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182 There is a widespread sense that popular media are consumed by people with inadequate education and no ideas of their own: “the young, the ignorant, and the idle.” Social conservatives argue for the “danger” of media that engage in “scandal” and “smuttiness” that “in effect degrade human nature.” Given, however, that the first quotation is from Samuel Johnson’s 1750 discussion of the new genre of the English novel, and the second from Jeremy Collier’s 1698 attack on popular theatrical productions,1 modern objections to television’s supposed frivolousness seem rather benign. Every new art form seems to struggle first with early perceptions of its failure to live up to the standards of existing forms, and then with arguments that excessive attention to such forms will contribute to the lowering of intellectual and social standards. As J. Paul Hunter notes of the early novel, “[L]iterary protectionists had, early on, begun to worry about competition from the popular culture that novels represented” (26). That protectionism continues with a vengeance in many academic institutions. This chapter will argue that television occupies a similar place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: a narrative experience shared by people of all classes and domestic geographies (and often international ones too, in the case of American television). Janet Wasko is right when she asserts that television is “a storyteller, if not THE storyteller for [our] society. . . . television inevitably is a fund of values, ideals, morals, and Thinking Inside the Box: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of Television Studies C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter 8 Thinking Inside the Box · 183 ethical standards. In other words, television is an ideological source that cannot be overlooked in modern societies” (3). Less convincing, however, is her repetition of old arguments that offer justification of the medium as a stepping-stone to ostensibly real literature: “Despite disparaging comments about television’s impact on print culture, some would point out that TV may serve as a catalyst for reading, as viewers may follow up on TV programs by getting books on the same subjects or reading authors whose work was adapted for the programs” (4). This perspective on television (“The more you know . . .”) denies television’s centrality as cultural discourse, rendering it secondary to print even in the introduction to a book titled A Companion to Television. Our interest in this chapter is not to pursue the reductive question “Is television literature?” It is, rather, to establish that methodologies of literary studies can be used to illuminate televisual narrative, and thus that television is a mode that contributes powerfully to the long history of the description and recreation of culture for audience consumption. The Frankfurt School and Television Studies Beyond the overly inclusive definition of “academic research on television ,” television studies is a somewhat slippery term, not least because of its high level of what has been called disciplinary hybridity. More than most fields of scholarly investigation, television studies flourishes in an environment of multidisciplinarity: departments of English, communications , film studies, theater, sociology, psychology, business, ethnography , women’s studies, African American studies, and cultural studies, for example, might all house faculty members who study television. The handful of formal departments of television studies house scholars trained in very different traditional disciplines, united by the social and artistic phenomenon they study. Television is thus conceptualized along distinct and at times conflicting polarities: audience and reception (sociological studies of the impact of television on families and children, for example); ownership (including the economics of mass media and its relationship to ideology); distribution (television as cultural product, including issues of regulation of media); and cultural documentation (including analyses of specific programs under rubrics 184 · C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter such as race or gender studies, or discussions of the cultural implications of television programs or genres as reflections and mediations of contemporary life). One of the earliest approaches to the study of television originated , ironically, in the 1930s, long before the first program ever hit the airwaves. Members of the Frankfurt School in many ways began the systematic critical approach to studies of mass communication and culture with their study of what they termed “culture industries” and their work in the reproduction of contemporary societies. The Frankfurt School was the first to argue that since mass culture and communications stand at the center of leisure activity, they are critical agents of socialization, and so warrant intensive investigation and analysis. Given the era of the initial thinking...

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