TV Milestones Series

Short monographs based on single films, TV series, or video games have been a prominent format in media studies for the past decade or so. They’re popular with publishers and scholars, though for different reasons. Publishers can build a potentially long-running series around a particular medium or genre, and scholars can carry out a relatively deep, multifaceted analysis on a single text. That said, as a form longer than an article but shorter than a traditional book, they also have their own potential pitfalls. While the singular focus has its advantages, the format certainly isn’t boundless. The word count of thirty-five thousand provides enough room to develop multiple points but not enough to dig too deeply or too broadly. Similarly, the understandable remit from publishers to be widely accessible (to undergraduates as well as interested fans of the text) necessitates clearer writing, including the brief treatment of theoretical concepts that would otherwise be expanded in more advanced work. As someone who’s written one of these, I appreciate how difficult it can be to balance the depth, breadth, accessibility, and brevity necessary to cover a long-running TV series in this format.

With twenty-eight titles published since 2004, the TV Milestones series from Wayne State University Press has been one of the most prolific and consistent of this type of series. It has covered a wide array of mostly US TV shows dating from the 1950s through the 2000s. Despite the great variety of genres and authors, the series editors, Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, have effectively managed each volume’s usual mix of historical, industrial, and cultural contexts, always coupled with extensive textual analysis. These books are effective introductions to key television series (particularly for the classroom) and provide intriguing analysis, even for those familiar with their subjects.

This review concerns four of the latest volumes, representing two distinct but, in retrospect, similar historical eras in American television. Matt Yockey’s analysis of Batman (ABC, 1966–1968) and Ken Feil’s investigation of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968– 1973) examine how the turbulent cultural changes of the late 1960s to early 1970s were managed at the peak of the classic network era by television producers and networks. Each of these series briefly dominated popular culture, and both were emblematic of television’s political dance between appealing to a younger, more iconoclastic counterculture and retaining an older, more conservative mainstream. The other two books, John McCullough’s study of 24 (Fox, 2001–2010, 2014) and Margaret T. McFadden’s exploration of The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009), focus on the more recent era of multichannel television, fragmenting audiences, and divergent industrial and cultural priorities. Appropriately, neither of these series aired on one of the traditional “big three” so dominant forty years earlier. However, as with the 1960s, the first decade of the twenty-first century was also a television era of shifting ranges of expression (in both form and content), as television producers and networks strategized to appeal not so much to a mainstream but to the extended loyalty of particular viewers. The L Word and 24 are radically different texts, yet both could have flourished only in the divided television ecosystem of the 2000s–2010s.

The TV adaptation of Batman blazed bright and faded quickly for just over two years, but Matt Yockey’s long-needed volume rescues the iconic series from its usual footnoted treatment in television history as either a bold experimental failure or a sign of mid-1960s cultural vapidity. Yockey displays a thorough understanding of the ramifications of this particular comic book character, the status of television, and the issue of “mass” culture...