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TELEVISION 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 byRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanada byRoutledge 270MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NY10016 RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” #2008BernadetteCasey,NeilCasey,BenCalvert,JohnLiamFrench,JustinLewis Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedorutilisedinany formorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,nowknownorhereafterinvented, includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinanyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem, withoutpermissioninwritingfromthepublishers. BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData Acatalogrecordforthisbookhasbeenrequested ISBN 0-203-96096-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN13:978-0-415-37149-0(hbk) ISBN13:978-0-415-37150-6(pbk) 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, television 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- vi 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 analysis. 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 vii 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 viewing 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 television 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 networks 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 television 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