Description

This book is a serious and welcome account of a particular television genre and its production and the organization of its topics illustrates some of the complexity of television as an object of study. It is the product of a team of academics bringing different methodological skill to the analysis; it seeks to combine work on production, text and audience in an integrated way; it takes on television’s roots in industrial processes of the mass media but pays attention to the aesthetics and indeed the poetics of the series; it looks at how the commercial exploitation of the television product is of key importance to the advertisers and sales organizations which pay for television production but, in analyzing the audience reception, does not forget that television audiences sometimes seek their pleasures in unpredictable ways.