Watching television with Jacques Ranciere: US 'Quality Television', Mad Men and the 'late cut'

Television has often been argued to prefer the rhetorics of the narrative, that is, plot, 'action' (dialogue) and character over the aesthetics of the image (choices in mise-en-scene). It has also been frequently said to prioritize straightforward and static composition instead of more complicated arrangements, and operate through closeups and two-shots rather than long shots. The so-called 'Quality TV' of the last twenty-five years is thought to have increasingly rebuffed these conventions, holding rhetoric and aesthetic in more equal value, adopting what is often (yet at times wrongly) called a 'cinematic style'. In this essay we argue that the transition from 'Television' to 'Quality Television' is not so much a qualitative evolution, as that it is a passage from one discourse of what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls 'imageness' to another that is visible elsewhere in the arts as well. By resituating the transition from 'TV' to 'Quality TV' in terms of 'imageness', we relocate the debate about 'Quality TV', and expand it beyond its narrow and ill-definable criteria of 'quality'. Although we take a number of television programmes into account, we primarily focus on one serialized drama, "Mad Men" (AMC, 2007- ) and one particularly illustrative aspect of its 'imageness,: what we will term the 'late' or 'delayed' cut. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]