Notes

Introduction

1. See, for example, the essays contained within Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, eds., It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era (New York: Routledge, 2008).

2. Lynn Spigel, “Introduction,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Jan Olsson and Lynn Spigel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6.

3. Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, “Introduction,” in Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, ed. Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.

4. Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 4.

5. Martin Lister et al. define new media as “those methods and social practices of communication, representation, and expression that have developed using the digital, multimedia, networked computer and the ways this machine is held to have transformed work in other media: from books to movies, from telephones to television.” Martin Lister et al., New Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.

6. Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, 2nd ed. (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 3.

7. The length of original TV series produced by cable networks and streaming providers differs immensely, although arguably a ten-episode season is standard. Some series run significantly shorter, others longer, and season lengths are not always consistent for the same show. The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–22), for example, had a first season that consisted of only six episodes, while all future seasons were thirteen to sixteen episodes long, with a two-month midseason hiatus halfway through each season (leading to the use of abbreviations such as season 2a and 2b).

8. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 162.

9. Basic cable channels “are the channels that come automatically with a cable subscription,” explains Bill Mesce Jr., and most carry advertising. Premium (also known as pay TV) channels are not included in basic cable packages “and need to be specifically requested by the subscriber and require the sub to pay an extra fee.” Bill Mesce Jr., Inside the Rise of HBO: A Personal History of the Company That Transformed Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 83.

10. Turner and Tay, “Introduction,” 2.

11. Spigel, “Introduction,” 1; Lotz, Television Will Be Revolutionized, 5; Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, “Introduction: An Owner’s Manual for Television,” in How to Watch Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 5.

12. Lotz, Television Will Be Revolutionized, 3.

13. Robin Nelson, “Quality TV Drama: Estimations and Emotions through Time and Space,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 39–40.

14. Different studies offer slightly differing periodization. Here I am drawing primarily upon the work of Mark C. Rogers, Michael Epstein, and Jimmie L. Reeves (TVI/TVII/TVIII) and Amanda D. Lotz (network era / multichannel transition / postnetwork era). For more detail, see Mark C. Rogers, Michael Epstein, and Jimmie L. Reeves, “The Sopranos as Brand Equity: The Art of Commerce in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in This Thing of Ours: Investigating “The Sopranos,” ed. David Lavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 43–44; Lotz, Television Will Be Revolutionized, 21–32.

15. Roberta Pearson, “Cult Television as Digital Television’s Cutting Edge,” in Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and Niki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 107.

16. Jane Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” in McCabe and Akass, Quality TV, 146.

17. Jason Jacobs, “Experimental and Live Television in the US,” in The Television History Book, ed. Michele Hilmes (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 72–75.

18. For example, see Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, eds., MTM “Quality Television” (London: British Film Institute, 1984); Charlotte Brunsdon, “Problems with Quality,” Screen 31, no. 1 (1990): 67–90; Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill Street Blues” to “ER” (New York: Continuum, 1996).

19. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age, 98.

20. Robert J. Thompson, “Preface,” in McCabe and Akass, Quality TV, xvii.

21. John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 57.

22. Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” 146, 148.

23. Dean DeFino, The HBO Effect (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 10. Also see Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll for an excellent definition of postnetwork quality TV. Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll, “HBO’s Girls: Gender, Generation, and Quality Television,” Continuum 29, no. 2 (2015): 258.

24. For a much more detailed history of the company and its entrepreneurial moves in the TV industry, see DeFino, HBO Effect, 4–5, 61–64; Gary R. Edgerton, “Introduction: A Brief History of HBO,” in The Essential HBO Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 1–20; Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, “Introduction,” in Leverette, Ott, and Buckley, It’s Not TV, 2–7; George Mair, Inside HBO: The Billion Dollar War between HBO, Hollywood, and the Home Video Revolution (New York: Dodd Mead, 1988).

25. Trisha Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television (New York: Routledge, 2017), 20.

26. Rogers, Epstein, and Reeves, “The Sopranos as Brand Equity,” 46–47.

27. Christopher Anderson, “Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” in Edgerton and Jones, Essential HBO Reader, 31–33; Leverette et al., “Introduction,” 3.

28. DeFino, HBO Effect, 14.

29. John Mack Faragher, “Deadwood: Not Your Typical Western,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 57, no. 3 (2007): 62.

30. Edgerton, “A Brief History of HBO,” 13.

31. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming,” in Leverette, Ott, and Buckley, It’s Not TV, 87.

32. Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama, 24.

33. Leverette et al., “Introduction,” 1.

34. Sue Harper, “Bonnie Prince Charlie Revisited: British Costume Film in the 1950s,” in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 133.

35. James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 3.

36. Natalie Zemon Davis, “‘Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead’: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 (1988): 270.

37. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 62.

38. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 85 (italics in original).

39. David Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 5.

40. As these examples demonstrate, war, and more specifically World War II (“Bomber’s Moon,” The Execution of Private Slovik, Hiroshima, Hogan’s Heroes, Goodtime Girls, Holocaust, and The Winds of War), has always been a popular period for TV narratives.

41. Gary R. Edgerton, “Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether,” in Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 1.

42. What the authors discovered when crafting the survey questions was that they needed to ask people about the past, not just history. “Our pilot survey showed that three quarters of those we interviewed thought of ‘the past’ and ‘history’ as different concepts, with most people defining the past in more inclusive terms and history as something more formal, analytical, official, or distant.” Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 210.

43. Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, 19–21, 98, 99.

44. “Museums” actually had the highest mean score of 8.4 for trustworthiness, followed by “personal accounts from grandparents or other relatives” with 8.0 and “conversation with someone who was there (witness)” with a mean of 7.8. Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, 21, 97.

45. Robert Burgoyne is a particularly important scholar in this area. Burgoyne has explored how Hollywood feature films both reflect and construct American national identity. Studying a range of films from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, he suggests that a “cinematic rewriting of history [is] currently taking shape, which stands as a particularly conspicuous attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define the American nation.” He sees these films as challenging the traditional myths of the nation-state and promoting instead a new national narrative that embraces “civic pluralism.” For more see Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

46. Graeme Turner, “Television and the Nation: Does This Matter Anymore?,” in Turner and Tay, Television Studies after TV, 54.

47. Chapman, Past and Present, 6.

48. Mark Connelly, “Gallipoli (1981): ‘A Poignant Search for National Identity,’” in The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 41.

49. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History (New York: Verso, 2005), 153.

50. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2–3.

51. As Glen Creeber points out, both these shows were accused by critics of trivializing the history they presented. Glen Creeber, “‘Taking Our Personal Lives Seriously’: Intimacy, Continuity and Memory in the Television Drama Serial,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 4 (2001): 444–50.

52. Morris-Suzuki, Past within Us, 147.

53. It is worth noting that the views of those working and publishing within the field of history-on-screen studies may not necessarily reflect the views of the discipline as a whole. Acceptance of film and TV by the wider historical community is moving at a slower pace. For example, while many leading historical journals now include film and TV reviews alongside book reviews, the spectrum of films chosen is generally narrow. The four issues of the Journal of American History released in 2016 contained a total of eleven film and TV reviews, six of which were documentaries. The remaining five feature films all centered on real historical figures and included three biopics: Trumbo (Roach, 2015), Born to Be Blue (Budreau, 2015), and Miles Ahead (Cheadle, 2015). The remaining two films, Spotlight (McCarthy, 2015) and The Finest Hours (Gillespie, 2016) were ensemble dramas that documented real events. Of the five films, only The Finest Hours, a big-budget action/adventure/romance Disney film, pushes the boundary of what may be considered a historical film.

54. Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu, “Introduction,” in A Companion to the Historical Film, ed. Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 2.

55. These, of course, are not the only early works on history and film. Two other important early works include Paul Smith, ed., The Historian and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Warren Susman, “Film and History: Artifact and Experience,” Film and History 15, no. 2 (1985): 25–36. For a detailed historiography of history-on-film writing, see Mia M. Treacey, Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television (New York: Routledge, 2016).

56. Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), vii, 207.

57. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History, trans. Naomi Greene (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 163.

58. David Herlihy, “Am I a Camera? Other Reflections on Films and History,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1191, 1188–90, 1192.

59. Rosenstone’s essay, “History in Images / History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” was the lead article that the others were directly responding to. For all articles see the American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1173–227. O’Connor had already published on the subject of history on film and television before this article and would continue to do so afterwards, editing a prolific number of books (often with Peter C. Rollins) on different periods of American history on film. Toplin would also go on to publish several books on the topic of film and history.

60. Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1193.

61. White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” 1193.

62. Davis, ‘“Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead,”’ 269–83.

63. The five films Davis looks at are Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), Burn! (Pontecorvo, 1969), The Last Supper (Gutiérrez Alea, 1976), Amistad (Spielberg, 1997), and Beloved (Demme, 1998).

64. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 15.

65. William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10.

66. In addition to his AHR article, Rosenstone’s most valuable contributions to the field of history on film include: Robert Rosenstone, “JFK: Historical Fact/Historical Film,” American Historical Review 97, no. 2 (1992): 506–11; Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Robert Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Robert Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 201–18; Robert Rosenstone, “Oliver Stone as Historian,” in Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 26–39; Robert Rosenstone, History on Film / Film on History, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2012); Rosenstone and Parvulescu, Companion to the Historical Film. Most recently, Rosenstone has written a memoir that chronicles his shifting research interests and the origins of his own involvement in the study of history on film. Robert Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

67. The article he is referring to was originally published in Reviews in American History. Robert Rosenstone, “Reds as History,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 3 (1982): 299–310.

68. Robert Rosenstone, “The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought,” in Rosenstone and Parvulescu, Companion to the Historical Film, 86.

69. Rosenstone, “History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought,” 72–73.

70. Useful published tomes on the subject include Tony Barta, ed., Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Tom Brown, Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s (New York: Routledge, 2016); Burgoyne, Film Nation; Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); Mike Chopra-Gant, Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories (London: Wallflower, 2008); George Custen, Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films; Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Guynn, Writing History in Film; Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Patrick McGee, Bad History and the Logics of Blockbuster Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Kathryn Anne Morey, ed., Bringing History to Life through Film: The Art of Cinematic Storytelling (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Bruno Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014); Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Jonathan Stubbs, Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Jonathan Stubbs, Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930–2017 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

71. See, for example, Kenneth M. Cameron, America on Film: Hollywood and American History (New York: Continuum, 1997); Marc C. Carnes, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: H. Holt, 1995); Joseph Roquemore, History Goes to the Movies (New York: Main Street Books, 1999).

72. J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From “Cimarron” to “Citizen Kane” (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). See also J. E. Smyth, ed., Hollywood and the American Historical Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

73. Marcia Landy, Cinema and Counter-History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), x, 251 (emphasis in original).

74. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2007); Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ed., The History on Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009).

75. Julia Erhart, Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018).

76. For a selection of work see Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started, ed. Lester Friedman (London: University College of London Press, 1993), 109–29; Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant, eds., British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (New York: Routledge, 2001); Julianne Pidduck, Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past (London: British Film Institute, 2004); Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Belén Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation (London: Wallflower, 2012).

77. The works that I have predominantly discussed thus far either are general history-on-film texts or focus more specifically on American history on film. There are, of course, also a variety of books that center on other historical places, periods, and specific events. Medieval Europe is just one period that has generated a vast literature of single-authored works and edited collections that explore how history is presented on-screen.

78. In The Past within Us, for example, Tessa Morris-Suzuki examines photographs, films, comic books, and the internet.

79. Cannadine’s collection pays the greatest attention to history on TV, with only one essay relating to history on film. David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Marcia Landy, ed., The Historical Film: History and Memory in the Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Kathleen McDonald, ed., Americanization of History: Conflation of Time and Culture in Film and Television (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011); Laura Mee and Johnny Walker, eds., Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014); Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996); Sam Edwards, Faye Sayer, and Michael Dolski, eds., Histories on Screen: The Past and Present in Anglo-American Cinema and Television (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

80. Landsberg, Engaging the Past.

81. William Guynn’s book on traumatic and catastrophic events in the twentieth century suggests that “film is exceptionally capable of evoking the affective dimension of the past.” Jerome de Groot’s most recent book argues that the affective nature of films, TV shows, plays, and novels is “fundamental to the historiography of the texts.” William Guynn, Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 1; Jerome de Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (New York: Routledge, 2016), 151.

82. Erin Bell and Ann Gray, eds., Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Ann Gray and Erin Bell, History on Television (London: Routledge, 2013). See also Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor, eds., The Historian, Television and Television History: A Collection (Luton, UK: University of Luton Press, 2001).

83. Edgerton and Rollins, Television Histories.

84. Alexander Dhoest, “History in Popular Television Drama: The Flemish Past in Wij, Heren van Zichem,” in Bell and Gray, Televising History, 182–88.

85. Steve Anderson, “History TV and Popular Memory,” in Edgerton and Rollins, Television Histories, 26.

86. In a review of Landy’s Cinema and Counter-History, J. E. Smyth states that she worries “increasingly about how ‘history’ is defined within film and media studies.” J. E. Smyth, review of Cinema and Counter-History, by Marcia Landy, Film Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2016): 133.

87. Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 80.

88. Rosenstone, “History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought,” 84.

89. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 77.

90. Rosenstone, History on Film / Film on History, 44.

91. The film Rosenstone uses, more often than not, to illustrate invention in dramatic feature film is Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989). Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 68–75.

92. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 72.

93. Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film, 43, 45.

94. Davis insists that historical evidence must be respected. If filmmakers decide to depart from the evidence and engage in invention by “creating a composite character or changing a time frame—then it should be in the spirit of the evidence and plausible, not misleading.” If crafting a counterfactual history, or simply experimenting with history in some way, then the film must make this clear to the audience and must not present itself as a “true story.” Davis, Slaves on Screen, 130–31.

95. McCrisken and Pepper, Contemporary Hollywood Film, 6.

96. Brett Martin describes both showrunners and lead characters on postnetwork quality TV serials as “difficult.” Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2013).

97. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (2006): 29, 32.

1. Building a Historical World

1. Jason P. Vest, The Wire, Deadwood, Homicide, and NYPD Blue: Violence Is Power (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 136.

2. Anthony N. Smith, Storytelling Industries: Narrative Production in the 21st Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 75.

3. Trisha Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television (New York: Routledge, 2017), 37–38.

4. William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 92.

5. Jonathan Stubbs, Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 39. There are exceptions to this rule. Some foreign and independent films eschew realist sets and opt instead for stylized and overtly artificial sets (although not a historical film, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, 2003, is an excellent example). This remains relatively rare, even in feature films, and such experimentation in historical television shows is almost nonexistent.

6. Ed Sikov, Film Studies: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8.

7. Tashiro is referring to Sorlin’s 1980 book, The Film in History: Restaging the Past. C. S. Tashiro, Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 64 (italics in original).

8. Stubbs, Historical Film, 41.

9. Tashiro, Pretty Pictures, 64.

10. Stubbs, Historical Film, 46.

11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), 26.

12. Anne Hollander, “The ‘Gatsby Look’ and Other Costume Movie Blunders,” New York Magazine, May 27, 1974, 58.

13. This is, of course, a generalization about the discipline as a whole. Burke recognizes that there have always been some historians who have utilized visual sources to their full potential. He also identifies the start of a shift in attitude towards the visual beginning in the 1980s. Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 10–13.

14. Michael L. Wilson, “Visual Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Jeannene M. Przyblyski and Vanessa R. Schwartz (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29.

15. Burke, Eyewitnessing, 14–15.

16. Wilson, “Visual Culture,” 30.

17. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 59.

18. Robert Rosenstone, History on Film / Film on History, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2012), 19.

19. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 93 (italics in original).

20. Sikov, Film Studies, 5; John Gibbs, Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation (London: Wallflower, 2002), 100.

21. Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xiv.

22. Gibbs, Mise-en-scène, 1.

23. Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style, 4.

24. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith, Film Art: An Introduction, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2012), 113. Other definitions are broader and more inclusive. For Gibbs, the physical elements noted in Bordwell, Thompson, and Smith’s definition provide only half the equation, which are the contents of the frame. Also included in Gibbs’s concept of mise-en-scène is how these contents are organized: “framing, camera movement, the particular lens employed and other photogenic decisions.” Gibbs, Mise-en-scène, 1.

25. Oscar-winning production designer Richard Sylbert, quoted in Peter Ettedgui, Production Design and Art Direction (Woburn, MA: Focal Press, 1999), 40.

26. Tashiro, Pretty Pictures, xvi.

27. Maria Caso, email to author, June 22, 2016.

28. Jeremy G. Butler, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Historicizing Visual Style in Mad Men,” in Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, ed. Gary R. Edgerton (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 55–56.

29. Sue Harper, quoted in Butler, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” 56.

30. Eve Stewart, quoted in Fionnuala Halligan, Production Design (Lewes, UK: Ilex, 2012), 161.

31. Antxón Gómez, quoted in Halligan, Production Design, 109.

32. Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 14.

33. Léon Barsacq, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976).

34. Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

35. Jane Barnwell, Production Design: Architects of the Screen (London: Wallflower, 2004); Bergfelder, Harris, and Street, Film Architecture; Ettedgui, Production Design and Art Direction; Halligan, Production Design; Vincent LoBrutto, The Filmmaker’s Guide to Production Design (New York: Allworth, 2002); Juan Antonio Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s Golden Age (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).

36. Jane Barnwell charts the various terms used within the US industry: technical director, interior decorator, art director, and production designer. These changing terms “reflect the changing complexity and focus of the role over time.” Barnwell, Production Design, 7–9.

37. Janie Bryant is credited on Deadwood as Katherine Jane Bryant. However, she now uses the professional name Janie Bryant, which is what I will be using throughout the chapter.

38. Deborah Thomas, Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film (London: Wallflower, 2001), 10.

39. I recognize that many scholars writing about history on-screen (including Rosenstone and Toplin) refer positively to the “look and feel” created by film and do not use it in a derogative sense. My argument is that this statement often obscures and undersells what history on-screen is capable of.

40. Bergfelder, Harris, and Street, Film Architecture, 15.

41. William S. Greever, The Bonanza West: The Story of the Western Mining Rushes, 1848–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 316–17.

42. Watson Parker, Deadwood: The Golden Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 219.

43. Jason Jacobs, Deadwood (London: British Film Institute, 2012), 23.

44. Horace Newcomb, “Deadwood,” in The Essential HBO Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 99.

45. Steven Peacock, “Borders and Boundaries in Deadwood,” in Genre and Performance: Film and Television, ed. Christine Cornea (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 96.

46. Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen, 81–89.

47. Parker, Deadwood, 192.

48. Kelly J. Dixon, “Siding up to the Archaeology of Western Saloons: Historical Archaeology Takes on the Wild of the West,” World Archaeology 38, no. 4 (2006): 581.

49. Elliott West, The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 96, 80.

50. West, Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, 79–80.

51. West, Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, 96.

52. The humor comes from the fact that Wu initially speaks only two words of English: “Sweargen,” for Swearengen, and “cocksucker.” Their interactions involve drawings and a slow and confused process of deduction.

53. Parker, Deadwood, 144–48.

54. William Whyte, “How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture,” History and Theory 45, no. 2 (2006): 156, 177.

55. Duane A. Smith, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 65.

56. Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen, 206.

57. West, Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, 43.

58. Greever, Bonanza West, 318.

59. David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 135.

60. Episode 7 of season 1, for example, has quite a different structure. It starts with Bullock and Charlie Utter tracking down Jack McCall at a fort and deciding to take him to Yankton, which is a few days’ ride away. The episode then cuts back to camp, where several days have passed and Bullock and Utter return to the camp.

61. Smith, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps, 75.

62. It is worth noting here as well that all these sets serve dual functions. As Caso explains, the set design of the Ellsworth house enhances elements of Alma Garret’s storyline (the stone around her bedroom and its tiny window speak to her unhappiness). Set design has to serve dramatic functions as well as historical ones. “Deadwood 360° Tour,” bonus disc, Deadwood: The Complete Series (HBO, 2013), DVD.

63. Smith, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps, 118; Parker, Deadwood, 185.

64. Smith, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps, 118.

65. Michelle Pierson, “A Production Designer’s Cinema: Historical Authenticity in Popular Films Set in the Past,” in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to “Reality” TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 147, 146.

66. Bruno Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 39.

67. As Pierson states, sepia has “come to function as the color of history in all sorts of popular cultural contexts.” Pierson, “Production Designer’s Cinema,” 145.

68. Maria Caso, email to author, June 22, 2016.

69. Robert Rosenstone, “History in Images / History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1177.

70. I have chosen to primarily utilize these two popular entertainment websites (the AV Club and HitFix) throughout this book. In November 2016, HitFix became part of Uproxx, but as the site was called HitFix at the time all the episode reviews and posts were made, I will continue to refer to it as HitFix. Recaps and reviews of individual episodes are posted by critics after each show airs, and from that point on fellow viewers are invited to post comments, questions, and critiques. Band of Brothers and Deadwood both originally aired before this practice was common, but given their popularity and cult status, both shows have been subject to what are often called “rewind” reviews.

71. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 59.

72. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 8.

73. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 15–18.

74. This scene of grief in Deadwood contrasts greatly with a scene of grief in Treme. In the latter, before Toni Bernette is notified by the police that her missing husband has been found dead, the scene jumps from inside the Bernette residence with Toni and the police to outside. We do not get to witness the actual news being imparted and see and share Toni’s grief at such close quarters.

75. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 28, 92.

76. OED Online, 3rd ed. s.v. “feel, v.,” accessed October 10, 2016.

77. Victoria Kelley, “A Superficial Guide to the Deeper Meanings of Surface,” in Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects, ed. Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 13 (italics in original).

78. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 63.

79. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2.

80. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 162.

81. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 134.

82. Alicia Annas, “The Photogenic Formula: Hairstyles and Makeup in Historical Films,” in Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film, ed. Edward Maeder (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 52–54.

83. Janie Bryant, “Janie Bryant Interview Part 1 of 3,” interview by Bonnie Datt, Archive of American Television, August 9, 2012, video, https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/janie-bryant?clip=65603#interview-clips.

84. Parker, Deadwood, 151.

85. Maria Caso, email to author, June 22, 2016.

86. Sarah Gilligan, “Long Coats, Flowing Fabrics: Fashioning Masculinity and Desire in Film and Television,” in Adamson and Kelley, Surface Tensions, 134.

87. LoBrutto, Filmmaker’s Guide to Production Design, 89.

88. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 76.

89. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 27, 65.

90. Sarah Street, Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Film (London: Wallflower, 2001), 23.

91. Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 123.

92. Natalie Zemon Davis worked on The Return of Martin Guerre (Vigne, 1982). Davis, “‘Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead’: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 (1988): 270–71.

93. Hannah Greig worked on The Duchess (Dibb, 2008). Hannah Greig, “As Seen on the Screen: Material Culture, Historical Accuracy and the Costume Drama,” in Writing Material Culture History, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 314.

94. Edward Maeder, “The Celluloid Image: Historical Dress in Film,” in Maeder, Hollywood and History, 11; Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen, 48.

95. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, “Which Body Too Much? Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette,” in Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, ed. Rachel Moseley (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 24.

96. Maeder, “Celluloid Image,” 42, 9.

97. LoBrutto, Filmmaker’s Guide to Production Design, 111–12.

98. Bryant, “Interview.”

99. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 72.

100. Margaret Ponsonby, “Textiles and Time: Conservation and Public Response,” in Adamson and Kelley, Surface Tensions, 72.

101. Leslie Ellis Miller, “Europe 1600–1800 in a Thousand Objects,” in Gerritsen and Riello, Writing Material Culture History, 245.

102. Miller, “Europe 1600–1800 in a Thousand Objects,” 247.

103. Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12.

104. The same is also true for sets. Specially built sets are designed with light, equipment, and potential camera angles in mind and can be constantly altered during shooting as needed and desired. However, if shooting on location in a historic building, no such changes can be made to the structure to facilitate the optimal film shot.

105. On the Terrence Malick film The New World (2005), production designer Jack Fisk built the Jamestown settlement set using the same methods as the original inhabitants. As Fisk points out, this gave those working on the film a unique insight and wonderful appreciation of the colonists. However, the authentic method of building Jamestown does not affect what viewers see or their understanding of the historical narrative on-screen. Halligan, Production Design, 96.

106. Maeder, “Celluloid Image,” 15.

107. Janie Bryant, quoted in Sam Molineaux, “Art Dept: Evoking Period on Deadwood—Costume,” Below the Line, September 1, 2005, http://www.btlnews.com/crafts/art-dept-evoking-period-on-deadwood-costume/.

108. Of course, as noted earlier, none of these departments operate in isolation. What the viewer sees is also shaped by how the sets and costumes are lit and captured on camera by the director of photography and how they are edited together.

109. Christopher Anderson, “Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” in Edgerton and Jones, Essential HBO Reader, 37.

110. Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama, 81.

111. Alun Munslow, A History of History (New York: Routledge, 2012), 118, 6, 120, 119.

112. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (1961; repr., London: Penguin, 2008), 22, 23.

113. See, for example, Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); and Willem Hesling, “Oliver Stone’s Nixon: The Rise and Fall of a Political Gangster,” in A Companion to the Historical Film, ed. Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 179–98. Other works that focus on the idea of the director as cinematic historian include Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Franz Weiser, “The Conventions of Unconventionality: Reconsidering the Cinematic Historian in Even the Rain,” Rethinking History 19, no. 2 (2015): 268–84.

114. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), x–xi, 12.

115. Having worked on historical films undoubtedly provides scholars with a unique perspective from which to explore history on-screen. Ramírez’s insights are based largely on his own experience on film sets and his interactions with cast and crew, which have given him the opportunity to understand, in great detail, how filmic language operates. “My awareness,” Ramírez states, “of filmic language, of its ‘rules’ and of its narrative potential, grew also from my understanding of how various film-making crafts bring their own special artistic talents and imagination to the construction of the moving image.” Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film, 33, 37–39.

116. According to Alisa Perren and Thomas Schatz, “showrunner” was first used in Variety in 1990 and appeared approximately a hundred times over the 1990s. There were more than five hundred references to showrunners from 2000 to 2011 in the same publication. Alisa Perren and Thomas Schatz, “Theorizing Television’s Writer-Producer: Re-viewing The Producer’s Medium,” Television & New Media 16, no. 1 (2014): 87.

117. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 89–90.

118. Miranda J. Banks, “I Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer,” in How to Watch Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 245.

119. Mark Singer, “The Misfit: How David Milch Got from NYPD Blue to Deadwood by Way of an Epistle of St. Paul,” New Yorker, February 14, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/the-misfit-2.

120. Some showrunners, such as Matthew Weiner of Mad Men, insist on adding their names to script credits to acknowledge their creative input. Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2013), 71, 258.

121. Sean Bridgers, quoted in Milch, Deadwood, 160.

122. Over three years (2011–13) TV reviewer Alan Sepinwall ran summer DVD “rewinds” of Deadwood on HitFix, where he posted a review/recap each week. A number of actors from the series also followed along and posted lengthy comments in the comments blogs. Jim Beaver (Ellsworth) posted something for almost every episode, giving behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how the show was made as well as righting the occasional incorrect fact from Sepinwall. He was joined by Keone Young (Mr. Wu) and once or twice by W. Earl Brown (Dority) and Garret Dillahunt (Jack McCall/Francis Wolcott). Their comments on this blog proved to be a particularly rich source. Earl (Guest), August 13, 2013 (8:39 p.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “‘Deadwood’ Rewind: Season 3, Episode 10: ‘A Constant Throb,’” HitFix, August 9, 2013, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/deadwood-rewind-season-3-episode-10-a-constant-throb/. All HitFix posts have since been migrated to the Uproxx website.

123. Mittell, Complex TV, 90.

124. Bianchi directed eight episodes of Deadwood across the three seasons (two season 1 episodes, four season 2 episodes, and two season 3 episodes) and was also credited as producer for season 2.

125. “Making of Episode 12, ‘Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To’: The Wedding Celebration,” disc 6, Deadwood: The Complete Second Season (HBO, 2013), DVD.

126. See, for example, the comments from Ian McShane, Robin Weigert, Titus Welliver, and Sean Bridgers in Milch, Deadwood, 22, 70, 138, 160.

127. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39.

128. Newcomb, “Deadwood,” 92.

129. Tobias Steiner, “Steering the Author Discourse: The Construction of Authorship in Quality TV, and the Case of Game of Thrones,” Series 1, no. 2 (2015): 183.

130. The early to mid 2000s was the period of the “Davids” for HBO, with David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire, 2002–8), and David Milch (Deadwood) in the area of dramatic original programming and Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2000–) in comedy.

131. “Making of Episode 12, ‘Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To’: Trusting the Process with David Milch,” disc 6, Deadwood: The Complete Second Season (HBO, 2013), DVD.

132. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 53.

133. As noted previously, this can be difficult to judge accurately because the networks tend to “push” the role of the showrunner in their marketing and promotional materials. However, based on comments from cast and crew during and after the series was completed, I firmly believe that Milch did have an incredibly strong influence on many areas of production and on the day-to-day running of the set.

134. Maria Caso, email to author, June 22, 2016.

135. One such request was that Wild Bill Hickok be wearing a red sash (as he is shown wearing in at least one photograph) on the night of his death. Bryant, “Interview.”

136. Maria Caso, email to author, June 22, 2016.

137. Here I am drawing upon Juan Antonio Ramírez, who asks similar questions: How many people have ever found themselves “trapped inside a burning skyscraper or entombed within an Egyptian pyramid,” or who has “passed any time inside a Shanghai brothel or the airborne ballroom of a zeppelin”? Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen, 5.

138. Earl (Guest), comment on Sepinwall, “‘Deadwood’ Rewind.”

139. Halligan, Production Design, 9.

140. Terence Winter, quoted in Noel Murray, “Boardwalk Empire Creator Terence Winter on Raising the Stakes in Season Two (Part 1 of 4),” AV Club, August 27, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/boardwalk-empire-creator-terence-winter-on-raising,84239/.

141. Terence Winter, quoted in Jennifer Vineyard, “Terence Winter on What’s Next for Boardwalk Empire,” Vulture, December 3, 2012, http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/terence-winter-on-whats-next-for-boardwalk.html.

142. That Paramount partially owned the show ate into HBO’s profits. For a discussion of some of the reasons behind the cancelation, see Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised, 2nd ed. (New York: Gallery Books, 2015), 128–32. For a response to Sepinwall’s comments from W. Earl Brown, see Earl (guest), July 30, 2013 (4:27 p.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Programming Note: ‘Deadwood’ Review Delayed Again,” HitFix, July 26, 2013, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/programming-note-deadwood-review-delayed-again/.

143. Robert Ito, “Rebuilding ‘Deadwood,’ Plank by Plank,” New York Times, May 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/arts/television/deadwood-the-movie-hbo.html.

144. Maria Caso, quoted in Wendy Wilkinson, “Behind the Scenes of Deadwood: The Movie,” Cowboys & Indians, April 12, 2019, https://www.cowboysindians.com/2019/04/behind-the-scenes-of-deadwood-the-movie/.

2. Constructing and Inventing Historical Characters

1. Terence Winter, quoted in Angela Watercutter, “TV Fact-Checkers: Ginning Up Boardwalk Empire’s Boozy Gangster Paradise,” Wired, September 14, 2012, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/tv-fact-checkers-boardwalk-empire/.

2. Terence Winter, quoted in Noel Murray, “Boardwalk Empire Creator Terence Winter on Raising the Stakes in Season Two (Part 2 of 4),” AV Club, August 28, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/boardwalk-empire-showrunner-terence-winter-dissect,84300/.

3. Terence Winter, quoted in Maureen Ryan, “An Interview with ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Creator Terence Winter,” AolTV, September 10, 2010, http://www.aoltv.com/2010/09/10/boardwalk-empire/ (website no longer active).

4. Ryan, “Interview with ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Creator.”

5. Terence Winter, foreword to Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, by Nelson Johnson (London: Ebury, 2011), xii.

6. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 12.

7. Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2004), 224.

8. Murray Smith, “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider (New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 234, 236.

9. David C. Giles, “Parasocial Relationships,” in Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider, Characters in Fictional Worlds, 447.

10. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 127.

11. The potential of the TV serial as a form of history is the focus of the next chapter on Treme.

12. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 149–50.

13. Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative,” Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 23.

14. Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2013), 4.

15. James Wolcott, “Prime Time’s Graduation,” Vanity Fair, April 3, 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/05/wolcott-television-better-than-movies.

16. “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: How HBO Is Redefining Storytelling: An Interview with Richard Plepler,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 42, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 233.

17. Anthony N. Smith, Storytelling Industries: Narrative Production in the 21st Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 76.

18. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, “Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction,” in Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider, Characters in Fictional Worlds, 5.

19. Henriette Heidbrink, “Fictional Characters in Literary and Media Studies: A Survey of the Research,” in Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider, Characters in Fictional Worlds, 73.

20. Smith, “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections,” 232–35.

21. Jens Eder, “Understanding Characters,” Projections 4, no. 1 (2010): 37.

22. Terence Winter, interview by author, May 22, 2012.

23. Terence Winter, interview by author, May 22, 2012.

24. John McCarty, Bullets over Hollywood: The American Gangster Picture from the Silents to “The Sopranos” (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004), 111; J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From “Cimarron” to “Citizen Kane” (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 75.

25. Capone once again became a popular screen figure in the late 1950s and 1960s, beginning with The Scarface Mob (Karlson, 1959), based on the exploits of Special Agent Eliot Ness and his squad of “Untouchables.” The success of The Scarface Mob led to the creation of the television series The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63), which featured Capone as a recurrent character. While Capone graced TV screens, he also received attention on the silver screen in Al Capone (Wilson, 1959) and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Corman, 1967), two films that centered on the Chicago mobster without any of the pretenses employed by the early gangster films. These examples are only the best-known portrayals of Capone on film; there have been many more direct portrayals of Capone, as well as characters that have been based on him. Most recently Capone was played by Jon Bern­thal in the children’s movie Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Levy, 2009) and by Tom Hardy in Capone (Trank, 2020), which charts his final years in Florida after his prison sentence.

26. Robert J. Schoenberg, Mr. Capone: The Real and Complete Story of Al Capone (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 8.

27. Laurence Bergreen, Capone: The Man and the Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 20.

28. The first four seasons were made up of twelve episodes, approximately fifty-two minutes long, while the fifth and final season consisted of eight episodes.

29. Roberta E. Pearson and Máire Messenger Davis, “‘You’re Not Going to See That on TV’: Star Trek: The Next Generation in Film and Television,” in Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans, ed. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 114.

30. “Making Boardwalk Empire,” disc 5, Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (HBO, 2012), DVD.

31. Laura Beshears, “Honorable Style in Dishonorable Times: American Gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of American Culture 33, no. 3 (2010): 197.

32. Corrigan and White, Film Experience, 229.

33. The event took place on May 8, 1924, approximately a year after the episode is set. Capone walked into a bar owned by Heine Jacobs and shot a man named Joe Howard six times in front of at least three witnesses. Howard had beaten Capone’s close friend and associate Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, although different biographers provide various motives for Capone’s seemingly drastic actions.

34. Winter, quoted in Watercutter, “TV Fact-Checkers.”

35. In Scarface, Capone has a relationship with a woman initially involved with the Johnny Torrio character (Johnny Lovo in the film), as well as an uncomfortable relationship with his sister.

36. Capone’s love of family continues to be shown in season 4 when his brothers are introduced. Capone is seen playfully roughhousing with his brothers and is completely devastated when his brother Frank is killed.

37. Viewers have appreciated the fully rounded portrait, with one commentator on the AV Club website posting: “It’s great to see such a layered human version of Capone. I’m so used to seeing him as a one role loud mouth gangster like Robert De Niro in the Untouchables.” The Silent 1, October 8, 2012 (3:30 p.m.), comment on Noel Murray, “Boardwalk Empire: ‘Blue Bell Boy,’” AV Club, October 7, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/blue-bell-boy,86002/.

38. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema, 64–65.

39. Edward Behr, Prohibition: The 13 Years That Changed America (London: BBC Books, 1997), 180.

40. Schoenberg, Mr. Capone, 62.

41. John Kobler, Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo, 2003), 72.

42. Bergreen, Capone, 84.

43. Terence Winter, commentary, “Pilot: Boardwalk Empire,” disc 1, Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (HBO, 2012), DVD.

44. Winter, quoted in Watercutter, “TV Fact-Checkers.”

45. In this, the writers are aided by the actors, most of whom have done a significant amount of research on their character.

46. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72.

47. Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 117.

48. In season 3, set in 1923, events in Chicago are moved forward approximately a year so that Capone’s career can advance and he can continue to evolve as a character. During Torrio’s 1924 trip to Europe, Capone was left in charge of the running of Torrio’s illegal business ventures and showed what an effective leader he could be. In the show this trip and transfer of power take place a year earlier, but again, it does not radically upset or alter Capone’s known history.

49. Winter, quoted in Watercutter, “TV Fact-Checkers.”

50. Comments posted on the AV Club and HitFix weekly reviews were generally very favorable in regards to Capone’s character. “Can we get a Capone spin off series when this is all done please?” one viewer asked. Cultstatus, November 26, 2012 (5:32 a.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall “Review: Boardwalk Empire—‘Two Imposters,’” HitFix, November 25, 2012, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/review-boardwalk-empire-two-imposters-youll-be-a-man-my-son/. All HitFix posts have since been migrated to the Uproxx website.

51. In this section I am putting a lot of emphasis on Winter as showrunner and decision maker. This is not to ignore the contributions of the other writers and various departments in crafting the character of Thompson, but Winter was responsible for writing the pilot, establishing the characters, and deciding on the different character types (at least for season 1).

52. Terence Winter, quoted in Susan Dormady Eisenberg, “An Interview with Terence Winter: Executive Producer, Writer, and Creator of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (Part 1),” Huffington Post, February 7, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-dormady-eisenberg/terence-winter-boardwalk-empire_b_1254667.html.

53. Terence Winter, quoted in David Bianculli, “Down on the ‘Boardwalk’ with Terence Winter,” NPR, September 28, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130184684.

54. This is by far the most detailed portrait of Johnson currently available, although it does not add anything significantly new to the existing interpretation of Johnson, and is padded out with facts about Atlantic City. Frank J. Ferry, Nucky: The Real Story of the Atlantic City Boardwalk Boss (Margate, NJ: ComteQ, 2013).

55. Nelson Johnson, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City (London: Ebury, 2011), 79, xvi.

56. Johnson, Boardwalk Empire, 93.

57. Jonathan Van Meter, The Last Good Time: Skinny DÁmato, the Notorious 500 Club, the Rat Pack and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 45.

58. Other incidental facts about Nucky Johnson are also featured on the show, including that he owned a powder-blue Rolls-Royce. An actual 1920s Rolls-Royce was procured for the show and repainted to make it the same color as Johnson’s.

59. Van Meter, Last Good Time, 42.

60. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 83.

61. Assistant Attorney General Esther Randolph is based on Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Like her real-life inspiration, Randolph is a dedicated, hardworking woman and an anomaly of the time, a high-ranking woman within the federal government.

62. Nelson Johnson, The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City (Medford, NJ: Plexus, 2010).

63. Terence Winter, interview by author, May 22, 2012.

64. Lisa Padovani, quoted in Chris Laverty, “Boardwalk Empire Costume Q&A: John Dunn and Lisa Padovani,” Clothesonfilm, September 21, 2011, http://clothesonfilm.com/boardwalk-empire-costume-qa-john-dunn-lisa-padovani/22114/.

65. For example, multiple characters based on the same historical figure in a narrative could allow storytellers to explore the alternative paths their lives may have taken.

66. Terence Winter, quoted in Christina Radish, “Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter Interview,” Collider, September 14, 2010, https://collider.com/boardwalk-empire-interview-martin-scorsese-terrence-winter/.

67. Although Johnson’s position as county treasurer did not bring in a pay check, he did not really need one with the $500,000 a year he made from protection money from the Atlantic City vice rackets. Johnson, Boardwalk Empire, 98.

68. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “racketeer” and “gangster.”

69. In order to keep FBI agent Nelson Van Alden off his back, Thompson arranges for another man to take the fall for the hijacking and murders in the pilot. It is Thompson’s brother Eli, the sheriff of Atlantic City, and his deputy who beat the fall guy, Hans Schroeder, to a bloody pulp before dumping him over the side of a boat into the Atlantic Ocean. Nucky undoubtedly gives the order but distances himself from the actual violence.

70. George S. Larke-Walsh, Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters from “The Godfather” to “The Sopranos” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 82.

71. Murray Smith, “Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?,” in Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 74.

72. While he shares many of the same characteristics, Thompson is arguably not the appealing antihero that Tony Soprano is. He has often divided viewers and elicited a number of negative responses on the internet, but nonetheless he fits into the same mold. These criticisms are often directed at Steve Buscemi, as many do not see him as an engaging leading man, and others simply do not find Thompson to be the most compelling character on the show.

73. Smith, Engaging Characters, 142.

74. Smith, “Just What Is It,” 84.

75. Smith, Engaging Characters, 194.

76. “Partial allegiance refers to cases in which we find ourselves sympathetic to some actions and attitudes of the character, but antipathetic to others,” Smith explains. “Perverse allegiance captures those cases where a film seeks to turn around aspects of our normal evaluation, eliciting our sympathy for actions and attitudes, which, on reflection, we realize we ought not endorse.” Smith, “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections,” 244–45.

77. Terence Winter, interview by author, May 22, 2012.

78. These three elements of character tend to get stressed in screenwriting guides. For example, see Linda Seger, Advanced Screenwriting: Raising Your Script to Academy Award Level (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 2003), 138–47.

79. Richard Dyer, Stars, with a supplementary chapter and bibliography by Paul McDonald (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 107.

80. Even before the viewer really gets to know Darmody, parts of his history are revealed through the signs of character that also prefigure his place and relationships on the show. His name, James Darmody, is clearly of Irish origin, and, as Dyer points out, names can suggest class and ethnic background as well as character traits. Organized crime in the 1920s, and even still today, is grouped by ethnic identity, with Jewish, Irish, and Italian gangs being the most predominant in the 1920s. There did exist, however, a considerable amount of crossover, and the gangs were not rigidly exclusive. Some gangsters, such as Rothstein, ran an ethnically diverse operation, and even the Torrio-Capone gang in Chicago employed non-Italians, such as the Jewish Jake Guzik. In film and television, though, ethnically categorized crime syndicates have remained a staple of the gangster genre, and from this viewers will likely understand the significance of Darmody’s name. Dyer, Stars, 109; Marc Mappen, Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 32.

81. Dyer, Stars, 106.

82. Roberta Pearson, “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character,” in Reading CSI: Crime TV under the Microscope, ed. Michael Allen (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 55–56.

83. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema, 197, 219.

84. Armitage Trail, Scarface (London: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 1997), 41.

85. George Browne, An American Soldier in World War I, ed. David L. Snead (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 128.

86. Jennifer Keene notes that it is extremely difficult to generalize about wartime experiences, or even to identify just who a typical soldier was. Only about 40 percent of American troops served in combat roles, while the remaining 60 percent worked in organizational and supply roles, often far back from the front lines. Jennifer Keene, The United States and the First World War (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000), 60.

87. Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 56–57.

88. Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 8.

89. Nancy Gentile Ford, The Great War and America: Civil-Military Relations during World War I (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 101.

90. Richard Severo and Lewis Milford, The Wages of War: When America’s Soldiers Came Home—from Valley Forge to Vietnam (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 1989), 240.

91. Butler, Television, 58.

92. Jeffrey Kirkwood, introduction to Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans Including Women, Reservists and Those Coming Back from Iraq, by Daryl S. Paulson and Stanley Krippner (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), xvi, xix.

93. Patrick Phillips, Understanding Film Texts: Meaning and Experience (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 62.

94. Dyer, Stars, 125.

A number of comments on HitFix conveyed concerns over Buscemi’s ability to carry the lead role of a show, some of them in part influenced by his prior roles. “I’m still having trouble seeing Buscemi in this role,” Sareeta commented after the pilot episode. “I am so used to him playing a background sort of wimpy character.” Sareeta, September 21, 2010 (2:04 a.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘Pilot,’” HitFix, September 19, 2010, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/boardwalk-empire-pilot-the-day-the-drinking-died/.

95. DC, December 12, 2011 (5:09 a.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘To the Lost,’” HitFix, December 11, 2011, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/boardwalk-empire-to-the-lost-nucky-get-your-gun/.

96. mike_c, December 12, 2011 (3:20 p.m.), comment on Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘To the Lost.’”

97. C1, December 12, 2011 (6:57 p.m.) and Stravu9, December 12, 2011 (3:27 a.m.), comments on Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘To the Lost.’”

98. William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 36.

99. Guynn, Writing History in Film, 38.

100. Terence Winter, interview by author, May 22, 2012.

101. Robert Rosenstone, “Oliver Stone as Historian,” in Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 26.

102. Ever, December 12, 2011 (11:46 p.m.), comment on Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘To the Lost.’”

103. Brian, November 29, 2010 (4:05 p.m.), comment (since deleted on Uproxx site) on Alan Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘Paris Green,’” HitFix, November 28, 2010, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/boardwalk-empire-paris-green-baptism-by-fire/.

104. Anonymous, November 22, 2010 (10:16 p.m.), comment (since deleted on Uproxx site) on Alan Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘Emerald City,’” HitFix, November 21, 2010, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/boardwalk-empire-emerald-city-with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility/.

105. Gridlock, November 9, 2010 (3:37 a.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Boardwalk Empire—‘Hold Me in Paradise,’” HitFix, November 7, 2010, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/boardwalk-empire-hold-me-in-paradise-first-in-war/.

106. Greg Grant, September 17, 2012 (2:15 a.m.), comment (since deleted on Uproxx site) on Alan Sepinwall, “Season Premiere Review: Boardwalk Empire—‘Resolution,’” HitFix, September 16, 2012, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/season-premiere-review-boardwalk-empire-resolution-walk-like-an-egyptian/.

107. Dr. Gross, October 8, 2012 (1:30 p.m.), comment on Sepinwall, “Review: Boardwalk Empire—‘Blue Bell Boy,’” HitFix, October 7, 2012, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/review-boardwalk-empire-blue-bell-boy-cellars-market/.

108. ficus, November 2, 2012 (8:51 p.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Review: Boardwalk Empire—‘Sunday Best,’” HitFix, October 28, 2012, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/review-boardwalk-empire-sunday-best-house-of-the-bathing-son/.

109. Dyer, Stars, 122.

110. Phillips, Understanding Film Texts, 88.

111. Dyer, Stars, 118.

112. Gary Alan Fine, Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7.

113. Jonathan Eig, quoted in Katherine Don, “How Real Is Boardwalk Empire’s Al Capone?,” Salon, October 11, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2010/10/11/boardwalk_empire_al_capone/.

114. Phillips, Understanding Film Texts, 62.

115. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,” Screen 19, no. 2 (1978): 44.

116. In online discussions following episodes, numerous commenters often referenced or questioned how history matches up with what happened on the show. For example, commenter r1186 posted: “In reality, Nucky Thompson was convicted of tax evasion, fraud etc and sent to jail,” obviously confusing Nucky Johnson with the fictional Nucky Thompson. Ben Kabak set him straight with the reply: “Nucky Thompson is NOT a real person. Nucky Johnson was real.” This discussion took place after an episode midway through season 4, demonstrating that even after a number of seasons this confusion still existed. r11856, October 14, 2013 (1:52 p.m.) and Ben Kabak, October 14, 2013 (2:46 p.m.), comments on Alan Sepinwall, “Review: Boardwalk Empire—‘The North Star,’” HitFix, October 13, 2013, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/review-boardwalk-empire-the-north-star-just-another-girl-on-the-irt/.

117. Although we do not actually see Swearengen die in the last moments of Deadwood: The Movie, it is clearly implied that this is the end of the road for the Gem’s proprietor.

118. Johnny C., “Is Jimmy Darmody Based on a Real Person?,” A Boardwalk Empire Blog (blog), September 28, 2010, http://theboardwalkempire.blogspot.co.nz/2010/09/was-jimmy-darmody-based-on-real-person.html.

119. “Getting to Know the Characters of Boardwalk Empire,” Efficient Drinker (blog), September 21, 2010, https://www.efficientdrinker.com/blog/boardwalk-empire-characters/ (website no longer active).

120. For example, Agent Nelson Van Alden’s real-life inspiration is supposedly William Frank, who investigated Nucky Johnson’s operation in the 1930s. Apart from both investigating Nucky, there is no correlation between the two, or even between their investigations.

121. Each of these areas of history, particularly biography, has come under attack, especially since historians moved away from the “great man” approach to history. Historian John Tosh points out that “biographical narrative encourages a simplified, linear interpretation of events” and notes that “an exclusive focus on the thoughts and actions of individuals is likely to find no shape and to see instead only a chaotic sequence of accident and blunder.” John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5th ed. (New York: Longman/Pearson, 2010), 120, 224.

3. Crafting Complex Historical Narratives in Serial Television

1. Simon and Overmyer worked together on Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993–99), which was when they first began talking about a New Orleans–set television series. However, their plans would always dissolve when they tried to imagine selling a show about New Orleans culture to a Los Angeles executive. David Simon and Eric Overmyer, “After The Wire, Taking on New Orleans in Treme,” interview by Terry Gross, NPR, April 5, 2010, http://www.npr.org/2010/04/05/125364838/after-the-wire-taking-on-new-orleans-in-treme.

2. Creeber’s discussion of historical series focuses on Roots and Holocaust, which are both from the late 1970s. Glen Creeber, “‘Taking Our Personal Lives Seriously’: Intimacy, Continuity and Memory in the Television Drama Serial,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 4 (2001): 443–49.

3. Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 37.

4. For example, Creighton’s YouTube rants are based upon the blogs of Ashley Morris, with snippets, including Morris’s trademark “fuck you, you fucking fucks,” borrowed directly from the source. While both are also university professors (Morris, computer science; Creighton, English), other parts of Creighton’s character are drawn from additional sources or completely invented. His suicide is not informed by Morris, who died of a heart attack in 2008, but by the spike in the suicide rate that, after Hurricane Katrina, reached four times higher than before the storm. Simon notes that for this scenario he and his staff took inspiration from Stevenson Palfi, a New Orleans–based filmmaker who committed suicide in December 2005. Davis McAlary perhaps comes closest to repeating the problems of “based-on characters,” sharing a similar name with his real-life inspiration, Davis Rogan.

5. Catherine Dessinges, Dominique Gendrin, and Wendy Hajjar, “Fiction and Reality in HBO’s Treme: A Narrative Alchemy in the Service of Political Truth,” TV/Series 1, no. 1 (2012): 186.

6. Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 41.

7. In order to avoid confusion, from this point on I will refer to this type of television narrative as an “episodic series” rather than just a “series” due to the multiple uses and meanings of the word.

8. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 29–40; Thomas Schatz, “St Elsewhere and the Evolution of the Ensemble Series,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 85–100; Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Jan Olsson and Lynn Spigel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 93–112; Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 67–100.

9. Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” 92.

10. Law and Order (NBC, 1990–2010) is an example of an episodic series that remained true to the form. Shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–2015) and House (Fox, 2004–12), while appearing like episodic series with a case solved every week, contain serial elements involving the main characters and their interpersonal relationships.

11. Alun Munslow, Narrative and History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.

12. Hayden White, “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” in Hayden White, the Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory, 1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 120–21.

13. “Historians’ traditional understanding of the nature, epistemological grounding, truth-value, and goals of research and writing faced a significant challenge beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s,” explains Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “with the emergence of what came to be known as the ‘linguistic turn,’ the notion that language is the constitutive agent of human consciousness and the social production of meaning, and that our apprehension of the world, both past and present, arrives only through the lens of language’s precoded perceptions.” For a more thorough explanation of the linguistic turn, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Introduction,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 2–6.

14. Geoffrey Roberts, “The History and Narrative Debate,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. For more on historians’ turn away from narrative (and then their return to it), see Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past & Present, no. 85 (1979): 3–24.

15. Hayden White, “Storytelling: Historical and Ideological,” in Doran, Hayden White, the Fiction of Narrative, 273.

16. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 91; Alun Munslow, Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 182.

17. Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 94; Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Historiography: An Introductory Guide (London: Continuum, 2012), 129.

18. Clark, History, Theory, Text, 86.

19. Munslow, Narrative and History, 4 (italics in original).

20. Munslow, Narrative and History, 64.

21. Robert Rosenstone, “History in Images / History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1174, 1178.

22. Jason Mittell is not the only television scholar to note changes in narrative structure on TV, but he has been influential in charting changes and developments. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 29.

23. Mittell uses Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13) and The Wire to demonstrate “stark contrasts among the range of options within the realm of serialised primetime dramas.” Both are examples of narrative complexity despite their obvious structural and stylistic differences. Jason Mittell, “The Qualities of Complexity: Vast versus Dense Seriality in Contemporary Television,” in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 45–56.

24. Jason Mittell, “Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory,” in Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 78.

25. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 37.

26. For an example, see Rossend Sánchez-Baró’s article on the “formidable” confusion caused by Breaking Bad’s cold opens. Rossend Sánchez-Baró, “Uncertain Beginnings: Breaking Bad’s Episodic Openings,” in Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, ed. David P. Pierson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 139–54.

27. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 37; Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative,” Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 22.

28. For a more detailed explanation of some of the key changes in the industry resulting in the “postnetwork era,” see Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, 2nd ed. (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 25–34.

29. Anthony N. Smith, Storytelling Industries: Narrative Production in the 21st Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 88.

30. Smith, Storytelling Industries, 89 (italics in original).

31. For example, Boardwalk Empire premiered the same year and did not drop below 2.5 million in live-plus-same-day viewings during the first season. True Blood’s third season, airing in 2010, regularly posted ratings above 5 million.

32. Richard Plepler, quoted in Dave Walker, “With ‘Treme’ Renewed for a Third Season, Its Writers Focus on Stories Left to Tell,” Times-Picayune, August 14, 2011, http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2011/08/with_treme_renewed_for_a_third.html (article no longer stored on site).

33. Both HitFix and AV Club reviewers regularly reminded readers to utilize Walker’s guide. Echoing similar sentiments, viewer Far Ceide posted on Walker’s blog, “Dave, your explainers really enrich my appreciation of ‘Treme.’ Thanks again for this work.” Far Ceide, October 1, 2012, comment on Dave Walker, “‘Treme’ Explained: ‘Saints,’” Times-Picayune, September 30, 2012, http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2012/09/treme_explained_saints.html (article no longer stored on site).

34. David Herman, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13.

35. David Simon, “HBO’s Treme Creator David Simon Explains It All for You,” Times-Picayune, April 11, 2010, http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2010/04/hbos_treme_creator_david_simon.html (article no longer stored on site).

36. Charles McGrath, “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” New York Times, October 22, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/22/magazine/the-prime-time-novel-the-triumph-of-the-prime-time-novel.html.

37. Greg Metcalf, The DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the Television We Watch (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012).

38. Sean O’Sullivan, “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season,” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2 (2010): 60.

39. Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2013), 6.

40. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 30.

41. Jason Mittell, “Film and Television Narrative,” in Herman, Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 162.

42. Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1193.

43. David Simon, quoted in Matt Zoller Seitz, “Hot Seat: David Simon Explains ‘Treme,’” Salon, July 5, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/07/04/treme_season_2_david_simon_interview/.

44. Simon stated that he is not interested in sensational TV tropes—a gun being put to a person’s head, a car being wrecked: “those are not the stakes of post-Katrina New Orleans, and I’m interested in post-Katrina New Orleans.” David Simon, quoted in Alan Sepinwall, “Interview: ‘Treme’ Co-creator David Simon Post-mortems Season One,” HitFix, June 20, 2010, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/interview-treme-co-creator-david-simon-post-mortems-season-one/. All HitFix posts have since been migrated to the Uproxx website.

45. Simon himself has admitted that the live viewing numbers for his HBO serials (both The Wire and Treme) are “appalling” and notes that The Wire did not become a cult hit until all five seasons had been aired. Angela Watercutter, “David Simon on Treme, the CIA and Why TV Isn’t Journalism,” Wired, November 24, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/11/david-simon-tv-journalism-cia/4/ (article no longer stored on site).

46. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 19 (italics in original).

47. Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Laurence King, 2011), 69.

48. David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 98, 110.

49. Anthony N. Smith, “TV or Not TV? The Sopranos and Contemporary Episode Architecture in US Network and Premium Cable Drama,” Critical Studies in Television 6, no. 1 (2011): 36–38.

50. Newman explains that networks prefer beats that are under two and a half minutes, as they believe the audience’s attention may be lost. Cable networks, on the other hand, are more flexible with this rule, allowing scenes to linger and slowly play out. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs,” 17; Smith, “TV or Not TV?,” 39.

51. Smith, “TV or Not TV?,” 46.

52. Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television, 54; Smith, “TV or Not TV?,” 41–44.

53. Some shows with a large ensemble cast, such as Game of Thrones, focus on a selection of the characters and locations from week to week, but on Treme most of the characters appear every week, at least for the first three seasons.

54. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 65–72.

55. Indeed, some writers use this formula when planning a show. David Chase, for example, works with a rough formula of thirteen beats each for the A and B story, five or six for the C story, and a couple for a D story. O’Sullivan, “Broken on Purpose,” 63.

56. In a previous episode Antoine, a trombone player by trade, was unjustly assaulted and arrested by the police and his instrument lost in police evidence. His lawyer, Toni, is trying to track down his trombone for him and alerts him to how Japanese jazz fans are funding musicians through Tipitina’s Foundation. Toni is also LaDonna’s lawyer, and together the two are working to find out what has become of LaDonna’s brother Daymo, who is suspected to have been in police custody on the day of the hurricane and has not been seen since.

57. Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values, and Cultural Change (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 24.

58. Nelson states that multiple storylines incorporating a variety of characters and storylines help keep viewers interested. Even if there is one storyline or set of characters that does not interest a segment of the audience, a different narrative thread will be taken up in the next beat. Nelson, TV Drama in Transition, 33.

59. I call the scenes where Janette cooks for the famous chefs—Tom Colicchio, Wylie Dufresne, Eric Ripert, and David Chang—a vignette because it is only dealt with in these three closely spaced beats and serves more as a short character piece or short story than really continuing or developing Janette’s longer-running restaurant woes.

60. Adam Nossiter, “New Orleans Crime Swept Away, with Most of the People,” New York Times, November 10, 2005.

61. Michael Leitner et al., “The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Reported Crimes in Louisiana: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis,” Professional Geographer 63, no. 2 (2011): 258.

62. For a full report on crime statistics, not just in Orleans Parish but also neighboring parishes that took in Katrina evacuees, see Leitner et al., “Impact of Hurricane Katrina,” 244–61.

63. Although difficult to pinpoint exact numbers due to conflicting census estimates, VanLandingham concludes that the 2006 murder rate increased by at least 49 percent over recorded numbers for 2004. Mark J. VanLandingham, “Murder Rates in New Orleans, La, 2004–2006,” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 9 (2007): 1614–15.

64. Eloise Dunlap, Jennifer Graves, and Ellen Benoit, “Stages of Drug Market Change during Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and Reformulation of the New Orleans Drug Market,” International Journal of Drug Policy 23, no. 6 (2012): 477.

65. Nona Ivey, quoted in Nossiter, “New Orleans Crime Swept Away.”

66. Amanda Ripley et al. highlight some of the problems in the New Orleans justice system both before and after the storm, including the peculiar “sixty-day homicide” rule that Colson mentions. Amanda Ripley et al., “What Happened to the Gangs of New Orleans?,” Time, May 22, 2006, 54–61.

67. Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 100.

68. A cold open is a scene or sequence that appears before the opening credits. Not all shows use this device; Boardwalk Empire is an example of a show that starts straight into the title sequence and then begins the weekly narrative.

69. Creighton watched part of Bush’s Jackson Square speech on YouTube during the previous episode.

70. Spencer S. Hsu, “Post-Katrina Promises Unfulfilled: On the Gulf Coast, Federal Recovery Effort Makes Halting Progress,” Washington Post, January 28, 2006; Tracie L. Washington et al., NAACP Reports Housing in New Orleans: Policy Recommendations for Equitable Rebuilding (n.p.: NAACP, Gulf Coast Advocacy Center, Opportunity Agenda, and Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, 2006).

71. Creighton’s references to San Francisco as “an overpriced cess pool with hills” and declaration that “anything that’s any good in Chicago comes from someplace else” clearly demonstrate his extremely biased point of view.

72. Local council authorities insisted they could not open the housing projects, despite the fact they were relatively undamaged, because they were under federal control. The debate over public housing in New Orleans and the fate of the Big Four developments remained a contentious issue for a number of years after the storm. Displaced residents filed lawsuits in 2006 and 2007 in an attempt to halt demolition.

73. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Year after Katrina, Bush Still Fights for 9/11 Image,” New York Times, August 28, 2006.

74. A USA Today/Gallup poll was conducted in September and October 2005 with a sample of 1,510 participants. In August 2006, 602 of those individuals were recontacted and asked to participate in another poll with updated questions. Frank Newport, “Follow-up on Katrina Victims: One Year Later,” Gallup, August 21, 2006, http://www.gallup.com/poll/24208/FollowUp-Katrina-Victims-One-Year-Later.aspx#4.

75. Munslow, Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 180.

76. Peter Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 310.

77. Given Toni’s vexed relationship with the NOPD, the fact that she has a friendly rapport with Colson serves to show the audience that he is one of the “good guys” and that his assessment of crime can be taken as accurate. Still, the fact he is dressed as a police officer may incline some in the audience to think his sympathies lie with his fellow officers.

78. Watercutter, “David Simon on Treme.”

79. Smith, Storytelling Industries, 93.

80. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 60.

81. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 142, 188 (italics in original).

82. Murray Smith, “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider (New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 244.

83. Being the Big Chief of a Mardi Gras Indian tribe, Albert is a culture bearer of New Orleans culture. Delmond, although a part of the Indian tradition, is more open to change and is a successful modern jazz musician splitting his time between New Orleans and New York. Delmond is first introduced to the jazz center idea by developer Will Branson, who argues there should be a world-class jazz performance center in New Orleans. Now is the time to move ahead, he suggests, with so much of the city being rebuilt after the storm.

84. Manning Marable, for example, argues that the storm was “perceived as a golden opportunity by corporate and conservative political elites who had long desired to ‘remake’ the historic city.” Manning Marable, “Introduction,” in Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and Public Policy Reader, ed. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xi; Juliette Landphair, “‘The Forgotten People of New Orleans’: Community, Vulnerability, and the Lower Ninth Ward,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 844.

85. Kevin Fox Gotham, “Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre (French Quarter),” Urban Studies 42, no. 7 (2005): 1105.

86. Gotham, “Tourism Gentrification,” 1105. Numbers, of course, do not tell the full story. As Kevin Fox Gotham points out, “The transition to a tourism-dominated economy has paralleled population decline, white flight to the suburbs, racial segregation, poverty and a host of other social problems” in New Orleans. Furthermore, many jobs in the tourism industry are seasonal, have a high turnover, are low paid, and do not make up for the loss of jobs in other sectors of the New Orleans economy. Kevin Fox Gotham, “Marketing Mardi Gras: Commodification, Spectacle and the Political Economy of Tourism in New Orleans,” Urban Studies 39, no. 10 (2002): 1740, 1743.

87. When Liguori first mentions the jazz center plan to Nelson, he describes a proposal very similar to one headed by the owner of the New Orleans Hyatt Regency to create a twenty-acre jazz district that would include a national jazz center and new city government buildings. It was estimated that this new tourist center would create 6,500 permanent jobs and “generate more than $6 billion in economic benefits over 20 years.” “Hyatt-Superdome Area to Be Redeveloped into New Hyatt Jazz District: Finished Site to Generate More than 6,500 Permanent Jobs,” press release, May 30, 2006, https://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4027606.html.

88. Michael L. Dolfman, Solidelle Fortier Wasser, and Bruce Bergman, “The Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the New Orleans Economy,” Monthly Labor Review 130, no. 6 (2007): 7.

89. “Report of the Cultural Committee: Mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission,” January 17, 2006, 12, https://nolaplans.com/plans/BNOB/Culture%20Committee%20Report%20Attachment%20C.pdf.

90. Anna Hartnell, “Katrina Tourism and a Tale of Two Cities: Visualizing Race and Class in New Orleans,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 723–47; Lynell L. Thomas, “‘Roots Run Deep Here’: The Construction of Black New Orleans in Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 749–68.

91. Hartnell, “Katrina Tourism,” 724.

92. Jonathan Mark Souther, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006), 209.

93. Joyce Williams, quoted in Lolis Eric Elie, “Armstrong Park Planning Exclusionary, Treme Residents Complain,” Times-Picayune, August 18, 2009, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/08/armstrong_park_planning_exclus.html (article no longer stored on site).

94. Katy Reckdahl, “Locked-Up Armstrong Park Lamented as ‘Neglected Jewel’ of Treme, French Quarter Area,” Times-Picayune, August 17, 2011, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/08/locked-up_armstrong_park_lamen.html (article no longer stored on site).

95. Mtangulizi Sanyika, “Katrina and the Condition of Black New Orleans: The Struggle for Justice, Equity, and Democracy,” in Race, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina, ed. Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009), 104.

96. Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Rita J. King, “Post-Katrina Profiteering: The New Big Easy,” in Bullard and Wright, Race, Place, and Environmental Justice, 169–82.

97. Bruce Eggler, “Inspector General Urges City Council to Reject Municipal Auditorium Deal,” Times-Picayune, November 11, 2009, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/11/post_134.html (article no longer stored on site).

98. Karl F. Seidman, Coming Home to New Orleans: Neighborhood Rebuilding after Katrina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8–9.

99. Antoine’s home in Mid-City was flooded, and he and Desiree have to rent outside of the city where it is difficult for him to get to his music gigs; the bottom floor of Janette’s home, as well as the roof, was badly damaged and she receives her Road Home payout only in season 3; Albert’s home was also badly damaged, and season 1 documented his struggles with the insurance company over the payout; Colson is still living in his FEMA trailer through season 3.

100. For scholarly texts that discuss the Road Home Program, see Adams, Markets of Sorrow, 74–97; Lisa K. Bates and Rebekah A. Green, “Housing Recovery in the Ninth Ward: Disparities in Policy, Process and Prospects,” in Bullard and Wright, Race, Place, and Environmental Justice, 229–45; Christina Finch, Christopher T. Emirich, and Susan L. Cutter, “Disaster Disparities and Differential Recovery in New Orleans,” Population and Environment 31, no. 4 (2010): 179–202.

101. Gadbois’s Squandered Heritage blog posts have been archived on The Lens, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-interest newsroom cofounded by Gadbois in 2010. Karen Gadbois, “What Is up with This?,” The Lens, June 28, 2008, http://thelensnola.org/2008/06/28/what-is-up-with-this/.

102. David Simon, quoted in Watercutter, “David Simon on Treme.”

103. David Simon and Eric Overmyer, commentary, “Do You Know What It Means,” disc 1, Treme: The Complete First Season (HBO, 2011), DVD.

104. “I’m looking forward to going back and watching earlier episodes again after having seen them all,” commented Jan on HitFix at the end of season 1. Jan, June 21, 2010 (1:19 p.m.), comment (since deleted on Uproxx site) on Alan Sepinwall, “‘Treme’—‘I’ll Fly Away’: Stormy Weather,” HitFix, June 20, 2010, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/treme-i-11-fly-away-stormy-weather/.

105. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 133.

106. This is how Creighton describes New Orleans while being interviewed by a British reporter who questions the rebuilding of New Orleans in the pilot episode.

107. Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” 310; Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections of the Uses of History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 127.

108. Katy Reckdahl, “Mardi Gras Indians’ Suits Stitched with Help of Invisible Hands,” Times-Picayune, February 20, 2012, http://www.nola.com/mardigras/index.ssf/2012/02/mardi_gras_indians_suits_stitc.html (article no longer stored on site).

109. “I will say that as a native, caucasian New Orleanian, I have learned more about the Mardi Gras Indians by watching Treme than I have by living in the city for over 40 years,” Ybnorma11 posted partway through season 1. “I knew they existed and little else.” Ybnorma11, June 22, 2010, comment on Dave Walker, “‘Treme’ Explained: ‘I’ll Fly Away,’” Times-Picayune, June 20, 2010, http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2010/06/treme_explained_ill_fly_away.html (article no longer stored on site).

110. For example, see Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 113–30; Michael P. Smith, “Buffalo Bill and Mardi Gras Indians,” in Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco: Readings in Louisiana Culture, ed. Marcia G. Gaudet and James C. McDonald (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 16–25; Richard Brent Turner, Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 39–68.

111. Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day, 116, 122.

112. Cherice Harrison-Nelson, quoted in Clyde Woods, “Upholding Community Traditions: An Interview with Cherice Harrison-Nelson,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 645, 642.

113. Smith, Storytelling Industries, 79–84.

114. Martha P. Nochimson, Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 141.

115. James F. Brooks, Christopher R. N. DeCorse and John Walton, “Introduction,” in Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory, ed. James F. Brooks, Christopher R. N. DeCorse, and John Walton (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research, 2008), 4.

116. Here I am referencing Ladurie’s work as well as two other well-known microhistories that appeared in the 1980s: Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

117. Stone’s examples of “new” narrative history include works by Ladurie, Zemon Davis, Darnton, Ginzburg, and E. P. Thompson. Stone, “Revival of Narrative,” 19.

118. Stone, “Revival of Narrative,” 15; István Szijártó, “Four Arguments for Microhistory,” Rethinking History 6, no. 2 (2002): 210.

119. Richard D. Brown, “Microhistory and the Postmodern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 1 (2003): 11.

120. Looking at press coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans, Robin Andersen concludes that the plight of New Orleans was quickly forgotten in the American press. And when the city did receive media attention, it was often focused on violence perpetrated by the poor. Robin Andersen, “HBO’s Treme: Exposing the Fractured Press Coverage of the Storm and Post-Katrina New Orleans,” in Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media Revolution, ed. Mickey Huff (New York: Seven Stories, 2011), 423–36.

121. Brown, “Microhistory and the Postmodern Challenge,” 18.

122. Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” 307.

123. Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 133.

124. Brown, “Microhistory and the Postmodern Challenge,” 15.

125. David Simon, “David Simon on What HBO’s Treme Meant to Him and What He Hopes It Meant to New Orleans,” Times-Picayune, December 27, 2013, http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2013/12/david_simon_on_what_hbos_treme.html (article no longer stored on site).

126. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5th ed. (New York: Longman/Pearson, 2010), 82.

127. Gordon Wood opines that sometimes the “sheer intensity and interest of particular stories overwhelm their larger significance, turning them into little trees in search of a forest.” Wood, Purpose of the Past, 128.

128. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2, 4–5.

129. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 6, 23.

130. Craig Hight, “Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions,” Velvet Light Trap 56 (Fall 2006): 5; Aaron Barlow, The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture and Technology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 76.

131. Hight, “Making-of Documentaries on DVD,” 7.

132. Debra Ramsay, “Flagging Up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature,” in A Companion to the Historical Film, ed. Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 59, 68.

133. Ramsay, “Flagging Up History,” 68.

134. At one point during the commentary for the pilot episode, Simon and Overmyer suggest viewers google Mardi Gras Indians to learn more about them. However, over the course of this commentary and others for season 1 episodes (Overmyer for episode 8, Simon for episode 10), they do relate a lot more useful information about Mardi Gras Indians that complements what is happening on-screen.

135. Given that the Criterion Collection provided the blueprint for DVD special features, it is unsurprising that the Criterion Channel streaming library continues to provide a vast array of special features for its catalog of films and offers an example of how special features can be incorporated on streaming platforms.

136. For example, a weekly podcast for the historical series Chernobyl (HBO, 2019), featuring showrunner Craig Mazin in discussion with host Peter Segal, was made available on a number of platforms, including Spotify and YouTube.

137. In January 2021, Hulu released a commentary cut of the film Palm Springs (Barbakow, 2020) featuring the director, writer, and stars. This opens up another potential avenue for film and TV commentaries if other streaming services follow suit.

138. For a thoughtful consideration of the special features included on the Deadwood DVD box set and how they present and address history, see Allison Perlman, “Deadwood, Generic Transformation and Televisual History,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 39, no. 2 (2011): 110–12.

139. Simon, “David Simon on What HBO’s Treme Meant to Him.”

140. Similarly, Michael Samuel argues that Treme is a “social, cultural and historical document of life in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina” that is informed and shaped by Simon’s background as a journalist. For more, see Michael Samuel, “‘The Storm’: Spatial Discourses and Katrina Narratives in David Simon’s Treme (2010–2013),” in Ten Years after Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity, ed. Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 33–56.

141. Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” 314, 311.

142. Simon, “David Simon on What HBO’s Treme Meant to Him.”

143. Thomas J. Billard, “Experimental Evidence for Differences in the Prosocial Effects of Binge-Watched Versus Appointment-Viewed Television Programs,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2019): 1025–51.

144. Jared C. Horvath et al., “The Impact of Binge Watching on Memory and Perceived Comprehension,” First Monday 22, no. 9 (2017): https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i9.7729.

145. David Simon, quoted in Alan Sepinwall, “Treme Co-creator David Simon on the Series’ End and His Career’s Future,” HitFix, December 29, 2013, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/treme-co-creator-david-simon-on-the-series-end-and-his-careers-future/.

146. Alan Sepinwall, “HBO Renews ‘Treme’ for Abbreviated Fourth and Final Season,” HitFix, September 22, 2012, https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/hbo-renews-treme-for-abbreviated-fourth-and-final-season/.

147. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 31.

4. Listening to History

1. This is something that I am also guilty of, choosing to use such terms as “history on-screen” and “history on television” and referring to audiences watching at home. However, as James Buhler, Rob Deemer, and David Neumeyer point out, there is not (yet) “an easy way to point in language to this complex interplay of hearing and seeing in the experience of a film.” So for now these terms will have to suffice, and it should be understood that to watch history on-screen means to both see what is on-screen and listen to what issues from the speakers. James Buhler, Rob Deemer, and David Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xxii.

2. Herbert Zettl, Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2007), 331.

3. Gianluca Sergi, “The Sonic Playground: Hollywood Cinema and Its Listeners,” in Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 121.

4. Producer Tony To describes this “filmmaking language” as the shaky, handheld, subjective point of view. Tony To, quoted in Thomas Schatz, “Old War / New War: Band of Brothers and the Revival of the WWII War Film,” Film & History 32, no. 1 (2002): 76.

5. Tom Hanks, quoted in Bill Carter, “HBO Bets Pentagon-Style Budget on a World War II Saga,” New York Times, September 3, 2001.

6. Jeff Bewkes, quoted in Carter, “HBO Bets Pentagon-Style Budget.”

7. Mike Dowson, quoted in Blair Jackson, “Surround Mixing for Band of Brothers,” Mix Online, November 1, 2001, http://www.mixonline.com/news/profiles/surround-mixing-band-brothers/365073.

8. John Orloff, “Why ‘Band of Brothers’ Lasts: A Perspective from One of Its Writers,” Task & Purpose, August 3, 2018, https://taskandpurpose.com/band-brothers-lasts-perspective-one-writers.

9. Dolby, “Dolby Digital 5.1 Programming Takes Off,” press release, April 1, 2003, http://investor.dolby.com/news-releases/news-release-details/dolby-digital-51-programming-takes; Dolby, “HBO’s The Wire Broadcast in Dolby Digital 5.1,” press release, June 12, 2003, http://investor.dolby.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hbos-wire-broadcast-dolby-digital-51; Dolby, “HBO’s Carnivale to Be Broadcast in Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio,” press release, August 25, 2003, http://investor.dolby.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hbos-carnivale-be-broadcast-dolby-digital-51-audio (webpages no longer active).

10. Vincent LoBrutto, Sound on Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), xi.

11. For an overview of postproduction sound process, see Elizabeth Weis, “Sync Tanks: The Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound,” Cineaste 21, nos. 1–2 (1995): 56–61.

12. Gary Rydstrom, quoted in Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 170.

13. Ben Burtt, quoted in David Sonnenschein, Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese, 2001), 197.

14. George H. Roeder Jr., “Coming to Our Senses,” Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 1112.

15. David W. Samuels et al., “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 338.

16. Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, “Introduction: Listening to American Studies,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 446.

17. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Les Back and Michael Bull, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015); Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, eds., “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies,” special issue, American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011).

18. Robert Rosenstone, History on Film / Film on History, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2012), 44.

19. J. E. Smyth, “Julia’s Resistant History: Women’s Historical Films in Holly­wood and the Legacy of Citizen Kane,” in A Companion to the Historical Film, ed. Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 100; Guy Westwell, “In Country: Narrating the Iraq War in Contemporary US Cinema,” in Rosenstone and Parvulescu, Companion to the Historical Film, 388–95.

20. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 27, 70–84.

21. Winfried Pauleit, “Sonic Icons: Prominent Moments of Cinematic Self-Reflexivity,” Research in Film and History (2018): https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14812; Mattias Frey, “The Authenticity Feeling: Language and Dialect in the Historical Film,” Research in Film and History (2018): https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14811; Rasmus Greiner, “Sonic Histospheres: Sound Design and History,” Research in Film and History (2018): https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14810.

22. Sergi, Dolby Era, 4.

23. For a more detailed overview of sound scholarship until 2004, see the chapter “Critical Receptions of Sound” in Sergi, Dolby Era, 56–90.

24. There are, of course, some exceptions. A recent edited collection on the series Mad Men included a section on “Visual and Aural Stylistic Influences.” The essay, included by Tim Anderson, thoughtfully explores the use of music both during episodes and over the closing credits, although Maurice Yacowar’s piece on “suggestive silences” has little to do with the series’ soundscape. Gary R. Edgerton, ed., Mad Men: Dream Come True TV (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

25. Hilmes considers various types of TV programming (fiction and nonfiction, not just the dramatic series I am focused on) and explores why TV sound has largely been neglected. Michele Hilmes, “Television Sound: Why the Silence?,” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2008): 153.

26. For an overview of exhibition practices relating to movie theater sound, see Rick Altman, “The Sound of Sound: A Brief History of the Reproduction of Sound in Movie Theatres,” Cineaste 21, nos. 1–2 (1995): 67–71.

27. Buhler, Deemer, and Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies, 395.

28. Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 320–21.

29. The music used in television programs—played over opening and closing credit sequences and during the shows themselves—is one area that has started to generate scholarship, although the soundtrack as a whole remains largely unexplored. See, for example, James Andrew Deaville, ed., Music in Television: Channels of Listening (New York: Routledge, 2011); Kevin Donnelly and Philip Hayward, eds., Music in Science Fiction Television: Tuned to the Future (New York: Routledge, 2013); Ronald W. Rodman, Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

30. Mike Dowson, quoted in Jackson, “Surround Mixing for Band of Brothers.”

31. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 22.

32. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 3.

33. Robynn J. Stilwell, “Sound and Empathy: Subjectivity, Gender and the Cinematic Soundscape,” in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. Kevin J. Donnelly (New York: Continuum, 2001), 169.

34. Soundtracks Kamen scored over his career include Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Reynolds, 1991), Mr. Holland’s Opus (Herek, 1995), and the series From the Earth to the Moon (HBO, 1998).

35. I am using the names provided on the Band of Brothers soundtrack released by Sony in 2001.

36. For a much more detailed explanation of the Good War and greatest generation myths, see Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Philip D. Beidler, The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War Two and American Remembering (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Kenneth D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008).

37. Adams, Best War Ever, xv.

38. John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 213–14.

39. John Bodnar, “Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 806.

40. Tanine Allison, “Virtue through Suffering: The American War Film at the End of Celluloid,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 45, no. 1 (2017): 51.

41. Anne Mork, “‘Will This Picture Help Win the War’? Band of Brothers and the Mythology of World War II,” American Studies in Scandinavia 43, no. 2 (2012): 68.

42. Rodman, Tuning In, 57.

43. Rodman, Tuning In, 34.

44. Rodman, Tuning In, 24.

45. Rodman, Tuning In, 42 (italics in original).

46. Rodman, Tuning In, 25.

47. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 32, 58.

48. Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2001), 56.

49. Rodman, Tuning In, 15.

50. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 85.

51. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 85; Kassabian, Hearing Film, 17.

52. Kassabian, Hearing Film, 21.

53. Tagg and Clarida’s study asked for verbal-visual associations when the Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–90) theme music was played. Kassabian, Hearing Film, 20.

54. For more on the color manipulation of Band of Brothers, see Damian Sutton, “The DreamWorks Effect: The Case for Studying the Ideology of Production Design,” Screen 45, no. 4 (2004): 383–90.

55. Wesley J. O’Brien, Music in American Combat Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 140.

56. O’Brien, Music in American Combat Films, 138.

57. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 16–18.

58. William Smith, review of “Main Titles for the HBO Miniseries Band of Brothers (Instrumental),” Amazon, July 14, 2008, http://www.amazon.com/Main-Titles-Miniseries-Brothers-Instrumental/dp/B00136NLFQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1441409192&sr=8–2&keywords=band+of+brothers+soundtrack.

59. John O “peacemover,” review of “Band of Brothers: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” Amazon, December 4, 2001, http://www.amazon.com/Band-Brothers-Original-Picture-Soundtrack/dp/B00136LYPA/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8.

60. Bram Janssen, review of “Band of Brothers: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” Amazon, October 27, 2003, http://www.amazon.com/Band-Brothers-Original-Picture-Soundtrack/dp/B00136LYPA/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8.

61. Unnamed reviewer, review of “Band of Brothers: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” Amazon, November 15, 2002, http://www.amazon.com/Band-Brothers-Original-PictureSoundtrack/dp/B00136LYPA/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8.

62. Mork, “Band of Brothers,” 67.

63. Dick Winters, quoted in Stephen Ambrose, Band of Brothers (London: Pocket Books, 2001), 263.

64. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 81.

65. John Orloff, July 1, 2009 (7:15 p.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Band of Brothers Rewind, Episode 9: ‘Why We Fight,’” What’s Alan Watching? (blog), June 29, 2009, http://sepinwall.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/band-of-brothers-rewind-episode-9-why.html.

66. A number of viewers picked up on this very subtle and nuanced message, carried in large part through the choice of music. On the AV Club website, one commenter posted: “It’s not just that Beethoven is beautiful German music, it’s that Beethoven in a lot of ways is the strongest symbol along with Goethe of the German humanist principle, which in a lot of ways was the polar opposite of Hitler’s racism.” Another posted on Alan Sepinwall’s blog about recognizing the music in the first scene, but then coming to appreciate its significance during the second: “The juxtaposition of Beethoven’s music with what Nixon (and the others) had seen at the camp was just devastating.” Matropoli catropoli, May 29, 2014 (6:15 a.m.), comment on Emily Todd VanDerWerff, “Band of Brothers: ‘Why We Fight,’” AV Club, May 28, 2014, http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/band-brothers-why-we-fight-205104; Jeanne, June 29, 2009 (10:33 p.m.), comment on Sepinwall, “Band of Brothers Rewind, Episode 9.”

67. Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 68, 104.

68. Stanley Alten, Audio in Media, 10th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2014), 319.

69. Alten, Audio in Media, 332.

70. Alun Munslow, Narrative and History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9.

71. James Lastra, “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 67 (italics in original).

72. Masha Shpolberg, “The Din of Gunfire: Rethinking the Role of Sound in World War II Newsreels,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2014): 123, https://doi.org/10.5117/NECSUS2014.2.SHPO.

73. Munslow, Narrative and History, 9.

74. James Boyle, email to author, June 3, 2015.

75. Primary sources like diaries and legal documents are archived so that, ideally, all scholars can have access to them. These aural primary sources are likewise utilized by other sound teams: Tom Hanks gave Ken Burns access to the Band of Brothers sound library for the creation of his documentary series The War (PBS, 2007).

76. Sonnenschein, Sound Design, 190.

77. Alten, Audio in Media, 319.

78. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 270.

79. Shpolberg, “Din of Gunfire.”

80. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 155.

81. James Boyle, email to author, June 3, 2015.

82. Mike Dowson quoted in Jackson, “Surround Mixing for Band of Brothers.”

83. Gary Rydstrom, the sound designer for Ryan, was happy that the artificially created sounds resonated with veterans who told him after viewing the movie that the sound had been captured correctly. Sergi, Dolby Era, 168.

84. Tomlinson Holman, Surround Sound: Up and Running (Boston: Focal Press, 2008), 1.

85. Sergi, Dolby Era, 20.

86. Sergi, Dolby Era, 24–29; Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 31–32.

87. Sergi, Dolby Era, 31; Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 41.

88. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 22.

89. “Dolby Digital 5.1,” Dolby Professional, accessed May 5, 2021, https://professional.dolby.com/tv/dolby-digital/.

90. Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 47.

91. Gary Rydstrom, quoted in Holman, Surround Sound, 197.

92. Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 54.

93. For a full explanation of the dynamic range of digital surround sound and how it compares to previous systems, see Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 4–65.

94. Gary Rydstrom, quoted in Holman, Surround Sound, 196.

95. Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 65.

96. Mike Dowson, quoted in Jackson, “Surround Mixing for Band of Brothers.”

97. William Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 126.

98. Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory, 154, 148.

99. Lucy Fife Donaldson, Texture in Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 114.

100. Varying use of the surrounds is also important; heavy use of the surrounds in battle sequences such as those in “The Breaking Point” can become draining on audiences and lose their impact if not balanced with equally effective subtle use of the surrounds.

101. Nicolas J. Cull, “Film Reviews: Band of Brothers,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 992.

102. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 48.

103. Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction, 122.

104. The Directors Guild of America considers sound a technical category, and therefore head credits cannot be given to sound. Sergi, Dolby Era, 144.

105. Arnt Maasø, “The Proxemics of the Mediated Voice,” in Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, ed. Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 36.

106. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6–7 (italics in original).

107. Buhler, Deemer, and Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies, 9.

108. Charles Hardy III and Pamela Dean, “Oral History in Sound and Moving Image Documentaries,” in Handbook of Oral History, ed. Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharples (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2006), 512.

109. Brien R. Williams, “Doing Video Oral History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald A. Ritchie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 268.

110. Mork, “Band of Brothers,” 61.

111. “One of my favorite parts of watching the series for the first time was figuring out over the course of the series that the interview segments at the beginning of episodes were the characters in the series, and then trying to figure out who was who,” posted CaliThunderbird. CaliThunderbird, April 3, 2014 (8:48 a.m.), comment on Emily Todd VanDerWerff, “Band of Brothers: ‘Currahee,’” AV Club, April 2, 2014, http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/band-brothers-currahee-202958.

112. The other “signs of performance” that Butler identifies are gestural, facial, and corporeal (the body). Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 65–67.

113. Theo van Leeuwen, “Voice: A Semiotics of the Voice,” in Sound and Music in Film and Media: An Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 427.

114. Jody Kreiman and Diana Sidtis, Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Reception (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 303–5.

115. David Schwimmer was the biggest “star” in Band of Brothers, especially when it first aired in 2001. While he still sounds very similar to his character Ross Geller on Friends (NBC, 1994–2004), his vocal performance on the sitcom is often faster paced and higher pitched with a whinier inflection to match his neurotic character on that show.

116. Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 163.

117. Donald Malarkey with Bob Welch, Easy Company Soldier: The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II’s “Band of Brothers” (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 190.

118. Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 23–27.

119. William Guarenere and Edward Heffron with Robyn Post, Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends (New York: Berkley Caliber, 2007), 18.

120. Tom McArthur, ed., Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6.

121. Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, 4th ed. (London: Penguin, 2000), 2.

122. For more on the use of accents and different languages in Hollywood films, see Lukas Bleichenbacher, Multilingualism in the Movies: Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices (Tübingen, Germany: Francke, 2007).

123. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 46, 259.

124. Caryn James, “TV Weekend: An Intricate Tapestry of a Heroic Age,” New York Times, September 7, 2001. Multiple online commenters went further by commending his regional accent. For example, Sister T posted that she was “stunned” when she watched the DVD extras and heard Lewis’s British accent. “I could have sworn he had a Lancaster County, PA accent. He had the demeanor and tonal inflections that I associate with older folks in Lancaster County and other parts of PA.” Sister T, June 1, 2009 (9:31 p.m.), comment on Alan Sepinwall, “Band of Brothers Rewind, Episode 1: ‘Currahee,’” What’s Alan Watching? (blog), June 1, 2009, http://sepinwall.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/band-of-brothers-rewind-episode-1.html.

125. Roe was born and raised in Louisiana but did not have the strong Cajun heritage that he claims in the series. In “Part Six: Bastogne,” he tells a fellow medic that his grandmother was a Cajun traiteurs (healer), but this is an invention.

126. Emily Todd VanDerWerff, “Band of Brothers: ‘Bastogne,’” AV Club, May 7, 2014, http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/band-brothers-bastogne-204326.

127. TV critic Alan Sepinwall ranked Warren “the worst” when it came to accents on the show. Alan Sepinwall, “Band of Brothers Rewind, Episode 1, ‘Currahee,’” What’s Alan Watching? (blog), June 1, 2009, http://sepinwall.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/band-of-brothers-rewind-episode-1.html.

128. Shane Taylor, “Ross Owen’s Band of Brothers Cast Interviews: Shane Taylor,” Black Sky Radio (blog), July 28, 2010, http://bandofbrotherswherearetheynow.blogspot.co.nz/2010/07/shane-taylor.html.

129. This is possible for American history but becomes much more difficult when it comes to the histories of other nations and very distant time periods. Adopting the language and accents of ancient Rome for the HBO series Rome would be almost impossible and, if attempted, would likely alienate the audience.

130. Stephanie Hoth, “The Female Voice in Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives: Voice-Over Narration in Contemporary American Television Series,” in Gendered (Re)Visions: Constructions of Gender in Audiovisual Media, ed. Marion Gymnich, Kathrin Ruhl, and Klaus Scheunemann (Göttingen, Germany: V&R Unipress, 2010), 79.

131. Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 44–45.

132. Hoth, “Female Voice,” 82.

133. Alan Sepinwall, “Band of Brothers Rewind, Episode 7, ‘The Breaking Point,’” What’s Alan Watching? (blog), June 22, 2009, http://sepinwall.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/band-of-brothers-rewind-episode-7.html. A number of people responding to Sepinwall’s review concurred with his critique: “I agree, Alan,” posted Carolyn. “The narration drove me nutty and at least 85% of the time seemed to be explaining something that was already perfectly obvious.” Carolyn, July 1, 2009 (1:11 p.m.), comment on Sepinwall, “Band of Brothers Rewind, Episode 7”

134. Erik Bork, email to author, March 15, 2015.

135. Erik Bork, email to author, March 15, 2015.

136. David Kenyon Webster did participate in D-Day and Market Garden (where he was injured). However, he had not been with the company since its formation but transferred to Easy after D-Day and before Market Garden.

137. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 50–51.

138. Alten, Audio in Media, 220.

139. Tomlinson Holman, Sound for Film and Television (Boston: Focal Press, 1997), 186.

140. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 51.

141. Alten, Audio in Media, 221.

142. Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 14, 18.

143. Stilwell, “Sound and Empathy,” 168.

144. Michel Rabiger and Mick Hubris-Cherrier, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, 5th ed. (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2013), 128.

145. Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction, 2–3.

146. Mark S. Ward, “Art in Noise: An Embodied Simulation Account of Cinematic Sound Design,” in Embodied Cognition and Cinema, ed. Maarten Coegnarts and Peter Kravanja (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2015), 163–64.

147. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 77, 16.

148. Playing one of the battle sequences in Band of Brothers with the sound off clearly illustrates this point. The scenes do not have the immediacy and tension that they do when played with sound.

149. Alex Ben Block, “How HBO Spent $200 Million on ‘The Pacific,’” Hollywood Reporter, August 26, 2010, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-hbo-spent-200-million-27133.

150. Debra Ramsay, American Media and the Memory of World War II (London: Routledge, 2015), 148–52.

151. As another example, HBO has produced four historical shows with David Simon as showrunner or co-showrunner (Treme, Show Me a Hero, The Deuce, and The Plot against America). The histories presented in what could be called Simon’s historical oeuvre tend to be bottom-up histories that challenge traditional American narratives of progress and exceptionalism, while Playtone’s series tend to hew closer to dominant and master narratives.

Conclusion

1. Prolific TV writer-producers Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy have both signed five-year deals with Netflix for $150 million and $300 million, respectively. Since completing Game of Thrones for HBO, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have also signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the streamer.

2. Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey, “Introduction,” in The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, ed. Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 5.

3. Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 2.

4. Todd Spangler, “Netflix Tops 200 Million Streaming Customers, Handily Beats Q4 Subscriber Forecast,” Variety, January 19, 2021, https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/netflix-q4–2020-earnings-200-million-subscribers-1234887784/.

5. Todd Spangler, “Disney Plus Pops to 95 Million Paid Subscribers,” Variety, February 11, 2021, https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/disney-plus-pops-to-95-million-paid-subscribers-1234906356/.

6. In May 2021 it was announced that WarnerMedia would be merging with Discovery and forming Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal is set to close mid-2022, so it remains to be seen what these latest business developments will mean for HBO.

7. Scripted programming did decline 7 percent in 2020 (to 493 shows), most likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lesley Goldberg, “Peak TV Update: Scripted Originals Dip 7% in 2020, FX Says,” Hollywood Reporter, January 29, 2021, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/peak-tv-update-scripted-originals-dip-7-in-2020-fx-says-4124718/.

8. Lacey Rose and Marisa Guthrie, “FX Chief John Landgraf on Content Bubble: ‘This Is Simply Too Much Television,’” Hollywood Reporter, August 7, 2015, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/fx-chief-john-landgraf-content-813914/.

9. For more on the concept of peak TV and the streaming revolution, see Amanda Lotz, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

10. John Stankey, quoted in Edmund Lee and John Koblin, “HBO Must Get Bigger and Broader, Says Its New Overseer,” New York Times, July 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/media/hbo-att-merger.html.

11. Casey Bloys, HBO programming chief (now promoted to chief content officer of HBO and HBO Max), has repeatedly stated in interviews and during Television Critics Association press tours that the AT&T merger will not negatively impact the HBO brand. For example, see Daniel Holloway and Elaine Low, “HBO’s Casey Bloys on Scaling Up under AT&T, Streaming Plans and ‘Big Little Lies 2,’” Variety, February 8, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/hbo-casey-bloys-emmys-att-programming-1203133367/.

12. The Sex and the City reboot, titled And Just Like That, is going to be an HBO Max original, despite the fact that Sex was an HBO show. Two special episodes of Euphoria (2019–), an HBO show, premiered on HBO Max before they were released on the cable channel.

13. Jerome de Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (New York: Routledge, 2016), 7.

14. Vivian Sobchack, “The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 16, 14 (italics in original).

15. Sobchack, “Insistent Fringe,” 5.

16. Of course, I am not suggesting that all historical drama series adhere to the standards of academic history; there are many TV shows to which these common criticisms would apply. I only wish to argue that historians must not automatically assume that all historical TV series and films share the same shortcomings.

17. Glen Creeber, “‘Taking Our Personal Lives Seriously’: Intimacy, Continuity and Memory in the Television Drama Serial,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 4 (2001): 444.

18. Gary R. Edgerton, “Introduction: A Different Kind of History Altogether,” in Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 9 (italics in original).

19. Simon worked as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun for twelve years and wrote the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, on which the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street was based.

20. Boardwalk averaged around five million viewers in its first season, and Deadwood around 4.5 million. The ratings for Band of Brothers varied greatly, starting with around ten million viewers for the first episode and then dropping to five million for the finale. Band of Brothers achieved much greater success on DVD, generating over $700 million in revenue and becoming HBO’s best-selling DVD within its first eight years of release. Claude Brodesser-Akner, “HBO’s Choppy Waters on Hanks and Spielberg’s The Pacific,” Vulture, February 3, 2010, http://www.vulture.com/2010/02/the_pacific_hbo_250_million.html.

21. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 63, 64.

22. Alun Munslow, “Fiction, Imagination and the Fictive: The Literary Aesthetics of Historying,” in The Fiction of History, ed. Alexander Lyon Macfie (New York: Routledge, 2015), 35, 32.

23. Ann Curthoys and John Docker, “The Boundaries of History and Fiction,” in The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: SAGE Publications, 2013), 203.

24. See, for example, Sara J. Brenneis, Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014); Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010); Beverley Southgate, “A New Type of History”: Fictional Proposals for Dealing with the Past (London: Routledge, 2015).

25. Here I am drawing upon a criticism of Schindler’s List by Jacob Epstein included in Creeber, “‘Taking Our Personal Lives Seriously,’” 448.

26. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (London: Flamingo, 1990), 79.

27. David Simon addressed the many inventions of Treme in a piece for the Times-Picayune before the first show aired. As he put it, “We are likely to be at our best in those instances in which we are entirely aware of our deceits, just as we are likely to fail when we proceed in ignorance of the facts. Technically speaking, when we cheat and know it, we are ‘taking creative liberties,’ and when we cheat and don’t know it, we are ‘screwing up.’” David Simon, “HBO’s Treme Creator David Simon Explains It All for You,” Times-Picayune, April 11, 2010, http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2010/04/hbos_treme_creator_david_simon.html (article no longer stored on site).

28. Gordon Blithe, the son of Albert Blithe, has recounted his struggles in trying set the record straight about his father’s death. After watching the series and figuring out the Albert Blithe depicted was meant to be his father (confirmed when he matched their RA numbers), Gordon attempted to find out how and why it had happened. Some of the surviving Easy Company soldiers had apparently told Ambrose that Blithe died in 1948 and that they had attended his funeral. Neither Ambrose nor anyone involved in the series checked this information. Marcus Brotherton, A Company of Heroes: Personal Memories about the Real Band of Brothers and the Legacy They Left Us (New York: Berkley Caliber, 2010), 3–10.

29. Curthoys and Docker, “Boundaries of History and Fiction,” 203.