Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Communications, Media, and Culture Series)

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." "The decline of network TV in the face of cable was a crisis in television history, but it also spawned new production initiatives to reassert network authority. John T. Caldwell's classic, Televisuality, demonstrates the cultural logic of stylistic exhibitionism in everything from prestige series and loss-leader event-status programming (Northern Exposure and War and Remembrance) to lower trash and tabloid forms (Pee-Wee's Playhouse and reality TV) as "import-auteurs" like Oliver Stone and David Lynch were stylized for prime time, and videographics packaged and tamed crisis news coverage. Drawing on production experience and critical and cultural analysis, Televisuality is a powerful call for desegregation of theory and practice in media scholarship and an end to the willful blindness of high theory."--Back cover Although the "decline" of network television in the face of cable was a crisis in television history, John Caldwell finds that it spawned new production initiatives to reassert network authority. Caldwell's classic volume, now available as a handsome volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics imprint, calls for desegregation of theory and practice in media scholarship.