The Extratextuals

In a few days, New York University Press will be releasing Amanda D. Lotz’s The Television Will Be Revolutionized, and I wanted to give it a healthy plug here, since it really is a fantastic book. I was lucky enough to be asked to review it for NYU when it was a manuscript. At the time, I was struggling to piece together, from endless trade journal articles, recent academic journal articles, and conference papers, a picture of exactly how American television worked today, not five, ten, or twenty years ago. I felt sort of like the doctor at the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, who must study his patient through a small tear in a sheet, each day seeing just a tiny part of the whole. Then along came Lotz’s manuscript and did away with the sheet. Anyone who has read Lotz’s work (in seemingly every journal in the field by now) knows her remarkable capacity to explain how the system works, and this book offers an embarrassment of riches. It is the best book on the state of contemporary television that I know of, and a wonderful resource for teachers, students, or non-academics alike.

She carefully charts a variety of changes to television as we knew it, and, in an encompassing manner, discusses the ramifications of these changes, on advertising models, patterns of audience reception, production cultures, distribution practices, etc. The book covers a large and complex territory, but does so with deft skill, written in an accessible style: even when the material would appear dry and procedural by necessity, Lotz manages to present it in a way that reads well.

Furthermore (and important to those of us who love extratextuals), it has a very attractive cover, its colors screaming out at you, ironically mimicking the television test screens that are a product of a bygone, pre-revolutionized era when television actually stopped at the end of the day. But I must warn that the interior of the book will likely become quite ugly quite quickly following purchase, as you’ll find yourself underlining, highlighting, and jotting notes everywhere, till you make her book look something more akin to the crazed journals of Kevin Spacey’s serial killer in Se7en.

For those of you who still use Inside Prime Time, even though you know it’s woefully out of date by now, The Television Will Be Revolutionized will finally give you a chance to put Gitlin on the shelf. While there is less direct quotation from television production personnel than Gitlin offered, Lotz nevertheless offers just as much of an inside look, providing access to those of us who have little or none.

Quite refreshingly, though, Lotz clearly watches television, and hasn’t just consigned it to the trashcan. Thus her considerable knowledge of the industry is balanced by her familiarity with specific programs, and her examples and case studies often defy television studies’ “received wisdom” precisely because she’s able to get into the trenches and see how things work on an everyday level. I appreciate how it never reads as though the writer is sitting on a culture critic’s distant throne, eating grapes while pontificating without close analysis. It’s written by someone involved with television, for others involved with television, whether that mean researchers, producers, or viewers.

I just checked my initial review of the book for NYU Press, and see that I ended by writing:

The book serves as both a bible of television in the here-and-now, and as provocation for and contribution to a whole new wave of debates on television in the future. I will recommend it to colleagues, and assign it to students with swift resolve upon its release. Bravo

‘Nuff said. At $22 it’s a great deal.

book reviews books, Lotz, television