ABOUT THIS BOOK

Although the "decline" of network television in the face of cable programming was an institutional crisis of television history, John Caldwell's classic volume Televisuality reveals that this decline spawned a flurry of new production initiatives to reassert network authority. Television in the 1980s hyped an extensive array of exhibitionist practices to raise the prime-time marquee above the multi-channel flow. Televisuality demonstrates the cultural logic of stylistic exhibitionism in everything from prestige series (Northern Exposure) and "loss-leader" event-status programming (War and Remembrance) to lower "trash" and "tabloid" forms (Pee-Wee's Playhouse and reality TV). Caldwell shows how "import-auteurs" like Oliver Stone and David Lynch were stylized for prime time as videographics packaged and tamed crisis news coverage. By drawing on production experience and critical and cultural analysis, and by tying technologies to aesthetics and ideology, Televisuality is a powerful call for desegregation of theory and practice in media scholarship and an end to the willful blindness of "high theory."

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

JOHN T. CALDWELL is a Distinguished Research Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California–Los Angeles. He is the author of Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (2008), and the director of Freak Street to Goa, Rancho California (por favor) , and Land Hacks , which have been featured in Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin, and at the Margaret Mead and Sundance Film Festivals. He was awarded the “Outstanding Pedagogy Award” by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2018.

REVIEWS

“Engrossing and thought-provoking…. Televisuality points to a hole in television studies and highlights an interdisciplinary approach-combining the economic with the aesthetic and ideological-that could help to plug it.”

— Matthew P. McAllister, Film Quarterly

"Intense and complex."

— Markus Stauff, University of Amsterdam

“An original and outstanding contribution to television scholarship…. Illuminating both in its examination of television at a specific historical moment and in challenging common academic conceptions about the medium for their failure to engage with the historical changes in television production.

— Allan D. Campbell, Velvet Light Trap

“[A] well-researched volume.”

— Library Journal

“With its combined attention to television aesthetic, economic, and technological aspects, it [is] a highly innovative book that question[s] a great deal of conventional wisdom.”

— European Journal of Media Studies

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