Throughout his television career, screenwriter and producer Russell T Davies has explored potential relationships between the spectacular intensity of epic storytelling and the intricate patterns of everyday life. This investment results in a synthesis of contrasting scales and dramatic tones as the extraordinary and grandiose become fused with the modest and familiar. Years and Years (2019) encapsulates Davies’ approach, as the cataclysmic events of an alternative near-future are given shape and meaning within the domestic context of a family’s commonplace existence. Emphasis is frequently placed upon slight, nuanced aesthetic features which come to express and encapsulate global tensions and traumas. This chapter explores the ways in which Davies builds up layers of meaning and significance through his evocation of the everyday in the epic, and the epic in the everyday. The discussion moves through earlier examples of Davies’ television work, tracing complementary and contrasting patterns across earlier programmes The Second Coming (2003) and his rebooted Doctor Who (2005– ). Attending to moments from the span of Davies’ career in this way reveals thematic coherence in his writing and, consequently, gestures towards a wider sense of his status as a television author. More specifically, however, Davies’ ability to consistently find dramatic potential in the balance between the epic and the everyday might also reveal his especially acute understanding of television itself, which is always small and domestic but also vast and unbound. In this way, Davies’ stories reveal and reinforce aspects of the medium, shaping narrative fiction to the television experience.
Epic / everyday: moments in television appraises an eclectic selection of programmes, exploring and weighing their particular achievements and their contribution to the television landscape. It does so via a simultaneous engagement with the concepts of the epic and the everyday. The book explores how both the epic and the everyday inform television’s creative practice as well as critical and scholarly responses to TV. It argues that a fuller consideration of these two modes can revitalise TV criticism and interpretation, enabling fresh perspectives on the value of television, its essential qualities and aesthetic significance. The contributors to this collection come from diverse areas of TV studies, bringing with them myriad interests, expertise and perspectives. All chapters undertake close analysis of selected moments in television, considering a wide range of stylistic elements including mise-en-scène, spatial organisation and composition, scripting, costuming, characterisation, performance, lighting and sound design, colour and patterning. The range of television works addressed is similarly broad, covering UK and US drama, comedy-drama, sitcom, science fiction and detective shows. Programmes comprise The Incredible Hulk, Game of Thrones, Detectorists, Community, Doctor Who, The Second Coming, Years and Years, The Americans, Columbo and Lost. Epic / everyday is essential reading for those interested in how closer attention to the presence of the epic and the everyday might enhance our critical appreciation and enjoyment of television.