Television with  
Stanley Cavell   

in Mind



TV-Philosophy

Series Editors:
Sandra Laugier, Martin Shuster, Robert Sinnerbrink

Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind
edited by David LaRocca and Sandra Laugier (2023)

TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change our Thinking
Sandra Laugier (2023)

TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series
Sandra Laugier (2023)



Television with 
Stanley Cavell 

in Mind
edited by  

DAVID LaROCCA  
and SANDRA LAUGIER



First published in 2023 by
University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR, UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

© 2023 David LaRocca, Sandra Laugier, and the individual contributors

The right of David LaRocca, Sandra Laugier, and the  
individual contributors to be identified as authors of this

work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Contributors ix

Introduction: The Fact and Fiction of Television: Stanley Cavell  
and the Terms of Television Philosophy 1

DAVID LaROCCA and SANDRA LAUGIER

PART I: NEW TELEVISION 29

1 Justifying Justified 31
WILLIAM ROTHMAN

2 ‘You Get Paid for Pain’: Kingdom and New Television 50
MARTIN SHUSTER

3 To See and to Stop: The Problem of Abdication in Succession 67
ELISABETH BRONFEN

4 When TV is on TV: Metatelevision and the Art of Watching 
TV with the Royal Family in The Crown 85
DAVID LaROCCA

PART II: BIG PERFECTIONISM ON THE SMALL SCREEN 99

5 It’s My Party and I’ll Die Even If I Don’t Want To: Repetition, 
Acknowledgement, and Cavellian Perfectionism in Russian Doll 101
MICHELLE DEVEREAUX

6 ‘Nobody’s Perfect’: Moral Imperfectionism in Ozark 121
HENT de VRIES

7 A Zigzag of a Hundred Tacks: Narrative Complexity  
in The Good Place 135
CATHERINE WHEATLEY

8 Im/Moral Perfectionism: On TV’s Two Worlds 152
JEROEN GERRITS



vi Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

PART III: EVERYDAY EDUCATION 171

9 The Sublime and the American Dream in Fargo 173
HUGO CLÉMOT

10 TV Time, Recurrence, and the Situation of the Spectator: 
An Approach via Stanley Cavell, Raúl Ruiz, and Ruiz’s Late  
Chilean Series Litoral 191
BYRON DAVIES

11 Homeland: An Education in Trust 222
THIBAUT de SAINT MAURICE

12 Small Acts 236
PAUL STANDISH

PART IV: POPULAR TV AND ITS GENRES 263

13 The Event of Television: Sitcoms, Superheroes,  
and WandaVision 265
STEPHEN MULHALL

14 Love, Remarriage, and The Americans 288
SANDRA LAUGIER

15 True Detective: Existential Scepticism and Television  
Crime Drama 305
ROBERT SINNERBRINK

Index 325



Acknowledgements

Our first and deepest thanks are extended to the roster of contributors 
without whom this ample and artful book would be but a faint sketch. Their 
wide and penetrating experience writing on and teaching television, film, 
and media studies—in a philosophical cast of mind—provides this volume 
with special purchase on the pertinence of Stanley Cavell for the study of 
TV. More than providing a much-needed, never-before-attempted retrospec-
tive assessment of Cavell’s contribution to television studies, this gifted band 
also managed to supply a sense of Cavell’s prospective relevance to ongoing 
and future considerations of TV as streaming, as broadcast, as viewing and 
re-viewing, and as an essential feature of our private and public lives.

Not far behind, we continue with ready thanks to Anna Henderson, our 
capable and clever editor, who helped guide this volume from first conception 
through final realization. We’re very grateful for her sense of the book’s 
ambitions and also of its role in a new series on TV-Philosophy at the 
University of Exeter Press. Two anonymous referees for the press provided 
much guidance for refining and clarifying the expression of the project, and 
we remain appreciative for the time and attention demanded of their labors. 
During production, we have David Hawkins to thank for capable assistance 
with project management and Sara Magness for informed and impressive 
copyediting.

The incubation of the volume goes back years, but first took initial and 
deliberate shape during a pre-pandemic conference hosted by Sandra at the 
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in June 2019, a year after Cavell’s 
death, entitled La pensée du cinema: En hommage à Stanley Cavell. Just a few 
months later, the world was sent into lockdown—and while the coronavirus 
disaster unfolded, TV queues were loaded and a global binge was underway. 
The phase illustrated something fundamental about the contemporary role 
of television in our lives. Given a palpable shift to the digital stream, we felt 
it time to take stock of Cavell’s once and ongoing insights into this ground-
breaking subfield of his multiple, expansive interests. Bonding over our shared 
love of TV (and film), and of course, our long-standing dedication to the 
life’s work and legacy of Stanley Cavell, we hit upon several overlapping 
magisteria suited to our shared attention.



viii Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

Benjamin Cavell’s ambitious and accomplished work in television, covering 
a diversity of genres in popular TV, has been taken by us—from first thoughts 
about this book and throughout its development—as a propitious sign of 
the creative power and intellectual value of the topic, and of its promising 
future life.

David would like to acknowledge the gratifying influence of conversations 
and correspondence with Garrett Stewart, Robert Pippin, Hent de Vries, 
Emily Apter, Paul Cronin, Haaris Naqvi, Oscar Jansson, Ricardo Miguel-
Alfonso, John Opera, Rita Mullaney, and Alessandro Subrizi. For spells of 
memorable intensity in Montréal and precious duration in Cortona, mille 
grazie Diana Allan and Curtis Brown. In addition to the elastic and motley 
pleasures of diurnal life together, I’m lucky also to find company for discov-
ering the salutary effects of TV with my insightful wife, K.L. Evans, and 
our savvy daughters, Ruby and Star.

Sandra wishes also to thank her children, Marie, Simon, and Ulysse, for 
having introduced her to great shows, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 
Game of Thrones, and Jocelyn Benoist for all the time discovering and watching 
TV series together. She owes thanks to all those on both sides of the Atlantic 
who have shared with her the long-term project of acknowledging the 
philosophical importance of TV series in the tradition of Cavell’s work on 
cinema: Martin Shuster, Paola Marrati, William Rothman, Jeroen Gerrits, 
Arnaud Desplechin, Sylvie Allouche, Hugo Clémot, and Thibaut de Saint 
Maurice. Many thanks to Tatsiana Zhurauliova for her wonderful editing 
work and advice, and to Anastasia Krutikova for her support and 
friendship.

Lastly, we wish to express our gratitude to Stanley Cavell, including but also 
beyond his work on film and television. His writings—an infinite resource 
for thinking seriously about almost anything that draws one’s interest, coupled 
with his boldness in opening and defending new topics for exploration—have 
encouraged and inspired us in pursuing a series philosophy.

This publication has received funding from the European Research Council 
(ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation 
program (grant agreement N° 834759).



Contributors

David LaRocca is the author or contributing editor of more than a dozen 
books, including Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor 
(2013). Recipient of a teaching commendation from Harvard Extension 
School, he served as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow 
in the United Kingdom and has held visiting research or teaching positions 
in the United States at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca 
College, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. Advised by Stanley Cavell 
during doctoral research, he later edited Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental 
Etudes (2003, published under his bachelor name, David Justin Hodge, as 
was On Emerson, also 2003) and worked as Cavell’s research assistant during 
the time he was completing Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register 
of the Moral Life (2004) and Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005), and 
beginning Little Did I  Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010). A recipient of 
the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Distinguished Achievement Award, 
LaRocca has edited additional books featuring Cavell’s work, including 
Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013) 
and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the 
Anthropocene (2017), and contributed chapters to Stanley Cavell, Literature, 
and Film: The Idea of America (2013), Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Understanding 
(2018), and Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (2023). LaRocca 
served as guest editor of a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal 
of Cavellian Studies, no. 7 (2019): Acknowledging Stanley Cavell, and edited 
The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of 
Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed (2020), Inheriting Stanley Cavell: 
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (2020), and Movies with Stanley Cavell in 
Mind  (2021). www.DavidLaRocca.org

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-
Sorbonne, Senior Fellow of Institut universitaire de France, and Deputy 
Director of the Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la 
Sorbonne (UMR 8103, CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). She 
is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) 
Advanced Grant project DEMOSERIES (www.demoseries.eu). A former 
student of the École normale supérieure and of Harvard University, she has 
extensively published on ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, 

http://www.DavidLaRocca.org
http://www.demoseries.eu


x Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

Austin, Cavell); moral philosophy (moral perfectionism, ethics of care); 
classic American philosophy (Cavell, Thoreau, Emerson); and democracy 
and civil disobedience. Her most recent work focuses on gender studies and 
popular culture, film, and TV series. She is the translator of most of Cavell’s 
work in French and is an advisor for the publication of Cavell’s Nachlass. 
She has been Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto (2022), Boston 
University (2019, 2021), La Sapienza Roma (2019), Pontifical University 
Lima (2017), and Johns Hopkins University (2008, 2009); Visiting 
Researcher at the Max Planck Institute Berlin (2014, 2015); Distinguished 
Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University (2011); Chaire invitée 
Facultés Saint-Louis, Bruxelles (2009). Awards include: Senior Fellow of 
Institut universitaire de France (2012–23), Grand prix de philosophie, 
Académie française (2022), Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (2014). Among 
her publications are: Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (University 
of Chicago Press, 2013), Recommencer la philosophie, la philosophie américaine 
aujourd’hui (Vrin, 2014), Etica e politica dell ’ordinario (LED, Milano, 2015), 
Formes de vie (ed. with E. Ferrarese, CNRS Editions, 2018), Nos vies en 
séries, Ethique et philosophie d’une culture populaire (Flammarion Climats, 
2019), Politics of the Ordinary: Care, Ethics, Forms of Life (Peeters, 2020), 
Wittgenstein, Politique de l ’ordinaire (Vrin, 2021). Cavell ’s Must We Mean 
What We Say? at Fifty (ed. with G. Chase and J. Floyd, Cambridge 
University Press, 2022). She is a columnist at the French journal Libération: 
www.liberation.fr/auteur/6377-sandra- laugier.

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the 
University of Zurich and Global Distinguished Professor at New York 
University. She has published an introduction to Stanley Cavell in German 
( Junius Verlag), Mad Men: Death and the American Dream (Diaphanes, 2016), 
and Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV 
Drama (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Hugo Clémot is Lecturer in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at Gustave 
Eiffel University, member of LISAA (EA 4120). After completing a PhD 
thesis on Stanley Cavell and cinema under the supervision of Sandra Laugier, 
he wrote several books about film, television, and philosophy—such as Les 
jeux philosophiques de la trilogie Matrix (Vrin, 2011), La philosophie d’après le 
cinéma: Une lecture de La projection du monde de Stanley Cavell (PUR, 2014), 
Cinéthique (Vrin, 2018), and Serial philosophie: Le paradoxe des séries télévisées 
(PUFR, 2022)—and has edited Enseigner la philosophie avec le cinema (Les 
Contemporains favoris, 2015). On the topic of TV series, he has published 
five articles and eight chapters in journals and edited collections. He has also 
spoken eighteen times in colloquiums and seminars, and has given fifteen 
public lectures. Always with Stanley Cavell in mind, he has written about 
numerous TV series such as Dexter, Lost, Dollhouse, The Sopranos, The Walking 
Dead, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, and Twin Peaks.

http://www.liberation.fr/auteur/6377-sandra-�laugier.Elisabeth


xicontributors

Byron Davies has taught philosophy at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor 
Juana in Mexico City and been a Visiting Researcher at the International 
Institute for Advanced Political Studies ‘Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’, 
Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero. He previously held a post-doc at the 
Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of 
Mexico (UNAM), and before that he received his PhD from the Department 
of Philosophy at Harvard University. In 2024, he will be on a María Zambrano 
and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship in Spain, affiliated with the 
Aresmur research group in aesthetics and art theory at the University of 
Murcia. Among his recent publications are ‘Found Footage at the Receding 
of the World’ (Screen, 2022), ‘Cavell on Color’ (Conversations, 2022), ‘The 
Specter of the Electronic Screen: Bruno Varela’s Reception of Stanley Cavell’ 
(Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, ed. David LaRocca, Bloomsbury, 2021), 
and ‘Accidents Made Permanent: Theater and Automatism in Stanley Cavell, 
Michael Fried, and Matías Piñeiro’ (MLN, 2020). 

Thibaut de Saint Maurice is a PhD student and researcher in DEMOSERIES, 
a European Research Council project hosted at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-
Sorbonne and funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research 
and innovation programme. His work focuses on the uses of seriality as well 
as on the moral and political issues of TV series. Between 2010 and 2013, 
he directed the ‘Culture Pop’ collection published by Ellipses. He is the 
author of Philosophie en séries (2009), Philosophie en séries-saison 2 (2010), and 
Des philosophes et des héros (2019). He has also published numerous articles, 
including ‘D’un canapé à l’autre, la série En thérapie, comme spectacle de 
l’expressivité’, Imaginaire et Inconscient, vol. 48, no. 2 (2021); ‘Hippocrate, 
critique de la faculté de soigner’, Multitudes, vol. 84 (Fall 2021); and ‘Élargir 
la vie: les eries contemporaines’, Le Débat, vol. 194 with Hervé Glévarec. 
Since 2011, he has been questioning fiction and everyday life in various 
columns on the French public radio channel France Inter. In 2018, his 
founded the Paris Podcast Festival, the first French festival entirely dedicated 
to native podcasts.

Michelle Devereaux is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in film and 
television at the University of Warwick. Her work has recently appeared in 
Screen, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and The Bloomsbury Handbook to 
Sofia Coppola. Her monograph, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and 
Contemporary American Independent Film, was published in 2019 by Edinburgh 
University Press. Her current research relates Stanley Cavell’s writing on film, 
genre, scepticism, and perfectionism to explorations of gender and trauma 
in contemporary film and television. Research interests more broadly include 
the influence of post-romantic philosophy on contemporary screen culture, 
gender and feminist theory, film and television aesthetics, performance and 
stardom studies, adaptation, genre studies, and the study of affect and emotion 
both on screen and in spectatorship practices.



xii Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

Hent de Vries is Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities at New York 
University, where he is a Professor of German, Religious Studies, Comparative 
Literature, and an Affiliated Professor of Philosophy.  From 2014 through 
2014, he served as Director of the summer School of Criticism and Theory 
at Cornell University (SCT), Ithaca. De Vries studied Judaica and Hellenistic 
Thought (Theology), Public Finance and Political Economy (Law), at Leiden 
University,  The Netherlands,  where he obtained his PhD in Philosophy of 
Religion. Before joining NYU, de Vries directed The Humanities Center at 
Johns Hopkins University (2009-2017), holding the Russ Family Chair in 
the Humanities with a joint appointment in Philosophy, and also taught in 
the Philosophy departments of Loyola University Chicago and the University 
of Amsterdam, where he held the Chair of Metaphysics and its History 
(1993-2004). He co-founded and directed the  interdisciplinary Amsterdam 
School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA, 1998-2004). De Vries received visiting 
positions and fellowships at Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, the 
Université Saint Louis in Brussels, the University of Amsterdam, the Hebrew 
University of Jerusalem, and the Université de Paris, Panthéon Sorbonne. Having 
served from 2007 through 2013 as Directeur de Programme at the Collège 
International de Philosophie, in Paris, de Vries was the Titulaire of the Chaire 
de Métaphysique Étienne Gilson at the Institut Catholique  de  Paris, in 
2018.  In 2020, de Vries was a  recipient of  the  Prix du Rayonnement de la 
langue et de la littérature françaises, one of the Grands Prix awarded yearly by 
the Académie Française. De Vries is the author of seven monographs, notably 
the trilogy Minimal Theologies, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, and Religion 
and Violence ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 2002, and 2005), and, 
most recently, Miracles et métaphysique (Presses Universitaires de France, 2019) 
and Le miracle au coeur de l ’ordinaire (Les Belles Lettres, 2019). Moreover, he 
is the editor and co-editor of ten multi-author volumes. In 2023, a Festschrift, 
edited by Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster, with an extensive informative 
introduction and some fourteen critical responses to his work was published 
under the title Religion in Reason: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de 
Vries. To this volume, de Vries added a lengthy rejoinder, summarizing his 
scholarly projects thus far while charting some new directions.

Jeroen Gerrits is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton 
University, State University of New York, where he teaches courses at the 
intersection of film, literature, and philosophy. He has published a monograph 
titled Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns with State 
University of New York Press (2019), as well as numerous articles and book 
chapters on Cavell’s philosophy in the context of film and TV. Among 
additional publications are articles on specific television shows, including 
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy, and the Russell H. Carpenter 
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, at New College, Oxford. His books include 



xiiicontributors

Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford University 
Press, 1994), The Cavell Reader (as editor, Blackwell, 1996), On Film (which 
has gone through three editions with Routledge, the most recent being 2016), 
and The Self and Its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in 
Philosophy and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2013). His most recent book 
is In Other Words: Transpositions of Philosophy in J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy 
(Oxford University Press, 2022).

William Rothman is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami 
School of Communication. He graduated from Harvard College in 1965, 
where Stanley Cavell was his honors thesis advisor, and received his PhD 
from Harvard in 1974, with Cavell the chair of his dissertation committee. 
After teaching for three years in the NYU Cinema Studies Department, an 
NEH grant—Cavell was the project director—brought him back to Harvard, 
where he taught for many years (including a course in film comedy he 
co-taught with Cavell). He was for three years the Director of the International 
Honors Program on Film, Television and Social Change in Asia, which led 
to his writing and co-producing (with the National Film Development 
Corporation of India) Unni, a feature film directed by the distinguished 
Indian filmmaker G. Aravindan. He was the Founding Editor of Harvard 
University Press’s ‘Harvard Film Studies’ series before becoming Series Editor 
for Cambridge University Press’s ‘Studies in Film’ series. He has published 
essays on diverse aspects of film and television history, criticism, and theory, 
and on the writings of Cavell. His many books include Hitchcock: The 
Murderous Gaze; The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays in Film History; Reading Cavell ’s 
The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film; Cavell on Film; Jean 
Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film; Three Documentary Filmmakers; and The 
Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell ’s Vision of Film and Philosophy.

Martin Shuster is Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished 
Professor of Jewish Studies at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In 
addition to many articles and book chapters, he is the author of Autonomy 
after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (University of 
Chicago Press, 2014), New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre 
(University of Chicago Press, 2017), and How to Measure a World? A Philosophy 
of Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2021). With Anne O’Byrne, he is the 
editor of Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary 
World (Routledge, 2020), and with Henry Pickford, he is currently editing 
The Oxford Handbook of Theodor W. Adorno. His work on television frequently 
engages with Cavell’s work on film and in philosophy, and he is currently 
working on a collection of essays intended as a follow-up to New Television.

Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie 
University, Sydney. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film: An 
Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking (Second Edition, Bloomsbury, 



xiv Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

2021), Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2019), 
Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge, 2016), 
New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011), 
and Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007/Routledge, 2014). He has 
edited two books—Emotion, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience (Berghahn 
Books, 2021) and Critique Today (Brill, 2006)—and is a member of the 
editorial boards of Film-Philosophy, Film and Philosophy, and Projections: The 
Journal of Movies and Mind.

Paul Standish is Professor and Head of the Centre for Philosophy of 
Education at UCL IOE. He has extensive experience as a teacher in schools, 
colleges, and universities, and his research reflects that range. His Beyond the 
Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Limits of Language (Ashgate, 1992) 
indicates an interest in Wittgenstein and education that spans four decades. 
He is the author or editor of some twenty books, including Stanley Cavell 
and the Education of Grownups (Fordham, 2012), Education and the Kyoto 
School of Philosophy: Pedagogy for Human Transformation (Springer, 2012), and 
Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: ‘The Truth is Translated’ (Rowman 
and Littlefield, 2017), all in collaboration with Naoko Saito; and Wittgenstein 
and Education: On Not Sparing Others the Trouble of Thinking (Wiley, 2023), 
co-edited with Adrian Skilbeck. He is life president of the Philosophy of 
Education Society of Great Britain and co-editor of the Journal of Philosophy 
of Education.

Catherine Wheatley is Reader in Film and Visual Culture at King’s College 
London. She has published widely on questions pertaining to film, ethics, 
and aesthetics, and the work of Stanley Cavell. Catherine is the author of 
four monographs—including Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image 
(Berghahn, 2009), the BFI Classics book on Caché (BFI Publishing, 2013), 
and Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema 
(Bloomsbury, 2018)—and the editor of a number of essay collections and 
special issues, including, with Kate Rennebohm, a dossier for the journal 
Screen entitled ‘Projecting Cavell’. Catherine also writes regularly for Sight 
& Sound magazine, and is a convenor of the BFI’s Philosophical Screens 
series. She is currently working on articles about the concept of wonder and 
the everyday in film, and on the question of love, friendship, and the Cavellian 
couple.



David LaRocca and Sandra Laugier, ‘Introduction: The Fact and Fiction of Television: Stanley Cavell and the 
Terms of Television Philosophy’ in: Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind. University of Exeter Press (2023). 
© David LaRocca and Sandra Laugier. DOI: 10.47788/KRMY5433

Introduction

The Fact and Fiction of Television: 
Stanley Cavell and the Terms of Television 

Philosophy
David LaRocca and Sandra Laugier

Television meets its critics on their own terms, and in their own 
times. For Stanley Cavell, this meant having a life with cinema—‘memories 
of movies are strand over strand with memories of my life’—long before he 
had a relationship with television.1 When I Love Lucy premiered, Cavell was 
twenty-five years old and commencing graduate studies in philosophy at 
Harvard University, having taken a formal and formidable step away from 
the life in musical composition and performance that he trained for in 
previous years at Berkeley and Juilliard.2 While going to the movies was a 
regular part of his everyday routine, television viewing was still a novelty in 
1951, something more akin to a relationship with a domestic appliance than 
a mode of art—much less a mode of art one could have philosophical reflec-
tions about. The medium would have to mature, as would culture’s 
sensibilities for treating it as an intimate part of daily experience and, in 
time, serious academic study, including, more broadly and provocatively, the 
formation of one’s character and one’s attunement to the lives of others.

Contemporaries of Cavell, older and younger, would find their way to the 
analytical tools and frameworks for discussing television. As with many 
things, the timing of one’s encounters matters. Though we live in an era 
praised for the artfulness, abundance, and cultural relevance of TV, earlier 
ages contended with different circumstances: network dominance, technical 
limits of broadcast, commercial interruptions, a prominent antagonism 
between art and commerce. Like photography in the nineteenth century and 
film in the twentieth, television was another vector of controversy over the 
purposes and meanings of technological innovations. Thus, questions of 



2 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

ontology (what was or is TV?) and aesthetics (when does TV become art?) 
are joined with the ethical and epistemological (what is TV good for? what 
does TV help us know?). What you think of television, then, involves an 
assessment of when you make contact with the medium, including what sorts 
of conceptions and preconceptions you bring with you. As with the study of 
art and media more generally, the interaction between concept and artifact 
is generally fecund, especially when approached generously.

Yet we cannot foreclose the extent to which some thinkers and theorists, 
especially looking back over the long arc of TV reception, have raised concerns 
about the medium’s deleterious potential: its apparent agency in human 
dissipation and degeneracy. While Raymond Williams offered a critical 
materialist approach equipped with a searing interest in how serious criticism 
of TV-as-form was possible (having already co-written Preface to Film in 
1954);3 Paul Goodman placed TV in the context of social change and worried 
about its detrimental effects; Norbert Weiner charted a course for the tele-
visual via cybernetics; Newton Minow admonished viewers of the ‘vast 
wasteland’ of television with its ‘procession of sadism’;4 Marshall McLuhan 
spoke of television as a ‘cool medium’ that instigates active viewership;5 Mihaly 
Csikszentmihalyi posited the notion of ‘flow’ and TV as its antagonist (in 
the form of ‘mindless entertainment’6); Leslie Fiedler regarded television as 
providing a ‘relief from art’;7 and Neil Postman generated a culture critique 
insisting the shallow offerings of TV underwrite a shallow society,8 it is 
Cavell’s philosophical uptake of moving images—at first, movies, and in time, 
television—that calls and keeps our attention on the present occasion.

What if spending a lot of time with TV shows—and their characters—is 
positively transformative for one’s character or moral sense (even when those 
characters are morally depraved), leading not to degeneracy but efflorescence 
and a tilting towards perfectionism? In this alternate take, television would 
be a condition for sharing company and receiving instruction, for finding a 
friend and welcoming a teacher. Instead of adopting Larry David’s resolute 
credo for Seinfeld—‘no hugging, no learning’—we find reasons for contem-
plating television’s impact on the articulation and exercise of moral 
perfectionism, an outlook that displaces the prospect of achieving perfection 
for the more vital aim of incremental improvements, progressive if minor 
insights. The form and content of television, especially since the new millen-
nium, provides portraits of human behavior and sustains them—thus what 
we watch and how we behave (and think) are interactive. We have more 
characters and we have more time with them in their ‘worlds’. Could it be 
that television in the present age has become, perhaps without us noticing 
or articulating it in so many words, the audiovisual equivalent of the novel—or 
depending on a character’s age or arc, perhaps the Bildungsroman? In this 
analogy, the brevity of films (as we have known them) can suddenly seem 
like short stories, or poems even. In this comparison, television has become 
the long-form mode in which viewers have a chance to inhabit their own 
lives—and over a longer term than film allows—while also productively 



3the fact and fiction of television

entering the fictional realms presented to them. Whether the analogy proves 
productive or divisive, it nevertheless gestures towards the evolving function, 
and undeniably prominent force, of TV shows in our ordinary experience. 
Against the polemical gesture of writing off television as a danger to democ-
racy or the proper functioning of the human mind, we claim that 
TV—understood as an appellation involving form and content—is an 
aesthetic rendering of the philosophical life: providing profound sights and 
sounds worthy of our enduring critical appraisal.

The Fact and Art of Television

Indeed, the authors commissioned to write entirely new chapters for this 
volume—all acknowledged analysts of varied media environments—have their 
own histories of encounter with television to call upon and address, including 
familiarity with the aforementioned media theorists and critics, among many 
others. Each new decade confronts the evolution of form (from black-and-
white to color, from cathode ray tube to retina monitor, from broadcast with 
commercial sponsors to cable conglomerates to on-demand streaming by way 
of subscription, from living room screen to mobile phone display) and content 
(from situation comedy to soap opera, newscast to prestige drama, talk show 
to game show, live sports event to multi-season nature documentaries, and 
so on), and so each new decade demands criticism that takes stock and offers 
pronouncements that give us pause, perspective and, in alternation, provoca-
tion and peace. Yet, whenever someone arrives at the study of television, one 
must brace for an encounter with the undeniable magic of the medium; or, 
as Cavell put it, more eloquently and evocatively, with ‘something like the 
sheer fact that television exists, and that this existence is at once among the 
most obvious and the most mysterious facts of contemporary life’.9

Given the range of Cavell’s philosophical concerns—especially among the 
arts of literature, music, painting, theatre, opera, and film—one could substi-
tute them for ‘television’ in the just-cited sentence and walk away similarly 
dumbfounded (and thus also eager to sign up for further tuitions of this 
sort). Yet the mysteriousness of television is, perhaps until recently only 
challenged by film, compounded by its ubiquity, its intimate presence in our 
lives—endlessly looked to, seldom looked at.10 ‘Television’, as Thomas Streeter 
suggested, ‘is something people do.’11 We take this fact of television as one 
of the abiding mysteries of the medium and our contemporary lives spent 
in its company.

With Cavell, we see a decided turn to the serious watching of, and listening 
to, television, thereby acknowledging yet bracketing the curmudgeonly chatter 
about the detriments of ‘the boob tube’ alluded to above. As befits a philos-
opher who would write his second book about film (The World Viewed, 1971) 
and his third one on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (The Senses of Walden, 
1972), who would co-found the Harvard Film Archive and the African-
American Studies Department at Harvard, Cavell discovered a way to 



4 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

approach the study of television productively—that is, in ways that were 
attuned to the medium’s effects on him, on his thoughts, and the environ-
ments he inhabited and helped create. In his case, we may discern how his 
regard for ‘reading’ (and listening to) TV extends—and adapts—certain habits 
familiar to his brand of philosophical film criticism, including the virtuosity 
of its dispensations in ordinary language.

In the 1970s, for example, TV was TV and film was film. ‘It was a time 
when movies were magical’, said celebrated auteur director P.T. Anderson, 
‘and TV was just something you had in a box at home. Those days are long 
gone, you know?’12 In the pandemicine, when theatre-going is interrupted 
or unsettled—along with film festivals and marquee premieres—and tech-
nologies disrupt models and ideas for distribution, the very notion of ‘movies’ 
is in flux. As cineplexes began reopening after a long pandemic hiatus, A.O. 
Scott declared—and asked: ‘The movies are back. But what are movies now?’13 
And so, part of the motive in what follows is to track such up-to-the-minute 
contemporary queries by placing them in intimate conversation with Cavell’s 
more established sense of the form and content of what television was, what 
cinema was. For instance, Garrett Stewart distinguishes phenomena and our 
language to describe them when he writes, ‘What motion pictures are now 
is post-filmic, not postcinematic.’14 On one register, then, television natively 
absorbs the cinematic as an indication of its temporal circumstance. Hence 
the question that inaugurates (and we think sustains) these opening remarks—
when is television?—since the interrogative naturally pushes TV-watchers 
and cinephiles into dialogue about the parameters of what are clearly evolving, 
interrelated, transmedial phenomena. Television was historically never filmic 
(not that stylists such as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch didn’t make it 
seem so), but it can and it should now be recognized in many of its current 
modalities as ably cinematic. No wonder Cavell took an interest in parsing 
the nature of what were, in his time, different technologies with sometimes 
overlapping and sometimes distinguishable characteristics. But times change 
and so must our conceptual frameworks and terms of engagement.

Though one can find scattered remarks on TV in Cavell’s writings, the 
locus classicus is his 1982 article ‘The Fact of Television’, which is engaged 
with and explicated by our contributing authors throughout the present 
volume, and situated in the context of related scholarly research on television. 
In this essay, Cavell writes from the scene in which moviegoers were faced 
with multiple and contemporaneous fronts: the familiar movie theatre (then 
just catching wind of the blockbuster and IP-drive content inaugurated in 
the mid-1970s), broadcast television, cable television, and the uncanny accom-
plice to the audio cassette, the video cassette (with its capacity to present 
‘film’, to record live television, and in the case of camcorders, to function as 
the medium of the home movie and for aspiring filmmakers, the means for 
creating homemade movies).

One of the most enduring observations of Cavell’s text on television is 
his sense that cinematic representations and televisual presentations do 



5the fact and fiction of television

different things, stand in different relationships to viewers: a movie screen 
is something we watch, whereas broadcast signals intimate that the content 
of a television screen is, in fact, something we witness or surveil. In Cavell’s 
recasting of ordinary language, television offers a ‘current of simultaneous 
event reception’ whereas film remains a ‘succession of automatic world projec-
tions’.15 Use Jean-Luc Godard’s Numéro Deux (1975) as a quick clinic on 
the difference: here Godard’s film incorporates an actual TV set, and so the 
film projects Godard as a succession of automatic world projections while, 
simultaneously, we see him monitored by the TV within the film frame; 
obviously, the closed-circuit TV screen in Numéro Deux is not the same as 
the broadcast version that displays live sports or talk shows or breaking news, 
but it provides a picture of the way we might distinguish the ontology of 
film from the ontology of television as they would have appeared to Cavell 
some decades ago. ‘The distinction between filming the world and monitoring 
an event is a decisive one for “The Fact of Television”’, Cavell tells us in ‘The 
Advent of Videos’.16 The temporality of broadcast TV, for instance, collapses 
the here and the there so that we peer through a monitor—as if through a 
looking glass, such as a telescope—to see what is happening on the other 
side (indeed, to monitor it); as television has become increasingly scripted, 
produced in the same manner as film (though presented according to a 
different logic), the quality of TV as a site for monitoring has shifted—hence 
the need for a return and reconsideration of Cavell’s early 1980s insights.

The publication time stamp of ‘The Fact of Television’ is worth dwelling 
on: Cavell wrote the piece in the wake of Norman Lear’s revolution of TV 
content and cable’s emergence as a form of distribution. My Dinner with 
Andre, directed by Louis Malle and released in near proximity to Cavell’s 
article, in 1981, captures something of the frenzied sentiment Cavell responds 
to in his remarks for Daedalus: the eponymous Andre says that people are 
nowadays ‘lobotomized by TV’, ‘lulled into a dangerous tranquility’. Cognizant 
of such perturbations, Cavell acknowledges the widespread worry that TV 
is a threat not just to high culture but to higher thoughts, yet finds such 
‘disapprovals’ about, for example, its addictiveness wanting. That is, he sees 
reason to turn off the alarm and, instead, turn our attention to the varieties 
and virtues of the televisual (perhaps especially as they are made manifest 
in contradistinction with cinema). That TV and cinema have seemingly 
collapsed into one another in this third decade of the new millennium should 
be a cause for further inquiries, not a reason to shut them down.

[Is] there some surmise about the nature of the pleasure television 
provides that sets off disapproval of it, perhaps like surmises that 
once caused the disapproval of novel-reading or, later, of movie-
viewing? If this were the case, one might expect the disapproval to 
vanish when television comes of age, when its programs achieve an 
artistic maturity to match that of the great novels and movies. Is 
this a reasonable faith?17



6 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

Since we approach television more than forty years after Cavell asked 
these questions, we are in a position to assess outcomes—whether his faith 
was warranted, whether maturity has been achieved. In his time, he wrote: 
‘the absence of interest in the medium seems to me more complete, or studied, 
than can be accounted for by the accidents of taste’.18 Offense at content—the 
subject of aesthetic judgment, including disapproval—can distract from atten-
tion to the ‘aesthetic possibilities of the medium’, a refrain, a hope, evident 
also in his study of film.19 Possibilities, moreover, that are not given or 
foreclosed. Pointing out such a distinction does not preclude the ongoing 
commentary and occasional crisis about the intoxicating, addictive, or other-
wise perverse charms of TV. Cavell recalls:

William Rothman has suggested to me that since television can 
equally adopt a movie mode or a video mode, we might recognize 
one dimension of television’s ‘company’ in the understanding of the 
act of switching from one mode to another as the thing that is always 
live, that is, effected simultaneously with our watching. This points 
to the feature of the current (suggesting the contemporary as well 
as indicating the continuous) in my articulation of this aesthetic 
medium’s physical basis.20

A few years after Cavell wrote, the moral and intellectual panic remained 
febrile, embodied for instance in Allan Bloom’s trenchant critique of how 
television, like radio before it, ‘assaulted and overturned the privacy of the 
home’.21 Cavell spoke directly to Bloom’s concerns in ‘Who Disappoints 
Whom?’. After first underscoring numerous points of agreement between 
them—that is, of a shared concern with the state of culture, including the 
academy and the education of the young—Cavell dwelled at more length 
on a couple of differences, in particular, ‘our experience of the modern and 
the popular in the arts’.22 Responding to such veritable observations (ones 
hyper-charged when, in our age, the screen delivers social media23), and citing 
indications of Cavell’s faith fulfilled, may require saying that television has, 
in time, in its ever-evolving medial and aesthetic maturity, become a force 
for pedagogical and perfectionist possibility.

We may recognize a familiar pattern, one harkening back to the network 
era and still very present. As Horace Newcomb notes: ‘From the late 1940s 
through the mid-1970s, almost all serious attention to television was filtered 
through a model of American social science designed to explore and deter-
mine the “effects” of the medium. Serious attention was focused on the effects 
of television on children, on political processes, and on general problems 
related to the representation of violence on television.’24 The moral panic 
about the effects of television on human behavior, thus, has given way to the 
moral panic about the effects of social media on human behavior (and for 
an even longer term, the purported detriments of video games, especially 
hyper-violent ones25). If we are prone to dismiss the alarm still audible from 



7the fact and fiction of television

the mid-twentieth century, we may wonder about the extent of the analogy 
to the present time. Several studies suggest that the impact of social media, 
especially on adolescents, is graver than any perceived among earlier gener-
ations of youth who watched television.26

Drawing a line of continuity with the study of effects—wherever they may 
fall on the spectrum of influence, and making a link between concerns about 
television and social media—we should also cultivate proximity to the many 
fascinating findings of cognitive studies, especially of film and literature. Scholars 
such as Lisa Zunshine and Blakey Vermeule favor us with the intelligence 
necessary for parsing the way our minds interact with the characters we find 
on the page and the screen, and as importantly, how we can think productively 
and satisfyingly about how emotional relationships develop between readers 
and texts—even when we figure them as viewers of television.27

By the time Cavell had published his first book on film, The World Viewed 
(1971), ‘humanistic approaches to television were fugitive in nature, often 
appearing in general readership magazines such as the Nation or Saturday 
Review’.28 Cavell began reading film criticism by the likes of James Agee in 
The Nation and Robert Warshow in the Partisan Review.29 Early forays of 
television criticism in book form were similarly made by journalists such as 
Gilbert Seldes (The Public Arts, 1956), Patrick Hazard (TV as Art: Some Essays 
in Criticism, 1966), and Robert Lewis Shayon (The Eighth Art, 1962 and 
Open to Criticism, 1971). Television genre study was enriched by Horace 
Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art (1974) and his many editions of 
Television: The Critical View (1976).30 Meanwhile, during this same period, 
film as a legitimate field of academic inquiry was just making its first forays 
into journals and monograph publications as well as achieving residence in 
departments, programs, and archives; Cavell’s contributions to the evolution 
of film as a bona fide medium for academic study—including within 
 philosophy—are now legendary. As his thoughts on television have been less 
widely circulated, we hope the present initiative will provide some compen-
sation, thereby inaugurating a new and refreshed series of consideration of 
Cavell’s enduring relevance to the study of television.

During these transformations in the nature of television criticism, TV has 
made contact with the internet—to a large extent, been absorbed by it—and 
thus turned back upon us as condition of a life spent with screens of all sizes 
in nearly all places and times. In our pandemic milieu, we are ‘distributed’ 
and have willingly pointed self-surveillance apparatuses at our faces. ‘Remote 
work’ is the latest iteration of the televisual, a variation on reality TV. Linked 
together this way means television-as-life all day long; with Zoom, Teams, 
WhatsApp, and FaceTime, we are connected by TV feeds; we monitor 
ourselves and monitor each other. Using TV to understand our predicament, 
appeals to the logic of the Brady Brunch taxonomic grid are tired, yet perpet-
ually relevant. And then, of course, after a long workday of video conferencing, 
we turn, with relief, from the unscripted televisual space of the monitor to 
the scripted content of cinematic television.



8 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

The restless mobility of the televisual image—incarnating variously in our 
laptop web browsers or phones, then picked up where we left off on our 
home screens or digital projectors—has displaced the familiar, seemingly- 
until-now-fixed location of ‘the set’ or ‘the box’. Here, TV’s absorption by 
the internet coalesces into something like the constantly streaming, descending 
data of The Matrix, not to mention the habituated quality of ‘plugging in’ as 
a form of ‘tuning out’ the rest of the world. As the postmodern parable goes, 
virtual life becomes life altogether. Soon enough, we are told, the green 
light—not Fitzgerald’s but the Wachowskis’—will be drawn into service in 
the metaverse and its variants: our avatars will watch TV in virtual commu-
nities, while our bodies rest in place, motionless yet filled with emotions. At 
such intervals as these, we are, once again, left wondering how TV (as we 
have known it) will evolve. Taking stock of where we are, and have been, is 
a viable response to charting a course into novel and as yet unarticulated 
frontiers.

Education in and on TV

The contributors assembled here take it as evident that in Cavell’s writing 
on television—and, indeed, in the topics it touches, such as moral 
 perfectionism—there is much to enchant and much to agitate in one’s onward 
reflections about the role TV has in our lives. Watching television with Cavell 
is a deeply rewarding venture—and the chapters collected here exemplify 
just how profitable the enterprise can be.

Readers arriving on this occasion of critical study likely have a sense for 
television and for Cavell too, but perhaps not the two already in conversation. 
How well known, in fact, is Cavell’s ‘The Fact of Television’, which has been 
described as ‘surprisingly unheralded’?31 We can point out how the critical 
study of television emerged first from technology studies, communication 
departments, and realms largely beyond the humanities. Scholars and scientists 
from many disparate fields—in mechanical engineering, physics, sound tech-
nology, the history of science, science and technology studies—found 
themselves coming to terms with the medium as medium, and alongside 
them (first as a trickle, then as a deluge), in the discursive arts of media 
studies, film theory, sound studies, philosophy, and of course, most conspic-
uously, the precipitate of them all: television studies—to varying degrees, a 
blend of all the aforementioned disciplines. The bibliographies and frames 
of reference in what follows chart debts and affordances made possible by 
these varied and interrelated histories of inquiry and their auspicious offerings. 
Cavell’s thought of television is our collective common ground, but each 
contributing author takes up the invitation with a different show (or shows) 
in mind and a varying sense of what Cavell’s work portends for the past, 
present, and future of television studies.

In recent decades, as television has become more cinematic and no doubt 
with franchises, film has become more like television, Cavell’s work calls to 



9the fact and fiction of television

us, and so we find ourselves watching and listening to television with Stanley 
Cavell in mind. As we take stock of the expanse of television history, we are 
especially intrigued by the changes that have taken place since the turn of 
the millennium when, it would seem, ‘prestige TV’ or ‘serious TV’ or ‘complex 
TV’ troubled long-standing binaries such as film and television, the (flatness 
of the) screen and the (‘convexity’32 of the) tube, the image and the monitor, 
the stand-alone and the serial, art and commerce, celluloid strip and pixel 
array, theatrical release and streaming on demand, what is projected and what 
is broadcast, and so on. Thus, when we read Cavell’s ‘The Fact of Television’, 
we can appreciate his take from that vantage in time and space, but also 
wonder what to make of his observations decades later. In our day, in our 
time, what is distinctive, if anything, about TV as a form or format, a genre 
or a medium? How do we think with Cavell about what some have called 
‘cinematic television’?33 What is the purpose or difference or significance of 
what TV has become, in relation to the medium that remains cinematic but 
has become ‘postfilmic’?34 Such lines of investigation preoccupy us in the 
pages that follow.

In the decades since the coincident burgeoning of screened content and 
scholarly interest in it, the critical literature on television has tracked the 
evolution of the medium—from HBO (a name that promises how cinema 
comes home) to Netflix (a portmanteau that draws together the internet and 
the onomatopoeia of the mechanical film projector’s flicker) to AppleTV+ 
(which combines three elements: a legacy, luxury computer manufacturer 
with global impact, an abbreviation, and a glyph inviting open-endedness). 
These medial exemplars, running roughly from the early 1980s to the present, 
not only coincide with the appearance of Cavell’s remarks on television 
(c.1981), but also provide a generous temporal span in which varied and 
consequential deliberations over television’s meaning—as technological 
phenomenon, as mass art, as agent of influence in our lives—are found.

Recent books have been devoted to articulating and assessing Cavell’s 
understanding of the ontology of film and the nature of ‘reading’ films—in 
the latter case, especially as they are expressive of the genres he proposed 
(viz., comedies of remarriage on the one hand, and melodramas of the 
unknown woman on the other).35 We should like to add to these dynamic 
libraries of dispatches, this time on the subject of television—yet another 
salvo in the onward development and expansion of Cavell studies. That said, 
we proceed with an appreciation for the intellectual landscape of several 
interrelated subfields, among them cinema studies, television studies, media 
studies, cultural studies, American studies, as well as philosophy, political 
theory, and cultural anthropology. Indeed, we see ourselves as joining a vibrant 
conversation already underway. There are interventions in appreciation: lessons 
on studying television as cultural artifact (such as Tele-Visions) and as repos-
itory of philosophical insight (such as Appreciating the Art of Television).36 
Attempts are made at addressing the radically and rapidly evolving modes 
of the medium—from animation to reality TV, from documentary to soap 



10 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

opera, from game show to talk show, and more—as found in Thinking Outside 
the Box and The Tube Has Spoken.37 In the new millennium, as premium 
television was transforming credentials and criteria, Jan Olsson and Lynn 
Spigel collected their remarks on a ‘medium in transition’ under the title 
Television after TV.38 Soon after, Television Studies after TV continued the 
elegy and the inquiry.39 Even as we are said to live in the wake of TV, tele-
vision appears a fecund and ongoing forum for intellectual investigation, as 
seen in Television Aesthetics and Style and Why Theory?: Cultural Critique in 
Film and Television.40 After Jason Mittell’s Complex TV: The Poetics of 
Contemporary Television Storytelling, we find license to explore the moral 
complexity of television (as in Jeroen Gerrits’ chapter) and narrative complexity 
(as in Catherine Wheatley’s chapter), including the ways these two dimensions 
of contemporary storytelling interact.

And yet, despite the richness and variety of these mostly still-relevant 
studies, only a rare few directly make contact with Cavell’s own enduring 
observations of television (and film), or mark their debts and points of 
inspiration. Among the notable exceptions we find Lorenz Engell’s The Switch 
Image, and our own Martin Shuster’s New Television along with William 
Rothman’s serial commentary, such as ‘Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera’; 
Alex Clayton draws from Cavell in productive ways in ‘Why Comedy is at 
Home on Television’, as does contributor Byron Davies in ‘The Specter of 
the Electronic Screen’, along with Luca Bandirali and Enrico Terrone in 
their Concept TV.41 Cavell’s remarks on TV also figure crucially in Alberto 
N. García and Ted Nannicelli’s ‘Television’s Temporality: Seriality and 
Temporal Prolongation’.42 To up the ante, then, our collective effort, in these 
pages, sets an agenda where Cavell is essential company to each and every 
dispatch gathered here, regardless of disciplinary locale or privileged television 
program. If the invitation to contributors afforded incubation for making 
connections and developing new pathways, the ambition for the final volume 
is to present a coordinated forum for systematically improving the clarity of 
Cavell’s sense of television (albeit now in a certain historical register), while 
also discerning what lessons he offers for the present and future study of 
this ever-evolving medium and its varied content.

TV series teach us about paying attention to forms of life. A bit like 
parents, families, and societies, they initiate us into what Wittgenstein defines 
as Lebensformen: vital forms or configurations of human coexistence whose 
texture is the result of the practices and actions that produce or modify them. 
They are also ideal sites for perceiving ways of being: of people, relationships, 
and family resemblances. The moral vision of characters is publicly revealed 
or intimately developed through their use of language—their choice of words, 
their style of conversation. Television series thus pursue the quest for the 
ordinary and the ‘pedagogical’ task defined by Cavell and taken up by popular 
cinema: that of providing a subjective education through shared experience 
and expression. Here we are invoking the tradition of ordinary language 
philosophy that we have inherited from Wittgenstein and Austin and Cavell, 



11the fact and fiction of television

all of whom defined language as predicated on voice, conversation, and the 
practice of both. The creation of sound films constituted a historical step in 
giving voice to humans (on film), and, within certain genres, to women in 
particular, as Cavell demonstrated in Pursuits of Happiness and later, Contesting 
Tears. TV series are a further technical and narrative development that 
continue this progression in a more diverse way and by giving a place and 
voice to a wider variety of people—across time, tradition, race, ethnicity, 
gender, and linguistic context.

Keep in mind that for Cavell, the importance of cinema is defined by its 
place in an ordinary form of life. Series shape our everyday experience, 
including our sense of politics and ethics. Here we may think of the impor-
tance, within adolescent culture (and also among many working academics), 
of the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose creator, Joss Whedon, imagined 
it as a feminist work intended to morally transform a coed audience by 
showing an apparently ordinary girl who was capable of fighting. Buffy’s 
strength lies in her being at once an ordinary girl and a fearsome killer, and 
in the powerful and paradoxical way she embodies care (care for her friends, 
her mother, her sister—as well as for the world, which she saves on a regular 
basis). This allows her to be a role model for girls as well as for boys; care, 
in this television portrait, is defined as a capacity shared by both sexes.

After what we may call a ‘first wave’ in which women advanced towards 
equal presence in popular series, with sexual rights at stake (invoking the 
classics, Sex and the City [HBO] and The L Word [Showtime]), now we are 
in the heart of a ‘second wave’ that offers the public tools for cultural analysis 
of the situation of women, confirming Cavell’s point in Pursuits of Happiness—
that the right to vote does not equal political equality. The series Unbelievable 
(Netflix, 2019), from showrunner Susannah Grant, and based on an inves-
tigation by the media outlet Propublica, introduces us to two women detectives 
in an investigation that leads them to confront a serial rapist … and a police 
force that is negligent, grossly incompetent, and brutal towards the victims, 
who are immediately considered ‘not believable’. Unbelievable’s originality lies 
in its focus not on the rapist but on the victims, and (as indicative of its role 
in the second wave) it also ‘takes care’ of its viewing subjects by avoiding the 
graphic display of rape. Unbelievable holds its own with its actresses. Looking 
at them, one wonders if the feminine and feminist power of new TV series 
is perhaps due to the arrival in force of a whole generation of actresses ready 
to take this women’s genre to the next level, like the comedies and melodramas 
of Hollywood cinema in the 1930s and 1940s: to name a few, Toni Collette 
and Merritt Wever in Unbelievable; Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and 
Shailene Woodley in Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017–19); Regina King in Seven 
Seconds (Netflix, 2018) and Watchmen (HBO, 2019); Sandra Oh and Jodie 
Comer in Killing Eve (BBC, 2018–22); Elisabeth Moss in Top of the Lake 
(BBC and Sundance, 2013–17) and The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017–). These 
are actors who, like the Katharine Hepburns, Irene Dunnes, and Barbara 
Stanwycks of the last century, do not aim to undergo any kind of male 



12 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

gaze—but resolutely embody self-reliance and female solidarity by building 
on the work of previous generations.

The presence of strong female characters, when women have long been 
rendered invisible in cinema, is certainly one of the most striking elements 
in the transformations brought about by, and in, popular culture and TV 
series. Similarly, two major HBO works, Watchmen and Lovecraft Country 
(Misha Green, D. Lindelof, J.J. Abrams, 2019), revisit a repressed episode of 
American history (the Tulsa massacre) and, as the film Black Panther has 
already done, radically broaden the audience for Black characters, who have 
themselves become emblematic, morally discerning, and saviors of a nation 
or the world. By drawing from a range of popular culture resources—comic 
books, H.P. Lovecraft fantasy fiction, horror stories, and superheroes—and 
by featuring women, as well as Black actors, the struggles for equality are 
given a novel depiction (such as embodied by the late Michael K. Williams, 
hero of The Wire, revisited in The Night Of, When They See Us, and Lovecraft 
Country); in turn, these series invent a new, exuberant, and instructive violence, 
articulating gender and race, film and TV (as exemplified by Paul Standish’s 
chapter on Steve McQueen’s Small Axe [Amazon, 2020] below).

Our Lives in Series

As a further scene of instruction, let’s consider when Cavell discusses the 
way TV time involves ‘an order of time incommensurate with film time’ with 
reference to the eleven, weekly hour-length episodes of Brideshead Revisited:43

[Brideshead Revisited] is equivalent in its effect neither to something 
on film that would last eleven hours, nor to something that would 
last eleven weeks (whatever such things would be), nor, I  think, to 
eleven films of an hour each. Not only does an hour signify something 
in television time that has no bearing on film time, but it is internal 
to the establishment of its formats that television obeys the rhythm, 
perhaps even celebrates the articulations, the recurrences, of the order 
of the week, as does Genesis.44

A description of familiar features of everyday life takes on new shape in the 
light of his diction, and syntax and frames of reference (linking television 
and Genesis). Film time? Of course, we have for years absorbed (mostly 
passively) the way movies deploy a three-act structure, continuity editing, 
voice-over, blocking, etc. that amount to an object we recognize as a movie. 
Even and especially in this case, we have a sense of the (acceptable, practiced, 
even normative) durational range of a film—as opposed to a music video, 
commercial, or short film. When a film, for its length, breaks into two parts, 
we wonder if it is still one movie. We have a customary awareness of a film’s 
temporal limits (nowadays roughly ranging from ninety minutes to two-and-
a-half hours) as providing a certain criterion for what can be accomplished 



13the fact and fiction of television

in such a span. In the shift to television—with its seasons/series and 
episodes—all limits are lifted; seasons may have episodes of varying length, 
and indeed, of varying number; and one is never sure when a TV program 
is finished (see, for example, Curb Your Enthusiasm [2000–], which began at 
the turn of the millennium and has appeared periodically ever since45). And 
then, of course, there are shows that become movies and movies that become 
shows; Cavell’s own example, the TV show Brideshead Revisited (1981) 
appeared as a feature film in 2008. Michael Mann’s celebrated Heat (1995) 
was, in fact, a remake of his own earlier television work, L.A. Takedown 
(1989); a comparison of the two, side by side, offers a unique, single-author 
lesson on the differences between the creation of television and film in the 
late twentieth century—along with hints about how historical differences 
can be elided, for example, the way TV production can adopt cinematic 
style (as Mann does with Miami Vice, 1984–89, and recently with Tokyo 
Vice, 2022; s1:e1), and how films can trade on the prodigality of the serial 
(as with Mann’s own cinematic remake of his cult TV series in Miami Vice, 
2006). Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) began as a television 
miniseries (with six hour-long episodes), but was soon thereafter condensed 
into a feature film of 167 minutes. Saraband, a sequel featuring the same 
actors, appeared thirty years later in 2003. In 2021, Hagai Levi wrote and 
produced a five-part series with the same title for HBO, which begins in a 
moment of meta-awareness of its production, with the actors preparing to 
begin the scene. These switchbacks, reconceptions, revisions, and repetitions 
provide concrete instances with which to test our sense of—and confidence 
in—the criteria that (have historically) defined and divided film and tele-
vision, and are increasingly deployed to insist on (and exemplify) their 
common ground.

Moreover, now that films, such as those linked together by the Marvel 
Cinematic Universe, have adopted seriality, we see a hybridity that makes 
each independent film behave much more like an episode in a series; indeed, 
we may descry this trait as far back as 1977 with the first installment of Star 
Wars (i.e., Episode IV). Cinephiles are often left wondering about the coher-
ency of a film-as-episode: does it hold up on its own terms—or does it need 
the previous or next installment? Alongside these narrative conundrums, the 
nature of parasocial relationships remains salient, with viewers invited to 
bond with, or in today’s parlance, ‘follow’ the exploits and emotional journeys 
of any number of characters. The exemplarity of such characters can be 
outsized: Steven Spielberg once quipped that TV was his third parent.46 We 
spend days and nights with the characters, and return to them season after 
season, in a parasocial intimacy from which we draw morals and insights. 
TV allows for the pleasure of ‘keeping something in mind’—and it is a term 
that informs the very title of this collection.

Not to be missed, then, it is not just the quantity, but the very nature of 
brief episodic encounters that appears to encourage a habit, indeed, a mode 
of iterative and perpetual relation; we can allocate the time, perhaps very 



14 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

nearly on a daily basis, to watch an episode of a television show, in a way 
that we cannot justify watching a standard film with such regularity. And 
perhaps we would even find ourselves less inclined to watch a short film 
(lasting a mere thirty minutes) than a TV show lasting ‘the same’ thirty 
minutes; why is this a felt difference in our modes of reception? Such emer-
gent dichotomies, doubtless tied to aspects of behavioral psychology, received 
a talented treatment at the Golden Globes when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler 
had this exchange:

FEY: So you may be confused which nominees count as movies 
and which are considered TV.

POEHLER: Now TV is the one that I watch five hours straight, 
but a movie is the one that I  don’t turn on because it’s two 
hours. I  don’t want to be in front of my TV for two hours, 
I want to be in front of the TV for one hour five times.47

Cavell was sensible to the quality and pitch of humor—indeed, outright 
jokes—in the course of philosophical investigation,48 and this perceptive 
repartee deserves our attention and our self-reflection. Why is what they say 
the case? And how does it affect the present and future not so much of 
television (which appears to have bested its cinematic counterpart) but of 
film? Cavell’s own autobiographical reflections on his moviegoing life—e.g., 
attending a movie almost daily for a stretch of his life in New York and Los 
Angeles—remind us how material conditions for viewership doubtless inform 
possibilities (is there a repertory movie theatre in your neighborhood playing 
masterworks of cinema day after day, night after night, as there is in Paris’ 
Quartier Latin?).

All the more striking, we learn that, according to surveys, it is the 
moviegoers themselves who have unlearned going to the movies during the 
pandemic—and it is those who used to go regularly who appear to return 
the least (who may be permanently lost to the public habit), now preferring 
the setting of their own home to screen films that are so easily available and 
in such abundance. People have lost the habit—and we might say the talent 
and taste—for watching films in movie theatres. Film seems to have joined 
the domestic, private space, previously associated more closely with TV series, 
which have in turn acquired a new role as comforter (and company against 
social isolation) to compensate for the increased withdrawal into the home, 
and especially as a consequence of lockdown and quarantine. This is just 
an(other) example of the ‘privatization’ of cultural life, which may well be a 
radical change in the ‘movie-going lives’ Cavell described. What so many 
moviegoers give up is not film per se, but a form of life (a quite French, and 
in France a still persistent, Lebensform): passing in front of a cinema on the 
way home from work, or on the way out of the metro or the café, and 
deciding impulsively to see a film, or making a trip to the cinema as part of 
a friendship, or a family gathering—all of this now feels part of a distant 



15the fact and fiction of television

life, where the cinema was an integral part of daily experience, a portion of 
a constant mixing of public and private spaces.

One can be forgiven for seeing moviegoing, on these terms, as an allegory 
of democracy: the (lost?) agora in which individuals assemble peaceably to 
test the terms of common (i.e., shared) civilization, and to walk away with 
new understanding (of oneself and others), ready to speak new things out 
in public, in the light of day—maybe today or the day after tomorrow.

Moreover, Cavell notes in The World Viewed that you have a different 
memory of a film depending on who you were with when viewing it. 
Companionship in the film experience is thus central to Cavell’s analysis; so 
also is ‘care’:

Rich and poor, those who care about no (other) art and those who 
live on the promise of art, those whose pride is education and those 
whose pride is power or practicality—all care about movies, await 
them, respond to them, remember them, talk about them, hate some 
of them, are grateful for some of them.49

Now, what Cavell says about movies is also true of TV. Everyone cares. And 
to our gratification, the series has provided a semblance of continuity in the 
face of the pandemic’s destruction of cherished public spaces. Series—and 
their producers, i.e., the streaming behemoths—have taken care of us during 
the containment. The series used to accompany ordinary lives, and now they 
prove to be a resource or a refuge in extraordinary situations. They present 
‘comfort worlds’ which, in turn, have the power to become live and ongoing 
‘relationships’, essential to personal memories and the formation of self- 
understanding, all the while displacing in-person alternatives: going to coffee 
shops, traveling, meeting and touching each other. When the world couldn’t 
visit Paris, Emily in Paris provided vicarious travel and ‘friends’ to be among. 
And series allow their viewers, like the characters in a dystopian series, to 
perceive the price and the charm of an everyday life that we took for 
granted—we remember June in The Handmaid’s Tale, nostalgically watching 
old videos of Friends episodes in the devastated premises of the Boston Globe. 
With Station Eleven (HBO, 2021), likewise, we began to feel a demarcation 
separating Before Times from the present.

The characters of television fiction are so well anchored and clear in their 
moral expressions—idiosyncratic rather than archetypal—that they can be 
‘released’ and opened to the imagination and use of all viewers, ‘entrusted’ to 
us—as if it were up to each of us also to take care of them. Indeed, for a fan 
who has followed a serious series from the beginning, living with the char-
acters for three, four, seven years, and sometimes many more (including 
repeated viewing, ‘restarting’ a series), these characters become an object of 
care, even as the series care for us. Hence the great importance of the conclu-
sions to series, which must teach their viewers to go on without them. The 
final moments of Lost (ABC, 2004–10) and Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) are 



16 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

illustrations of the labor that series enact to guide us in separating from their 
characters, if not leaving their worlds (cherished as a mode of personal 
memory). As Sandra Laugier discusses in her contribution to this volume, 
The Americans (FX, 2013–18) teaches us how to leave Elizabeth and Philip 
Jennings, a couple of KGB spies infiltrated in the United States in the 1980s, 
or perhaps more aptly, to let them leave us. Banshee (Cinemax, 2013–16) 
devotes with admirable concentration its entire last episode to the hero’s 
melancholic farewell to each of the characters, a way for him to free himself 
from these people in his life, and to find autonomy apart from them.

Part of the hold characters have on us must be attributed to the movie or 
television actor’s mysterious capacity for what Cavell defined as ‘photogenesis’: 
making themselves perceptible to spectators and thereby, somehow, consti-
tuting the spectator’s experience of a character. Thus, the modes of expression 
of TV series actors (their moral texture, distinctive style of speech and gesture) 
are a veritable ethical resource offered by popular culture. Episode by episode, 
season after season, the question of morality is shifted towards the develop-
ment of a common sensibility, which is both presupposed and educated (or 
transformed) by the sharing of values. We live with these characters and in 
time, even when the show ends, they live in us. Such ‘serial care’ is essential 
to collective moral survival. And during the present time, the series that we 
thought had been relocated, progressively detached from our television screens 
(because they were once broadcast) have reinstalled themselves in the home 
(thanks to on-demand streaming to our laptops, tablets, and phones). We 
now consume series and films alike—on the same screen real estate.

It is not accidental that series are (almost) never available in cinemas. At 
the cinema, film educates, transforms, consoles, but film does not ‘take care’ 
of us the way TV series do. Rather, film offers the disturbing experience of 
a world and of characters bigger than oneself, on a screen which, while 
presenting this to us, cuts us off from the world, makes the world strange 
anew. Perhaps this is one answer to the question why it is ‘easier’ to watch 
hours and hours of television but harder to devote oneself to a single film, 
especially a much-vaunted classic. The invention of cinema caused the subver-
sion of what John Dewey called ‘the abyss between ordinary and aesthetic 
experience’.50 It is now necessary to take into account this redistribution of 
public and private spaces, the privatization of the public by the mutation of 
the forms of everyday life where the cinema is secularly embedded.

Popular Art?

As Cavell noted decades ago, playing a movie on TV doesn’t make the movie 
into TV; indeed, it may highlight (as it did for Cavell) the way that television- 
as-a-medium remains in development as a form of art:

I have begun by citing grounds on which to deny that the evanescence 
of the instance, of the individual work, in itself shows that television 



17the fact and fiction of television

has not yet come of age aesthetically. (Even were it to prove true 
that certain television works yet to be made may become treasured 
instances, as instances, such as the annual running of The Wizard of 
Oz—which serves to prove my case, since this is not an object made 
by and for television—my topic here remains television as it stands 
in our lives now).51

We are on much less certain ground when we capture another phrase, one 
addressed to The Wizard of Oz—as ‘not an object made by and for televi-
sion’—since we are currently inundated with objects that are made by and 
for television and yet claim themselves to be movies (see again how the crop 
of streaming platforms—Amazon, AppleTV+, Netflix, HBO, etc.—appear 
comfortable declaring a work ‘film’ without blushing, as they should, given 
the long, vaunted history of moviemaking). Cavell continues:

But movies also, at least some movies, maybe most, used to exist in 
something that resembles this condition of evanescence, viewable 
only in certain places at certain times, discussable solely as occasions 
for sociable exchange, almost never seen more than once, and then 
more or less forgotten.52

Cavell has spoken of how he wrote much of Pursuits of Happiness (published 
the year before ‘The Fact of Television’) from memories of the seven come-
dies he wrote about in stunning detail and to pronounced philosophical 
effect. He did not write from digital databases, nor elaborate notebooks of 
film quotations nor careful step outlines—just personal memories of the 
movies. Our present condition requires no such exhaustive memories of 
movies (and television) comparable to what Cavell was compelled to main-
tain and retrieve as he composed his masterwork in the 1970s.53

Reflection on popular culture and its ‘ordinary’ objects leads to a trans-
formation of theory and of criticism, as Cavell was one of the first to realize 
and enact. Cavell was less concerned with inverting artistic hierarchies, or 
the relationship between theory and practice, than with the transformation 
necessitated by our encounters with new experiences. The framework that 
he proposed for cinema—that of cultural democracy—is also a potent one 
for TV series. To use it, we must also prove the need for TV criticism, and 
define its form—a challenge raised by Robert Warshow, who, in The Immediate 
Experience, maintained:

We are all ‘self-made men’ culturally, establishing ourselves in terms 
of the particular choices we make from among the confusing multi-
tude of stimuli that present themselves to us. Something more than 
the pleasures of personal cultivation is at stake when one chooses to 
respond to Proust rather than to Mickey Spillane, to Laurence Olivier 
in Oedipus Rex rather than Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle. 



18 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

And when one has made the ‘right’ choice, Mickey Spillane and 
Sterling Hayden do not disappear; perhaps no one gets quite out of 
sight of them. There is great need, I think, for a criticism of ‘popular 
culture’ which can acknowledge its pervasive and disturbing power 
without ceasing to be aware of the superior claims of the higher arts, 
and yet without a bad conscience.54

Cavell shows that a film (taken as a whole, including its actors and produc-
tion) brings its own intelligence into its making, and that this intelligence 
itself educates us, leads us to recognize and appreciate our own tastes as 
movie fans, and thus for coming to know ourselves. This reading is even 
more valuable for TV series. An ordinary aesthetics of television must defend 
not the specificity of the individuals who create shows, nor the works as 
such, but rather the conditions for a common and shareable aesthetic expe-
rience. One of Cavell’s greatest achievements is to have shown the ‘intelligence 
that a film has already brought to bear in its making’, which amounts to 
letting a work of art have its own voice in what philosophy will say about 
it.55 Or learning what it means to ‘check one’s experience’, to use the expres-
sion from Pursuits of Happiness56—that is, what it means to examine one’s 
own experience and ‘let the object or the work of your interest teach you 
how to consider it’.57 This means that one must educate one’s experience so 
that one can be educated by it. There is an inevitable, but not regrettable or 
embarrassing, circularity at work here: having an experience requires trusting 
one’s experience. This role of trust in education is what makes TV an essen-
tial resource for the aforementioned moral education.

And as Cavell mindfully cautions, the philosophical catch is that the 
education cannot be achieved before the trusting.58 For Cavell, there is a 
parallel between the relationship of cinema to high art and the relationship 
of ordinary language philosophy to ‘high’ philosophy. Philosophy, then, is 
connected to the self-education that television provides, and which can be 
defined as each person’s cinematographic autobiography, to use Cavell’s concept: 
the way in which our lives include fragments of movies and series; the way 
in which we orient ourselves in relation to these key moments, which are 
just as much a part of our experience as the dreams or real moments that 
we experienced—and which now haunt us. Our self-image, in a word, is 
formed and informed by fragments from film and increasingly also from 
TV; a strange donning of characters or drawing from their experience becomes 
essential to our own sense of identity and action. Call this cosplay of the 
imagination. Great television, just as film, presents us with important 
moments, moments of transformation—moments that in real life are fleeting 
and indeterminate, or that require years or an entire lifetime to understand 
(and even then, as so much else, may remain enigmatic and unresolved).

Popular culture does not refer to a primitive or inferior version of culture, 
but rather to a shared democratic culture that creates common values and 
serves as a resource for a form of self-education—or more specifically, a form 



19the fact and fiction of television

of culture of the self, a subjective perfecting or subjectivation that occurs 
through sharing and commenting on ordinary and public material that is 
integrated into ordinary life. It is in this sense that, to cite Warshow again, 
‘we are all self-made men’. Cinema for Warshow is at the heart of popular 
culture: ‘movies … are the most highly developed and most engrossing of 
the popular arts, and … seem to have an almost unlimited power to absorb 
and transform the discordant elements of our fragmented culture’.59 In reading 
this passage, one cannot help but transfer the remark to television series, 
which are certainly (even more so than movies) a repository of all of culture, 
and absorb and recycle elements from music, video games, classical  television—
and of course, movies. That which Cavell claimed for Hollywood popular 
movies—their capacity to create a culture shared by millions—has been 
transferred onto other corpora and practices, in particular onto television 
series, which have taken up, if not taken over, the task of educating the 
public. Cavell’s argument in Cities of Words was both ethical and perfectionist, 
if we redefine morality in new terms: that is, no longer in terms of ‘the good’ 
or definitive judgment, but rather the ongoing exploration of our forms of 
life. The importance and benefit of extending this aesthetic and ethical method 
to include television series is equally ethical, for these works are as shared 
and public as movies were in the twentieth century; they reach a significant 
audience and play an educational role, and perhaps even more emphatically 
than cinema, they make it possible to anchor the value of a work in the 
experience one has of it.

Even as television allows (and may encourage or insist upon) a retreat 
into the home, it may also provide conditions for a renewed sense of poten-
tiality for democratic conversation—admittedly, as yet to manifest itself. If 
human civility—both in the conditions for physical ‘in-person’ congregation 
and the modes in which we address ourselves, one to the other—has been 
negatively impacted by this pandemic and this iteration of social media (with 
its capacity to spread misinformation and hate around the world in an instant), 
perhaps a future time, not far off, will surprise us with an opportunity to 
share our hard-won findings, some of them the precipitate of years’ or decades’ 
worth of time spent with television shows (either watching them alone or 
with a small band of trusted others). Like the solitary scholar emerging from 
the library after an independent sojourn with the classics to find her 
 community—including moral and political agency—so too may we reserve 
the hope that in years to come television shows will be at once a lingua 
franca that crosses borders and languages, and also provide the terms and 
conditions for instantiating a richer, more nuanced understanding of what 
it means to be—and become—human.

As such, we need to rethink what we mean today by popular culture 
(which is no longer exactly ‘popular’ in the social or political sense in which 
certain arts—songs, folklore—once were, even if popular culture sometimes 
draws on the resources of these arts) by connecting it more clearly to the 
Deweyan notion of the public. Television series are sites of the education of 



20 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

individuals, an education that amounts to a form of personal ‘perfecting’ 
through sharing and discussing public and ordinary material, which is inte-
grated into individuals’ lives and provides a resource for their conversation 
with others. Thus the democratic experiment returns to us anew under the 
auspices of television. Cavell’s ordinary aesthetics deliberately goes against 
the traditional critical approach, which is obsessed by art as a separate domain 
and the mystique of the individual creator, as well as with ‘representation’ 
and image, to the detriment of the ordinary experience of seeing a movie, 
which is the subjective—but always shared—experience of public material. 
For Cavell, cinema is a matter less of aesthetics than of practice—an ordinary 
practice that connects and reconciles the private and the public, the subject’s 
expectation and the shared common experience.

The forms of work that interest the contributors in this book are those 
that are capable of transforming our existences by educating and cultivating 
our ordinary experience, not only in the classical sense of training our 
aesthetic taste, but in the sense of a moral training that is constitutive of 
both our singularity and representativeness. Cavell, radically combining 
Emerson’s analyses (in the latter’s essay ‘Experience’) and Dewey’s (in Art 
as Experience), emphasizes that it is important to be able to educate one’s 
experience in such a way that one can have confidence in it and, in this way, 
to live it. If cinephilia is a form of education of the self, ‘seriesphilia’ is even 
more so. This education does not occur through exposure to a set of universal 
masterpieces (even if such television classics do now exist), but through the 
constitution of one’s personal list of favorite movies or series, and of scenes 
and lines of dialogue that are appropriate to various circumstances or occa-
sions in one’s life, at which points they are remobilized to pronounced and 
profound effect.

Cinematographic art, whether in the form of movies or TV series, is 
‘popular’ art because the experience of it underlies ordinary experience. 
Dewey maintained that aesthetic experience is emblematic of experience in 
general, and Wittgenstein told us ‘ethics and aesthetics are one’; so too this 
experience of television art is moral—both mysterious and ordinary, personal 
and public. It is ordinary because nothing is more shareable and self-evident 
than going to see movies or watching shows and talking about them, and 
these are often moments in which we reaffirm common ground in language. 
It is a mysterious form of knowledge, this coming to know what counts for 
oneself, and there is nothing easy or immediate about it. The only source 
for verifying one’s description of what counts is oneself—whence comes the 
role of confidence, of trust in one’s own experience,60 which is the source 
of moral perfectionism and the only basis for public education and public 
moral expression.

The redefinition and relocation of the important is the hallmark of Cavell’s 
approach to popular culture. In ‘More of the World Viewed’, Cavell contests 
the possibility of determining the importance of a film from a solely theo-
retical or historical point of view.61 In art, as in politics, though I exist in a 



21the fact and fiction of television

community of inquirers, I alone can say what counts (for me), I  alone can 
determine the importance and significance of the movies or series I see. This 
personal (or in an Emersonian sense, ‘original’) relation is, paradoxically, the 
democratic aspect of the experience of cinema, which stands in contrast to 
the condescension that marks some approaches to the aesthetics and criticism 
of TV series. In short, moral perfectionism takes individual experience seri-
ously, encourages the individual to articulate what elements of culture are 
important, and then invites the individual to give expression—not so much 
in a mood of defense or combat as in an agreeable pitch—to their orientation 
of the work, to what counts and why.

It is a requirement of individual exemplars of a particular genre that they 
conform to the identifying features of that genre. For example, given how 
seductive the character played by James Stewart is to the heroine of The 
Philadelphia Story (1940, dir. George Cukor), the movie could easily have 
ended with their marriage, a possibility to which the film briefly alludes. But, 
as Cavell notes, it is the genre that decides—just as we know, without needing 
any confirmation, that War of the Worlds (2005, dir. Steven Spielberg) will 
end with a remarriage (as most catastrophe movies do), and just as genre 
allows us to understand the perplexing conclusion of The Affair (2014–19), 
which depicts the reconciliation of protagonists who start out as a couple at 
the beginning of the series. Thus, cinema is full of explicit references to 
archetypal works within a given genre. TV series are also preoccupied by 
genre features, and are themselves a compendium of such references: the 
invocation of films or classical series through the ‘citation’ of scenes or actors, 
the repetition of plot points or allusion to character types, and so on.62 It is, 
however, the openness of genre, and its creative and intertextual potential that 
enables its productive capacity, including the invention of new genres and 
subgenres.

TV series inherit the conversational capacities of couples from film’s 
remarriage comedy genre, which bestows on them a particular grammar of 
expressions, interactions, and emotions. And early twenty-first-century series 
have supplied an even more diverse and variegated set of forms for narrative 
and moral reflection, thereby enriching an ever-expanding range of genres 
and subgenres, among them: mafia/cartel shows such as Narcos and Mafiosa 
drawing from The Sopranos; political shows such as the French Baron Noir, 
reworking The West Wing; metaphysical shows such as The Leftovers paying 
homage to Lost; and feminist examples such as Girls and I May Destroy You 
reinventing and updating elements from Sex and the City. In this way, tele-
vision genres offer resources for empowering the generations of characters 
that emerge from their creative potency, not least because they provide an 
adaptable grammar that can be mobilized to provide both moments of 
continuity and overlap, and the permission to deviate—and invent. Such 
genre fluidity also offers the viewer a wealth of resources for exploring and 
better understanding their own thoughts and feelings, from the perspective 
of the particular context of the subject’s personal reception (e.g., watching a 



22 Television wiTh sTanley Cavell in Mind

given show at a certain time in one’s life, during, after, or before a crucial 
phase of development). Cavell, citing again Warshow, writes that:

[Warshow] expresses his sense of the necessarily personal in various 
ways … namely, a sense of the writer’s having to invent his own 
audience, of the writer’s having to invent all the meanings of expe-
rience, of the modern intellectual’s ‘facing the necessity of describing 
and clarifying an experience which has itself deprived him of the 
vocabulary he requires to deal with it.’63

Towards TV-Philosophy

As an aid to defining the scope of our consolidated investigations in Television 
with Stanley Cavell in Mind, all of the chapters gathered here are dedicated 
to television shows produced in the twenty-first century, or, selecting a 
near-synonymous temporal marker, post-9/11 TV. The delineation may sound 
arbitrary, but it is fruitful, since it is around this time that the term ‘prestige 
TV’ was invented, with customary invocations of The Sopranos (1999–2007) 
as another emblematic point of reference. Suddenly television seemed weighty 
enough to bear serious philosophical discussion. A scene in the movie Juliet, 
Naked (2018, dir. Jesse Peretz) dramatizes this shift with satirical finesse: in 
the wake of screening a clip from The Wire during a university class, an 
auditor asks the professor whether students need to have read Euripides’ 
Medea in order to understand the TV show—to which he replies humorlessly, 
‘It wouldn’t hurt.’ Another indication of a subtle change in the critical stance 
of some philosophers towards television, and popular culture more generally, 
can be seen in the bracketed appearance of Seinfeld and Philosophy (2000) 
and The Simpsons and Philosophy (2001). These books have authorized the 
pursuit of such forms of study and added legitimacy to the sophisticated 
treatment of everyday objects of art. We could trace these instincts back 
much further to Duchamp or Warhol, but it is sufficient to notice that the 
coincidence of serious television and serious criticism of television share a 
time horizon. What accounts for the shift, however, is more mercurial, though 
it might resolve itself in the Emersonian notion that ‘what attracts my 
attention shall have it’.64 When philosophers began to watch television in 
the new millennium, they may have recognized that the aspirations of their 
craft were coordinate with those seen and heard on screen. Moreover, the 
expanding study of television—not only by philosophers but by other serious 
humanist critics—may mark one of those moments when a person’s avocations 
(nighttime binge-watching, say) found purpose and purchase in a person’s 
daylight vocation.

The contributors to this volume, some of whose discerning criticism in 
this collection has already been mentioned, propel our collective conversation 
about the meanings of television into new realms—at times drawing from 
preexisting thinking and transforming it, while at other points, Theseus-like, 



23the fact and fiction of television

inventing new ground as they proceed into auspicious territory. Indeed, both 
inclinations may amount to the same effect: as when Elisabeth Bronfen draws 
out the Shakespearean core of HBO’s celebrated Succession (2018–), Paul 
Standish workshops the nuances of race in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (BBC, 
2020), and Byron Davies explores lines of affiliation between Cavell’s thought 
and Francophone Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz’s late-in-life TV series, Litoral 
(2008). Interventions into the moral landscape of TV as found in celebrated 
marquee shows such as Homeland (2011–20), Ozark (2017–22), Justified 
(2010–15), True Detective (2014–2019) and The Good Place (2016–20) cascade 
respectively from Thibaut de Saint Maurice, Hent de Vries, William Rothman, 
Robert Sinnerbrink, and Catherine Wheatley. Stephen Mulhall helps us navi-
gate layers of metareference in Marvel’s WandaVision (2021–), full as it is with 
genre engagement through mise en abyme, while David LaRocca articulates 
expressions and achievements of metareflexivity in Netflix’s The Crown (2016–), 
and Michelle Devereaux takes further steps with Russian Doll (2019–), another 
series devoted to the representation of repetition and reflexiveness.

As these esteemed shows exemplify, serious television criticism often 
involves recognizing the presence—and effect—of a creator who is sometimes 
the same and sometimes different from the showrunner, which, in turn, we 
have learned is not the same as the director (of a film). These differences 
have presented challenges for those critics with ‘auteurist sensibilities’. Robert 
Pippin articulates the problem: ‘A room full of writers, often rotating in and 
out, series that are only planned out a few episodes when they begin, lots of 
interference from HBO or AMC types, many different directors over the 
course of a series. Even with the notion of an implied, collective author, 
tracking form and themes can be a mess.’65 In this context one may judge 
that a show is not good enough season over season, or even episode over 
episode in the same season, to warrant sustained close reading. Some worry 
that no single stretch of a series is on par with the quality of good film—
perhaps especially when