Discussion so far has centered on films, but I think the unreliable narrator is a comparatively frequent fixture on television. The decisive aspect of unreliable narration, after all, is a sudden exposure of the taken-for-granted rules of the diegetic world, rules which retrospectively prove to be mistaken or inadequate. Previously accepted chains of cause-and-effect, unproblematically recognized agents, even assumed spatial and temporal relationships may suddenly be up for reconsideration. Television promotes ambiguities in all these constructed identities, to the degree that its structure as a series of episodes requires continual revisitation and reconstruction of a presumedly, but never wholly, continuous diegesis. Many action-adventure shows and situation comedies, especially if they become popular, have special, celebratory episodes in which the usual rules are suspended, and "normally" impossible situations or relationships are explored. (I'm thinking, for example, of THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW episode which ended by suggesting that all Rob's friends were really aliens with eyes in the back of their heads.) The discontinuity between episodes--even between segments on different sides of a commercial--provides a recurrent formal occasion for such narrational unreliability. (Of course, some shows "do" more with this unreliability, while most--LAW AND ORDER, say--try to contain unreliability.) It seems to me that the question of a narrator's reliability is also related to viewers' conventional expectations, and thus to genre. Generic recombination may intensify the reliability of the narrator through a kind of narrative "overdetermination" (as in Mel Brooks' comedy), but, when different kinds of generic logic overlap and interact, it may also unseat usual generic certainties about the nature of the diegetic world (as on X FILES). Television, as a medium especially susceptible to generic recombination, invites considerable unreliability of this kind. (This emphasizes, as does Booth, that unreliabile narrators, like any other narrators, are constructions, implied authors. In the case of genre, viewers' expectations become active components, not just in the diegetic, but in the constitution of the narrator.) The most aggressive unrealiable narrator from television that I know is that of TWIN PEAKS. On that show, different theories of causality, and the forces on behalf of which different characters are acting, are casually intermixed, complicated, even contradicted from one moment to the next. (Remember Kyle McLaghlan's FBI agent, presumably the harbinger of scienctific law and order, becoming a zen dart-thrower to decide among possible mystery solutions? This alongside story lines right out of Peyton Place and Nightmare on Elm Street.) In fact, I think the show's diminishment in popularity and critical interest was precisely due to such narrational unreliability, which began to seem random, rather than suggestive and revelatory. Northern Exposure is a program in which the logic of coincidence and cause and effect are routinely and pleasurably disfigured too, and the viewer is thus invited to expect an expanded range of possiblities whose limits are not entirely clear. The unreliability here is sunny, not pathological as on Twin Peaks. (Perhaps one would say that the sunniness or the pathology they show are reliabilities. Does this, then, in Booth's classification, make individual episodes wholly reliable? I don't think so. Instead, it asks one to consider what degrees or dimensions of unreliability can be posited.) Another Falsey and Brand show, ST. ELSEWHERE, made much of discovered allegorical details, which lent an unexpected, retrospectively revelatory, almost magical realist dimension to events. And then, of course, there is any anthology show, which brings diverse narrations together under some rough rubric--an institutionalized unreliable narrator, whose unreliability serves a central commodity: the novelty of each new week. Perhaps individual episodes of such shows are too discontinuous to talk about a single narrator--though there was always Alfred Hitchcock or Dick Powell striving to offer tongue-in-cheek (unreliable?) continuity. (Talk of the anthology raises the example of a show whose individual episodes displayed heroically perverse unreliable narrators--THE TWILIGHT ZONE.) Writing these comments (I'm spurred on because these are arguments I make in my undergrad TV crit classes) makes me realize that, for me, the unreliable narrator is frequently tied to metaphysical irony. Does this make sense to others? Does anyone know any other "uses" for unreliable narration? ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]