So I found myself in an odd position while I read Legitimating Television. Like Television Studies before it, I read the book entirely on my commute back home from work. This in and of itself is not odd. People on this commute, a bus-coach service that largely serves professionals in bedroom communities around Atlanta, regularly consume media on the ride (if they’re not sleeping), including books, ebooks, music, and occasionally television episodes on a mobile device.
What struck me as odd, and I realized this about half way through the book is that I’d been reading it while listening to the soundtrack for Downton Abbey. Why is this odd? Well, here’s a show that is a soap opera through and through, but I don’t think the phrase is often uttered in connection with the show given its period settings, lavish production design (and cost!), and the cultural associations with British television and PBS.
Indeed, I’m listening to the soundtrack of a show that, had it aired in the daytime on a U.S. broadcast network, had a lot less money, probably no Maggie Smith, and wasn’t available on streaming through PBS’s Website (never mind downloading it as a torrent when it originally aired in Britain (which I didn’t do)) wouldn’t be considered one of the current highwater marks of television pleasures by critics and audiences alike. Hell, it probably wouldn’t have had a soundtrack released in the first place if any of those things hadn’t happened.
And all of these thoughts (as well as other thoughts) came to me because of this book. What Legitimating Television does is perform an analysis of the various discourses — be they academic, journalistic, fan-created, or industrial discussions — that have helped create a situation in which television has been able to achieve legitimacy in the tail end of the 20th century and raising its profile even more during the start of the 21st.
Like other good examples of this sort of work, evidenced by my reaction to my habit of listening to the Downton Abbey soundtrack while reading it, Newman and Levine help the reader realize how these discourses about television legitimization occur. The result is like when you first learn about the 180 degree rule, or when someone points out the arrow in the FedEx logo: You can’t stop seeing it. Read more »
Filed under: Book Reviews | Tagged: academic, books, television | Leave a Comment »


Persona 4: The Animation – “You’re Myself, I’m Yourself”
So, as should have been expected, I was excited by the idea of an anime adaptation of the game when it was announced last year. But I was also intrigued by the logistics of adapting this particular sort of video game (a mix of classic dungeon crawling with dating simulations) to a more linear narrative mapped out over 26 episodes.
I won’t be doing weekly write-ups on the show (instead I’ll drop in and out when I feel particularly spurred to write something about an episode), but I wanted to address the first episode and some of the elements of the game that come through in the episode that feel particularly interesting, and my own unfamiliarity with animes based on video games. Read more »
Filed under: Commentary | Tagged: anime, persona 4, tv shows, video games | Leave a Comment »