“Inter-Inner-Personal Archives: Pandemic-Induced Introspection and Television Studies (A Dialogue)”

Abstract

The way we do television studies changes with ongoing innovation; digital media and successive phases of subscription pay TV have complicated our work for the better. Additional contextual complexity in TV delivery, and the related notion of TV as a medium in perpetual identity crisis, contribute to experiences especially vivid in terms of pandemic pressures. This essay shares our collaboration from the Summer of 2020 through January 2021. We synthesize email correspondence and our many Zoom meetings discussing pandemic-inflected topics including sitcom redistribution and sports, weaving these conversations into an “inner-personal archive” combining individual history and notes on experience with in-depth television criticism. The essay explores how we as television scholars refer to the archive, and how we relate to archives that are becoming subsumed into the digital. It uses a conversational format to deconstruct, decolonize, and demonstrate the process of narrating the archive, capturing our struggle to grasp recent changes in television viewing while overwhelmed with loss, betrayal, and pain.