"Bespoke" Suits? Yes. "Bespoke" TV? That's New.
Writing for Vulture, New York Magazine television critic Matt Zoller Seitz called new, freer-form series "bespoke TV."
Bespoke means "custom-made," and it generally refers to clothing. Think: highly tailored, as in the look of a Don Draper suit. Bespoke's blurb in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary points out that:
The term was originally bespoken, meaning "spoken of or arranged beforehand," [and that] the man in the bespoke suit is likely to be either the best-dressed or the most overdressed person at your backyard barbecue.
However, as Vocabulary.com lexicographer Ben Zimmer tells us in a column for The Wall Street Journal, bespoke's meaning has been shifting. "Nowadays, you’re just as likely to hear 'bespoke' as a label for a luxury car, an audio system, a piece of jewelry or even high-end baked goods. In tech circles, 'bespoke' describes a custom-designed approach to software development." Shira Ovide, also for The Wall Street Journal, tracks down bespoke crackers, SAT tutoring, and even salads.
It's that newer, freer understanding of bespoke Seitz invokes with "bespoke TV," which he defines several different ways throughout the piece:
This fertile second phase in TV’s new golden age has taught us that the only rule is that there are no rules and that the final creative frontier is form.
Greater latitude for structural daring…
[An] anything-goes approach to storytelling…
Rubik’s Cube storytelling [that] would’ve been unthinkable ten years ago.…
The difference between a boutique confectioner’s kitchen and an M&M factory.
Perhaps his use of bespoke is putting the faddish, posh quality of the word behind, instead creating a new sense that bespoke = art.
It’s taken an unconscionably long time for American TV to learn that one size does not fit all, but this lesson won’t be unlearned. From now on, the size and shape of television’s boxes will vary depending on what’s inside, and some containers won’t look like boxes at all. Considering that the word television has been morphing as well, this seems only fitting. The box once referred to the device whose squarish screen delivered all manner of programming. Now it refers to a particular set of expectations for storytelling. You can watch the stories on a 60-inch wall-mounted plasma-screen television, a desktop computer, an iPad, or an iPhone. We still call it “television” mainly to distinguish it from movies, which are generally more self-contained, though theatrical films have increasingly taken their storytelling cues from TV (and from comic books, where dense and endlessly rebootable stories have been the norm for 70 years). Television is becoming a medium in which function follows form. There’s a word for work like this, made in an atmosphere of excitement and freedom: art.
So maybe the vocabularian's shiver reading Seitz's essay shouldn't come so much from the rare and exciting word bespoke as much as from the rare and exciting word…television. Hold on to your hats, bespoke as they may be.