Television shows – from Nashville to The Fall to Springwatch – are often peppered with in-jokes, puzzles and pop culture references. But do we get them?
Viewer’s of Nashville, More4′s imported country-music soap, will expect ripe melodrama from the season one finale. Its conflagration of emotional tangles and record company wrangles is sure to be, well, like a country song. It’s even named after one: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. That title – also the name of the final single released by tragic country legend Hank Williams in 1953 – suggests something really heavy. But only to those who care to look it up; typically for such TV dramas, the title doesn’t appear on screen. It’s one for the writers – and the hardcore who supplement their enjoyment by consulting online episode guides.
They will already know that each of Nashville’s last 20 episodes is titled after a Hank tune, just as jazzbos will recognise the song titles applied to all 31 eps of HBO’s New Orleans-set Treme. Whether self-indulgence or supplementary benefit, this music-themed “extra” is a benign instance of the multitextual modern TV experience.
It’s puzzle-book stuff next to the existential paper trail left by more highfalutin dramas such as Mad Men (Sally’s reading Rosemary’s Baby! Megan’s wearing the same top as Sharon Tate! What does it all mean?) and Breaking Bad (the episode titles in season two actually formed a clue, “Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ”, although that’s only a spoiler if you know the question).
But can an ingenious authorial in-joke tip into uninvited distraction? Followers of BBC2′s high-quality Northern Irish crime hit The Fall may have rumbled writer Allan Cubitt’s frankly spectacular wheeze of naming the bulk of his characters after guitar manufacturers. (I can’t take any credit for spotting this; circa episode four, eagle-eyed guitarist Tim Maple told a friend-of-a-friend, Jim, who tweeted it.) Cubitt’s principals were detective Stella Gibson, named after the blues guitar maker founded in New Jersey and the manufacture of the iconic Les Paul, and killer Paul Spector – Les Paul again, and the New York electric bass specialist. Gibson’s boss is Jim Burns, after James Ormston Burns, known as “the British Fender”; bent cop Rob Breedlove is named after the 90s-founded Oregon maker; and on it goes … Eastwood, Kay, Martin, McCurdy, Ferrington.
I asked Cubitt what his motivation was. Though a self-professed collector of vintage guitars, it was never a guessing game. “It’s a way of ensuring that the names have meaning for me,” he says. “There’s a hidden power in a name, and when you get them right – Don Draper, Tony Soprano – they really resonate.”
He concedes such elaborate conceits are risky; they can take the viewer out of the carefully constructed fiction – or factual subject. Another music lover, wildlife presenter Chris Packham, has his traditional spot-the-song-title game on Springwatch and Autumnwatch. But after three days of this season’s deftly woven Clash titles (Hitsville UK, Complete Control, Career Opportunities, even obscure album track Drug Stabbing Time in a piece about mating snails), I had to tune out. (As a side note, More4′s ace legal potboiler The Good Wife began its fourth season with consecutive titles from a song covered by the Clash, I Fought the Law and And the Law Won, but the punk allusions stopped there.)
There’s a fabled episode of The Bill from 2004 in which writer Matt Leys named four minor characters after the lineup of Scots janglers Teenage Fanclub (Norman Blake, Gerard Love, Ray McGinley, Paul Quinn). This was, literally, one for the fanclub, and unlikely to spoil the cops-and-robbers action for the uninitiated. Hats off to TV Burp writer Daniel Maier for cracking that particular case.
Do you have any favourite instances of metatextual teasers on TV that you’d like to share with the class?