Cinema Journal

Here is one of the main distinctions I can make about our field based on twenty-five years as an SCMS member and scholar of radio, television, film, and new media: virtually all television scholars have taken courses in film history, institutions, and aesthetics; very few film scholars have taken courses in broadcasting history, institutions, and aesthetics. Or, to put it in slightly less sweeping terms, there is an information and [End Page 111] awareness deficit in the community of film scholars, especially among its senior members, with respect to radio and television. And it reflects something much larger.

This deficit is rooted in a number of factors. First, for scholars of my generation (which, I hate to say, is now the older generation), there was no television study to speak of when we were attending graduate school. I was thrilled in 1978 when, during my first semester at NYU, Robert Sklar held what I believe was the university's first seminar on television. It had to take place at his SoHo loft, not on campus, because he possessed, remarkably, an early VCR—about the size of a suitcase and twice as heavy.

A few more courses on TV were offered during my years in NYU's cinema studies department, but not many. Most of us who were interested in television studied on our own or took perplexing classes in journalism and mass communication departments, where our professors and fellow students regarded our fixation on such peculiar aspects of TV as narrative, representation, and meaning construction as frivolous, time-wasting affectations.

A few of us persisted. At the University of Texas, Horace Newcomb led in approaching television as a cultural form long before anyone else dared to. In 1984, E. Ann Kaplan came out with her seminal collection, Regarding Television. By the mid-1980s, my somewhat more advanced NYU classmate William Boddy, one of the authors of Regarding Television, was writing his influential and still-in-print Fifties Television; Lynn Spigel at UCLA was working on her groundbreaking Make Room for TV.¹

I migrated over to the brand-new Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where I found a group of people who were very interested in that era's new media—cable, satellites, and text-based electronics (remember teletext?)—and not hugely invested in maintaining old distinctions. Their influence led me to think outside the two separate boxes of film and television studies; it could be that this "new media" moment in SCMS's history will do the same. But see below.

Second, film study has benefited from the presence of television as the "low other." Film's status in the academy, steadily ascendant since the 1960s, was initially predicated on the identification of the director as the "author" of an individual film, turning film from a mass-produced object into a work of art. One could easily see that important distinction when film was compared to television, the mass-produced commodity par excellence. Television's bad example kept scholarly attention distracted from the fact that there are really lots of authors in film; the director is only one, and perhaps did not even become so until the first generation of film school–educated directors learned about the director's new status from their professors. That our nation's Ivy League universities, notably slow to pick up on innovative trends in scholarship that involve culture "from below," now have a few film courses but still eschew the cultural study of television and radio speaks volumes here.² It is the nation's public land-grant universities that have led, since the 1920s, in the study of communication and of broadcasting in particular. I predict that most Ivy League students will be studying "new media" before television is ever allowed to darken the doorsteps of their institutions.

Television does present difficulties for study if one approaches it from the set of assumptions in which most film scholars have been trained. What is the object of [End Page 112] study: the episode, the season, the series? Who is the author, and if we cannot specify, how do we understand the...