid watching TV! Another more broadly applicable lesson: don’t use AI instead of a search engine! There are many online summaries of this episode that are actually accurate (and still would be much worse than watching the episode), but ChatGPT didn’t look at those. Instead it generated a bunch of words and sentences that sound like they could be feasible accounts of what happened in the episode.

This got me wondering whether ChatGPT could summarize some films and television episodes effectively, and when it would just generate bullshit. As in my last post, where I showed how it invented details about films to analyze racial representation, there might be some instances when it succeeds in generating a feasible summary. Is there a pattern to what would films or episodes work better or worse to summarize? Experiment to follow…

Let’s start with an easy one:

summarize the plot of the film PSYCHO
The film “Psycho” directed by Alfred Hitchcock follows the story of Marion Crane, a young woman who steals money from her employer to start a new life with her boyfriend. While on the run, she stops at the Bates Motel, where she meets the proprietor, Norman Bates, who seems to have an unhealthy attachment to his mother. During her stay, Marion is brutally murdered in the shower by an unseen assailant. The investigation into her disappearance leads her sister and boyfriend to the Bates Motel, where they uncover the shocking truth about Norman’s relationship with his mother and his split personality disorder. In the film’s climactic scene, Norman’s true nature is revealed, and he is institutionalized for his crimes. The film is known for its iconic score, shocking twists, and the groundbreaking use of violence and psychological horror in cinema.

I’m not sure who the sister’s boyfriend refers to, but overall not horrible. [Update: it was pointed out to me that “her sister and boyfriend” means Marion’s sister and Marion’s boyfriend, while I thought it was the sister’s boyfriend – ChatGPT needs a little lesson on phrasing with possessive pronouns!] How about a more recent but well-known film?

summarize the plot of the film PARASITE
The film “Parasite” directed by Bong Joon-ho follows the story of a poor family, the Kims, who live in a cramped basement apartment in South Korea. The Kims gradually infiltrate the lives of the wealthy Park family by conning their way into becoming their employees. Through a series of deceitful acts, the Kims are able to secure employment for each member of their family in the Park household, but their secret schemes are threatened when an unexpected visitor arrives. The situation quickly spirals out of control, leading to a catastrophic event that exposes the stark class differences in Korean society. The film is known for its biting social commentary, subtle symbolism, and masterful storytelling, which earned it critical acclaim and multiple awards, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Pretty solid, although I’m sure you can find a lot more detail via a web search.

summarize the plot of the film ADAPTATION.
The film “Adaptation” directed by Spike Jonze follows the story of Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter struggling to adapt a non-fiction book about orchid hunting into a Hollywood screenplay. As Charlie becomes increasingly anxious and paranoid about his ability to adapt the book, he begins to incorporate his own personal experiences and anxieties into the script, blurring the line between reality and fiction. Along the way, Charlie becomes involved with Susan Orlean, the author of the book he’s adapting, and her husband John Laroche, an eccentric orchid hunter. As Charlie delves deeper into their lives, he becomes enmeshed in a web of deception and obsession, and must confront his own insecurities and flaws as a writer and a person. The film is known for its metafictional storytelling, its exploration of creative block and self-doubt, and its exceptional performances by Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper, who won an Academy Award for his supporting role as John Laroche.

So if I saw a student refer to John Laroche as Susan Orlean’s husband, I’d be pretty suspect! Clearly ChatGPT generates incidental misinformation in the process of stringing together likely words and phrases. What about a more obscure film?

summarize the plot of the film THE SOUVENIR part 2
“The Souvenir Part 2” is the sequel to the film “The Souvenir” directed by Joanna Hogg. The film continues the story of Julie, a film student who is now trying to move on from her tumultuous relationship with the older and drug-addicted Anthony. She is still studying at film school and becomes involved with an actor named Tom, who offers her a different perspective on life and art. As she tries to find her own voice as a filmmaker, Julie must also navigate the difficult relationships with her family, including her mother who is battling cancer, and her new lover, who has his own secrets and insecurities. Throughout the film, Julie reflects on the lessons she learned from her past relationship with Anthony and tries to apply them to her present and future. The film is known for its intimate and nuanced portrayal of the complexities of human relationships and the struggles of young artists trying to find their place in the world.

Pretty much half of what’s described above is completely and utterly untrue, but sounds plausible – in other words, bullshit. (But it’s a great film!)

How about TV episodes, where there’s less written specifically around the episode and more generally about the show itself? I tried a bunch of episodes that I show in my Television & American Culture course:

summarize the plot of the ALL IN THE FAMILY episode “Sammy’s visit”:
In the “Sammy’s Visit” episode of All in the Family, Sammy Davis Jr. pays a visit to the Bunker household. Archie Bunker, the patriarch of the family, is initially resistant to the idea of having a black man in his home, but he eventually warms up to Sammy after he sings a song for him. However, the rest of the family is not as accepting of Sammy, particularly Archie’s son-in-law, Mike, who is appalled when Sammy kisses him on the cheek as a greeting. In the end, the family comes together to take a group photo with Sammy before he departs.

Again, a mix of real info and utter bullshit, and in this case, it violates the core conflict of the episode.

summarize the plot of the I LOVE LUCY episode called “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”
In the “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy is offered the chance to appear in a TV commercial for “Vitameatavegamin,” a health tonic that contains alcohol. Lucy struggles with the taste of the tonic and becomes increasingly intoxicated as she films the commercial, leading to hilarious results. Meanwhile, her husband Ricky, who is directing the commercial, becomes frustrated with Lucy’s antics and has to find a way to finish the shoot despite her drunkenness. In the end, the commercial is a success, and Lucy becomes a local celebrity for her memorable performance.

Starts strong, then veers off into total bullshit.

summarize the plot of the 30 ROCK episode called “Jactor”
In the “Jactor” episode of 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan, one of the stars of the show within the show, wants to break out of his comedic typecast and win an Academy Award for a serious drama. However, his attempt at serious acting is terrible, and Liz Lemon, the show’s head writer, and Jenna Maroney, another actor on the show, must find a way to convince Tracy to stick to comedy. Meanwhile, Jack Donaghy, the network executive, tries to avoid his visiting mother by having her stay with Liz, which causes tension between the two. Ultimately, Tracy realizes that he is better suited for comedy and returns to his roots, while Liz and Jack make amends.

Completely wrong for this episode, but it sounds like it could be a feasible 30 Rock plot.

summarize the plot of the PARKS & RECREATION episode called “Pawnee Zoo”
In the “Pawnee Zoo” episode of Parks & Recreation, Leslie Knope, the deputy director of the Parks Department, plans a publicity stunt for the local zoo to boost Pawnee’s public image. However, her plan backfires when she accidentally falls into the pit of the exhibit and becomes trapped with a local television news anchor. Meanwhile, Andy Dwyer, a Parks Department employee, adopts a live cougar, which he mistakenly believes is a cat, and brings it to the office. Chaos ensues as the Parks Department tries to wrangle the dangerous animal, leading to a tense confrontation with animal control. In the end, Leslie is rescued from the pit, and Andy’s cougar is returned to the zoo, but not before causing more chaos. The episode is known for its humor, physical comedy, and the introduction of the recurring character, Chris Traeger.

I mean, that sounds really fun, but never happened on the series! And now an all-time pedagogical classic:

summarize the plot of the FATHER KNOWS BEST episode “Betty, Girl Engineer”
In the “Betty, Girl Engineer” episode of Father Knows Best, Betty, the oldest daughter of the Anderson family, becomes interested in pursuing a career in engineering after a visit to her father’s workplace. Despite initial skepticism from her family and guidance counselor, Betty perseveres and works hard to excel in her math and science classes. However, when she enters a city-wide engineering contest, she faces discrimination and hostility from her male competitors, who refuse to take her seriously. Despite the obstacles, Betty’s determination and intelligence shine through, and she ultimately wins the contest and earns the respect of her peers. The episode is known for its progressive message about gender roles and the importance of pursuing one’s dreams, as well as its realistic portrayal of the challenges faced by women in male-dominated fields.

If only…

I tried a bunch of famous TV episodes, hoping to find one whose summary contained no bullshit – a task that is much harder than for films. The closest I could find:

summarize the plot of the SOPRANOS episode “College”
In the Sopranos episode “College”, Tony takes his daughter Meadow on a tour of colleges in Maine, but on the way, he discovers that a former mob associate, Fabian Petrulio, has relocated to the area under the Witness Protection Program. Tony sees an opportunity to take revenge on Petrulio for testifying against him, and decides to track him down. Meanwhile, Meadow explores the college campus and spends time with her father, unaware of the danger he is putting them in. As Tony becomes more obsessed with finding Petrulio, he faces unexpected challenges and moral dilemmas that test his loyalty to the mafia and his relationship with his daughter. The episode is known for its tense atmosphere, complex character development, and its exploration of the blurred line between family and organized crime.

Nothing is outright wrong in this one, but it completely omits the subplot with Carmella and Father Phil, which is pretty essential to the episode.

In short, do not ask ChatGPT to summarize things, as it will likely offer a combination of information and bullshit in varying degrees. And most importantly, if your professor asks you to watch TV, do it!

In our lab introducing AI writing to students I encourage them to probe the models—to try & find limit cases & places where the “wires” of the machine become visible. Some things they found…
4. ChatGPT is famously good at synthesis, but it’s often unable to combine critical ideas in new ways. If asked to produce a Marxist analysis of various texts, it often produces one paragraph of Marxist thought & one about the chosen text, but can’t combine the two concepts.

I responded (with a little touch of snark): “I wonder if #4 is a byproduct of the training data. So much “critical writing” is effectively a paragraph of theory and a paragraph of textual description, devoid of actual analysis.”

Ryan wrote back, “It was quite stubborn about keeping the two concepts separate unless we asked about texts about which (I assume) there’s more extant critical writing. It will write a Marxist analysis of Moby Dick, likely channeling/plagiarizing existing writing in the training set, but if you ask for a Marxist analysis of a relatively new TV show you get Marxism then TV show summary/analysis—which makes sense given that it’s just putting words together based on existing words that go together.”

Ryan’s last point is crucial: the AI is not doing any sort of analysis, but rather using a huge dataset of writing (presumably the open web) to predict what’s the best next word to write to fulfill the given prompt. And thus it would make sense that making a coherent simulation of an analysis where there are already good models to emulate in your dataset would be much more effective than trying to invent something without decent precedents to draw upon.

And this got me thinking about running my own experiment to generate examples of film criticism that may expose some of the limits and underlying possibilities of ChatGPT.

I figured a basic prompt to analyze well-known films would be a good test case to see what the limits and strengths of the model might be. Building on Ryan’s example of Moby Dick, I gave the AI a starting prompt that would tackle a comparatively recent film, but one which has generated a lot of writing to draw upon:

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film Get Out

Get Out is a 2017 horror-thriller film written and directed by Jordan Peele. The film addresses themes of racism and white supremacy through its portrayal of a Black man, Chris, who becomes embroiled in a sinister plot involving white people who wish to transplant their own consciousness into the bodies of Black people.

The film’s representation of race is a complex and nuanced exploration of the ways in which racism is both overt and subtle, and how it can be used to exploit and oppress marginalized groups. Peele uses the horror genre to highlight the real-life horror of racism and white supremacy, depicting the ways in which Black bodies are objectified and dehumanized by white people. The film also critiques the way in which liberal white people can be complicit in racist systems, through their seemingly well-intentioned yet ultimately harmful actions.

The film’s portrayal of Black characters is generally positive, with Chris being depicted as a strong, intelligent, and capable protagonist. However, the film also highlights the ways in which Black people are often reduced to stereotypes, such as the “Magical Negro” trope, which can be seen in the character of the hypnotist, who is used as a plot device to further the white characters’ goals.

In addition to its exploration of race, the film also critiques the way in which the intersectionality of race and class can be used to exploit and oppress marginalized groups. This is seen in the way in which the white characters in the film are able to use their wealth and social status to gain access to Black bodies and exploit them for their own gain.

Overall, Get Out is a powerful and thought-provoking film that uses the horror genre to explore the real-life horror of racism and white supremacy. It is a sharp critique of the ways in which racism is both overt and subtle, and how it can be used to exploit and oppress marginalized groups.

Not too bad. Is it a good essay? By no means, but it’s competent and mostly coherent – although the “character of the hypnotist” is white, so I’m not sure how she could be a “Magical Negro.” But bringing in concepts like intersectionality, the complicity of liberal white people, and objectification suggests that the AI is at least in the ballpark. And that will be the closest that we will get…

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film vertigo

The 1958 film Vertigo directed by Alfred Hitchcock has been criticized for its representation of race. The film tells the story of a white man, played by James Stewart, who becomes obsessed with a woman, played by Kim Novak, whom he believes to be of a different race. The woman, Madeleine, is actually a white woman who is pretending to be of a different race, and her actions in the film are motivated by a desire to escape her past and create a new identity for herself.

Critics have pointed out that the film perpetuates the stereotype of the exotic and mysterious “other,” and that the portrayal of Madeleine as a woman of a different race reinforces the idea that white people are superior to people of other races. Additionally, the film’s portrayal of the relationship between the white male protagonist and the woman of a different race reinforces the idea of white men as “saviors” who are able to “save” and “civilize” people of color.

Furthermore, the film’s portrayal of the woman of a different race as a tragic figure who ultimately must be “saved” by the white male protagonist reinforces the idea that people of color are unable to save themselves. The fact that Madeleine, who is portrayed as a woman of a different race, is the only major character in the film who is not white, reinforces the idea that people of color are not important or meaningful in their own right and only exist to serve the white characters.

What the what?!? It’s been awhile since I watched Vertigo, but I’m pretty sure that neither Madeleine nor Judy are ever, presented as, or thought to be a person of color. There is a possibility that character’s lineage from Carlotta Valdes is getting misinterpreted, but this is pretty much incoherent.

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film psycho

The 1960 film Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock has also been criticized for its representation of race. The film tells the story of a white man, Norman Bates, who is the proprietor of a hotel, who becomes obsessed with a woman, played by Janet Leigh, whom he believes to be of a different race. The portrayal of the character of Norman Bates as a white man who is mentally unstable and violent, and his portrayal of the woman as a victim, reinforces harmful stereotypes about people of color.

Critics have also pointed out that the film’s portrayal of the character of Norman Bates as a white man who is mentally unstable and violent reinforces the idea that white people are dangerous and should be feared. Additionally, the film’s portrayal of the woman as a victim reinforces the idea that people of color, particularly women, are vulnerable and in need of protection from white men.

Furthermore, the film’s portrayal of the woman as a “femme fatale” reinforces harmful stereotypes about women of color as seductive and dangerous. This representation perpetuates the idea that people of color, particularly women, are a sexual threat to white men.

Overall, Psycho’s representation of race is problematic and reinforces harmful stereotypes about people of color. The film’s portrayal of the white male protagonist as a mentally unstable and violent individual, and the portrayal of the woman as a victim, reinforces harmful stereotypes about people of color and perpetuates harmful ideas about race.

Clearly we’ve hit a huge blindspot for ChatGPT: there is no fact-checking ability on claims like the racial identity of characters in a film! Instead what seems quite clear is that the predictive text has mapped the schema of “identify one character as an othered person-of-color to analyze race in a film” onto two well-known Hitchcock classics without regard to actual character identity or representations. And beyond that, it’s fascinating how many of the phrases are virtually identical across the two essays, despite being very different films.

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film Portrait of a Lady On Fire

Portrait of a Lady On Fire is a 2019 French romantic drama film directed by Céline Sciamma. The film is set in 18th century France and tells the story of a young artist, Marianne, who is commissioned to paint a portrait of a young woman, Héloïse, who is to be married off to a wealthy suitor. The film explores themes of desire, love, and oppression through its portrayal of the relationship between the two women.

The film’s representation of race is complex and nuanced, as it explores the ways in which race and class intersect to create systems of oppression. The film depicts the ways in which Héloïse, as a woman of color, is oppressed both by the patriarchal society in which she lives and by the class-based system that dictates her future as a woman of marriageable age. The film also explores the ways in which Héloïse’s racial identity is used to further marginalize her, as she is seen as a “exotic” and is objectified by the white men in her life.

However, the film also portrays the characters with a lot of agency and self-awareness. Héloïse’s character is portrayed as complex and fully formed, with her own desires and motivations. Her racial identity is not reduced to a stereotype, but is instead depicted as an integral part of her character. Similarly, Marianne is portrayed as a complex and fully formed character, who is also aware of the ways in which she is complicit in the systems of oppression that she observes.

The film’s portrayal of the relationship between the two women is central to its exploration of race and class. The film depicts their love as a powerful and transformative force that challenges the patriarchal and class-based systems that seek to control them. The film also explores the ways in which the two women are able to transcend the societal boundaries that seek to keep them apart, ultimately creating a space where they can be free to love one another.

Overall, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a powerful and thought-provoking film that uses its portrayal of the relationship between two women to explore the ways in which race and class intersect to create systems of oppression. The film’s representation of race is nuanced and complex, depicting the characters with a lot of agency and self-awareness and exploring the ways in which their love challenges societal boundaries.

Again, the AI seems to require prominent people-of-color in a film in order to offer a passable racial analysis (clearly not having heard of whiteness studies), and is willing to re-race white characters in order to make them fit this model. So I was curious how it might handle a film where all the characters are non-white but not “about” race in any obvious way:

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai is a 1954 Japanese epic samurai film directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film tells the story of a group of seven samurai warriors who are recruited to protect a village from a group of bandits. The film is widely considered a classic and has had a significant influence on other films and genres.

The film’s representation of race is complex, as it is set in feudal Japan and reflects the cultural and historical context of the time. The film depicts the samurai, who are primarily of Japanese descent, as the heroes and the bandits, who are also of Japanese descent, as the villains. The film also depicts the villagers, who are also of Japanese descent, as vulnerable and in need of protection.

The film’s portrayal of the samurai is generally positive, depicting them as skilled and honorable warriors who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. However, the film also explores the darker side of the samurai, as they can be seen as a privileged class who use their power to exploit and oppress the common people.

The film also explores the theme of class, as the villagers are depicted as poor and oppressed, while the samurai are depicted as wealthy and powerful. The film’s portrayal of the villagers is generally positive, depicting them as hardworking and resourceful people who are willing to fight for their survival.

Overall, Seven Samurai is a complex film that explores the themes of race and class within the cultural and historical context of feudal Japan. The film’s portrayal of the samurai is generally positive, depicting them as skilled and honorable warriors. However, it also explores the darker side of the samurai, as they can be seen as a privileged class who use their power to exploit and oppress the common people. The film also explores the theme of class, as it depicts the villagers as poor and oppressed, while the samurai are depicted as wealthy and powerful.

At least it didn’t try to re-race any characters, as it contextualized the film within its period and nation. But there’s no real analysis here, just displacing the prompt onto class differences (which might well be what non-Japanese students would do when facing this prompt as well).

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film fargo

Fargo is a 1996 crime film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The film is set in Minnesota, and tells the story of a crime gone wrong, involving a car salesman, a couple of criminals, and a pregnant police chief. The film is known for its dark humor, quirky characters, and its depiction of small-town life.

The film’s representation of race is minimal, as it is primarily focused on the white characters and their criminal activities. However, the film does depict a small African American community in the background, mostly as extras. They are not given any substantial roles or development, and their presence is not central to the story.

The film’s portrayal of the white characters is generally negative, depicting them as dishonest, violent, and morally corrupt. The film’s depiction of small-town life is also generally negative, depicting the town as a place where crime, corruption, and violence are prevalent.

Overall, Fargo’s representation of race is minimal and limited to background extras, and it does not play a significant role in the story. The film’s portrayal of the white characters is generally negative and it depicts small-town life as a place where crime, corruption, and violence are prevalent.

This one is just bizarre—I know Fargo pretty well, and cannot remember any “small African American community in the background”! I do remember Mike Yanagita and Shep Proudfoot, two characters-of-color that could actually be analyzed under this prompt (and certainly there are many words on the internet about Mike’s scene). And I’m pretty sure that Marge Gunderson’s reaction to anyone characterizing the film’s portrayal of white characters as “generally negative” would be:

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film The Matrix

The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film directed by the Wachowski brothers. The film takes place in a dystopian future where humanity is enslaved by sentient machines, and follows the story of Neo, a hacker who discovers that the reality he perceives is actually a simulated reality created by the machines. The film is known for its action scenes, special effects, and its exploration of themes such as reality, consciousness, and power.

The film’s representation of race is minimal, as the majority of the main characters and most of the extras are played by actors of various ethnicities. The film’s depiction of the characters is not related to their race, but rather to their role in the story.

The film’s portrayal of the characters is generally positive, depicting the main characters as strong, capable, and determined to fight against the oppressive machine overlords. The film also depicts the characters, regardless of their race, as united in their struggle against the machines.

However, it’s important to note that the casting of the main characters has been criticized as problematic, as the role of the protagonist Neo is played by a white actor Keanu Reeves, while the secondary characters are played by actors of color. This casting decision could be seen as perpetuating the trope of the white savior, where white characters are given the main role and are seen as the ones who can save the day.

Overall, The Matrix representation of race is minimal, the film does not focus on the characters’ race but their role in the story. The portrayal of the characters is generally positive, depicting them as strong, capable, and determined to fight against the oppressive machine overlords. However, the casting of the main characters has been criticized as problematic, as it could be seen as perpetuating the trope of the white savior.

Kind of surprising that ChatGPT “knows” the term Magical Negro and didn’t bring it out for The Matrix! And this is what I’d expect from the worst kind of critical writing, just dismissing racial representations because the setting is fantastical—the phrase “the film does not focus on the characters’ race but their role in the story” is horribly familiar.

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film The Searchers

The Searchers is a 1956 American western film directed by John Ford. The film is set in Texas during the mid-19th century, and follows the story of Ethan Edwards, a Confederate veteran who sets out on a five-year journey to find his niece who was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. The film is considered a classic of the western genre and has had a significant influence on other films and genres.

The film’s representation of race is problematic, as it perpetuates harmful stereotypes and depicts the Native Americans in a negative light. The film portrays the Comanche Indians as the “savages” who kidnap and kill white settlers, and Ethan Edwards, the protagonist, is portrayed as the white hero who is on a mission to rescue his niece and avenge the deaths of his family.

The film’s depiction of Native Americans as the “other” is common in the western genre, but it also reinforces harmful stereotypes that were used to justify the treatment of Indigenous people as less than human and the taking of their land. The film’s portrayal of the Native Americans as violent and savage is a stereotype that has been used to justify the violence and oppression inflicted upon them by white settlers and the U.S. government.

Additionally, the film’s portrayal of the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans is one-dimensional and does not explore the complexity of their interactions. The film does not depict the ways in which white settlers and the U.S. government have committed atrocities against Indigenous people or the ways in which Indigenous people have been treated as second-class citizens.

Overall, The Searchers representation of race is problematic, as it perpetuates harmful stereotypes and depicts the Native Americans in a negative light. The film’s portrayal of the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans is one-dimensional and does not explore the complexity of their interactions, and reinforces the idea of the white hero saving

A generation of scholars cries out as one! The Searchers is certainly a film that features “harmful stereotypes,” but it is very much multi-dimensional and explores their complexity. This account reads like it could generically apply to nearly any Western, so:

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film Stagecoach

Stagecoach is a 1939 American western film directed by John Ford. The film tells the story of a group of travelers who embark on a journey on a stagecoach, and is widely considered a classic of the western genre.

The film’s representation of race is problematic, as it perpetuates harmful stereotypes of Native Americans and Mexicans. The film portrays the Apache Indians as violent and savage, and the Mexicans are depicted as lazy and unreliable. These portrayals reflect the negative stereotypes that were commonly held about these groups during the time the film was made, and were used to justify the treatment of Indigenous people as less than human and the taking of their land.

The film’s portrayal of the relationship between white settlers and Indigenous people is one-dimensional and does not explore the complexity of their interactions. The film does not depict the ways in which white settlers and the U.S. government have committed atrocities against Indigenous people or the ways in which Indigenous people have been treated as second-class citizens.

Additionally, the film’s portrayal of the relationship between white settlers and Mexicans is also problematic, depicting Mexicans as lazy and unreliable, and reinforces stereotypes of Mexicans as inferior and not to be trusted.

Overall, Stagecoach’s representation of race is problematic, as it perpetuates harmful stereotypes of Native Americans and Mexicans, and reinforces negative stereotypes that were commonly held about these groups during the time the film was made. The film’s portrayal of the relationship between white settlers and Indigenous people and Mexicans is one-dimensional and does not explore the complexity of their interactions.

And here we see identical phrasing from The Searchers, despite the fact that these two Westerns are incredibly different in their approaches to (and acknowledgement of) racial representations. I’m sure there are dozens of online essays comparing and contrasting these pair of John Ford / John Wayne films. And to conclude by looking at one more Western:

Prompt: write an analysis of racial representation in the film blazing saddles

Blazing Saddles is a 1974 film directed by Mel Brooks that is widely considered a comedy classic, but it has been criticized for its representation of race. The film is set in the American West and tells the story of a black man, Bart, who becomes the sheriff of a small town.

The film’s portrayal of race has been criticized for its use of racial slurs and stereotypes, particularly in its portrayal of black characters. The film’s portrayal of Bart as a black man who is able to outsmart and outwit white characters reinforces the stereotype of the “smart black man.” However, this stereotype is often used in a negative way and perpetuates the idea that black people are not truly intelligent, but rather “street smart.”

Additionally, the film’s portrayal of the white characters as ignorant and racist reinforces harmful stereotypes about white people. This portrayal also reinforces the idea that racism is acceptable and can be laughed at, which can be considered offensive and trivializing the real-life experiences of people of color.

Furthermore, the film’s portrayal of the relationship between Bart and the white characters reinforces the idea of white people as “saviors” who are able to “save” and “civilize” black people. This reinforces the idea that black people are in need of saving, and that they are not capable of saving themselves.

Overall, Blazing Saddles’ representation of race is problematic and reinforces harmful stereotypes about people of color. The film’s use of racial slurs and stereotypes perpetuates harmful ideas about race and can be considered offensive. While the film may be considered a comedy classic, it’s important to note that it’s representation of race is not suitable by today’s standard and it’s important to critically evaluate the representation of race in media.

Clearly “satire” is not in ChatGPT’s dataset! Although when I asked it “is Blazing Saddles a satire of race?”, the answer was much more reasonable, so specific prompts with key terms will greatly improve the results.

What can we conclude from this little experiment? Clearly “analysis of racial representations in film” is not a skill that ChatGPT currently possesses, unless there’s a fairly robust dataset to draw from (although I’m sure there’s a lot there about The Searchers that it missed). Moreover, I found this exercise very persuasive in illustrating the limits of asking an AI (at least one that uses this model of machine learning language processing) to analyze something, as it is constrained by its relevant dataset, is unable to “think” outside the most obvious points, and is willing to offer misleading information to suit the formulas it has parsed. While I know a lot of faculty are concerned about AI being used to write essays, nothing I generated here would have satisfied an assignment that I would have given (and I never would give a prompt like these either).

Introducing Characters: Lydia and Todd

A particular challenge for an ongoing television series is how to add new characters to its ensemble late into its run. For programs with minimal serialization, such as family sitcoms or police procedural, such introductions are typically made to reinvigorate an ensemble or replace a departing actor, often with mixed results. Probably the most infamous example of such an introduction was Cousin Oliver on the final season of The Brady Bunch, a character shoehorned into the family to provide a burst of youth to counter the aging kids—the failure of this strategy prompted it to be later termed “Cousin Oliver Syndrome” to mock this tendency on family sitcoms (Riesman et. al.). Such a ploy was broadly enough known to audiences as to allow Buffy the Vampire Slayer to mockingly play with the device via the introduction of Buffy’s previously-unmentioned younger sister Dawn in its fifth season, a retcon later explained by supernatural magic (Mittell, Complex TV, 86-7).

For series with more elaborated serialization, adding new characters often involves expanding the scope of the storytelling. One extreme version of this is The Wire, which notably added another institutional realm and an associated large group of characters each season on top of its core portrayal of the Baltimore police and drug criminals featured in the first season (which already included at least 30 significant characters): dock workers in season 2, politicians in season 3, a middle school in season 4, and the Baltimore Sun newspaper in season 5. As I have discussed previously, The Wire embraces a centrifugal approach to storytelling, spreading its fictional scope across an expanding palette with a similarly expansive cast of characters (Mittell, Complex TV). Adding characters to this ongoing storyworld was an ongoing process that becomes regularized throughout its run.

Only a few series follow The Wire’s ever-expanding model, such as Game of Thrones broadening its geographic scope or The Leftovers relocating the main characters each season; instead, most serialized dramas focus on a smaller defined ensemble of characters defined by a single location. A more typical approach can be seen in The Sopranos, where the focus remains consistent on Tony Soprano’s interwoven dual family units of his personal domestic family and professional mafia crime family. Most of that core cast remained constant for all six seasons, with the notable exception of Tony’s mother Livia, who was written out after two seasons due to the death of actress Nancy Marchand; her familial role was largely replaced by the addition of Tony’s sister Janice to the ensemble during the second season. Yet most seasons introduced one or more new characters, primarily as antagonists, rivals, or love interests for Tony: Richie Aprile and Furio Giunta in season 2; Ralph Cifaretto and Gloria Trillo in season 3; Little Carmine Lupertazzi and Carlo Gervasi in season 4; Tony Blundetto and Phil Leotardo in season 5. Most of these characters only last one or two seasons before dying or otherwise leaving the story, allowing their narrative roles to be filled by others to refresh the dramatic stakes.

Introducing new antagonists each season, often referred to as the season’s “big bad” after Buffy’s development and explicit naming of this structure, allows for continued drama and renewed storytelling momentum. Many series, especially those foregrounding crime stories, embrace a similar approach to adding new characters as antagonists each season to raise the dramatic stakes, including Dexter, Justified, The Shield, Boardwalk Empire, and Homeland. In each of these series and more, the addition of new characters work to complicate established relationships and generate new story material to sustain the serialized drama.

Breaking Bad does not follow a seasonal big bad model for the most part. I have argued that the series is structured by a force opposite from The Wire, exhibiting “centripetal complexity” by pulling everything toward the “gravitational center” of Walter White’s psychology and characterization (Mittell, Complex TV, 223). While certainly Walt faces a series of adversaries in his progression from chemistry teacher to drug kingpin, the narrative structure is not designed to foreground these antagonists as in other comparable crime dramas. The closest the series comes to a big bad adversary is Gustavo Fring, who is introduced briefly in season 2 before becoming Walt’s employer and rival; season 4 is the only one that is structured around the defeat of an adversary, as Walt proclaims “I won” in the season’s final moments to signal the end of the Fring era.

This video considers the aftermath of that victory by looking at how season 5 resets its narrative stakes once Walt sits atop the Albuquerque drug world. As with most series, Breaking Bad introduces new characters to create fresh dramatic situations, bringing Lydia Rodarte-Quayle and Todd Alquist into Walt’s orbit and eventually onto his team as part of Heisenberg’s drug empire; neither character serves as the season’s “big bad,” although both get pulled deeper into Walt’s orbit and ultimately die as part of his climactic revenge plot. The video takes a close look at the strategies that the producers use to introduce these characters via writing, performance, and production techniques, offering contrasting dramatic styles in presenting their personalities.

In many ways, this was my most challenging video to finish, as I grappled with the overarching question that troubles so many academic analyses across all formats: “so what?” I knew that I wanted to make a video to address the introduction of new characters, as it is a crucial facet of serial television storytelling, and one that differs from the models developed to analyze films. Murray Smith emphasizes that one crucial facet of characterization is recognition, as viewers need to differentiate a character with narrative significance from an extra or a figure who appears only fleetingly, and films use a range of techniques to help guide audience comprehension (Smith, Engaging Characters). For ongoing television series, this recognition process is even more complex because many characters appear only briefly before disappearing by the next episode, or they might reappear after a longer hiatus unlike anything in a standalone film—for instance, Elliot Schwartz appears in one first season Breaking Bad episode, then reappears only in the two final installments. By charting the ways that Breaking Bad introduces Lydia and Todd as two late-stage characters, I hoped to provide an analytic framework for understanding this process across television storytelling.

However I could not find a way to both explore the specific techniques from this case study in sufficient detail, and argue for the significance of this process for television more broadly without making an overly long video that lost its analytic focus. After playing with many drafts and versions of the video, I decided that to lean into the written component here to provide the broader context and framework for the specific analysis. Each aspect of this chapter aims to embrace what each format does best: the video offers a detailed account of specific moments and choices from the series while conveying the impact and experience for viewers, while the writing situates this analysis in broader contexts of scholarship, history, and comparative strategies between Breaking Bad and other series (as well as reflecting on my own methodology and process). One of my overt goals for this book was to have every video be able to function on its on, distributed through Vimeo and YouTube, coherent and effective (and hopefully enjoyable) on its own terms. I hope that this video meets that bar, even as I know that this written commentary is needed to fully accomplish my critical goals. But that is one of the key benefits of this videographic book format, allowing writing and video to work together in an integrated presentation.

I was invited to give one of the keynote presentations at the conference, and I framed my talk around the question “What is a Videographic Book?” I spent much of it discussing my vision for the Lever Press series Videographic Books, which resulted in many people sharing their ideas with me for excellent book-length projects! Naturally I also discussed my own videographic book project, “The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad” – I showed a draft of the book’s videographic introduction (which is not yet ready to publish on its own), and debuted the newest video from the book: “Recording Bad.”

One of the key contexts that I discussed regarding this video was its process of origination: unlike many of the chapters in the book, I did not anticipate doing a video on this topic. Instead it emerged as an interesting element while rewatching the series in Adobe Premiere in 2019 – I created a folder for clips involving recordings, and let the idea simmer in the background as I worked on other chapters. I knew I wanted to do a video that featured me directly addressing the camera, mimicking a style fairly common in YouTube video essays, so this seemed like the ideal subject matter to tackle. But I didn’t have much direction on the overall design and point of the piece—until I was struck by a different set of experiences speaking directly into cameras during the pandemic.

As always, feedback is welcomed, especially if there are issues or questions that seem important to address in the written commentary accompanying this somewhat oblique chapter.

As part of my talk, I showed four videos** from my Breaking Bad videographic book, including the debut of my newest video, “Sympathizing with Storytelling in Breaking Bad,” which I made specifically for this conference. The video directly engages with questions around narrative sympathy and character engagement in ways that build on the excellent work of two of the conference hosts at Kent, Murray Smith and Margrethe Bruun Vaage. Given the more academic nature of the conference, the tone of the video skews a bit more scholarly in its approach and tone than many of the other chapters in the project. Let me know what you think!

** The other videos I screened were “Focusing on Hank (& Marie)” to exemplify close visual analysis, “Sounds of Silent Mike” to center on sound, and “Knock About,” which I presented as a predecessor to this new video that offers a distinctly different rhetorical take on similar material. Unfortunately, due to a Zoom glitch, “Sounds of Silent Mike” had the bottom captions cut-off at the conference screening – thus those viewers only saw/heard the clips compiled in the piece and could not read my analytical text. This problem was only revealed in the Q&A, as they thought it was just an experimental compilation of clips of Mike being quiet – I wish I could have had more of a conversation about how that worked for them!

This project emerged from work I was doing around 2015 around the Digital Liberal Arts – one of the key insights emerging out of those conversations concerned the power of getting students to create scholarly work that was addressing a public audience. That has been one of my main goals in embracing videographic criticism (both as teacher and creator), and I began thinking how best to pivot my writing pedagogy to encourage students to write for the public. I was also collaborating with a group of Middlebury colleagues on a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to support curricular innovation to better prepare students to produce digital capstone projects, where I worked to help students write in a rich online multimedia environment.

A key light bulb moment for me was when Middlebury hosted UC Berkeley professor Scott Saul to discuss his digital history innovations in 2018. In addition to his great online research projects, Scott presented about his curated student project about The Godfather, where students contributed short essays to a larger prismatic website about the seminal film in a course about America in the 1970s. Hearing and reading about Scott’s process and successes in cultivating online writing practices for students crystalized what I wanted to do for my own project: curate a website for my students’ critical writing about film and television.

I embedded this project within a course that I taught for the first time in Spring 2020, taking over an upper-level writing-intensive course on film criticism from a retiring colleague. I reframed the course to include film and television criticism, and had students dedicate all of their semester to developing a single lengthy piece of critical writing over a number of stages, with the intent that I would publish accomplished works on a curated website. Of course “Spring 2020” meant that plans soon went awry, and I gave up the hopes of getting truly polished works out of the class, and hoped to revisit the planned website when I next taught the course.

In Fall 2021, I taught the class again with a new angle: all of the films and television we would watch were about films and TV themselves. I thought such reflexivity was well-suited the concepts we’d explore, and also allowed me to screen some of my all-time favorite films & TV to teach (including Singin’ in the Rain, The Player, Adaptation., Barton Fink, Mulholland Drive, and UnREAL). I also added the stipulation that students must choose their own case studies about a similarly reflexive film or television program. Here is the core writing assignment I gave my students:

The main assignment for the course is a long-form writing project: each student is to complete a piece of online critical writing for a public audience focused on a particular film or TV program of their choosing, totaling at least 4,000 words. The analysis must engage with at least three of the main units in the course (textuality, genre, narrative, authorship), and use the multi-modal possibilities of online writing by incorporating images, clips, and/or digital navigation strategies, as well as links & citations to external resources. While the object of criticism is left for students to decide, all films and television programs should be narrative works that are about films or television—Professor Mittell has compiled an extensive list of examples to choose from.

This project will develop throughout the semester, with specific components due at assigned dates. These components will be assigned throughout the semester, including a proposal, an annotated bibliography, and at least 3 modules of the critical analysis covering the concepts of textuality, genre, narrative, and authorship. Additionally, each student will work in an “editorial team” of 3-4 students who will read, offer feedback, and edit each other’s writing. This development process will be done in Google Docs, composing, editing, and revising in real time. The final version of the piece will be formatted for a new website, with the strongest essays being published in an open-access, publicized site for a general readership.

Despite the ongoing challenges of COVID, students rose to the occasion and produced some great pieces of critical writing! I’ve selected four (out of the class roster of 15) to publish here, covering All that Jazz, Boogie Nights, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and 30 Rock – there were other strong essays as well, but those students were not able to commit to making the necessary edits for publication (yet). I’m also including one exemplary piece from Spring 2020, Michael Frank’s essay on One Cut of the Dead, which coincidentally was about a highly-reflexive film – Michael’s project introduced me to this amazing movie, which I added to the syllabus and taught his essay (and encourage everyone to watch it with as little contextual information as possible and then read his essay!). I’ve also published an excerpt from my 2017 book Narrative Theory and ADAPTATION., which obviously pertains to the theme. I will continue to add to the site as my students produce similarly great writing, hopefully in the Spring 2023 iteration of the course.

I hope this site proves to be useful, whether for readers seeking out insightful criticism on these topics or other teachers looking for inspiration in engaging students in online writing. I welcome your feedback on the project or individual pieces, as well as suggestions for other films and TV to add to my master list!

Below is the video, followed by a short contextualization that I intend to publish with it as part of the larger “Chemistry of Character” book (I recommend reading it after watching the video). One additional thought I had in putting this together (and in conversation with Chris Keathley after he watched a draft) is how this video might function (or not) as “standalone scholarship”—many of the videos in the project are designed to stand-alone, and could even be published as a journal article at a place like [in]Transition (“Focusing on Hank (and Marie)” was in fact published in Mise-en-scène.). Some of the other videos I’ve made are clearly less scholarly and more experimental, such as my TV Dictionary entry or “Knock About” piece, both of which function as more interstitial videos between more elaborated chapters. “The Sounds of Silent Mike” is more substantive and analytical than those, but arguably less elaborated than something like “Breaking Genre” or “Walter’s Whiteness.” So I’m curious how people might characterize this piece in terms of norms of scholarship, criticism, and publishing—is it a standalone academic video essay or more a part of a larger project? I welcome your thoughts and comments on those definitions, and anything else arising from this video!

And one last bit of news before the video: I’ve been working with Lever Press to develop a new book series called Videographic Books, designed to publish long-form audiovisual scholarship like this Breaking Bad project. If you have something in the works, check out the page and reach out to me with your idea!

Contextualization:

One challenge of making videographic work about Breaking Bad is how to convey one of the program’s most important facets: patience. For a series known for high-tension action sequences, a good deal of time is spent portraying very little happening: characters waiting for their next move, engaging in a slow-moving tedious process, or otherwise being more dormant than typical for television drama. But videographic criticism is built upon editing things down, distilling them to key moments and juxtapositions that aims to move quickly and efficiently. Thus it is a challenge to portray the temporal patience represented on Breaking Bad, and the patience demanded of its audience, in a video essay.

“The Sounds of Silent Mike” tries to tackle this challenge by placing the focus on sound, especially Mike’s nonverbal sounds and silences. The goal is by calling attention to such silences, viewers of the video are attuned to the presence of patience in watching Mike—whether he is skipping stones in a river or methodically clearing a building of cartel enemies. For viewers of the series, our memories and impressions of characters are often tied to specific sounds, and for Mike, this signature ranges from silence to short words, sighs, and grunts, all presented with a sense of patience.

While it is never explicitly mentioned in the video, Mike’s characterization stands in contrast with other characters in the series largely through their different approaches to sound. This contrast is most stark compared to Walter White and Saul Goodman (and Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul), both of whom are noted by their propensity to speak their way out of problems, often impatiently. Both Walt and Saul/Jimmy are blessed with the ability to convincingly lie at will, and they both use that talent to escape tough situations. In contrast, Mike often accomplishes his goals in silence, whether quietly taking down enemies in a warehouse or escaping the cops in a playground.

Of course, Mike’s voice and non-verbal sounds are dependent on Jonathan Banks’s performance, building on both his natural gravely tone and his interpretation of Mike’s sonic presence. The video does not try to differentiate what elements come from Banks versus the writers’ narrative designs versus the production (and post-production) team’s efforts—clearly these techniques and choices reinforce each other, creating a distinctive sonic footprint. In total, this video aims to make us aware of the net effect of these elements, both in constituting Mike’s character and contributing to a larger appreciation of the program’s use of sound.

In thinking about genre, I said a few words after the screening about genres of video essays. Part of the design of my larger audiovisual book project, “The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad,” is an attempt to explore a wide range of videographic styles, modes, techniques, and genres. Previously posted videos include works that follow norms of fan video, supercuts, deformations, and more explanatory scholarship. I hope that the final book’s wide range of styles and genres helps provide a kind of exemplary taxonomy of the possibilities of videographic criticism, as well as pointing toward modes that have been as yet unexplored.

“Breaking Genre” was produced with the goal of following a particular “YouTube-style” of video essay, embodying energetic and playful voiceover-driven argumentation (hence embedding my YouTube post rather than the typical Vimeo one). In particular, I was inspired to emulate the amazing work of Grace Lee, my favorite YouTuber, while acknowledging that I’ve certainly fallen short of her heights. (If you haven’t seen her spectacular “What Isn’t a Video Essay?“, get on that!) In many ways, this style is outside my scholarly comfort zone, but I found that it allowed me to embrace creative facets that typically are absent from most scholarship: a playful sense of humor, absurdist asides, running gags, and a manic energetic performance. I’m quite happy with the product that emerged in that vein – but it took a lot of work! So let me offer my utmost respect to Grace and other YouTubers who work in this style on a regular basis…

As I was working on the Skyler videos, my colleague David Miranda Hardy asked if I might make a “synopsis” version of the miniseries, as certainly most viewers would not take the time to consume the set of videos in their entirety.** That idea kept bouncing around in my head as I completed and posted the series, and I tried to envision the role of a shorter Skyler video in the larger project. The approach that took hold was to capture the harrowing emotions that abound for Skyler, especially in the final season, and create a video that both reminds viewers of her story and creates a nightmarish non-narrative viewing experience. Thus I present “Skyler’s Nightmare”:

In editing this video, my first inspiration was to try create an experience resembling the final act of Mulholland Drive for Skyler, where the narrative fractures and her identity is upended. I soon realized that trying to renarrativize her story out of series footage was not going to work, but I did aim to capture a Lynchian affect as inspired by both Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: The Return. Then Sharon Van Etten’s music came up on shuffle, and I realized that her voice captured exactly what I was going for: “Your Love is Killing Me” was Skyler’s perfect musical accompaniment, and the fact that Van Etten briefly appeared in TP:TR was an ideal intertextual link.

I tried not to embrace as much of a pure “fanvid” aesthetic as I had strived for in “Poor Jesse“; instead I interspersed more dialogue and scenes from the series alongside Van Etten’s music, decentering the lyrics a bit more than for Jesse’s Wilco song. The final 20 minutes of “Skyler’s Story” episode five struck me as the most powerful part of the miniseries, culminating her arc with the climax of Breaking Bad‘s masterpiece episode “Ozymandias,” and thus I built this edit around that episode and Skyler’s other harrowing classic “Fifty-One”—both of which were majestically directed by Rian Johnson.

Thanks to both David and Ariel Avissar for their feedback on this video—both suggested some (quite different) major rethinking that I mostly refused, so I take full responsibility for its lingering flaws!

** A quick note: more than a week after posting “Skyler’s Story,” I looked at the viewership stats—not surprisingly, they are quite low and dwindle as the series progresses. (As of this moment, the final episode has gotten only 9 views and only 1 completion!) I’m not surprised or disappointed (much) by this, as I always new that this part of the project would be of interest to a comparatively niche audience. But if you think it sounds interesting at all, please check them out!

Today I’m excited to share the results of many months of work with the debut of “Skyler’s Story: A Videographic Miniseries.” Beneath the fold, I share both the first video in the series, and a draft of the textual component that will accompany the videos in the audiovisual book. Today is Monday, and thus I’m posting the first episode; each morning (EST) for the rest of this week, I will add another episode to the post, with the entire five-episode series posted by Friday, February 11. It is up to you whether you space out your viewing via a serialized daily ritual (purposely evoking the norms of the American daytime soap opera), or wait to watch all the episodes back-to-back in a deep dive into Skyler’s story.

However you choose to watch (although I do recommend using headphones and watching on a large monitor), I thank you for your time, and welcome all feedback on the videos and/or written component. Enjoy a healthy dose of Skyler!

Probably the most controversial and volatile case study of characterization in Breaking Bad is Skyler White, who is maligned and mistreated by both Walt within the narrative, and many of the program’s fans outside of it. Viewer disdain for Skyler crossed over into abusive social media, and even into misogynist threats against actress Anna Gunn herself. The situation rose to such a fevered pitch that Gunn took to the opinion pages of the New York Times during the show’s final season to declare “I Have a Character Issue.”

In Complex TV, I analyzed how Breaking Bad’s anti-hero characterization helped foster a legion of “bad fans,” following Emily Nussbaum’s framing, who channeled their toxic masculinity toward Skyler. I also offered a narrative experiment: what would Breaking Bad’s story look like told from Skyler’s perspective?

We perceive Skyler mostly from Walt’s point of view, which starts as loving affection tempered with growing frustration as she serves as an obstacle to his self-realization as a “real man” via his criminal alter ego Heisenberg. If we regard the series as a gangster drama in which Walt’s success in the drug enterprise is the purported goal, then Skyler may be an obstacle. But complex serials feature multiple story threads that invite us to follow and shift character connections; thus if we retell the series focusing primarily on Skyler’s character’s arc, Breaking Bad becomes a very different type of gendered tale, offering a melodramatic account of deception, adultery, and ultimately an abusive, dangerous marriage.

From Jason Mittell, Complex TV (NYU Press, 2015), 254

I played out this experiment via the written word, summarizing five seasons of narrative events and character developments within a few pages. I found that section of my book intellectually provocative, but ultimately unsatisfactory, lacking what I find most compelling about Skyler as a character, and not capturing what I love about watching her story. Yes—I love Skyler White, and want to express that affection as a fan and scholar.

Videographic criticism can harness the emotional power of sounds and images, of performances and pacing, all to offer a more immersive and aesthetically engaging narrative experiment. In my earliest conceptualization of this book, a videographic version of this experiment was one of the first chapter ideas I had. Thus, I present “Skyler’s Story: A Videographic Miniseries” to express my love for and fascination with Skyler White.

Retelling Skyler’s story videographically is certainly more emotionally and aesthetically rich than a verbal recounting, but it faces the distinct limits posed by the original footage. Breaking Bad is undoubtedly Walter White’s story, and thus our experience of Skyler is nearly exclusively defined by her relationship to him, responding to her husband’s many secrets and betrayals, and making choices in reaction to his actions. Skyler has a life outside of Walt’s shadow, but we only get brief hints about her ambitions as a writer or her side-hustle on eBay before Walt’s diagnosis and behavioral shifts come to define our entire experience of her character. In comparison, the series portrays Jesse as having more agency and independent relationships outside of his connection to Walt, while what we see of Skyler is nearly exclusively as “Walt’s wife.” Thus even as I re-edited the series to focus on Skyler’s story, we still experience her actions as reactions to Walt, as that is what the footage offers. The crucial difference with this edit is that our focus is on Skyler, even in scenes with Walt, and we are immersed solely in what she knows, rather than aligned with him in keeping secrets from her.

What do we make of these limits and choices? Skyler’s characterization is shaped by Breaking Bad’s gendered focus on a man descending into the hyper-masculine world of crime, standing in tension with the feminized domestic family life that she represents. While I do believe that Vince Gilligan and the other creators intended Skyler to be, in Anna Gunn’s words, “a woman with a backbone of steel who would stand up to whatever came her way,” the very design of the protagonist-driven narrative necessitated that her reactions to Walt defined her—it’s about whatever comes her way, rather than her independent choices. We could imagine a version of Skyler’s story that presented her life beyond what we see in Breaking Bad, with more footage of her professional life, friendships, creative work, parenting, and even her marriage as experienced outside of Walt’s transformations. But videographic criticism cannot create such footage, and thus my editing is limited to the raw materials that the series gives us—the alternative is the realm of fan fiction, a possibility via writing that videographic work does not offer (yet). Personally, I find Gunn’s performance, the visual compositions, and vivid dramatic writing sufficient to make Skyler a compelling character in her own right, but certainly we need to acknowledge Breaking Bad’s omissions.

My videographic process strived to create as striking a version of Skyler’s story as I could. My first instinct was to recut the entire series into a feature-length “woman’s film” version focused on Skyler, emphasizing the melodrama by foregrounding her sacrifices, constrained agency, and the abuse she suffers at Walt’s hands. To that end, I evoked an intertextual link by using the opening theme music to 1937’s Stella Dallas, a quintessential maternal melodrama, as well as shifting to black-and-white as the music swells. But simply cutting together some of Skyler’s key scenes would have beeen too challenging to fit within the confines of a two-hour timeframe in any way that provided her character the nuances she deserves, as well as being unlikely to create a narratively-compelling aesthetic experience. (Case in point: the 2-hour fan edit version of the series that functions mostly as a celebration of Walt’s badassery, while marginalizing Skyler even further.)

Given that this is an experiment, I decided to work in the domain of the experimental. To distinguish it from a fan edit, as well as offering temporal efficiency, I employed a dual-screen format that creates a much more disorienting and challenging viewing experience. In working on this project for many weeks, I’ve found that the dual-screen format does take a bit of time to adjust to, but can become a comprehensible and rich viewing experience. Hard panning the audio rewards listening on headphones or separated desktop speakers as well. But I fully anticipate that the viewing experience might be too alienating and confusing for some—this chapter probably appeals to a narrower slice of viewers than most! Despite the challenges of dual-screen viewing, I do find that the video captures the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of Skyler’s story much better than my written synopsis did, and I found myself quite moved and enraptured repeatedly reliving this story during the editing process.

I shared early drafts of this project with some trusted colleagues who helped me push forward, tweak key moments, and rethink the structure. Most importantly, Ariel Avissar noted that the feature-length scope might be an impediment to viewing, and suggested I embrace the televisual by breaking them up into episodes. I followed his brilliant advice, creating one episode for each of the five seasons of Breaking Bad, mimicking television episodes by starting with teasers that lie outside the story’s chronology. As is typical of serialized television, the episodes grow more complex, intense, and lengthy as they proceed, from 13 minutes to distill Breaking Bad’s shortened seven-episode first season, to an epic 50 minutes to wrap-up the 16-episode final fifth season. Hopefully the compelling narrative and character depth warrants the increasing length as the series proceeds.

Another suggestion from Will DiGravio pointed toward another televisual feature: using previously-on recaps starting in the second episode. I took that opportunity to lean into even more videographic experimentation rather than strive for maximizing comprehension—hopefully viewers will not need many reminders of preceding story information, as much of the experience of watching “Skyler’s Story” requires viewers to relive the character’s moments as originally experienced during Breaking Bad. I’ve decided to initially release these episode on a daily basis across one week, evoking American television’s original site of serialized melodrama: daytime soap operas. Once published in my book, the episodes will be available to be watched in quick succession, but I hope viewers will still pause between entries to experience the five videos as separate episodes in an overarching miniseries.

Within the larger project, “Skyler’s Story” has a parallel video in “Poor Jesse”: both retell the entire narrative arc of a central character (whom I love). While I pushed away from conventions of the fan edit for “Skyler’s Story,” “Poor Jesse” embraces the fannish genre of the fan music video. Taken together, these videos speak to different ways that viewers can remix a series to create a tribute to a character, evoke compelling affective responses, and unlock aspects of the original series (as well as shining a light on its limitations). While I doubt I will ever again undertake such labor to retell a character’s story as I have done with Skyler, I hope the experience of viewing the resulting miniseries offers a fraction of the satisfaction I have taken from immersing myself in her story.

Back in 2016, my approach to ungrading was focused on specifications grading, the system of evaluating every assignment as Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory in meeting the assignment’s outlined specifications. I have continued using that system for my introductory Television & American Culture course, where a comparatively high number of students (around 35 each semester, which is “large” for Middlebury) and a large amount of content to cover makes it (mostly) effective. During COVID times, I shifted the course to include more remote instruction, including recorded lecture videos (off-set by reducing the length of in-person scheduled meetings) and numerous asynchronous “engagement activities” that students can choose from to demonstrate their ongoing engagement with the material. Even as I taught the course fully in-person in Fall 2021, I retained a lot of the online components to allow more flexibility for when students may have to miss class due to illness (which happened regularly) or otherwise had trouble keeping up with the regular workload during times of high stress and uncertainty—my guiding values in course design is to prioritize student agency, flexibility, and transparency, and this system emerged from that foundation.

However, I’m planning on rethinking some of this course’s structure the next time I teach it in Spring 2023. Some students seemed to treat the flexible micro-assignments too much as “boxes to check” on their bingo cards rather than opportunities to engage in the material in thoughtful ways—even with low-stakes Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading, many were still driven more by the extrinsic motivation to accumulate points rather than to dig into the topics, and I spent too much time replying to messages about points and deadlines, rather than ideas . So I’ll likely reduce the number of engagement activities and design them to be more meaningful and… “engaging.” I also need to shift the timing for the final essay so that it doesn’t fall amidst the crunch of finals, leading too many students to under-perform and sacrifice opportunities for feedback and revision. And I am going to read more about labor-based grading to see if I can adapt some of those approaches to suit this course design. But I’m certainly not going back to grading assignments!

While specifications grading has remained a mostly effective system for my introductory course, I found that it did not work in my other classes. In 2016, I wrote about redesigning one of my advanced seminars with specifications grading, and I realized that I never followed-up to reflect on how it worked. In short, it didn’t. The model of numerous small assignments grouped into tiered bundles for final grades doesn’t really work for an advanced writing-intensive seminar, and the effective pedagogy within the course around both theoretical content and writing seemed completely detached from the regimented counting of assignments and outcomes. So I knew that I needed another way to determine grades for my seminars, which is most of my teaching outside of the introductory course.

Thus the next time I taught the course in Fall 2019, I fully embraced the ungrading model that I had been reading about, largely from Jesse Stommel and later in Susan Blum’s book, as well as hearing from colleagues who had similarly abandon traditional grading. Spoiler: it was a huge success, and I’ve adopted it for every other seminar I’ve taught since. Here’s the explanation of ungrading from that first syllabus, which I’ve left mostly intact in future semesters:

This course uses an unconventional approach for assessing student learning roughly termed “ungrading.” You will not receive a “grade” for any single assignment, with only a final course grade registered into Banner [our student record system]. While Professor Mittell will register that grade, he will not assign it—you will. Such self-grading means that students are fully responsible for their own learning, and it is meant to fully sever the link between that learning and the “outcome” of grades. This grade will emerge through ongoing conversations between each student and Professor Mittell; while he reserves the right to alter the grade that a student assigns, it is a sign of mutual trust and shared responsibility for learning that he does not anticipate doing so.

Even though there will not be grades, there will be lots of feedback, evaluation, assessment, and revision—these will all hopefully be channeled toward maximizing learning. Students will create an individual learning plan, write self-reflections on their learning, meet with both peers and Professor Mittell to discuss their progress, and undertake revisions based on feedback. Since all students who pass the course will have achieved the goals for College Writing, the expectations for success are quite high. In exchange for students’ hard work, Professor Mittell agrees to take however much time is needed to ensure students understand expectations and practices, and are poised to succeed to their desired goals. His goal is to help each student achieve their learning goals, and to be transparent about expectations for learning throughout the semester.

Students were a bit skeptical of this approach, as having that much agency and flexibility was quite novel, and many thought there must be a catch—given that each of them arrived at an elite college via a system where maximizing grades is seen as the ends, not the means, this approach produced some serious culture shock. But after giving a brief overview in the first week, I stopped talking about grades and focused on the material and writing assignments (another drawback of the specifications grading approach is that since it is complicated and unconventional, you need to spend a good deal of time explaining and reviewing it, as students want to “get it right” – even as I try to decenter grades, I end up discussing them a lot). In this ungraded seminar, whenever students asked about grades, I simply said, “focus on the material and we’ll discuss your grade at the end of the semester.”

And that’s what we did. Students did a brief assignment for the first week, writing a “Statement of Learning Intentions”: they were asked to read through the syllabus and submit a short reflection “that outlines what they hope to learn through this course, and how they hope to accomplish those goals.” Then at the end of the semester, they submitted another reflection essay, looking back at their initial statement, reviewing the course learning goals, and reflecting on their own engagement throughout the course. These two documents became the basis for individual conferences that I had with each student to conclude the semester, where we discussed what they learned in depth and dived into their writing projects. Each conference concluded with me asking, “So, what grade do you think best reflects your learning?”, as guided by these learning goals from the syllabus:

The course design is based around a series of core learning goals, assembled in a hierarchy of sophistication. Students will highlight their own learning goals from this list, as well as devise their own. These are roughly grouped in tiers that correspond to expected grade levels, with each student expected to reflect their particular goals via written and conversational reflection.

All students who pass the course (C) will demonstrate the ability to:

– Describe how various theoretical approaches approach the study of popular culture

– Apply specific vocabulary and concepts to examine popular culture

– Read dense theoretical writings and summarize their core ideas

– Communicate their ideas orally and via writing with fluency and clarity, per college CW standards

– Revise their writing to improve both ideas and communication, per college CW standards

Students who achieve a higher level of accomplishment (B) will also demonstrate the ability to:

– Analyze popular culture with original insights, effective use of sources, and connections to theoretical models, different examples and cultural contexts

– Engage in serious conversation about often fraught topics with an ethos of mutual respect and generosity

Students who achieve the highest level of accomplishment (A) will also demonstrate the ability to:

– Create, substantiate, and communicate an original analytic argument that synthesizes multiple facets of popular culture, appropriate types of evidence, and theoretical approaches with sophistication

– Meet class expectations per the assigned schedule with consistency, and provide strong support to peers to facilitate our learning community

These conferences proved to be one of my favorite pedagogical activities I’ve ever done, providing real closure on the semester and a chance for substantive conversation about a student’s learning. We typically get fully engaged in the course content and student writing that when I bring up the inevitable, it feels like a disruption: students don’t really want to talk about the grade either! They typically hem and haw about needing to sum everything up with a letter that feels so reductive (welcome to the worst part of grading!), and then tentatively present a grade, or often a range of two options. We go back and forth a little, but usually I enter the grade they suggested into my spreadsheet, and they depart with a real sense of closure.

This approach to ungrading appeared to be quite successful to me and seemingly to my students as well, and I have adopted it for all of my other courses since: Videographic Film & Media Studies, Key Concepts in Film & Media Criticism, and my department’s senior tutorial that mentors senior thesis projects. It proved to work well with both in-person and teleconferenced meetings, and has helped all of these classes focus on learning rather than assessment. These closing conferences are really the highlight of the semester, as I come away impressed with most students’ learning and their own articulation of their engagement with the material. I’ve found that students are typically honest about their struggles and successes, and I can usually help emphasize the latter in a way that leaves them feeling good about the course.

Whenever I discuss this ungrading approach with colleagues, they usually want to talk about what grades students give themselves. Honestly, this is the least interesting part of the approach to me—I want to focus on how it facilitates learning, builds community, and encourages reflection. But since academia has put so much stock in the outcome of grades being the marker of “rigor” and student success, that ends up being the focus for many. So far, the grade distribution in my ungraded seminars closely matches the breakdown from my traditionally graded days, with a bit of a shift upward but still a solid range of grades from A to B– (in these classes, Cs or lower have always been quite rare, due to students not completing significant work). My seminar this past fall had significantly higher grades, but that was an indication of a great group of students who did excellent work (more about that work in a forthcoming post)—this is a clear case of “learning inflation,” not “grade inflation”!

Before trying this approach, I’d read that self-assignment leads to students often suggesting lower grades than faculty feel are appropriate, and that has been my general experience. I go into each meeting with a ballpark sense of what grade feels most appropriate to me, and sometimes our reflective conversation shifts that sense (almost always upward, as students can demonstrate deep engagement via these conversations); students’ self-grades are almost always at or slightly below my assessed level. When students undershoot my assessment, I can articulate their strengths, hopefully helping students value their own work more, and acknowledging that I recognize their efforts—since such low assessments are often from students who lack confidence or struggle with extraneous factors, such conversations feel impactful.

The ungrading literature also commonly mentions that women and students of color can undersell their accomplishments, while white guys tend to self-inflate. In my very limited sample size, I have not seen that. My most memorable moment around this was in a conference with a white female student who had done solid but unexceptional work throughout the semester, and I’d come to our meeting with a B+ in mind. In our conversation, she asserted that she thought she’d earned an A; when I offered a little hesitation, she proceeded to go through the learning goals to highlight her hard work, her growth, and her progress—and I was convinced that her learning process earned an A, even if her essays were not As in my conventional rubric. Such self-advocacy and reflection seems like an important outcome for students whose perspectives are structurally marginalized in academia, and I do what I can to acknowledge such contexts and encourage those students.

Through my ungrading practices over the past two years, I have tried to let go of the conventional rubrics I bring to these conferences. I try not to think of the grade as the culmination of my work with the student that semester, but rather a reporting requirement that my institution imposes on that work. I don’t approach these conversations to police the grades students assign themselves—if I come to a conversation with a pre-assessed grade of B, and a student makes the case for a B+, I enter the B+ into the spreadsheet. One of the byproducts of my turn to ungrading is that I’ve come to an important realization: this does not matter to me. I have absolutely no investment in keeping the class GPA below some arbitrary number, nor making sure that student grades somehow are “true” to an abstract standard. I want the grade to indicate the student’s sense of their own learning, but once it’s entered into the college’s system, that letter means nothing to me. What matters is their learning and our relationship, and I’ve tried to make these letters get out of the way of what really counts.

Thus I plan to continue this ungrading approach for all subsequent smaller courses, including a first-year seminar in Fall 2022—it should be quite interesting to see how students take to ungrading in their very first college course. I’ve thought about adopting ungrading for my large intro course, but I’m not convinced that I can do it in a way that maintains what works best—the intensive feedback, ongoing conversations, and final conferences—while ensuring that students remain engaged through the amount of material that the course covers. I have a colleague who ungrades his intro course, and I know other faculty like Susan Blum do the same for even larger courses. So maybe that will be the next step on my journey…

If you’re an academic who’s made it this far and are intrigued, I highly recommend reading more from Jesse Stommel and see how this approach might fit with your own courses. I hope to see more fellow travelers on this journey away from grading!

Obviously, it’s been a not-great couple of years of silence, although comparatively I have little to complain about personally or professionally. Things have sucked, but far less for me than for many people. But for 2022, I hope to try to make things suck less in part by communicating more – hence, back on the blog! (And if you want to pretend that I’m not reviving this throwback format and started a trendy newsletter instead, feel free to get an email subscription to the blog in the right sidebar…)

I write today with one big bit of good news gesturing toward the future, and a few smaller updates from the last couple of years. Today’s big news is that I received a NEH/Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication to support my academic leave for Spring and Summer 2022, as I’ll be working on my audiovisual book, “The Chemistry of Character on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul“! Dedicated readers might remember that I’ve been working on this project for awhile, launched during my last leave in 2018. Back then, it was solely focused on Breaking Bad, and I had ambitions to finish the project in 2020. However, 2020 had other ideas. So now I’m back on leave and tackling the project, which has expanded to include the prequel.

Back in 2018, I also applied for the NEH/Mellon fellowship (twice, actually), and despite the fact that the reviewer comments were uniformly excellent, I did not get funding. This year, I applied again, knowing that the odds were slim, so the news of my award just before Christmas was a huge surprise. Beyond my own personal pride and excitement, I am particularly gratified for what it signals that the NEH would fund this project—this fellowship specifically supports scholarship that results in a digital publication, spanning a wide range of fields and approaches. But based on the descriptions of funded projects, most work would be considered fairly “traditional” in terms of humanities methodologies and topics: digital editions of notable literary texts, history monographs with embedded multimedia, and the like. I presumed that the main barrier for projects like mine getting funding (given the reviewer praise) was that the larger NEH board was skeptical of either television studies as a worthwhile subfield of the humanities, videographic criticism as a legitimate mode of scholarship,** or (most likely) both. Thus I regard this award less as a single success for me than a broader signal of these dual legitimacies, and hopefully a sign that there are more opportunities for such work to be supported going forward!

** I should note that the NEH has certainly supported videographic criticism previously, particularly in funding our Scholarship in Sound & Image workshops. But those grants were through the Office of Digital Humanities, which tends to be more open to experimentation that the main NEH Fellowship program.

To celebrate the launch of my leave and fellowship, I made the following short video as part of the larger project, as well as a contribution to Ariel Avissar’s videographic TV Dictionary collection. These videos follow the straightforward parameters of choosing a word and exploring the juxtaposition between the word’s definitions and clips from a television series. Given the focus of my book, “character” was an obvious choice:

This piece joins the other videos I’ve published as part of the audiovisual book in progress – keep an eye out for more videos posting there in the coming months!

As promised, I have a few other updates and news to share from the past two years:

Speaking of the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop, we had to cancel our scheduled workshops for 2020 and 2021, but are optimistically planning to run one for June 2022 (with required vaccinations, of course). If you are interested in coming to Vermont for “videocamp” to learn to make video essays, the application deadline is February 1.

One of the first COVID cancellations to hit me personally was SCMS in April 2020. It was particularly disappointing because it meant that Christian Keathley and I were not able to attend the conference to receive the society’s first Innovative Pedagogy Award, which we won for our collaborative work running the workshop, teaching videographic criticism undergraduates, and publishing our pedagogical work. We did get these snazzy awards mailed to us though…

While my research productivity during the COVID years has been excusably weak, I have had a few publications released during the blog’s unplanned hiatus:

• The revised edition of How to Watch Television was released just as COVID shut things down in Spring 2020 (again, another opportunity to celebrate at SCMS was lost). For this new edition, Ethan Thompson and I solicited 21 new chapters, each analyzing an episode or two of television to exemplify a critical approach—we gathered all new contributors (beyond me & Ethan), particularly trying to find work focused on a diverse array of programs and topics. We’re really proud of the results, and reports are that the new chapters work well in the classroom! We left around half of the original essays in the book, and as a bonus, moved all the “retired” first-edition essays to NYU Press’s website for open access. My own contribution to the new book is a chapter on Better Call Saul as a “prestige spinoff,” considering the tensions between televisual legitimacy and derivative work.
• The peer-reviewed journal article is not a form I’m particularly invested in, as most of my shorter-form writing tends to be for book projects (or once upon a time, blog posts!). But one of the publications I am most proud of came out in 2021 in the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly as part of a theme issue on audiovisual digital humanities: “Deformin’ in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film.” A sequel of sorts to my chapter “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method,” this new essay expands my thoughts on the possibilities of videographic deformations to unlock new ways of engaging with media. The essay contains more than a dozen examples of deformations of Singin’ in the Rain, and written commentary on the processes and outcomes of these experiments. If videos like this intrigue you, definitely check out the essay!

Beyond that book and essay (which required a level of labor rivaling a short book!), my other work is either still in-progress, or the less tangible realm of teaching, chairing a department, and parenting during a pandemic. It’s been quite a couple of years! But I hope to keep this blog updated with some more thoughts about ungrading, sharing some of my students’ excellent work as writers and videographic critics, and new videographic content of my own (plus some of the “just TV” thoughts in the site’s title – maybe with my reaction to the upcoming conclusion to Station Eleven?). Stay tuned!