Television Aesthetics and Style - by Steven Peacock & Jason Jacobs (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form.

Television Aesthetics and Style provides a unique and vital intervention in the field, raising key questions about television's artistic properties and possibilities. Through a series of case-studies by internationally renowned scholars, the collection takes a radical step forward in understanding TV's stylistic achievements.

Review Quotes

Can television be more than an everyday phenomenon? Can it be compelling, extraordinary, haunting and distinctive and if so how can we analyze and judge it? The editors of this new collection challenge us to think about television aesthetically and the contributors have certainly responded with enthusiasm and passion. Their essays go well beyond the usual emphasis on recent US drama - though that's well represented here - and also offer detailed and unexpected interpretations of television comedy and non-fiction programmes. Some essays dwell on illuminating television moments while others range more widely into debates about style, seriality and visual pleasure. The authors are among the best in the field and this collection will be essential and rewarding reading for anyone interested in the possibilities of television.

The exciting mix of conceptual and analytical work in this book addresses the richness of contemporary television and offers insights into its past. The focus on aesthetics enables the contributors to ask fundamental questions about what it means to study TV, and the chapters show how aesthetic approaches illuminate British and international traditions, and fictional, factual and hybrid TV genres. Television Aesthetics and Style is at the forefront of thinking through ways of grasping television's inherited forms and the ways they are changing. It will be essential reading for anyone who wants to take television seriously.

This important collection marks the 'coming out' of television aesthetics and style in a medium often regarded as devoid of both. Building on nascent work aiming to re-value textual criticism in television, it directly takes on those who condemn such activity as 'pre-structuralist'. With well-worked illustrations from comedy as well as narrative fiction, it boldly celebrates television's visual pleasures whilst unpacking contested terms such as 'cinematic', 'complexity' and 'quality'. It acknowledges that aesthetic judgments are situated but posits that they are neither necessarily 'elitist' nor canonical. In sum, this volume sets the tone of a rigorous conversation in a new phase in Television Studies.

About the Author

Jason Jacobs is Associate Professor of Film and Television and Reader in Cultural History in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has written extensively on television history and aesthetics and is the author of The Intimate Screen (2000), Body Trauma TV (2003), Deadwood (2012), and David Milch (forthcoming in 2014). He is currently researching the history of the BBC's commercial arm.

Steven Peacock is Reader in Film and Television Aesthetics at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is the author of Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television (2013), Hollywood and Intimacy (2011), Colour (2010) and editor/author of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (2012) and Reading 24: TV against the Clock (2007). He is also co-editor of The Television Series for Manchester University Press. He has written extensively on the subject of television aesthetics, with a particular interest in the US serial drama.