Table Of ContentTELEVISION STUDIES:
THE KEY CONCEPTS
2ND EDITION
Nowinitssecondedition,TelevisionStudies:TheKeyConceptsincludes
close to 100 entries and is fully updated with case studies from new
media to illustrate the latest developments in the field. New coverage
includes:
(cid:2) New Media (convergence, interactivity, web tv)
(cid:2) Lifestyle Television
(cid:2) Talk shows
(cid:2) Ethnicity
(cid:2) Melodrama
(cid:2) History of Television
This A-Z guide is thoroughly cross-referenced and contains examples
from television in the US as well as in the UK. Further reading and
an extensive bibliography make for some lively engagement with the
latest issues. Readers will find much to carry them forward in this
fast-paced and fascinating subject area.
Bernadette Casey, University College Plymouth, St Mark & St
John.
Neil Casey, University College Plymouth, St Mark & St John.
Ben Calvert, University of Gloucestershire.
Liam French, University College Plymouth, St Mark & St John.
Justin Lewis, Cardiff University.
RELATED TITLES
TV Studies: The Key Concepts, 1st edition
Bernadette Casey, Neil Casey, Ben Calvert, Liam French, and Justin Lewis
Sept 2001
Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd edition
Susan Hayward
June 2000
Reading Television
Fiske and Hartley
1978
TELEVISION STUDIES
The Key Concepts
2nd edition
Bernadette Casey, Neil Casey,
Ben Calvert, Liam French,
& Justin Lewis
Firstpublished2008
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CONTENTS
Introduction to 2nd edition vi
Acknowledgements xii
List of concepts xiii
KEY CONCEPTS 1
Bibliography 308
Index 330
v
INTRODUCTION
TO 2ND EDITION
Even though a couple of generations have grown up with it, televi-
sion is still a comparatively new medium. Even in the context of the
authors’ own lives we have a lucid sense of its novelty. Some of us
dimly remember a single channel of British television. Most of us
recollect just two channels. Virtually all of us can recall black and
white television. And every one of us can remember the advent of
the video-cassette recorder, even if we never did master the knack of
setting it for when we were going out. The terrain continues to alter
dramatically, with a mushrooming of channels, interactive viewing,
DVDs, on-demand viewing, internet protocol television (broadband
TV) and other innovations that tax our imaginations. Soon, we may
even be able to watch TVon the move through our mobile phones.
Some of these are developments that have occurred since we wrote
the first edition of this book. They have made the production and
consumption of television very different. Digitisation allows for
greater choice and flexibility in viewing schedules and for the indi-
vidualisation of content. The days of the whole family sitting on the
sofa watching together are, if not ended, probably numbered.
Just as television is comparatively new so is its study. However,
neither ‘society’ nor the academy agrees even that it should be stu-
died (Allen 2004). In the UK, the media itself regularly sneers at the
availabilityof media degrees with the studyof television at their core,
while a small but persistent minorityof individuals boast that they do
not possess television sets, signalling the extreme end of the anxiety
surrounding the cultural legitimacy of watching television (Brunsdon
1998). Where television has been a topic of scholarly inquiry, this has
not necessarily been undertaken in ‘television studies’ or even media
studies departments but in those of, among other disciplines, sociol-
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INTRODUCTIONTO2NDEDITION
ogy, literature and economics (Allen 2004). It has often been carried
out despite a disapproval in some quarters. Bonner (2003) suggests
that the majority of the television schedule – what she calls ‘ordinary
television’ – was often neglected by studies of television lest a focus
on more ‘lightweight and ephemeral’ kinds of text detract from the
gravity required by the academy at large. Its impetus also owes much
to fears about the significance and effects of television rather than
intellectual interest. Nonetheless, over the last three or four decades
television studies has emerged as a bona fide subject area across Eng-
lish-speaking nations (reflecting the global dominance of television in
the English language). It is worth, therefore, tracing its development
as an area of studyand also the characteristics of its brief which sets it
apart from other media such as cinema, radio and newspapers.
Much early work was stimulated by diverse anxieties about the
effects and influences of television viewing (Corner 1999). It has
been blamed for encouraging violence and sexual promiscuity, for
lowering educational standards, for influencing political opinions and
for ‘doping’ passive viewers incapable of resisting television’s narcotic
power. As Allen (2004) notes, the moral panic has moved on to video
games, misogynistic rap lyrics and other media forms, but a fear of,
and distaste for, television clearly shaped its study. Many early studies
adopted a quantitative social scientific perspective aimed at solving
‘the problem’ of television. Others drew from a literary heritage in
subjecting television to cultural criticism in the form of textual ana-
lysis. Reflecting roots in art and literary criticism, the focus here was
on ‘quality’ television, often that associated with particular writers,
rather than television in its full and growing variety.
Butfromthe1970sand1980sitispossibleto seetheemergenceof
a steadily recognisable ‘field of inquiry’ which, despite roots in the
study of film, literature and the press, centres on television, explores
key debates, and uses particular, shared theories, concepts and meth-
ods (Brunsdon 1998). This is not to imply that the field remains
static – as will be seen, the technological, economic, political and
cultural changes which television has prompted and followed mean
that television studies is necessarilya vibrant, dynamic area of study –
but there is an identifiable foundation to its intellectual inquiry.
Various reasons for the growth of television studies have been
proffered, foremost among them the maturation of a first generation
of scholars who had grown up with television as their major infor-
mation and entertainment medium (Allen 2004). But others focus on
the developing recognition that television was, and remains, a specific
medium.Most obviously,no other mediaform hasattained thescope
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INTRODUCTIONTO2NDEDITION
and ubiquityof television. In more developed societies virtuallyevery
household possesses at least one television, with ownership of a set
per member becoming increasingly commonplace. Television view-
ing has become a dominant leisure activity for the majority of the
population, with some data suggesting that each individual in the UK
watches television, on average, for nearly three hours a day, while in
the USA research has suggested that sets may be on for an average of
seven hours (Macionis and Plummer 2002). Although ownership in
Asia and Latin America lags behind comparatively, these continents
andAfricahavealreadybeentargetedasthemajorareasofgrowth for
the global television industry during the twenty-first century. In any
case, as things stand, television is a mass communicator covering
major global events and festivals to send the same images – for
example, the football World Cup – all over the world.
Beyond these bare statistics, though, television plays a central role
in most people’s everyday lives. In the public sphere it has become
the venue for social and political debate, religious evangelism and the
exchange of news (Macionis and Plummer 2002). In the private
realm, television has been seen as constituting a unique viewing
experience as the ‘outside world’ is brought into the home and
shapes domestic life. At its extremes the analysis has seen television as
both a quasi-altar around which the family gathers and the harbinger
of domestic fragmentation as everybody slopes off to different rooms
to watch their own favoured programme. Increasingly, technological
development has begun to blur the distinction between the private
and the public spheres.
What television produces – its distinctively varied texts – has also
been presented as a warrant for the growth of television studies. It is
not only that television has given rise to different or reconfigured
cultural forms such as reality television and televised sport, but also its
association with ‘liveness’, actuality and what was, especially in the
early days of the medium, the extraordinary and exciting ability to
immediately represent events occurring elsewhere at that moment
(Bignell 2004). Its penetration of everyday worlds has led to televi-
sion employing a direct address to ‘us’, the viewer, with speech on
television often adopting a more intimate, spontaneous register (Cri-
sell 2006). Similarly, television is watched in identifiably different
ways with viewers experiencing not single texts, a newspaper or a
film, say, but a flow of full and partial texts which, with the multi-
plication of channels and schedules, can be watched endlessly and
with increasingly more control for the individual, remote-wielding
viewer.
viii
INTRODUCTIONTO2NDEDITION
Gradually then, television, with the realisation that it is the major,
global,contemporarymassmedium,hassteppedapartfromitsdiverse
origins and initial coverage in mass communications and then media
studies, to earn a more secure place in the academy. As has been
mentioned, the steps into the limelight have been hesitant and, in
certain quarters, resisted, but the very reason for that resistance – its
embraceofpopular culture–helpsexplainitsrise.Televisionstudiesas
a sub-discipline does not look for good or ‘quality’television because
it tends not to aesthetically value one programme over another
(Bignell 2004). Rather, reflecting its situation within, and shaping of,
popular culture, television studies analyses any and every form of
television. Now it turns its gaze on the pleasure of television every bit
as much as the harm that television is alleged to cause.
What, then, does television studies study? While, as Brunsdon
(1998) notes, there is very little which is obvious about the television
of television studies, it is possible to point to a range of areas upon
which television scholars have concentrated. First, they have analysed
television as text looking at programmes in terms of their narrative
structures, their forms of characterisation, their meanings (including
ideological ones) and their themes. In particular, there has been a focus
on the types or genres of texts and the ways in which phenomena
from places to social groups are recurrently represented. Second,
research has considered television as a set of institutions, including
corporations, networks, unions and production companies, operating
in particular economic, political and social contexts such as public
service broadcasting, typified by the BBC as the initial and then sole
television channel in post-war Britain, and the aggressively commercial
environment of American television. Third, television’s audiences have
been extensively analysed. This includes what is watched by whom
and where, research necessarily also undertaken by television net-
works which need to understand and predict ratings for their output
and advertisers, but also the social experience of watching, especially
in household contexts. So, the proliferation of specialist and main-
stream channels and the tendency for there to be several television
sets in many households have been assessed alongside changing
domestic and family arrangements and shifting leisure patterns.
Fourth, television has been assessed in terms of its role within society
and for that matter, globality. While simplistic assertions about the
deleterious effects of television tend to be avoided, the role of televi-
sion in shaping social order cannot be ignored. It has the capacity to
help construct the society in which it sits and that, in turn, gives
television and the agencies which produce it a remarkable power.
ix
