Television has long been a challenging object of study. In recent years, as distinctions between film, television, and new media continue to collapse, these challenges have become more pronounced. While film departments have begun to take up a broader transmedia focus, cinema scholars have been encouraged to think more and more across mediums. The domestication of cinema-going, the proliferation of screens and streaming services in everyday life, and the explosion of television and TV-adjacent digital media content over the past decade all speaks to the importance of television and television studies as a privileged lens onto local, global, and transnational cultures; onto industrial and everyday practices; and onto shifting dynamics between audiences and producers in different geographies and contexts.
The course will introduce students to the field of television studies through different critical frameworks and methodologies. It will examine television as a social and technological form, as an industry, and as an academic discipline, charting TV’s emergence from the development of the domestic television set in the mid-twentieth century to the streaming era and beyond. The course will be divided into three units. The first will focus on early television history, the network era, and the emergence of the field of television studies, looking both at canonical work and more contemporary theory. The second unit will focus on television genre and formats, and will explore topics such as TV aesthetics, representation, audiences, production, and distribution. The final unit will look at television in the post-network era and beyond, examining contemporary trends such as media convergence, fan cultures, nichification, production cultures, new technologies and media platforms.
- Teacher: PATRICK BONNER
- Teaching Assistant: Anton Oehmsen Clark