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                                           TELEVISION STUDIES

The first electronic television was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1927, but the possibility of television as a site of popular culture evolved slowly over several decades. It was not until the 1950s that television sets were widely available in the Global North, and then only to certain economic classes. From that time on the changes in the technology and marketing of TV set gradually expanded the range of audiences and with it the range of viewing content. Major changes occurred with the gradual introduction and then flood cable television channels. Most recently, digital technology has made the whole history of television programs more available, both in standard TV formats and via the Web. For both these technical reasons and cultural ones, the range of programming has expanded exponentially, with TV production occurring all over the globe and transnational dissemination of programming now common.

           channel logos from all over the world

Because television was long viewed as a lesser form of entertainment ("the idiot box"), as it was once known, it took a bit longer for television studies to reach the stage that film studies achieved a few years earlier. But now television is a major part of any popular culture or mass media studies curriculum. 

The materials below include some general sites offering insight into or information about the history and current state of television, a small sampling of articles from the field of television studies to give  some sense of the field, a bibliography of important works in television studies, links to journals (including some open access ones) that publish media studies work, and links to a variety of sites to perhaps spark analyses of TV shows and broadcast channels.

Featured Sites

  • Flow Online open access journal on TV and other media from UT Austin.
  • TV Tropes Excellent site for decoding the story-telling techniques used in TV and related media.

General Sites

  • AdViews Access thousands of TV commercials from the 1950s to 1980s.
  • After Ellen. A site with news and reviews on queer women in television and other media.
  • BBC Motion Gallery Clips from BBC broadcasts from 1922 to the present.
  • Children's Television Project Major source on history and impact of TV shows for children. 
  • ClassicTV. Good resource on TV shows from the 1950s onward.In addition to show information, the site includes accessto theme songs, fashions and other TV-related materials.
  • Encyclopedia of Television. Over 1000 entries on TV history.
  • Film and Media Studies Common. Includes links to online articles.
  • Footage.Net  Commercial site linked to thousands of archived moving images.
  • IMDB While better known as a film site, IMDB is also generally the most comprehensive site for basic data about television shows past and present.
  • Library of Congress TV and Film Includes archives  and projects on TV history.
  • Museum of Broadcast Communication
  • MZTV Museum. Fun site with lovely pictures of classic radios and television sets; lends itself to a semiotic analysis of how changing aesthetic styles in TV sets might reflect cultural changes.
  • Nielson Ratings Long the prime gathering of data on TV viewing and related issues.
  • PopMatters Includes many incisive articles and reviews of TV.
  • Queery's TVGayGuide. Sort of the queer TV Guide, with a daily schedule of television programming (as well as movies) with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer characters or topics related to queer issues.
  • Reality Blurred. A reality TV news digest with news on all reality TV since 2000.
  • Rotten Tomatoes. Useful for TV show reviews and news.
  • ScreenSite Especially good on production issues.
  • Television: Visual Storytelling and Screen Culture. Companion teaching website to the excellent TV studies book by Jeremy Butler.
  • TV.com. Previously tv tome, an excellent source for information on most any show, including tv listings, show summaries, episode guides, casting information, news, videos, images, reviews and a fan forum.
  • TV Guide magazine. Useful commercial site for tracking trends in TV watching.
  • Vanderbilt University TV News Archive. Key resource for anyoneexamining the past and present of TV news programming. Includes a database with written summaries of news broadcasts, and on-demand video copiesof broadcasts.

A Sampling of Online Articles

Some Key Journals that Include Television Studies

TV Program Sites (official & fan-based): Some Old, Some Current, Some Well-known, Some Almost Unknown, Some Just Plain Weird 

Active Network Sites to Analyze

Inactive Network Sites

Bibliography

[Few topics on popular culture can be adequately researched on the web alone. These reading suggestions are designed as beginning points for further offline study.]

  • Allen, Robert C. Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Classic, still relevant study of the production and consumption of daytime soap operas.
  • Ang, Ien. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge, 1996.Excellent collection of essays exploring various difficulties and possibilities in analyzing the responses of popular culture audiences.
  • Banks, Jack. Monopoly Television: MTV's Quest to Control the Music. Routledge, 2018.
  • Butler, Jeremy. Television: Critical Methods and Approaches. NY: Routledge, 2012. Excellent introduction to major scholarly approaches to television studies. See also the companion website linked above.
  • Craig, David. Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Book on the practice of turning web series into television shows.
  • Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Witty re-reading of popular figures from Jack Benny to Laverne and Shirley as having a “queer” subtext.
  • Gamson, Joshua. Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. The best book on the strange and wondrous phenomenon of Jerry Springer-style “tabloid” talk shows.
  • Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness." Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Brilliant interpretation of the evolution of representations of African Americans in television news and fiction programming, from the 1980s to the present.
  • Hamamoto, Darrell Y. Monitored Peril: Asian Americans andthe Politics of TV Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Wide-ranging study that includes issues of internment, and the war in Southeast Asia, in addition to ongoing, everyday stereotypes of TV orientalism.
  • Jhally, Sut and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Combines audience surveys and textual analysis to look at how confusions of race and class in the US are reflected in and reinforced by Cosby’s mid-80s show.
  • Kackman, Michael, et al. eds,. Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence. Routledge, 2010. Collection of essays Eexaming how new digital media like smart phones, iPads, and PCs that re-present TV shows are changing the medium and the meanings of televisual experience.
  • Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987. Sophisticated analysis of the relations among MTV videos, consumer culture, and the psychodynamics of identity formation in youth.
  • Lemish, Carol. Screening Gender of Children's Television. Routledge, 2010. Examines changing images of gender in recent TV aimed at young audiences.
  • Lewis, Lisa. Gender Politics and MTV. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Takes an audience-ethnographic approach that sees Madonna and similar figures as empowering to girls and young women.
  • Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Generally regarded as the best overall book on the sit-com.
  • Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. NY: NYU Press. 2015.
  • Schuster, Mark. The New Television: Aesthetics & Politics of a Genre. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2017. Sophisticated look at "The Wire," "Weeds" and "Justified" as offering a new vision of the family as an imperfect unit in an even more imperfect society.
  • Thompson, Ethan and Jason Mittell, eds. How to Watch Television. NY: NYU Press, 2013. Essays on 40 TV shows that reflect the evolution of the medium over the decades.
  • Walters, Suzanna Danuta. All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. An excellent book looking primarily at gay visibility in television but in all forms of media up to its publication in 2001.