Cult Television: Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard, and Cult Television - Jones and Pearson

Cult Television: Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard, and Cult Television

Patrick Stewart as Ebeneezer Scrooge

In December 1999, Patrick Stewart played Ebeneezer Scrooge in a Hallmark Entertainment version of A Christmas Carol.
Critics debated whether Stewart, known as Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek, could be convincing as Scrooge.
Some critics found it hard to separate Stewart from his role as Picard, attributing similar qualities to both characters.
One critic, John Carman, felt that Stewart couldn't escape the ghost of Jean-Luc Picard, missing the essential meanness of Scrooge.

Conflation of Actor and Character in Television

John Ellis suggests that television may encourage the conflation of actor and character more than cinema because TV performers appear regularly in a series, and their images circulate in newspapers and magazines.
This leads to a reduction in the distance between the circulated image and the performance, equating the performer's image with the fictional role.
Cult television may equate actor and character even more than other television fictions.
Ellis asserts that television tends to produce personalities rather than stars, but cult television program actors meet his definition of a star.
The process that turns cult television program actors into stars also makes it difficult for the actors to escape the characters they embody.
Subsidiary forms of circulation of cult television stars privilege the character over the actor, whereas the subsidiary forms of circulation of film stars privilege the actor over the character.
With film stars, the fictional figure is 'to one side' of the star's general image, whereas with cult television stars, the fictional figure overlaps the star's general image.

Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard

Patrick Stewart's association with Star Trek has made him one of the central icons of perhaps the central cult television phenomenon.
Stewart played Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) and in four feature films.
The modes of production, distribution, and reception characteristic of cult television ensure that Patrick Stewart is, to most people, Jean-Luc Picard and nothing else at all.
Paramount/Viacom uses its flagship franchise to maximize profits across all divisions.
Paramount's publishing subsidiary Simon and Schuster has published literally hundreds of Star Trek novels, with Jean-Luc Picard, a k a Patrick Stewart, appearing on cover after cover.
Paramount also publishes or authorizes the publication of Star Trek magazines that frequently contain pictures of Picard/Stewart and interviews with Stewart about Picard and Star Trek.
Paramount licenses products ranging from mugs to T-shirts to calendars to action figures, many of which display the features of Picard/Stewart.
Cult programs recycle endlessly, with local stations and satellite channels striping the syndicated episodes and producers distributing videos for rental and sell-through.

Mode of Reception and Fan Products

Cult television programs approximate what Roland Barthes dubbed "readerly texts," creating complex alternative realities and encouraging intense engagement with the fictional world.
This results in devoted fans producing their own, homemade products, ranging from videos to short stories to Web sites.
The vast majority of fan products focus on the characters rather than the actors, with fan fiction being emblematic in this regard.
Star Trek Web sites and newsgroups provide access to literally thousands of stories starring Jean-Luc Picard, but rarely ones starring Patrick Stewart.
The rarity of actor-centered fan fiction stems in part from the realist writing mode practiced by most fan writers.
The best of the character-centered stories display a full knowledge of the protagonists’ inner lives, predicated on the accumulated data of the entire run of a series.

Stewart's Post-Star Trek Career

Patrick Stewart's identification with Jean-Luc Picard is a prime exemplar of the extreme entanglement between actor and character produced by cult television programs.
In Stewart's case, this entanglement has not precluded a very active and successful post–Star Trek career.
Stewart deliberately selected his first post–Star Trek role (that of Sterling, the flamboyantly camp interior designer in Jeffrey) to take him "as far away as possible from Captain Picard, science fiction and ships of any kind.”
Stewart used some of his post–Star Trek television appearances to work against his associations with Captain Picard, such as hosting Saturday Night Live and guest-voicing on The Simpsons.
In addition to establishing himself as an actor in “quality” television, Stewart has ascended rapidly to the upper echelons of American theatrical actors since The Next Generation ceased production in 1994.
GQ recognized Stewart’s increasing centrality to the American theatrical scene by selecting him as its man of the year in the theater in 1998.

Comparison to Other Actors

Such an active and cross-media career is quite unusual for an actor who achieved fame in a cult television show.
Some television actors, e.g., George Clooney, manage to parlay their small-screen stardom into large-screen stardom, but many more try and fail.
It is even rarer for actors in cult television programs to forge successful post-cult careers.
William Shatner will forever and always be Captain James T. Kirk and nothing else at all.
A better comparison with Stewart might be Diana Rigg who, after playing Mrs. Peel in the British program The Avengers in the 1960s, went on to other television, film, and theater work.

Breaking Free from Picard

Ellis’s analysis of television stardom may help us to understand how Stewart has managed to some extent to break free of Picard.
Ellis believes that the “creation of stars is impossible in broadcast TV (which fosters personalities).”
Television stardom is impossible because the medium’s actors do not maintain that tension between ordinariness and extraordinariness first discussed by Richard Dyer in his pioneering book, Stars.
Dyer postulated that film stars are simultaneously ordinary and special.
Ellis postulates that the television performer is just like you and me, since she or he “exists . . . in the same space as the television audience, as a known and familiar person rather than a paradoxical figure, both ordinary and extraordinary.”
David Marshall is in basic agreement with Ellis’s analysis: “Whereas the film celebrity plays with aura through the construction of distance, the television celebrity is configured around conceptions of familiarity.”
Three factors reduce the aura of the television celebrity: the domestic nature of television viewing, the close affinity of the celebrity with the organization and perpetuation of consumer capitalism, and “the shattering of continuity and integrity of character that takes place through the interspersal of commercials in any program.”

Stewart's Uniqueness

Patrick Stewart is in several respects neither ordinary nor familiar in the context of American television.
It was extraordinary for a British actor to be given the central role in an American television program.
It was extraordinary for a long-term member of the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company to play the lead in a science fiction series.
It was extraordinary for a bald, middle-aged man to become a sex symbol.

Factors in Stewart's Casting

Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman took a considerable risk in choosing Stewart to play their captain.
American television producers generally rely on American actors with American television experience.
Stewart came to Star Trek from a lengthy career on the British stage, where he had played a wide variety of Shakespearean and other roles.
While Stewart’s nationality strongly militated against his being cast as The Next Generation’s captain, the actor’s Englishness, which constitutes a highly salient element of his star image, may have aided his attempts to break free of Picard.
Stewart has starred in three productions for Hallmark Entertainment, drawing heavily on the quality connotations of the actor’s well- known associations with the British stage in general and the Royal Shakespeare Company in particular.

Stewart's Englishness

For Americans, Stewart’s nationality, as signaled by his accent, distinguishes him from other performers, thereby expanding the range of roles for which he is suitable.
Stewart believes that speaking Received Pronunciation English provides him “with a neutral base.”
Listeners recognize the actor’s drama school inflections as well as the occasional Yorkshire undertone, but in the United States his accent carries distinct connotations, identifying the speaker as “cultured” and “upper-class.”
Stewart’s accent reinforces his cultural cachet, a product branding that might benefit the actor in an American market that still values British imports.
It also creates a rather unusual tension between actor and character, because Star Trek fans often speculate as to why the supposedly French Jean-Luc Picard speaks like a tony Brit.

Shakespearean Background

Stewart’s Englishness relates to another very salient aspect of his star image, the fact that he was an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company for more than two decades before transferring to Starfleet.
From the very first, Star Trek made much of its star’s Shakespearean background, both in publicity and in the primary text itself.
During the first season, a sign on Stewart’s Paramount trailer read “unknown Shakespearean actor,” and Stewart has often spoken of connections between Shakespeare and Star Trek.
Captain Picard kept a copy of the Globe Shakespeare on permanent display in his ready room and traded Shakespearean quotes with the omnipotent entity Q in the episode “Hide and Q.”
The Next Generation’s Shakespearean references served diegetic and nondiegetic functions.
In the fictional world, they helped define the character of Jean-Luc Picard as a cultured and civilized man.
In the “real” world they reinforced an aspect of the star’s image, reminding viewers that the actor still retained the cachet of a higher cultural form.

Cult Television and Control

Paradoxically, the very characteristics of cult television that create such tremendous overlap between character and actor also permitted Stewart to foreground the Shakespearean associations that would prove crucial in his post–Star Trek career.
Television producers wish to retain their lead actors throughout the run of a program, since the viewers’ strong identification with the characters is crucial to the success of a series.
Such strong viewer identification gives a certain power to the lead actors in cult television programs.
Producers, realizing that these actors face the potentially stultifying boredom of playing the same role week after endless week, grant them a degree of control over both story lines and dialogue.

Influence on Star Trek

Stewart talked “every day to [executive producer] Rick Berman about the scripts. And he was always tremendously supportive of what I was trying to do, encouraging.”
Stewart’s involvement in the production process meant that any scene of any substance that he played throughout the seven years would somewhere in it some tweakings or fine tunings from me.
The holodeck, the virtual reality computer program, gave Stewart the chance to lecture about Shakespeare to millions of viewers who might never attend a theatrical performance.

Stewart's Sex Appeal

As we have seen, “Englishness” and “Shakespeareanness” form key elements of Patrick Stewart’s star image, both making him extraordinary relative to other performers in American cult television, but from the actor’s own perspective the most extraordinary element of his image may be his widely discussed sex appeal.
Ellis says, “[T]he star is at once ordinary and extraordinary, available for desire and unobtainable,” but argues that television reduces “the extraordinariness of its performers, and their status as figures of an equivocal attraction and identification by viewers both male and female.”
Poster's expectation of becoming tongue-tied and swooning contradicts Ellis’s and Marshall’s assertions that the domestic nature of television renders its stars familiar and ordinary.

Summary

This essay has sought to show:

Cult television’s modes of production, distribution, and reception have conflated actor Patrick Stewart with character Jean-Luc Picard to a greater degree than usual even on television.
Nonetheless, Stewart has managed to some extent to free himself from Picard.
It is Stewart’s extraordinariness in the realm of American television with regard to his Englishness, Shakespeareanness, and sexiness that has opened up a distance between him and his fictional alter ego.

Therefore, contra both Ellis and Marshall, ordinariness and familiarity does not, in all cases at least, account for television’s conflation of actor and character.
Patrick Stewart is both conflated with his character and extraordinary.

The Logic of Capitalism

In the last two months of 1998, disparate and conflicting representations of Stewart circulated simultaneously.
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan approached the end of its initial off-Broadway run, while Dreamworks Studios and Paramount shifted their respective publicity machines into high gear for two major film releases, The Prince of Egypt and Star Trek: Insurrection.
Dreamworks publicity invoked the British actor image since The Prince of Egypt followed a long-standing tradition of casting Brits as the bad guys in historical films.
Paramount’s intense publicity spotlighted Stewart’s cult television connections, casting the other images into the shadows.
Paramount’s publicity and marketing juggernaut ensured that during late 1998 at least, Patrick Stewart was, if not Jean-Luc Picard and nothing else at all, primarily Jean-Luc Picard.