Television

For over two decades, Television has served as the foremost guide to television studies,

offering readers an in-depth understanding of how television programs and commercials are

made and how they function as producers of meaning. Author Jeremy G. Butler shows the

ways in which camera style, lighting, set design, editing, and sound combine to produce

meanings that viewers take away from their television experience.

Highlights of the fifth edition include:

An entirely new chapter by Amanda D. Lotz on television in the contemporary digital

media environment.

Discussions integrated throughout on the latest developments in screen culture during

the on-demand era, including the impact of binge-watching and the proliferation of

screens (smartphones, tablets, computer monitors, etc.).

Updates on the effects of new digital technologies on TV style.

Jeremy G. Butler is Professor of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of

Alabama. He has taught television, film, and new media courses since 1980 and is active in

online educational resources for television and film studies.

Television

Visual Storytelling and Screen Culture

Fifth Edition

Jeremy G. Butler

with a contribution from Amanda D. Lotz

Fifth edition published 2018

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.

The right of Jeremy G. Butler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by

him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,

including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published 1994 by Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Fourth edition published 2012 by Routledge.

The LIFE magazine photograph on the cover illustrates the variety of channels that were

available to “community antenna TV” (CATV) subscribers in 1966. CATV was the first form of

“cable television” in the U.S. and would eventually lead to the vast profusion of cable channels

in the 1990s. In turn, the proliferation of cable networks came to disrupt the dominance of

over-the-air broadcast networks—a harbinger of future upheaval caused by on-demand

streaming services. Photo credit: Arthur Schatz.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Butler, Jeremy G., 1954– author. | Lotz, Amanda D., 1974– author.

Title: Television : visual storytelling and screen culture / Jeremy G. Butler ; with a

contribution from Amanda D. Lotz.

Description: Fifth edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references

and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038602 | ISBN 9781138744004 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138743960 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Television—Psychological aspects. | Television—Semiotics. | Television

broadcasting—United States. | Television criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1992.6 .B86 2018 | DDC 302.23/45—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038602

ISBN: 978-1-138-74400-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-74396-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-18129-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Interstate

by Apex CoVantage, LLC.

Visit the companion website: www.routledge.com/cw/butler

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I

Television Structures and Systems

1 An Introduction to Television Structures and Systems: Ebb and Flow in the Network

Era

Television’s Not-So-Distant Past: The Network Era

Polysemy, Heterogeneity, Contradiction

Interruption and Sequence

Segmentation

Summary

Further Readings

2 Television in the Contemporary Media Environment

AMANDA D. LOTZ

Internet-Distributed Television: Digital Endemic and Legacy Media

But I Don’t Have a TV

We Can All Make Television

Summary

Further Readings

3 Narrative Structure: Television Stories

The Theatrical Film

The Television Series

The Television Serial

Transmedia Storytelling and Binge-Watching

Summary

Further Readings

4 Building Narrative: Character, Actor, Star

Building Characters

A Typology of Character Signs

Building Performances

A Typology of Performance Signs

Strategies of Performance

The Star System?

Summary

Further Readings

5 Beyond and Beside Narrative Structure

Television’s Reality

Television’s Reality: Forms and Modes

Television’s Reality: Genres

Summary

Further Readings

6 The Television Commercial

U.S. Linear-TV’s Economic Structure

The Polysemy of Commodities

The Persuasive Style of Commercials

Summary: “Capitalism in Action”

Further Readings

Part II

Television Style: Image and Sound

7 An Introduction to Television Style: Modes of Production

Single-Camera Mode of Production

Multiple-Camera Mode of Production

Hybrid Modes of Production

Summary

Further Readings

8 Style and Setting: Mise-en-Scene

Set Design

Costume Design

Lighting Design

Actor Movement

Summary

Further Readings

9 Style and the Camera: Videography and Cinematography

Basic Optics: The Camera Lens

Image Definition and Resolution

Color and Black-and-White

Framing

Aspect Ratio

In-Camera Visual Effects

Summary

Further Readings

10 Style and Editing

The Single-Camera Mode of Production

The Multiple-Camera Mode of Production

Continuity Editing and Hybrid Modes of Production

Summary

Further Readings

11 Style and Sound

Types of Television Sound

Audio’s Mode of Production

Purposes of Sound on Television

Acoustic Properties and Sound Technology

Space, Time, and Narrative

Summary

Further Readings

Part III

Television Studies

12 An Introduction to Television Studies

Critical Research and Television

Further Readings

13 Textual Analysis

Television Authorship

Style and Stylistics

Genre Study

Semiotics

Summary

Further Readings

14 Discourse and Identity

Ideological Criticism and Cultural Studies

The Discourse of the Industry I: Production Studies

The Discourse of the Industry II: Political Economy

Discourse and Identity I: Gender

Discourse and Identity II: Queer Theory

Discourse and Identity III: Race and Ethnicity

Summary

Further Readings

Appendix I: Sample Analyses and Exercises

Appendix II: Mass Communication Research

Glossary

Index

Preface

Should we take television seriously?

Should we take television seriously as a cultural or aesthetic medium, as a text capable of

producing meaning? Should we take The Real Housewives of Orange County seriously? Should

we commission studies on The Wire’s visual style? Should an interpretation of the discourse of

The Beverly Hillbillies be permitted in an academic journal? And, most pertinent to this book,

should there be college courses on these programs? Should The Simpsons be allowed in today’s

syllabi?

Yes, we should study television in school. And, yes, we should take television seriously.

Why? Because television provides meanings, many meanings, as it entertains. There is little

doubt that it is the predominant meaning-producing and entertainment medium of the past 70

years. As such it demands our scrutiny. In order to dissect the pleasures and meanings that

television affords us, we need an understanding of how narrative is structured, and how

commercials persuade, and how sets are designed, and how the camera positions the viewer’s

perspective, and how sound interacts with image.

Television: Visual Storytelling and Screen Culture (formerly subtitled Critical Methods and

Applications) supplies the student with a whole toolbox of implements to disassemble

television. It explains how television works, how television programs and commercials are

made, and how they function as fertile producers of meanings. Television does not attempt to

teach taste or aesthetics. It is less concerned with evaluation than with interpretation. It resists

asking, “Is The Bachelor great art?” Instead, it poses the question, “What meanings does The

Bachelor signify and how does it do so?” To answer this question brings viewers closer to

understanding television as a meaning-producing phenomenon and thus helps them stay

afloat in a sea of frequently contradictory meanings.

The form of analysis stressed here asks the viewer, first, to explore the structures of

narrative, non-narrative, and commercial television material. Second, Television questions

how those structures emphasize certain meanings (and repress others) to viewers, who

approach television with many varying understandings of how the world works. And third, it

considers how television’s images and sounds work together to create its programs,

commercials, and assorted on-screen flotsam and jetsam. Thus, this textbook works from the

very concrete (light and shadow on an illuminated screen, accompanied by sound) to the very

abstract (discourses on many aspects of the human experience)—and back again.

Accordingly, Part I of this textbook introduces the student to the principles organizing

television’s narrative, non-narrative, and commercial content and the industrial organization

of network-era TV and today’s on-demand media. Part II explains how that content is

communicated to the viewer through the medium’s style—its manipulation of image and

sound. And it accounts for how the American TV industry generates that style through two

main modes of production: single-camera and multiple-camera. Part III departs from

Television’s consideration of television texts to survey the critical approaches—the methods of

television studies—that have been applied to the medium. This part of the book first grounds

the student in methods of analyzing programs themselves and then outlines methods of

examining how TV’s meanings are received by viewers and produced by TV-industry

workers. Additionally, Appendix I provides guidance for writing papers about TV. It outlines

how the principles of textual analysis that are developed over the previous chapters may be

applied to a specific program. Appendix II discusses approaches to television from socialscientific or empirical methods, which contrast with the television-studies approach advocated

in the bulk of the book.

Television’s first edition was written during the year that websites evolved from a relatively

primitive, text-only format to one that accommodated images and sounds (1993, when the

Mosaic browser was released). We’re excited about the possibilities for TV analysis that online

platforms provide, and we’ve developed a companion website for Television at tvcrit.com.

Here you’ll find sample student analyses, color versions of all the illustrations (larger than

reproduced in print, too), and many additional television materials that cannot fit between the

covers of a book—specifically, audio and video clips. Parts of the site are reserved for

Television users and require the following account name and password:

Account name: tvcrit

Password: tvcrit4u

Television, this book, was born of the author’s frustration as a teacher of television studies

in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many television textbooks from that era deal with the history

and structure of television as an industry, but few offer students a way to analyze that

industry’s products from a critical perspective. Other TV textbooks emphasize the “nuts-andbolts” of video production (how to operate cameras, microphones, and the like) to the extent

that they seldom have space to consider television meanings and how they are generated by

those nuts-and-bolts. Textbooks that do address television analysis as part of “mass

communication” research and theory rely largely upon empirical methods drawn from

psychology and sociology. They often neglect the issue of critical interpretation.

Aside from Appendix II, Television does not engage extensively with the masscommunication research tradition. Instead, its authors draw upon nonempirical models for

their inspiration. Much of Television will look familiar, for example, to readers who have

encountered film-studies textbooks. Moreover, Television also bears the marks of nonempirical

disciplines such as literary criticism, semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), and

ideological criticism. It refers to these approaches where appropriate, but the authors are

concerned above all else to analyze television as television and not as a test case for a

particular research method. As such, this textbook fits within the still developing field of

“television studies”—a label that was firmly established in the early 2000s with the publication

of about a dozen books with it in their titles (see p. 311 for specific titles). The core principles

of television studies remain a bit fuzzy, but Part III will attempt to bring them into focus.

This, the fifth edition of Television (prepared 2017–18), arrives at a time when screen culture

is evolving rapidly. For many viewers, especially younger ones, the smartphone has become

the screen with which they spend the most time—sometimes supplanting the old-fashioned TV

set in front of the living room couch and sometimes serving as a second screen that can

distract from or enhance what’s on that TV set. We live in a time of a plenitude of screens: one

constantly in our pocket, one in the living room, one in the doctor’s waiting room, a dozen in

the sports bar, and on and on. The programming on all these screens is sometimes unique to

one technology, the way that Snapchat only works on phones; or, it can slide from one screen

to another, the way a humorous monologue on TV monitors later shows up on your

smartphone. Our 4K television sets can offer us a visual experience rivaling a movie theater,

and smart TVs can provide an interactive user interface much like a desktop computer. Our

phones can amuse us with cat videos, but they can also tell us the weather, entice us to play

games, allow us to communicate with our friends via social media, or play us the latest tune

from Beyoncé. Screen technology in the twenty-first century continues to mutate, blurring the

functions of specific devices and offering possibilities that at times seem endless.

This is not just a time of great technological shifts. There have also been huge changes in

the economics of television—particularly in the United States. The broadcast networks are

under siege from online, video-on-demand (VOD) portals such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

These VOD systems have significantly disrupted old broadcasting models by providing new

ways for getting storytelling video from a producer to a viewer. It is obvious that conventional

television no longer commands our attention as it did from the 1950s to the 1970s. Some critics

have even proclaimed an end to the “broadcast era” or “network era” of television, but the

mode of production associated with broadcast television is far from dead. Despite the

appearance of television programs on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, the

distribution of television via over-the-air or cable/satellite networks is still the engine that

powers the television machine. Television originated as a commercial, network medium in the

years after World War II and will continue to have an impact as such for the foreseeable

future. Just how much longer this will hold true is currently the subject of much speculation.

Television does not pretend to be a comprehensive guide to deconstructing everything that

appears on a video screen. No single volume could. We spend little time, for example, on video

gaming or the cultural discourse on social media. Rather, we here emphasize storytelling with

sound and image as it originated in the cinema and network-era television and as it remains,

perhaps surprisingly healthy, on streaming services. Television helps students understand

television’s various manifestations, emphasizing the ever-present, ever-flowing, network-era

television system and its many descendants.

New to the Fifth Edition

Readers familiar with previous editions will note the following changes:

An entirely new chapter by Amanda D. Lotz on television in the contemporary media

environment.

Discussions integrated throughout on the latest developments in screen culture during

the on-demand era, including the impact of binge-watching and the proliferation of

screens (smartphones, tablets, computer monitors, etc.).

Updates on the effects of new digital technologies on TV style.

The online availability of previously eliminated “special-topics” chapters: “A History of

Television Style” (tvcrit.com/find/history), “Music Television” (tvcrit.com/find/musictv),

and “Animated Television” (tvcrit.com/find/animation).

Additional video examples, to which short links are provided.

Dozens of newly added or updated still illustrations—eliminating ones from shows no

longer generally available and incorporating new ones from recent shows.

Acknowledgments

Blaine Allan and Gary Copeland each wrote a Television chapter that appeared in previous

editions, but their contributions to this project go far beyond that. They were there for the

original conceptualization of the project, helped shepherd it through various drafts and

rewrites, furnished key examples when my mind went blank, and generally illustrated just

how collegial colleagues can be. Daniel Goldmark stepped up and rewrote much of the

“Animated Television” chapter for the third edition.

I thank my original editor, Linda Bathgate, for her diligence in bringing this project to

fruition and for supporting it through multiple editions and Erica Wetter for assuming editing

duties on the current edition. I am also grateful to Routledge for its continuing efforts in the

area of television studies.

Several persons read and provided useful comments on previous editions: David Bordwell,

Jim Castonguay, Brent Davis, Maureen Furniss, Carolyn Hales, Chad Harriss, Michele Hilmes,

Lynne Joyrich, Chuck Kleinhans, Tara McPherson, Ellen Seiter, Greg Stroud, Lang Thompson,

Robert M. Young, Kristen Warner, Mark J. P. Wolf, and Shuhua Zhou. Among the televisionindustry workers I have consulted are Tom Azzari, Tom Cherones, Aaron Greer, Dean

Holland, Ken Kwapis, Michael Laibson, Chuck Meyers, Bryan C. Fails, Michael Parnes, and

Craig Pettigrew. I am grateful for all of their time and insights.

The Center for Public Television and Radio at the University of Alabama; its current

director, Elizabeth Brock; and its former director, Tom Rieland, graciously assisted with the

preparation of illustrations. Videographer Preston Sullivan set up several illustrative shots,

with the help of Brent Davis, Dawn Haskew, Jim Holliman, Glen Richard, and Jason Ruha.

Additionally, Catherine May assisted with photographs of a CPT&R editing suite, with

accompanying screen shots.

Most screen shots in this book were created by digitally capturing individual frames from

videotapes, DVDs, video files, Blu-ray discs, and mobile devices (as technology has marched

on). Barry Smith ably assisted in this task originally. Details on the process are provided in a

tutorial on tvcrit.com. Nathan Dains (and his son) kindly provided a screen shot from

Pokémon Go. Other illustrations were created by Laura Lineberry (drawings), and Rickey

Yanaura (photographs). Our narrative charts were inspired by a diagram created by Victoria

Costley. Figure 5.9 is courtesy of MTV. Figure 9.51 is courtesy of The Weather Channel and

photographer Richard Grant. The STEADICAM® photo in Figure 9.37 is courtesy of The

Tiffen Company. STEADICAM® is a registered trademark of The Tiffen Company. Tables 6.2

and 7.1 are courtesy of Nielsen Media Research. Figures 8.28–8.30 are courtesy of Steven

DiCasa, co-founder of Rethink Films.

Rosemary McMahill diligently compiled the glossary for the first edition and also provided

valuable assistance with the word processing of the manuscript.

My students at the University of Alabama were the first to be exposed to this text, while

still a manuscript. I thank them for their patience in dealing with Television in photocopied

form—missing an illustration here and there and lacking a binding that would properly hold it

together for a 15-week semester. Their responses and comments helped make this a much

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