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Brings together forty original essays from today's leading scholars on television culture, writing about the programs they care (and think) the most about.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Homicide 2 House 3 Life on Mars 4 Mad Men 5 Nip/Tuck 6 Phineas & Ferb 7 The Sopranos 8 Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job! 9 24 10 The Amazing Race 11 The Cosby Show 12 The Dick Van Dyke Show 13 Eva Luna 14 Glee / House Hunters International 15 Grey's Anatomy 16 Jersey Shore 17 30 Days 18 America's Next Top Model 19 Family Guy 20 Fox & Friends 21 M*A*S*H 22 Parks and Recreation 23 Star Trek 24 The Wonder Years 25 Entertainment Tonight 26 I Love Lucy 27 Modern Family 28 Monday Night Football 29 NYPD Blue 30 Onion News Network 31 The Prisoner 32 The Twilight Zone 33 Auto-Tune the News 34 Battlestar Galactica 35 Everyday Italian 36 Gossip Girl 37 It's Fun to Eat 38 One Life to Live 39 Samurai Champloo 40 The Walking Dead Contributors Index

About the Author

Ethan Thompson (Editor)
Ethan Thompson is Professor of Media Arts at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. He is the author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture and co-editor of Television History, the Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory and Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. He directed the documentary TV Family about a forgotten forerunner to reality television.
Jason Mittell (Editor)
Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Television & American Culture, and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, and Narrative Theory and Adaptation. He is project manager for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, and author of numerous video essays.

Reviews

"There's quite simply no book out there that can match this in scope and quality. The contributors are a 'Who's Who' of contemporary television studies, and the prose is engaging and highly readable. If you're looking for models of how to think about television from a range of perspectives, you need look no further."-Greg M. Smith, author of Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal [A] damn good collection, featuring 40 different contributions from American scholars, plus Matt Hills from Aberystwyth and Roberta Pearson from Nottingham. Their contributions are organised under five main themes: Aesthetics and Style; TV Representations: Social Identity and Cultural Politics; TV Politics: Democracy, Nation, and the Public Interest; TV Industry: Industrial Practices and Structures; andTV Practices: Medium, Technology, and Everyday Life. As with television schedules, it is easy to flick and pick and read - indeed, the editors in their Introduction actively encourage 'readers to go straight to a particular program or approach that interests them'". - Geoff Lealand, CSTonline