A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere uses the premise of a pitch and the formula of Sitcom to deliver an essay on representation, self-presentation, viewership and embedded codes, as they exist on the American screen. All this, paced by commercial interruptions as Lessons, with the same stakes in hand.

Episode = Familiar Status Quo => Ritual error made => Ritual lesson Learned => Familiar Status Quo

You are watching a pitch, an essay, a trial. And though you are not specifically on trial, you are complicit; your complicity is what makes it work. “It” is television’s role as a mirror of our concerns, our moral commons, our public display of values. What you are watching begins and ends with the pitch: SHE MAD is a half hour comedy about what it means to be an adult against the backdrop of Los Angeles’ Creative Industry. It follows a young ambitious black woman, and her friends, as they try to create the lives they want and deal with the unrealistic goals that they, and society have set.

In A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere, Martine Syms uses the premise of pitching a new television sitcom in order to deliver an essay on the representation of Black Americans on the American household screen. The video opens on a split composition: on one side the narrator-character-director is facing you, though not watching you, she is cleaning-up her inbox which is on the other side of the screen, exposed. She is speaking to someone off-camera (you?). The video is POV of her smart-device and, in the tradition of the cold open, she will set up her name, job, interests, and location before the title sequence begins. All this information happens to be almost biographical for Syms. It is a show about a young woman living in Los Angeles, trying to make it as an artist, by a young woman living in Los Angeles making it as an artist.

“None of that Hollywood shit.”

Using the formula of a sitcom episode as scaffolding, A Pilot begins with an introduction, is cast of archetypical characters, is 22 minutes long plus commercial breaks, and ends where it began. The feature presentation combines low-resolution YouTube clips of historical and contemporary television shows, as well as low-fi live-action scenes shot by Syms. The commercial interruptions, also a mix of found and shot, are a separate body of work the artist calls Lessons, which have also been exhibited separately: the pilot/video-essay and the Lessons are two bodies of work, intertwined.

1. American Television

American television and film are debatably its largest and most ideology-laden exports. While most countries have their own local and culturally specific programing, the reach of US entertainment is staggering, especially when you consider that it is broadcasting an illustration of family life and personal relationships that is so profoundly, well, North American; and that the American family is an idea that has been shifting with each generation, and each administration, at a pace that other nations, with more deeply embedded family models, tend not to follow. Regardless, this entertainment industry has consistently used humor, broad strokes, lack of complexity or very selective complexity to create a paradigm, which the public can use as a mirror and a template to reflect / project, changing belief systems and national self- image. In conversation with Syms, she notes that for an American audience, television exerts a powerful pull and often acts as a kind of “proof.” If it happened on television, an event gains authority. Television is its viewers shared experience, it facilitates a publicly agreed upon “normal.”

The sitcom, short for “situation comedy,” is structured around this very idea of the common: It involves a reoccurring cast of types, who share a space or a circumstance, domestic or professional. In each episode the characters begin in status quo, are subjected to a plot, and then return to status quo. Nothing changes. Each iteration’s obstacle is topical and contained entirely in the allocated time. It is not repeated (as opposed to real life problems, which tend to be more, let’s say reoccurring.) Sitcom characters do not evolve; growing is more conducive to the nuanced narrative building of drama. Through consistency and by means of repetition, these characters enroot stereotypes.

In tracing sitcom history, Syms highlights the fraught and often violent history of black representation on the American screen, one that begins before the screen, with minstrelsy. Minstrel shows, which date back to the late 18th century, consisted of white actors wearing blackface makeup and performing their interpretation of black life at the time. Composed of a three-act structure mingling song, pun-filled speech, and skits, minstrel shows were riddled with racist stereotypes and stock characters. They are considered to be one of the first distinctly American forms of theater and embody the racism, oppression, and abuse at the root of North American culture.

A Pilot sketches sitcom evolution through three seasons of television. The first corresponds to the 1970-1971 years of The Mary Tyler Moore Showand Sanford and Son, when the sitcom became a vehicle for addressing gender taboos, or as Syms notes, gave “visibility to a private black sphere” previously largely unseen. Secondly, the 1988 television season marked the rise of the cable drama and the proliferation of black sitcoms like The Cosby Show and A Different world, which used the safe, lighthearted frame of the half-hour comedy to address big ticket issues such as racial stereotyping, sexism, and AIDS. Lastly, the 2006 television season which showcases baring-the-device shows, such as The Bernie Mac Show, a series by a comedian, about a comedian in which the narrator regularly breaks the fourth wall. This third era also marks the transition from the television set to computer screens. Viewers are now in control of what they are consuming, seeking it out actively, packaging their own experience. Watching actors perform themselves, goes hand in hand with a growing trend of the audience’s self-performativity.

2. Self-Performing / Twice-Behaving

Self-performing is second nature to the present-day citizen. Social media platforms allow us to curate our public image on a daily basis and on the air, because we are in control of not just the picture but also its distribution. We are a product in flux. In the opening of this video Syms, our narrator, establishes herself: she is facing us, she speaks to us, but as the video progresses she is followed by an array of other faces, confronting the camera as well, speaking directly into it at times, in a range of tones. “Each person featured on screen is a proxy for me,” says Syms in an interview. Like a stand-up comedian, she uses her life as a guide but weaves in “historical narratives and tropes from popular culture.” In the end, the voices all come together coherently but imply a collectivity that is indefinable by “style,” tone, or “brand.”

“Style schmyle.” says writer/painter Percival Everett in a recent interview when asked about his writerly-range. Storytelling is part of an economic system, and creating a fixed style or persona is a marketing exercise. Though in fact, the bold strokes of logo-making appear comparable to the historical archetypes we thought we were leaving behind. Pointedly, Syms’ fictional show is titled “SHE MAD,” recalling the angry black woman stereotype constructed by, amongst others, the early sitcom Amos 'n' Andy; a stereotype whose nefarious effects have included, over time, the delegitimizing the very real, very anger-provoking realities of a black woman’s experience in America.

The commercial breaks stress this range further through their non-sequitur collage of ideas and voices. Characters “question the value of representation;” watch television (creating an infinite regress of watching and being watched, of passively becoming the characters on screen.) They mock the manipulative selectiveness of advertising, telling us who the viewershould be through the carefully targeted products selected for this time-slot: “black soap,” power yoga, biz-lit, together paint a portrait of the viewer. Reversely at times, the commercials become a testing ground, a consumer survey, a focus group that is content-gathering with demographic-defining cues:

“Complete the following sentence:
-I am a person who…
-Ever since I was a child…
-It’s hard for me to admit…”

That there is more than one proxy in Syms’ A Pilot, stresses the artifice of the seemingly un- staged candid expressions, which are in reality, self-consciously staged, and come closer to what theater- critics call “twice-behaving” or performing a performance. Behaving, which implies etymologically to “be,” and to “have” hold of yourself independent of context, is of course, contextual. When asked how she would begin working with an artist, Maxine Powell, etiquette instructor and Motown Records Charm Coach, answered: “First, who are you and what makes you tick. [...] Then get rid of all your hang ups.” The rules of presentation for the Motown artists involved a kind of forgetting, a learning to present oneself within an existing and unemotional protocol. Behaving, not-behaving, performing, not-performing these are all questions Claudia Rankine’s characters contend with in her book Citizen, An American Lyric which recounts in vignettes, a collective set of everyday aggressions in the supposedly liberal landscape of American academia. Behaving in these vignettes implies following the script, performing, often with interior consequences. By extension, not-performing,not-behaving, is upsetting an existing ecosystem, this time with exterior consequences. “The study of blackness is inseparable from the study of performance.” Says Fred Moten, “Non-performance is a problematic of decor, of a refusal to decorate, to embellish tastefully.”

3. Audience / Codes

A “situation” implies a “commons” a commonality of experience. When asked about the “politics of identity” in her work, Syms responds “I think less about myself as a black artist than I do about making work for a black viewer. I think a lot about the ideal viewer / reader / listener / user, and how assumptions about who they are and what they want influence aesthetic choices in pop culture. I usually out myself in reference or language or appearance, but I see an opportunity to be vague about blackness, to refuse an identity by shifting focus from author to audience.” Creating an audience is creating a context, a scenario in which this discourse is no longer forced to be the discourse of “the other,” as artist Charles Gaines recently described to Syms in a conversation. A community is not just a geography and a blood-line, it is a collective history of connotations, a set of codes. Not to say that two (or more) different communities cannot watch the same content, but as Syms reminds you (the viewer of A Pilot) of the sub-content, the undertow of the narratives in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air “a secret hidden in plain sight, Will was not talking to you, he was talking to me.”

Syms’ intended audience in A Pilot is unreliable, just as she is an unreliable narrator. In one instance the audience is assumed to be in the know and references are unexplained. In another, she gives her audience an outsider’s breakdown. This uncertainty is key to watching A Pilot, nothing here is a given. In either case Syms is petitioning the viewer’s empathy: a layered read of the project, through layers that are intellectual as much as optical. Why do you watch what you watch? In the 2014 pilot for Black-ishthe voice-over narration opens, skeptically, “Whatever American had thisAmerican Dream probably wasn’t where I’m from.”

4. American Business

“Nobody ever told me that America is business and without business you will have nothing and be nothing, and nobody ever told me how to organize business so that I would be able to develop institutions in my own community. So now the sincerity, the sincerity, of all of the education has to be questioned, indicted and convicted.”

Though this pilot and its pitch are fictions, not intended for a real skewer of Hollywood execs, Syms’ role as an entrepreneur, and the entrepreneurialism implied in writing and pitching a pilot, is an important part of her practice as an artist. The mutual absorption of business into art and art into business is a conceptually interesting proposition to her. This particular kind of entrepreneurialism on-screen is empowered not only by creating watchable content but also by creating a community out of its viewers. Syms’ content is didactic in the most productive way: didactic and experiential, pointed while elliptical.

Syms’ choice of the sitcom as subject matter and structure is incisive. As Jack Halberstam reminds us in his introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive planning & Black Study “It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging [...] because this book is not a prescription for repair.” This disclaimer is petitioning for the provisional, for identifying not solving, as a radical place. A Pilot for a Show About Nowhereis not a prescription, but it is a series of lessons, embedded in a larger lesson, wrapped up in easy-watching, because one thing we certainly know how to do is watch. Watch this video, and then watch it again, and then watch it again.

Credits

Directed by Martine Syms
Edited by Marco Braunschweiler
Music by Anthony Iamurri