Book Review: Television Studies by Gray and Lotz

Along with Levine and Newman’s Legitimating Television, Gray and Lotz’s Television Studies, part of a Polity’s Short Introduction series, topped my To Read list enough that they were high priorities for Christmas gifts from folks this year. Thankfully, I received both.

I opted for Television Studies first as both a primer for Legitimating‘s discussions and as a refresher on my own knowledge of the ins and outs of television studies. Likewise, still being a relatively young scholar, I haven’t read many of these sorts of single unified texts that seek to provide a broad overview of a single field or approach. I’ve read individual essays, book chapters, and the like that do similar things as Television Studies (including many of the ones that Gray and Lotz cite here), but I wanted to read something that was specifically designed as an introduction for a few reasons.

First and foremost is an issue of pedagogy. Books like Television Studies or Routledge’s Film Guidebooks (I can recommend Brigid Cherry’s Horror from that series) serve primarily, at least in my mind, as texts given to undergrads in introductory courses to provide both an orientation to what could be a brand new area of study and to provide a common ground on which for those in the course to speak to one another. So I’ll say upfront that as I was reading Television Studies, I was primarily reading it through this lens, asking myself how the book as a whole, as well as individual chapters, would fit into a syllabus, what kind of a syllabus, and how students might respond.

The second reason for wanting to Television Studies is directly related to my first reason. That these books are primarily expected to be used in introductory courses, or as a self-guided introduction as the case may be, they are inherently very political books. These books define and parse out the field or subject, policing borders and establishing ideas of what is/could be expected for someone operating in that field. And if you’re familiar with academia, you know that we take the defining of a field seriously.

So on the one hand we have a book that should be evaluated on its pedagogical value, but on the other, we have a book that delineates what something is, whether it be a field of study or a film genre. As a result, we have to consider what histories are told, who the major figures and/or theories are, and so forth, and the potential impact that can have on whatever topic the book is addressing since such books are used to train and educated younger scholars.

Where does that leave Television Studies?

The book is successful as an introduction to the television studies, and would fit snugly into a variety of syllabi, ranging from an introductory television studies class (supplemented with readings mentioned in the text, of course) to taking individual chapters away from the wider context of the book, and using them to highlight one of the particular areas — Programs, Audiences, and Institutions — in a class that focuses on  that area. Likewise, in my own experience as a graduate student, I think any of the chapters, but particularly the Introduction or the Contexts chapter, would fit well in a survey of theories of media studies or mass communication. (The book could work in a graduate seminar on television studies, but I think that reading the texts mentioned in the book itself would significantly more valuable.)

Each of the body chapters covers the highlights of their topic’s important authors, books, or essays, delving just enough into a particular text to provide a basic sense of its argument before moving onto the next one. Often such discussions don’t last any longer than two paragraphs, which gives the book an excellent sense of breadth while still supplying just enough depth to prime students for additional readings or analysis.

The introduction provides a nice history of how televisions studies got to where it is today, and I particularly appreciated Lotz and Gray’s discussion of the role social sciences played in helping develop television studies. This aspect of television studies’s history is often glossed over (at least in my experience) in favor of highlighting its association with the traditions of cultural studies.

I would likewise recommend Television Studies to scholars unfamiliar with the contours of television studies. As I was reading, I was thinking of a colleague of mine who has been trained in film studies and his experience rooming with two television studies graduate students at last year’s SCMS. And while said colleague has since taken a television studies class (an achievement I take full credit for!), had this book been around last year, I would probably point him to it so he’d have a sense of things.

On a personal level, I was pleased that as I was reading along, that I was nodding and marking and being able to follow Gray and Lotz’s discussion of the larger works within television studies, both because such discussions has firmly taken root in my brain and because I was recognizing my own education in this area in the text.

Both of these aspects, my own reaction to the book as well as the brief story about my colleague, bring me to the book’s parsing out of television studies. I imagine the more academically-centric of you, especially those within the television and wider media studies field, may already have a clue as to how Gray and Lotz believe that television studies should be practiced based on their body chapters that I mentioned above.

Gray and Lotz position a television studies project as one that  considers those three areas of a site of analysis: the program (or text), the audience that engages the program, and the institutions/industries that produce/market/regulate it. Gray and Lotz make room that a project sometimes can’t reasonably cover all three and do it well* (I’ve ready plenty of books that attempt to do it, and normally one of those aspects (typically the institution) will fall short), and that the research question may not necessarily allow for all three to be addressed.

*And they do nod to the the one book that does it well, D’Acci’s Cagney & Lacey book.

But they stress that any project and any researcher that decides to ignore one of those areas without first thinking deeply about how each of those areas influence one another and make gestures to those influences in the final project, is losing an important aspect of what marks television studies.

Indeed, the claim that the book ultimately makes, and where Gray and Lotz stake their concept of television studies is this (variation on the) circuit of culture approach of study.  As referenced above when I mentioned the history Gray and Lotz provide, here we see the indebtedness that television studies has to cultural studies, a field whose history considered these three things to varying degrees.

This claim is the basis for how Gray and Lotz position television studies to “studies of television”, singling out psychological studies of television and violence or the thematic analyses associated with literary studies as the latter and not how they conceive of television studies. You may have likewise noticed that I haven’t referred to television studies as field in this post (at least not directly). This is because Gray and Lotz, by highlighting television studies and “studies of television”, position the former as an approach.

And this is the perhaps the largest intervention the book makes, shifting the question of whether television studies is a field to making it a way of understanding a site of analysis. They mention doing a “television studies approach to YouTube”, but with the framework Lotz and Gray supply, you could, theoretically, carry out a television studies project centered on a book, as odd as that would at first appear.*

*I say ‘book’ only because I remember a particularly frustrated literary scholar at the 2010 Flow Conference in Austin who didn’t understand the obsession with industry that she was experiencing during panels, and I remembered thinking from my table during the panel about why she wouldn’t want to know about the industry that was publishing the books she was studying, and then thinking what a valuable project that would be.

That above asterisk, along with my earlier mention of nodding along, probably indicates that I do agree with this idea of television studies as an approach. It is something that through my education has been drilled into me as the most productive way of considering an object of study. Gray and Lotz do make room that this television studies approach could also be called media studies (I consider myself a media scholar, not a television scholar, for what it’s worth), basing this in the ideological and departmental tensions within universities as well as the nomenclature between the U.S. and the U.K.

I’m going to wrap up here. There are a number of other aspects to the book, including a discussion of convergence, paratexts, and a call for an expanded look at televised media beyond the U.S.-U.K. systems, that I feel the book address well enough, but the above were the primary concerns I had as I was reading and considering the book’s place within the discourses of television studies.

If all of this isn’t clear, I do recommend Television Studies for both those academics within media studies, but also those who may associate with media scholars and are interested in what they (and I) do. It is accessible to a wider audience, so I do think if you’re interested, you’ll have little trouble navigating the book.

I, of course, welcome comments and questions down below.