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James Zborowski, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, Screen, Volume 53, Issue 4, Winter 2012, Pages 492–495, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs043
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Extract
Legitimating Television is the impressive outcome of an ambitious undertaking. The book explores what its authors identify as ‘the primary sites of contemporary discourses of legitimation [of television] within the U.S.’ (p. 12). It provides detailed accounts of the discourse that heralds a new ‘Golden Age’ of television drama; of the practices and discourses that position the contemporary television ‘Showrunner’ as an auteur, the ‘single-camera’ sitcom as more prestigious than its multi-camera counterpart, and the primetime serial drama as ‘not a soap opera’; of the images and rhetoric that surround the promotion of television in its latest technological incarnations, and its promotion as a medium that now permits (for some) forms of viewer agency; and, finally, of some of the discourses of academic television studies. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine offer their book's project ‘as both history of the present and polemic’ (p. 12). The substance of the polemic is as follows: although ‘television's improvement in status might seem like a welcome development’ (p. 6), in fact, in the forms they are taking, the discourses of legitimation perpetuate rather than overturn ‘prevailing structures of status’ (p. 3), particularly, it is argued, those based in distinctions of class and gender. Furthermore, within the realm of television, some ‘genres, instances, technologies and experiences’ (p. 3) are elevated at the expense of others, in ways that again perpetuate the aforementioned hierarchies.
