A World in Retreat: The Reconfiguration of Hybridity in 20th-Century New Zealand Television

Abstract

The blurring of formerly distinct contents is a much-noted feature of contemporary television. By focusing on the development of reality TV, interpreters have misconceived both the complexity of these hybridizations and the novelty of their current forms. Analysis of 20th-century New Zealand television reveals a range of hybrid types whose relative standing has changed over time. Post-war contents were dominated by fiction and by hybrid forms that maintained a distinction between reference and invention. The late 1970s, however, saw the advent of hybridizations that identified fiction with fact. During the 1990s this identification was generalized to televisual discourse through a sharp decline in fiction levels and the ascendance of a new cross between fact and advertisement, the infomercial. Over the course of the 20th century, hybridity moved from the conventional sense of a transformable world to fatalistic and unimaginative cultures of self-improvement.