TV's Next Season?

For those of us who attended the Second International Television Studies Conference (ITSC) in London in 1986, the 2005 SCMS conference (held in the same building at the University of London Institute of Education) evoked an eerie wave of déjà vu. Talking with friends I met at the ITSC, I recalled how formative that gathering was for TV and cultural studies. The sense of TV ghosts lurking at the 2005 SCMS conference was palpable. Although I admit to some personal nostalgia for that "Golden Age" of TV studies, I think the earlier moment of television scholarship did its work, and now there are different things to do.

In one respect, television scholarship is changing because TV itself is so different from what it was in the past. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the increasing commercialization of public-service/state-run systems, the rise of multichannel cable and global satellite delivery, multinational conglomerates, Internet convergence, changes in regulatory policies and ownership rules, the advent of high-definition TV, technological changes in screen design, digital video recorders, and new forms of media competition—as well as new forms of programming (e.g., reality TV) and scheduling practices (e.g., year-long seasons or multiplexing)—have all transformed the practice we call watching TV. This does not mean all of television is suddenly unrecognizable—indeed, familiarity and habit continue to be central to the TV experience—but it does mean that television's past is recognizably distinct from its present.

In the wake of these changes, much of the literature in television studies now seems out of sync with the object it aims to describe. When teaching the seminal books and essays of television studies, I often notice that my students object to aesthetic/cultural theories that were developed to explain terrestrial broadcast systems and pre-VCR TV sets. Although classic texts such as Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form still have great explanatory value, today's television systems demand new inquiries and theories.¹

To be sure, television studies in the humanities has always been a hybrid, interdisciplinary venture, drawing on fields of inquiry that often were at odds with one another. As it developed in the 1970s and 1980s in the Anglophone university and publishing industry, television studies drew upon at least five critical paradigms: (1) the "mass society" critique associated with the Frankfurt School and postwar intellectuals such as Dwight MacDonald; (2) a textual tradition (to borrow John Hartley's term² ) associated with literary and film theory and, by the late 1970s, with feminist theories of spectatorship; (3) a journalistic tradition associated especially with theater criticism (in the United States, this tradition formed a canon of Golden Age programming); (4) quantitative and qualitative mass communications research on audiences and content; and (5) cultural studies approaches to media and their audiences. Although these traditions developed differently in different national contexts, they all formed a discursive field—a set of interrelated ways of speaking about TV—that continues to affect the way we frame television as an object of study.

Television studies in the humanities in the 1970s through the 1990s accompanied the rise of cultural studies and the general move away from thinking about TV through top-down models of effects to thinking of television as culture. What followed were a flurry of essays, books, and anthologies that dealt with subjects ranging from institutional history to television aesthetics to genre to spectator theory to audiences and fans. People still study these subjects, and there is still important work to do in these areas. Nevertheless, the field is shifting.

So where is TV studies headed? Honestly, I am not sure, and I do not know if I am going with it. The field—like the object itself—is in a moment of uncertainty. Nonetheless, some trends or shifts seem identifiable.

Insofar as television has always been studied under several disciplinary protocols, it is not surprising that TV is now studied under umbrella terms like new media studies and visual culture studies (which—to make matters more messy—are sometimes both the same field). What...