Television Studies

Jonathan Gray, Amanda D. Lotz

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509531813, 9781509531790
• eBook ISBN: 9781509531820
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Television Studies provides an overview of the origins, central ideas, and intellectual traditions of this exciting field.

What have been the primary areas of inquiry in television studies? Why and how did these areas develop? How have scholars studied them? How are they developing? What have been the discipline's key works?This book answers these questions by tracing the history of television studies right up tothe digital present, surveying emerging scholarship, and addressing new questions about the field's relationship with the digital.The second edition includes an examination of how internet-distributed services such as Netflix have adjusted the stories, industrial practices, and audience experience of television.

For all those wondering how to study television, or even why to study television, this newedition of Television Studies will provide a clear and engaging overview of key topics. The book works as a stand-alone introduction and, by placing key works in a broader context, can also provide an excellent basis for an entire course.

1
Programs

Television can command the attention of our eyes, ears, fears, and dreams as can few other sources. Despite the proliferation of competition from a variety of media, television is still arguably the key storyteller in the contemporary industrialized world. Where the medium was once surrounded by a more disapproving cultural aura, with many people fearing they watched “too much” television, the explosion of critically lauded programming in recent years now finds many people talking about “needing to catch up” and hence to watch more television. This explosion of content also means that we're by no means watching the same stories and receiving the same messages as one another, but a great deal of us are tuning in, streaming, or downloading on a daily basis. Between the news, advertisements, regular series, special event programming, broadcasted films, documentaries, and other programming, many of us are awash with stories and messages from television. And at some level or another, surely we all believe that these stories and messages matter, whether because some are beautiful, inspiring, and/or cause for reflection, or because they have another effect or role in our lives and the constitution of culture. Granted, we may not believe in the extremities of a “hypodermic needle” approach to media effects wherein television messages are imagined to be injected into a willing patient in need of direction. But surely everyone sees television as responsible for something, whether that something be the dominant political sentiment in a country, pervasive views on race, gender, class, and/or sexuality, what haircuts, fashions, and body shapes are attractive, what is important in life, or so forth. Given the role that television is perceived to play in constructing core beliefs in areas from the most crucial to the exceptionally trivial, and given its role in telling us stories and offering us information that matter to us, a key task for television studies is to examine these stories and this information. This chapter will explore various approaches for doing so.

Critical analysis of texts – the television programs themselves – is a central technique for helping us to unpack what this world of images, messages, and representations means. A wide range of motivations for studying television programming exists. For some scholars, television is interesting because they perceive it as an art form, and thus pick their objects of study with great selectivity, privileging “quality” and “depth.” As will be discussed, these scholars have often studied television shows to identify their formal and narrative components and to celebrate their artistry with others. If it's not “art,” they're not interested. Other scholars have little if any interest in a program's “artistry,” and they look upon a show as a collection of messages, ideas, and suggestions, with their task being to study those messages. After all, nothing that happens on television “actually” happens – everything is a (re)presentation of reality, or a construction of an alternate reality. Even programmers of nonfiction must edit, choose shots, and so forth, thereby still giving us a representation of reality, never the thing itself. As such, everything on television is an image of, play on, and/or a message about reality.

This chapter explores the various ways in which television programs have been studied, why these approaches developed, which have taken root in television studies, and what understanding they offer us of the medium and of society around it. First, though, this chapter will examine an oddity – namely, that while “close reading” and textual analysis are approaches developed in the western humanistic tradition as far back as Aristotle, television wasn't being read closely with any real rigor until well into the 1970s. We will then explore the sites from which television program analysis emerged, before working through a variety of ways that texts have been analyzed since, offering examples from the wealth of work in the field. We pay particular attention to ideological approaches – those that focus on programs’ messages regarding power differentials and identity constructions in society at large – as we will argue that this work forms the backbone of television studies’ encounter with programs. Attention to how social power is reinforced within television programs often, but not exclusively, distinguishes television studies from other “studies of television” that focus on programs. Finally, the chapter concludes with suggestions for what work remains to be conducted within television studies’ engagement with programs, especially in the current era.

Throughout, we will use the word “text” interchangeably with “program” or “show.” While some readers may have been conditioned to think of texts as books, “text” is the common term in the field. A text is any item of culture that users deem to have enough coherence to treat as a single object. So, for instance, a film is a text, as is a novel, a song, a poem, a comic book, a video game, a painting, a radio program, or, for our purposes, a television program. Textual analysis is a style of analysis developed in and across multiple disciplines with the aim of studying various types of texts, and hence it will often be important to draw from this wider discussion of how texts in general work, rather than talking of programs and shows alone. In Chapter 4, we will complicate the term and what counts as a text in television, thereby moving beyond this chapter's simplified notion of what a text is … but that is for that later chapter to explain.

Understanding the late arrival of close analysis

Despite the contemporary prevalence within television studies of close textual analysis of television programs and their images, dialogue, characters, and plots, very little such analysis of television existed until the 1970s. To explain how studies of television went from disregarding textual features to at times excluding consideration of all else requires a careful parsing of the many different approaches to textual criticism that are common in a variety of disciplinary settings. In fact, some might argue that textual analysis dominated much of television studies’ history. We would nuance this argument to suggest that textual analyses have been the most common approach to studies of television, and delimit much of this work as distinctive from the terrain and approach this book defines as television studies. Text alone is rarely enough for television studies, even if it is often the first port of call before embarking to context, audience, and/or industry. However, before exploring the various approaches of textual analysis that have emerged in the last fifty years, we should at first address their absence for several decades.

Upon the invention of television, a first force restricting the textual analysis of television from developing was the established dominance of social science methods for studying mass media such as radio and print. Industrially and in terms of use, television grew directly from radio. Thus, just as many radio programs transitioned from one medium to the other, so too did many research agendas regarding the effect of mass ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Short Introductions
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Still Television Studies?
• 1: Programs
• 2: Audiences
• 3: Industries
• 4: Contexts
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement