Introduction

Since the late 1990s I have begun my television criticism seminar with a quick poll of students’ viewing repertoires, from casual surfing to favorite “must-see” programs. Despite the number of available narrowcasting cable options offered, even ten years ago the majority of students described themselves as avid viewers of the same five or six network series. However, in the past two or three years I have noticed a substantial change in the results of my poll: it is now remarkable to find even three students who watch the same programs. Still more striking is the increasing number of students who say they do not watch television at all and then proceed to describe the characters and story arcs of a vast array of dramas, comedies, crime procedurals, and reality shows. What they mean, of course, is that they do not regularly watch television on television. Their televisual world is one where content streams across multiple screens rather than across a broadcast program schedule. Whether they are torrenting or streaming on laptops and smartphones or bingeing on DVD box sets (sometimes even on the “old-fashioned” television set), our students’ temporal and spatial experiences of media compel us to consider contemporary challenges to teaching television as both a cultural object and a practice.

If conference workshops and hallway conversations with colleagues provide any indication, I think it is safe to say that both my polling practice and classroom experiences are widely shared among Television Studies faculty. It was not that long ago that we could presume that most Television Studies syllabi shared common foundational texts and conceptual frameworks, with the expectation that examples of single episodes or even mere clips of programming would suffice for exercises in classroom discussion and critical analysis. Despite the interdisciplinary engagement that shaped the development of the field of Television Studies, a glance in the rearview mirror indicates that, whether we like the term or not, a working canon had emerged in the discipline, and we sought to convey it to both our undergraduate and graduate students. Questions of television’s role as a “cultural forum,” or site of ideological struggle over representation, power, and reception, were central to our efforts to encourage students’ understanding of the medium’s material and cultural impact on social formations. ¹ The politics of the popular and quotidian dimensions of television remain as (or perhaps even more) acute today as new media platforms destabilize the notion of a common forum of meaning making that has long defined our pedagogy.

This In Focus is a provocation for a long overdue conversation about both the shifting terrain of television as a medium and the implications of this shifting terrain for Television Studies as an institutional configuration. The essays that follow share a number of intersecting concerns ranging from the practicalities of teaching television in an age of multiplatform delivery systems to the emergent challenges facing Television Studies as a disciplinary area in a time of economic crisis and amid overall threats to the humanities in the twenty-first-century university. Derek Kompare explicitly addresses this issue in his reminder to us that television has always been “multiple” in its aggregation of technology, industrial practices, and aesthetics. His emphasis on continuity within dialogues that describe a tidal wave of industrial change encourages us to contemplate how Television Studies is uniquely positioned to frame its centrality, even within the broader designation of “Media Studies,” as a vital component of a liberal arts education. Jon Kraszewski provides a critical connection here in his depiction of the assumed “hybridity” of the Television Studies scholar in most media and communications programs in North America. As he notes, it is increasingly rare to see job postings that specifically identify a position in Television Studies. This is not to say that departments have abandoned this area of study, but it is assumed that those hired as new media or digital media specialists will, of course, also be prepared to teach television. As Kraszewski emphasizes, such forms of hybrid scholarly identity are not expected within Film Studies, which has generally been able to maintain its distinction as a field of study...