December 2013
Conflicts over “Family Room TV”
Hideaki Matsuyama
The purpose of this series is to revisit views on television written by TV producers, critics, or academic researchers at the “early” stage of television age (from 1953 to mid-1960s), in an effort to find clues for further discussions on the future of television, which is becoming more and more uncertain, by reviewing and summarizing what the past “television age” and “television society” were like. This part four of the series features “views on dramas.”
Early Japanese TV dramas slowly moved from “one-off dramas” to “serial dramas.” Although initial views on dramas were merely technical debates, they gradually developed into full-scale discussions by drama producers and critics, which later became the foundation of the golden age of avant-garde “one-off dramas.” Those discussions unfolded interacting with actual televised dramas, generating colorful views such as “television art theories,” which pursued expressions different from those of cinemas, and heated “debates over Ochanoma (family room) art” between producers and critics. However, discussions on TV dramas gradually waned from 1960 onward, influenced by the rapid spread of television sets which lead to the surge of entertaining “serial dramas.”
The first ten years of early debates were a quest for new expressions for dramas, which unfolded focusing on a new viewing style in the “family room,” or Ochanoma where family members watch television together sitting on a tatami floor. Those debates flourished in the past will surely add rich perspectives on contemporary views on dramas, which lost its influence on drama production quite a long time ago, and serve as a good reference for further discussions on the future of television that is experiencing another changes in the viewing style.