Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television
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."
"1112985879"
Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television
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."
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Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television

Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television

by John T Caldwell
Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television

Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television

by John T Caldwell

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Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781978816039
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 08/14/2020
Series: Communications, Media, and Culture Series
Pages: 666
Product dimensions: 5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.60(d)
Age Range: 16 - 18 Years

About the Author

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.
 

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Part I The Problem of the Image

1 Excessive Style: The Crisis of Network Television 3

2 Unwanted Houseguests and Altered States: A Short History of Aesthetic Posturing 49

3 Modes of Production: The Televisual Apparatus 109

Part II The Aesthetic Economy of Televisuality

4 Boutique: Designer Television/Auteurist Spin Doctoring 157

5 Franchiser: Digital Packaging/Industrial-Strength Semiotics 197

6 Loss Leader: Event Status Programming/ Exhibitionist History 236

7 Trash TV: Thrift-Shop Video/More Is More 283

8 Tabloid TV: Styled Live/Ontological Stripmall 323

Part III Cultural Aspects of Televisuality

9 Televisual Audience: Interactive Pizza 357

10 Televisual Economy: Recessionary Aesthetics 408

11 Televisual Politics: Negotiating Race in the LA Rebellion 435

Postscript: Intellectual Culture, Image, and Iconoclasm 477

Acknowledgments 513

Notes 517

Bibliography 599

Index 623

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