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Jacqueline Macri ’09 (Malvern, Pa.), a psychology major, is conducting undergraduate research through the College’s EXCEL Scholars program with Mary Jo Lodge, assistant professor of English, about the evolution of the television musical.
A few months ago, I sat in my dorm room watching and attempting to analyze the early 90s American musical TV series, Hull High – dubbed in Hungarian. However that scenario may appear to you, it was not a student’s last ditch efforts for procrastination with the help of the most obscure material on YouTube; this was a valiant attempt at EXCEL research on the history of television musicals.
For the past year, Professor Lodge and I have been scouring television archives for the elusive but persistent genre of the musical TV series, the constituents of which have popped up every decade or so. Defining the genre provided a weeding-out challenge at first, due to the massive amounts of variety shows and children’s series with music in them. We decided that a musical series (not a miniseries) would consist of music that drove a plot forward and was performed or acknowledged by the cast in some capacity on a consistent basis.
To our knowledge, there have only been about five programs since the 1960s show That’s Life that fit this description, but the genre has been on the rise recently, beginning with the short-lived Hugh Jackman series, Viva Laughlin. Since the most successful run for a musical series has been about two seasons, our goal has been to determine the effective elements of a thriving (or, for now, surviving) musical series in order to help define this unformed genre for those attempts to come.
Though the research is still developing, we found that the two-episode Laughlin – in which main characters sang and danced along to the radio – took itself far too seriously and had too few likeable characters to win over its viewers. Its BBC counterpart, Blackpool, seemed to recognize and celebrate its own folly, making the show endearing and the audience willing to embrace the break from reality.
In the meantime, as I work on my Hungarian, wait for the next musical series to air, and as we track down ABC’s obscure 1960s series, we will be exploring the trends in this inexperienced genre over time, hoping to make it easier for a new medium of entertainment to thrive.
This research is an example of Lafayette’s goal in its new strategic plan to provide students with more educational experiences focusing on the creative arts. As part of this focus, the College is considering the development of a unique interdisciplinary program in film and media studies.