To understand American popular culture, we need to come to grips with the enormous role that television has played in shaping that culture over the past sixty years. In this timely and provocative book, Jason Mittell provides students with a uniquely thorough look at the medium of television. Exploring television at once as a technological medium, an economic system, a facet of democracy, and a part of everyday life, this landmark text uses numerous sidebars and case studies to demonstrate the past, immediate, and far-reaching effects of American culture on television--and television's influence on American culture. Arranged topically, the book provides a broad historical overview of television while also honing in on such finer points as the formal attributes of its various genres and its role in gender and racial identity formation.
