1. FISKE
TELEVISION CULTURE
Chapter 9 – Reading Character
“television is centrally
concerned with the
representation of people”

2. Overview of Theory
– Representation in TV drama is different to that in Film and News
due to the formal conventions of TV drama:
• series & serials / mid shots, close ups, 2 and 3 shots to establish
identities and camera movement to focus on individuals
– The actors become physical embodiments of the characters they
play (can be difficult to distinguish between the actor and
character) and blur reality
– The repeated representation of the characters invites audience
members to identify with the different characters
– Which characters we identify with will depend on our own social
and cultural experience and background
– This process of identification surpasses TV representations as
simply ideological (repressive dominant ideology) and allows
active audience participation
• Audiences make meaning from their reading of characters based upon
their own individual experience – do they identify with the
characters? Are they like them or different to them?

3. Idea 1
TV audiences have unique relationships with the
representation of characters compared to other Media forms
due to the structure of TV series, stylistic conventions and
developed familiarity with a programme’s characters:
“the constant repetition of a character means that characters “live” in
similar time scales to their audience. They have a past, a present and a
future that appear to exceed their textual existence, so that audience
members are invited to relate to them in terms of familiarity and
identification…this offers the viewer a quite different relationship to the
character from that offered by film, where the end of the film is normally
the end of the character.”

4. Idea 2
“The representation of characters in TV drama is a complex form of
representation” for it is constructed by:
– the text (use of mid shots, close ups, two and 3 shots etc…)
– the narrative (role of the character in the way the plot develops)
– the body of the player (what the actor looks like), and
– The performance of the actor.
“Reading character requires the viewer to negotiate…that boundary
between the representation and the real and the ideological
relationship between them”
• This negotiation must be conducted in two ways:
1. the relationship between the real world of the player and the
represented one of the character and
2. the real world of the viewer and that of the character /player they
watch

5. Idea 2 model
Constructed Representation by the writers & producers
THE CHARACTER
Physical Stereotypical Social values &
appearance individual ideology
of actor characteristics embedded in
playing the of represented representation
character character of the character
Audience Readings of Representation
(different viewers can identify with any or all of these 3 aspects of construction – this aids polysemic readings)

6. Idea 3
TV audiences are invited to see characters as ‘real’.
Individual characters are given some stereotypical
characteristics, they may be like someone we know or
have known and we gain pleasure from seeing how they
experience their ‘lives’:
“Realism proposes that a character represents a real person.
The text provides us with adequate pointers to the
characteristics of the person being portrayed: we, the
viewers, then call upon our life experience of understanding
real people…to fill out the characteristics in our imagination
so that we make the character into a “real” person whom we
“know” and has a “life” outside the text”

7. Idea 4
Characters in TV drama are read as individuals but also the representation of social positions and the
values embodied in them. Audiences are made up of different people with different viewpoints so
how they read a representation of young people will depend on their own experience of young
people.
“understanding of character is polysemic…a character is a set of values that are related
through…similarity and difference to other characters.
“Many viewers report that one of the main sources of the pleasure of television is the
opportunities it offers to identify with certain other characters, to share their emotions
and experiences…Imagining how he or she would have behaved had they been in a
character’s shoes at a particular moment *is+ an active identification that has the
reader sharing the role of the writer.”
“The viewer is less a subject of the dominant ideology and more in control of the
process of identification through his or her own meanings. Finding pleasure in TV is
connected to liking and disliking…the real and unreal. *Audiences+ judge characters on
how real they seemed but the characters they like appear more real than those they
dislike”
Refer back to the ‘idea 2’ model on slide 5 – this shows how different audience members can identify
with different aspects of a character’s representation and polysemic readings can therefore be formed

8. Idea 5
Any viewer may find in her / himself a number
of points of relationship with the personal /
social and ideological values seen in any
character:
“A viewer implicates him / herself with a character when that
character is in a similar social situation or embodies similar social
values to the viewer, and this implication offers the reward of
pleasure. They allow space for the viewer to read character and
incident as bearers of social value and thus to negotiate readings
that relate to his or her social position