unfolds over time. The rise of online criticism in the twenty-first century has drastically changed the terrain of television criticism, as sites like The A.V. Club and HitFix, as well as the online versions of print magazines like Time and Hollywood Reporter, feature regular coverage of many series, reviewing weekly episodes of new shows and returning to classic television series with critical coverage to inspire rewatching them. Noel Murray’s series “A Very Special Episode” at The A.V. Club is an example of such “classic television” criticism, featuring this tagline: “Sometimes a single TV episode can exemplify the spirit of its time and the properties that make television a unique medium.” This book shares that critical outlook, and an expanded version of Murray’s essay on “The Interview,” a M*A*S*H episode, was included in its first edition.
Despite the rise in robust television criticism in popular online sites, academics have been less involved in such discussions of the medium. While the histories of academic fields like literary studies, film studies, art history, and music include many critical analyses of specific works, television studies as a field features far less criticism of specific programs. In part this is due to the series nature of most television, as the boundaries of a “text” are much more fluid when discussing a program that might extend across months, years, or even decades. Additionally, television studies emerged as an academic field in the 1980s and 1990s under the rubric of Anglo-American cultural studies, an approach that emphasizes contexts over texts, and thus much of television scholarship is focused on understanding the industrial, regulatory, and reception contexts of the medium more than critical analyses of specific programs. Books examining a particular program do exist, but critical works in television studies more typically focus on a format or genre (reality TV), a decade (the 1960s), or a methodology or area of study (industry studies). There are exceptions to this, of course; online academic journals like FlowTV often feature short critical essays on particular TV series. But we believe that there is a crucial role for television scholars to use our expertise about the medium’s history, aesthetics, structures, and cultural importance to provide critical analyses of specific programs. Additionally, we want to see scholars writing for audiences broader than just other scholars, so we have commissioned shorter essays than typically found in an academic journal or book, and asked that they be written accessibly for students and a general readership.
While there is no single method employed by the dozens of authors found in this volume, most essays can be described as examples of textual analysis. The shared approach assumes that there is something to be discovered by carefully examining a cultural work, or “text”—in the case of this book’s topic, that means watching a television program closely. In some cases, the text might be a single episode or two; in others, the essay looks more broadly at a particular series, or multiple programs connected by a key thread. But in each case, the author uses a “close watching” of a program to make a broader argument about television and its relation to other cultural forces, ranging from representations of particular identities to economic conditions of production and distribution. The goal of such textual analysis is to connect the program to its broader contexts, and make an argument about the text’s cultural significance, thus providing a model for how you can watch television with a critical eye—and write your own works of television criticism.
A piece of television criticism, like the ones modeled in the rest of this book, can have a wide range of goals. Certainly all the book’s authors believe that watching television is an important and pervasive facet of modern culture, and that taking time to analyze programming is a vital critical act. Some authors are more invested in understanding television as a specific medium, with industrial and regulatory systems that shape its programming, and its own unique formal system of visual and aural communication that forge TV’s modes of storytelling and representation across a number of genres. Others regard television more as a window to broader social issues, whether by establishing norms of identity categories like gender or race or by framing political agendas and perspectives. These are not opposing perspectives, as television critics can think about the interplay between the medium itself and its broader context—indeed, every essay in this book hopes to shine a light on something about television itself as well as something broader within our culture, as we believe that knowing how to watch TV is a crucial skill for anyone living in our media-saturated world.
Of course, for many people reading this book, the idea of “watching television” might seem like an anachronism or a fossil from the previous century—what with so many electronic gadgets and “new media” surrounding us these days, why single out television? Television can seem to be an object from another era, quaint in its simplicity and functions. Such a response is the product of a very limited notion of what “television” is, and indeed, if you do think of TV as just a piece of furniture around which the family gathers each night, then there is something potentially outdated about television. However, television is (and always has been) more than just furniture, and now in our era of convergence among different technologies and cultural forms, there is more TV than ever. New or emergent forms of television work alongside the residual or “old,” and it’s important to remember that the majority of viewers still do most of their watching on traditional television sets. If we define the word “television” literally down to its Latin roots, it is often translated as “remote seeing.” By thinking about television not as furniture but as “remote seeing” (and hearing) of sounds and moving images from a distant time or place, we can recognize that so many of our new media interactions are new kinds of television that we integrate into our lives alongside the familiar and pleasurable uses of TV we’ve known for so long.
Rather than radically reconfiguring our uses of media culture, new technologies and media forms emerge and find a place among and alongside those forms that already exist; a medium might ebb and flow in popularity, but seldom disappears altogether. And one of the most important aspects of all forms of media engagement, whether watching on a television set or mobile phone, is that these forms of engagement become part of our everyday lives, adapting to our geographical, technological, and personal contexts. Moreover, while new technologies might enable some to claim that they do not watch television, we believe that people who say they don’t watch TV are either lying or deluding themselves. TV is everywhere in our culture and on many different screens, as we often watch television programs on our computers, or play videogames on our televisions. People who say they don’t watch TV are usually suggesting they don’t watch those kinds of TV shows that they assume less sophisticated viewers watch uncritically. But even as it gets reconfigured in the digital era, television is still America’s dominant mass medium, affecting nearly everyone.
A brief anecdote about the dual editors’ own media consumption practices while writing this introduction point to the role of television and other technologies in contemporary life. One of the editors of this book (Ethan) began writing the first draft of this introduction while watching a professional football game live via satellite television at a ranch in rural south Texas. The other editor (Jason) was at that very time travelling by train with his family across Europe, where they were watching Looney Tunes cartoons on an iPad. Ethan was watching a program via the latest digital high-definition TV technology, but in a highly traditional way—live broadcast to a mass audience sharing the same act of “remote seeing.” Certainly one of the great pleasures of watching televised sports, which remains one of the most popular and prevalent forms of television today, is the sense of communal participation in an event as it occurs, shared by viewers both within the same room and across the globe; this experience depends on liveness, even at the cost of watching commercials and boring bits that modern technologies like DVRs can easily bypass. As a fan, Ethan watches for the sense of participation in what is happening at the time—a case of old-fashioned remote seeing enabled by new technologies.
Jason’s experience is quite different, but still falls under the general category of “watching TV.” As his kids watched Looney Tunes on a European train, they embraced one of television’s long-standing primary functions: allowing children to see things beyond their personal experiences. This literally was “remote seeing,” as his kids were watching something from a distant time and place: Looney Tunes were created as animated shorts
