Introduction: why study television?

Summary

The question of why television should be studied needs to be addressed first since it is often an implicit one that students, academics and interested readers ask themselves when they pick up a book on television. Those more sceptical might even ask: can you study television? Television studies has been an academic discipline since the 1970s and comes from a variety of disciplines including literary theory, social sciences, journalism and linguistic theory. It is studied in universities and is either taught in departments that also teach theatre and film or exists as a primary component in departments that focus on the media, cultural studies and/or mass communication. Television studies is firmly rooted within the humanities and social sciences and has an advantage in that it can draw from a wide range of theoretical approaches and methodologies. It focuses primarily on issues involving representation, genre, the industry, textual analysis and audience reception. In his introduction to Television Studies Toby Miller points out that ‘[t]he intellectual genealogy of television studies is formidable and very interdisciplinary’ (2002: 1).

Even though television studies is accepted as an academic discipline it is often one that is misunderstood and even misrepresented by others. There is a continual suggestion of TV's ‘dumbing down’, which is often true of the cheap programming available en masse, but which unfairly dismisses the significant developments and achievements of television programming in what has been referred to as TV3 (Nelson 2007; see also New Review of Film and Television, 5(1), 2007).