Description:
Legitimating Television explores the increasingly prevalent idea that TV has gotten better. This notion, circulating in the popular press, the TV industry, and media scholarship, typically references shows like The Sopranos and new technologies like DVRs and HDTV sets. Across these sites, the cultural legitimation of television highlights the medium's rise in status from its previous reputation as the "idiot box" to a more respectable level, especially among cultural elites. But there are troubling ideological implications to this, as the upgrade of television's status comes at the expense of forms of TV deemed unworthy. These delegitimated forms are associated with audiences characterized by femininity and lower class status.
By locating the upgrade of television's cultural status within the context of media convergence, Legitimating Television historicizes this development. It denaturalizes the discourses of television's legitimation, revealing their underlying significance. In analyzing the iterations of television's improvement, Legitimating Television considers the history of Quality TV, the rise of the showrunner-auteur, the sitcom and prime time drama, and the emergence of digital TV technologies such as flat-panel sets, DVDs, and DVRs. It calls for a critical engagement with discourses of legitimation rather than a naive acceptance of television's natural progression toward cultural respectability.
Review Quotes:
"Trenchantly, Michael Newman and Elana Levine observe that every new attempt to declare some form of television as especially valuable culturally or artistically 'is predicated on the systematic degradation of old television practices' and they demonstrate this insight through sharp history combined with comprehensive analysis of the contemporary context. Most refreshing in this respect is their self-aware sense of TV studies' own contribution to processes of legitimation. A rich, far-reaching study of the values we've given to TV across its complicated history." --Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies, New York University
"Legitimating Television offers a crucial intervention in the popular and scholarly conception of television's increasing cultural significance. ... As a teaching tool, Newman and Levine's engaging and clear style make Legitimating Television suitable for both the graduate and undergraduate classroom, especially as a counterpoint to popular or scholarly sources that regard the increased cultural status of contemporary television in a more favorable light." --Melinda E. S. Kohnen, New York University