First published in 1990. This book is the first specifically about television drama from within a cultural studies perspective and as such examines the active agency of both viewers and media practitioners. The author examines dominant and counter-myths as they circulate in popular culture, discussing soap opera, science fiction, sitcom, cop series and 'authored' drama among its examples. It works within an ethnographic framework, he looks in detail at both the production and reception of TV drama. The overall aim of the book is to examine television representation as part of an historically positioned and differentiated social formation in which knowledgeable actors work in every institutional arena (whether media industry, academia or domestic household) to make their meanings.
Introduction: theories of myth, agency and audience Part One Popular TV drama: ideology and myth 1 ‘Soft’ news: the space of TV drama 2 Genre and myth: ‘a half-formed picture’ Part Two Authored drama: agency as ‘strategic penetration’ 3 ‘Reperceiving the world’: making history 4 ‘Serious drama’: the dangerous mesh of empathy 5 TV drama as social event: text and inter-text 6 Authored drama: ‘not just naturalism’ 7 Industry/performance: drama as ‘strategic penetration’ Part Three Reading drama: audience use, exchange and play 8 ‘Use and exchange’: delivering audiences 9 Sub-culture and reading formation: regimes of watching Conclusion: comedies of ‘myth’ and ‘resistance’ 10 Comic order and disorder: residual and emergent ultures 11 ‘Marauding behaviour’: parody, carnival and the grotesque
Biography
Professor John Tulloch (Charles Sturt University, Australia & Cardiff University, Wales) He has written widely on film history and theory, audience analysis and theories of textual criticism, and has published books on the British science fiction series, Doctor Who, and the Australian soap opera, A Country Practice.
