9/5/2023 0 Comments Six feet under title sequenceThis article explores the title credits for a series of television shows that are best described as “complex TV” (Mittell). They can be consumed on YouTube decades after their original broadcast, to be revisited as a nostalgic, brief re-entry into a viewer’s past media consumption habits. Indeed, while credits mainly serve to author the text and perform a clear promotional function, they can also be viewed well after the intended promotional window, separate from the main text. In this article I replicate this interest and, in particular, I argue that the way television is being consumed should be taken into consideration when turning to objects such as title sequences, particularly through the nostalgic logic of streaming services and online sites such as YouTube, in which past consumption dictates future viewing recommendations. Her book makes the significant connection between memory and television-a connection that takes into account both the materiality of the televisual object and how television functions as a medium. Central to this article is Amy Holdsworth’s work on nostalgia and memory in television. Television shows often prompt discussions in the press around the prevalence of nostalgia in popular culture. These tropes are drawn upon in order to understand the relationship between individual and collective memories and nostalgia in highly stylised sequences. I am interested in particular in examining how photography and home video are used in titles to play with time and pastness. In this article, I explore constructions of pastness in title sequences through the evocation and reworking of the past through a nostalgic lens. David Johansson argues that by turning our attention to the title sequences we may get to the “heart” of the series (29). Although the show was set in the 1960s and 1970s, the nostalgic mode and mood (Grainge) of the series was established in its opening credits, which linked individual and collective histories.Opening sequences like these can create complex and multifaceted relationships to pastness and memory, in which objects of a generic, shared past are presented to audiences. The credits served to make the story of the Arnold family a familiar one the action depicted in the credits was sufficiently generic to belong to any family and, in particular, any American family. The excerpts presented all the aesthetic and rhetorical markers of home video: graininess, hand-held movement, the subjects waving to the camera, and a black frame. The footage was updated as the actors aged along with their characters. The American television series The Wonder Years (1988–1993) opened with fake home video of the main characters each week. The Wonder Years: Nostalgia, Memory and Pastness in Television Credits Kathleen Williams
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