Abstract
A lot of books in recent years focus on ‘new’ media, so the authors of scholarly works on ‘old’ media very often feel the need to defend their objects of study. This is how Jonathan Grey and Amanda D Lotz open up their book on television studies. Their introductory chapter is called ‘Still Television Studies?’ In it, they acknowledge that television ‘has changed tremendously in the last twenty years’ (p. 1) but its predicted death ‘has not arrived’ (p. 2). Quite the contrary, they argue that more and more companies and services offer television these days. In their view, some of the present-day big media companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, YouTube/Google are ‘among television’s biggest players and disruptors’ (p. 4). Grey and Lotz explain that due to the rise in new technologies the evolving nature of television makes television studies even more pertinent. Their book ‘seeks to explain how and why television studies has evolved, and what legacy it has willed to the broader academic study of media and culture’ (p. 4). The book is split into an Introduction, four substantive chapters and a Conclusion. The substantive chapters trace the development of television studies from the 1960s through to today by focusing on programmes, audiences, industries and contexts. Gray and Lotz argue that television studies gained its legitimation as a subfield of media studies by the late 1990s. Their book offers an insight into the different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of television – from social science approaches to humanities approaches to cultural studies approaches, thus aiming to construct ‘an intellectual history for television studies’ (p. 25). All in all, the book is indeed a useful introductory text into the history of television studies albeit very heavily focused on the United Kingdom and the United States.