There have been two prerequisites for the development of television studies in the West-and it is primarily a Western phenomenon, which is not to imply that there is not, for example, a substantial literature on Indian television (Krishnan and Dighe, 1990). The first was that television as such be regarded as worthy of study. This apparently obvious point is significant in relation to a medium that has historically attracted dis­ trust, fear, and contempt. These responses, which often involve the invocation of television as both origin and symptom of social ills, have, as many scholars have pointed out, homologies with responses to earlier popular genres and forms such as the novel and the cinema. The second prerequisite was that television be granted, conceptually, some autonomy and specificity as a medium. Thus television had to be regarded as more than simply a transmitter of world, civic, or artistic events, and as distinguishable from others of the "mass media." Indeed, much of the literature of television studies could be characterized as attempting to formulate accounts of the specificity of television, of­ ten using comparison with, on the one hand, radio (broadcast, liveness, civic address) and on the other, cinema (moving pictures, fantasy), with particular attention, as discussed below, to debate about the nature of the television text and the television audience. Increasingly significant also are the emergent histories of television, whether it be the autobiographical accounts of insiders, such as Grace Wyndham Goldie's history of her years at the BBC, Facing the Nation, or the painstaking archival research of historians such as Wil­liam Boddy with his history of the quiz scandals in 1950s U.S. television or Lynn Spigel with her pioneering study of the way in which television was "installed" in the U.S. living room in the 1950s, Make Room for TV.

     Television studies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from three major bodies of commentary on television: journalism, literary/dramatic criticism, and the social sciences. The first, and most familiar, was daily and weekly journalism. This has generally taken the form of guides to viewing and reviews of recent programs. Television reviewing has, historically, been strongly personally voiced, with this authorial voice rendering continuity to the diverse topics and programs addressed. Some of this writing has offered formulations of great insight in its address to television form-for example the work of James Thurber, Raymond Williams, Philip Purser, or Nancy  Banks-Smith­ which is only now being recognized as one of the origins of the discipline of television studies. The second body of commentary is also organized through ideas of authorship, but here it is the writer or dramatist who forms the legitimation for the attention to television. Critical method here is extrapolated from traditional literary and dramatic criticism, and the television attracts serious critical attention as a "home theater." Representative texts here would be the early collection edited by Howard Thomas, Armchair Theatre (1959) or the later, more academic volume edited by George Brandt, British Television Drama (1981). Until the 1980s, the address of this type of work was almost exclusively to "high culture": plays and occasionally series by known playwrights, often featuring theatrical actors. Only with an understanding of this context is it possible to see how exceptional Raymond Williams's defense of television soap opera in Drama in Performance ( 1968), or Horace Newcomb's validation of popular genres in 1V: The Most Popular Art (1974).

     Both of these bodies of commentary are mainly concerned to address what was shown on the screen, and thus conceive of television mainly as a text within the arts and humanities academic traditions. Other early attention to television draws, in different ways, on the social sciences, addressing the production, circulation, and function of television in contemporary society. Here, research has tended not to address the television text as such, but instead to conceptualize television either through notions of its social function and effects, or within a governing question of cui bono? (whose goods are served?). Thus television, along with other forms of mass media, is conceptualized within frameworks principally concerned with the maintenance of social order: the reproduction of the status quo, the relationship between the state, media ownership, and citizenship, and the constitution of the public sphere. With these concerns, privileged areas of inquiry have tended to be non-textual: patterns of international cross-media ownership; national and international regulation of media production and distribution; professional ideologies; public opinion; media audiences. Methodologies here have been greatly contested, particularly in the extent to which Marxist frameworks, or those associated with the critical sociology of the Frankfurt School, have been employed. These debates have been given further impetus in recent years by research undertaken under the loose definition of cultural studies. In this case the privileged texts-if attention has been directed at texts-have been news and current affairs, and particularly special events such as elections, industrial disputes, and wars. It is this body of work that is least represented in "television studies," which, as an emergent discipline, tends toward the textualization of its object of study. The British journal Media, Culture and Society provides an exemplary instance of media research-in which television  plays  some part-in the traditions of critical sociology and political economy.     

     Much innovatory work in television studies has been focused on the definition of the television text. Indeed, this debate could be seen as one of the constituting frameworks of the field. The common-sense view points to the individual program as a unit, and this view has firm grounding in the way television is produced. Television is, for the most part, made as programs or runs of programs: series, serials, and miniseries. However, this is not necessarily how television is watched, despite the considerable currency of the view that it is somehow better for the viewer to choose to watch particular programs rather than just having the television on. Indeed, BBC television in the 1950s featured "interludes" between programs-most famously 'The Pot­ ter's Wheel," a short film showing a pair of hands making a clay pot on a wheel-to demarcate programs clearly and ensure that viewers did not just drift from one to the next. It is precisely this possible "drifting" through an evening's viewing that has come to seem, to many commentators, one of the unique features of television watching, and hence something that must be attended to in any account of the television text.

     The inaugural formulation is Raymond Williams's argument, in his 1974 book, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, that "the defining feature of broadcasting" is "planned flow." Williams developed these ideas through reflecting on four years of reviewing television for the BBC's weekly periodical The Listener, when he suggests that the separation of the television text into recognizable generic program units, which makes the reviewer's job much easier, somehow misses "the central television experience: the fact of flow" (1974). Williams's own discussion of flow draws on analysis of both British and U.S. television, and he is careful to insist on the national variation of broadcasting systems and types and management of flow, but his attempt to describe what is specific to the watching of television has been internationally genera­tive, particularly in combination with some of the more recent empirical studies of how people do (or do not) watch television.

     If Williams's idea of flow has been principally understood to focus attention on television viewing as involving more viewing and less choosing than a critical focus on individual programs would suggest, other critics have picked up the micro-narratives of which so much television is composed. Thus John Ellis approached the television text using a model ultimately derived from film studies, although he is precisely concerned, in his book Visible Fictions, to differentiate cinema and television. Ellis suggests that the key unit of the television text is the "segment," which he defines as "small, sequential unities of images and sounds whose maximum duration seems to be about five minutes" (1982). Broadcast television, Ellis argues, is composed of different types of combinations of segments: sometimes sequential, as in drama series, sometimes cumulative, as in news broadcasts and commercials. As with Williams's "flow," the radical element in EIiis's "segment" is the way in which it transgresses common-sense boundaries such as "program," "documentary," or "fiction" to bring to the analyst's attention common and defining features of broadcast television as a medium.

     However, it has also been argued that the television text cannot be conceptualized without attention to the structure of national broadcasting institutions and the financing of program production. In this context, Nick Browne has argued that the U.S. television system is best approached through a notion of the "super-text." Browne is concerned to address the specificities of the U.S. commercial television system in contrast to the public-service models-particularly the British one­ which have been so generative a context for such thinkers as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. Browne  defines the "super-text" as, initially,  a television program plus all of the introductory and interstitial material (trailers, commercials, voice-overs and so on) encountered during that program's slot in the schedule. He is thus insisting on an "impure" idea of the text, arguing that the program as broadcast at a particular time in the working week, interrupted by advertisements and announcements, condenses the political economy of television. Advertising, in Browne's schema, is the central mediating institution in U.S. television, linking program schedules to the wider world of production and consumption.

     The final concept to be considered in discussing the television text is Newcomb and Hirsch's idea of the "viewing strip" (1987). This concept suggests a mediation between broadcast provision and individual choice, attempting to grasp the way in which each individual negotiates his or her way through the "flow" on offer, putting together a sequence of viewing of their own selection. Thus different individuals might produce very different  "texts"-viewing  strips-from the same night's viewing. Implicit within the notion of the viewing strip-although not a prerequisite-is the remote-control device, allowing easy channel changing and surfing. And it is this tool of audience agency, embodied in the remote control, that points us to the second substantial area of innovative scholarship in television studies, the address to the audience.

     The hybrid disciplinary origins of television studies are particularly evident in the approach to the television audience. Here, particularly in the 1980s, we find the convergence of potentially antagonistic paradigms. Very simply, on the one hand, research traditions in the social sciences focus on the empirical investigation of the already existing audience. Research design here tends to seek representative samples of particular populations presumed to correlate with viewers of a particular type of programming (adolescent boys and violence; women and soap opera, and so on). Research on the television audience has historically been dominated, particularly in the United States, by large-scale quantitative surveys, often designed using a model of the "effects" of the media, of which television is not necessarily a differentiated element. Within the social sciences, this "effects" model has been challenged by what is known as the "uses and gratifications" model. In James Halloran's famous formulation, "we should ask not what the media does to people, but what people do to the media" (Halloran, 1970). Herta Herzog 's 1944 research on the listeners to radio daytime serials was an inaugural project within this "uses and gratifications" tradition, which in the late 1980s produced the project on the international decoding of the U.S. prime-time serial, Dallas (Liebes and Katz, 1990).

     On the other hand, this social-science history of empirical audience investigation has been confronted by ideas of a textually constituted "reader"-a concept originating in literary and film studies. This produces a very different conceptualization of the audience, drawing on literary, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theory to suggest-in different and disputed ways-that the text constructs a "subject position" from which it is intelligible. In this body of work, the context of consumption and the social origins of audience members are irrelevant to the making of meaning, which originates in the text. However-and it is thus that we see the potential convergence with social-science "uses and gratifications" models-literary theorists such as Umberto Eco have questioned the extent to which the reader should be seen as active in meaning-making ( 1979). It is, in this context, difficult to separate the development of television studies, as such, from that of cultural studies, for it is within cultural studies that we begin to find the most sophisticated theorizations and empirical investigations of the complex, contextual interplay of text and "reader" in the making of meaning.

     The first discussions of television in the field of cul­tural studies are those of Stuart Hall in essays such as his 1974 paper "Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse" (Hall, 1997) and David Morley's audience research (1980). However, this television-specific work cannot theoretically be completely separated from other cultural studies work conducted at Birmingham University in the 1970s, such as that of Dick Hebdige and Angela McRobbie, which stressed the often oppositional agency of individuals in response to contemporary culture. British cultural studies has proved a successful export, its theoretical paradigms meeting and sometimes clashing with those used internationally in the more generalized academic orientation toward the study of popular culture and entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s. Influential scholars working within, or closely related to, cultural-studies paradigms include Len Ang and John Fiske. Ang's work on the television audience ranges from a study of Dallas fans in the Netherlands to the interrogation of existing ideas of audience in a postmodern, global context. John Fiske's work has been particularly successful in introducing British cultural studies to a U.S. audience, and his 1987 book Television Culture was one of the first books about television to take seriously the feminist agenda that has been so important to the recent development of the field. For if television studies is understood as a barely established institutional space, carved out by scholars of television from, on the one hand, mass communications and traditional Marxist political economy, and on the other, cinema, drama, and literary studies, then the significance of feminist research to the establishment of this connotationally feminized field cannot be underestimated, even if it is not always recognized. E. Ann Kaplan's collection, Regarding Television, gives some indication of formations in this area from the early 1980s.

     The interest of new social movements in issues of representation, which has been fruitful for film and literary studies as well as for television studies, has produced sustained interventions by a range of scholars, approaching mainly "texts" with questions about the representation of particular social groups and the interpretation of programs such as thirtysomething, Cagney and Lacey, The Cosby Show, or various soap operas. Feminist scholars have, since the mid- I 970s, tended to focus particularly on programs "for" women and those that have key female protagonists. Key work here includes Julie D' Acci's study of Cagney and Lacey and the now substantial literature on soap opera (Seiter et al., 1989). Research by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis has addressed the complex meanings about class and "race" produced by viewers of The Cosby Show, but most audience research in this "representational" paradigm has been with white audiences. Jacqueline Bobo and Ellen Seiter argue that this is partly a consequence of the "whiteness" of the academy, which makes research about viewing in the domestic environment potentially a further extension of surveillance for those ethnicized by the dominant culture.

     Television studies in the 1990s, was characterized by work in four main areas. The most formative for the emergent discipline have been the work on the definition and interpretation of the television text and the new media ethnographies of viewing, which emphasize both the contexts and the social relations of viewing. However, there is a considerable history of "production studies," which trace the complex interplay of factors involved in getting programs on screen. Examples here might include Tom Burns's study of the professional culture of the BBC (1977), Philip Schlesinger's study of "The News" (1978), the study of MTM co-edited by Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi (1984), or Todd Gitlin's Inside Prime lime (1983, 2000). The fourth area, television history, has also been increasingly significant. Not only does the historical endeavor frequently necessitate working with vanished sources-such as the programs-but it has also  involved the use of material of contested evidentiary status (for example, advertisements in women's magazines, as opposed to producer statements). This history of television is a rapidly expanding field, creating a retrospective history for the discipline, but also documenting the period of nationally regulated terrestrial broadcasting-the "television" of "television studies"-which was coming to an end.

     The changes in the television industries occurring from the mid-1980s to the present led to still other questions, some of them variations on old themes, others developed in response to shifts in technology, policy, programming strategies, or alterations in social contexts. Studies of television texts continued to explore form and history, as in Aniko Bodroghkozy's Groove Tube, an exploration of television programs as they related to, represented, and appealed to young people. The popularity and socio-cultural significance-and financial success--of so-called "reality television" and "tabloid" television were explored in James Friedman's Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse and the Real (2002) and Kevin Glynn's Tabloid Culture (2000). These works not only worked toward definitions of these forms, but related them to earlier versions and examined responses from a range of sources. Other studies recognized that definitions of television studies tightly bound to prime-time fictional programming, or to news, or soap opera-and focused primarily on the experience of these forms in the home-were limited from the outset. Anna  Mc­ Carthy's Ambient Television (200 I), for example, explored the uses of television in taverns, department stores, installations, and other locations outside the home, thus calling into question conventional notions about the medium, its "viewers and audiences," and their practices.

     Other studies were focused on technological changes that altered practices in the television industries, the experience of television users, or both. John Thornton Caldwell's Televisuality (1995) argued for a powerful redefinition of the medium based on the rise of digital production technologies and the expansion of distribution systems. Ellen Seiter's Television and New Media Audiences (1998) extended approaches developed in the analysis of popular television to users of new media such as the internet. Significantly, the first academic journal to use the term "television studies" was Television and New Media Studies, first published in 2000. Article titles ranged over all the topics mentioned here, from textual definition and theory, to anal­ysis of specific programs, to essays on television history, and, as the journal title indicates, to exploration of new "screen" media. In these ways, television studies has kept pace with alterations in the varied experiences of the medium-industrial, individual, social, and cultural.