The changing spaces of television acting

Performing television history

“…Moreover, a focus on acting alone, such as in Alan Lovell and Peter Kramer’s (1999) collection, has underplayed television performance in comparison to cinema until Christine Cornea’s (2010) recent collection on the subject. That has led to a wave of new scholarship exemplified by new work such as Richard Hewett’s (2017) on acting in science fiction television and Cantrell and Hogg’s interviews with actors (2017) and collection of essays (2018). Television performance is a topic of intense interest at present, in which acting is being used as a key to questions of medium specificity.…”

Performing Sherlock: A study in studio and location realism

“…I have written elsewhere (Hewett 2013;2017) of the prominent role that production process plays in the shaping of television performances, and Holmes' UK television career conveniently spans the eras I have termed 'studio realism' and 'location realism'; from the multi-camera set-up of the 1960s episodes, through the single camera filming of the Granada programmes, and up to the HD techno-wizardry of the modern series. As will be seen, these three versions illustrate in various ways the chief characteristics of the models I developed in order to unpack the evolution of British television acting, which are briefly outlined below: These will now be applied to three televised versions of Doyle's novella The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)one of the most adapted stories in the Holmes canon.…”

Inter(acting)

“…Our expectations for what performance might achieve are shaped by this breadth, as television creates opportunities not only for change (important to genres as diverse as the drama serial and the makeover show) but also for sameness (a key feature of the long-running soap opera and central to the familiarity required for the presenter of a chat show). Given this especially wide context, it is encouraging to note an accumulating presence of work on performance and acting in TV scholarship over the last few years, with significant contributions from Simone Knox and Gary Cassidy in their blog series on CST Online ‘What Actors Do’, monographs by Richard Hewett (2017) and Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg (2017), as well as forthcoming edited collections: Exploring Television Acting (Cantrell and Hogg, 2018) and our own Television Performance (Donaldson and Walters, 2018). Taken together, these contributions give emphasis to the range of performance styles found across different genres of television and, furthermore, provide persuasive accounts of the ways in which compositional elements such as lighting, costume and set influence – and are influenced by – the work of the performer on screen.…”

“…In the most straightforward terms, television texts tend to be bigger and longer than films, though typically featuring less time and money for production, a fact that can place certain pressures on television performers who are often required to sustain their work across many hours of screen time, with little (or no) rehearsal time. With these particular professional conditions in mind, it is apt that scholarship on the context of television performance has sought to address the specificity of television acting through attention to actor experience and training (Cantrell and Hogg, 2017; Hewett, 2015, 2017; Pearson, 2010; Rawlins, 2012). We might see this focus similarly reflected in the work of Cassidy and Knox as they combine their close analysis of acting with knowledge of technique, drawing attention to the terminology of acting approaches – as in their discussion of Jennifer Aniston ‘acting off the line’ (2015b) – as well as to the work and skill invested by the actors under scrutiny.…”