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Let me start, though, by agreeing with the injunction not to edit a collection if you really think of it as a substitute for publishing work that you have written yourself. Edited collections won’t get you tenure or promotion by themselves, and they take time and energy, so if you have very limited reserves of each, you would be better advised to spend them elsewhere.

However, if you’re paid full-time to be an academic, unless you work a 4/4 load with lots of advising hours and you’re a slow writer, or unless you’re not working full-time, you very likely do have extra reserves. Which means that telling someone not to edit a collection because you could instead be writing a journal article is kind of like telling someone not to watch television because it’s important to read books: the fallacy lies in thinking you can’t do both. All three of my edited collections were compiled while I was writing monographs and journal articles.

As for tenure and promotion, I’ve seen numerous people across the humanities get tenure at top notch schools with the formula of one book + a strong selection of journal articles + another large project. That “other large project” is sometimes a second monograph (written or in progress), but it can also be an edited collection. Even directly, therefore, edited collections do and can matter – they aren’t fetishized as are monographs or articles at leading journals, no, but they still matter.

A great deal of their value, though, is best measured indirectly. They increase your skills, your profile, and your network in ways that can definitely impact tenure and promotion decisions (not that this is all that does or should matter, a point to which I’ll return).

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Indeed, let’s back up and discuss what’s involved in an edited collection. First, of course, one must come up with the idea. Then one begins the lion’s share of the editing, which involves wrangling academics and cat-herding. A heck of a lot of the job is social, finding talent, encouraging some people to write for you, soothing them when they think they might need to drop out, finding replacements if they do drop out, reminding them of deadlines, working out how best to get them to work when they inevitably miss the deadline, talking through their ideas, and smoothing over reviews. Another key part of the job is critical reading, looking for what works, what doesn’t, and being diplomatic and constructive in improving the chapters. Then there’s the dealings with the press, which involves selling it to them, running interference when their reviewers inevitably want you to drop one or two articles and replace them with make-believe ideal replacements, and proofreading and likely indexing the thing towards the end.

Let’s look at each in turn:

(1) The Idea – First, make sure there’s a reason for your collection. Vanity publishing for a group who got together and thought they had something teh awesome to say about topic X doesn’t suffice. Ask who else will want to read this, and will benefit from it. Ideally (at least if you want a book contract!), you’ll need to think about what kind of undergraduate classes might use the book, and should use the book. Some of the best edited collections make an intervention, and/or find something that everyone’s talking about and either teaching or wanting to teach yet not doing so because there aren’t the readings.

What this means is that one of the key reasons to do an edited collection is because the area needs it. If it’s vanity publishing and is the equivalent of forcing some poor soul to sit down and watch your entire wedding video, don’t bother. But if the book has something to say, adds to and develops the discussion on a topic, and thus will be seen as a good, then you’re doing a great service to the discipline, and that service will likely be noticed.

(As an aside, though, be aware that you’ll be identified with the topic of this collection if you edit it. Perhaps moreso than with your other work, because edited collections often enjoy a visibility that a lot of other work doesn’t. Case in point is my co-edited collection, Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. I was originally asked to co-edit it by someone who liked my essay on non-fans and anti-fans, and thought it would be neat to have me as a co-editor since I could add a critical viewpoint on fandom from outside fan studies. That person then needed to back out of the project, and I was left as the lead editor of a book on fandom. I am still introduced as a fan studies scholar, and a surprisingly large number of prospective grad students want to come to UW to work with me on fandom. So do ask yourself if this fits with your publishing profile.)

(2) The Cat-Herding – A lot of my job as editor is conducted while watching television, sending emails to check in on this or that, reading creative excuses for why something’s late, etc. It can get frustrating, especially if you run into a primadonna, and thus it pays to know who you’re working with, what they’re capable of, and how well they work with deadlines (a key reason I’m not fond of the open call edited collection). But it can also be immensely rewarding. Why?

On one hand, that social aspect can keep you sane. Rather than doing your work in a little bubble, or only leaving that bubble to share with students a limited version of it, edited collections can put you in touch with a lot of very smart people working on a topic that matters to you. But that can also be professionally rewarding. Back to Fandom, I largely met Henry Jenkins, Roberta Pearson, and a whole slate of other cool people through that book, and not just the “hello, my name is” style greeting you might “enjoy” at a conference reception. When I was a very junior faculty member, I had senior faculty regarding me as a peer as a result of Fandom. Then, with my next collection, Battleground: The Media, since it was an encyclopedia, I was in touch with an even wider group of scholars.

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(3) The Critical Reading – I moved to a university with a PhD program only two years ago. Yet I felt extremely well-prepared for working with grad students because of my editing (both the books and the journal). There is a profound difference between grading undergrad papers and giving comments to researchers that move them closer to publication, and editing hones the latter skills. Sure, it requires diplomacy – sometimes a lot! – but that is itself a great skill to learn and develop in our field.

But over and above that, surely one of the key reasons to edit a collection is because you believe more work on topic X is needed. And as an editor, you read that work closer than most. Academics often need an excuse to read, post-grad school – we either need to be teaching the topic, or writing on it directly. Editing has ensured, though, that I’m always reading. And if your edited collection is on a topic near and dear to you, you’re thinking through your own ideas in the process. I came out of editing Fandom knowing so very much more about fans, and with much more nuanced, sophisticated understandings of many aspects of fan studies. Ditto with Satire TV and satire. Granted, we can often feel like we’re in a business that’s all about publishing and teaching, but central to both of those, and likely the driving force that got all of us into this business, is a passion for ideas. Editing allows you to wrestle with those ideas in a wonderful way. Not just your own ideas, or not just others’ ideas for a paragraph or two, but meaningful, substantive investment with a range of ideas.

(4) Working With the Press – A lot of this work can be mundane, but that’s the nature of publishing, and at least you’re able to see reviewers’ comments on other people’s work, too, not just your own. Building a relationship with a press can’t hurt, either. So it’s all educational and helpful in its own way.

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To bring this all together, let me try to list the ways in which Fandom helped me, a collection that I began as I was finishing grad school, and that came out while I was in the second year of a tenure track position:

• I became much closer to Cornel Sandvoss and Lee Harrington, a bond that led to us editing Popular Communication for five years (and, btw, you can be damn sure that most journals wouldn’t be offering an editorship to someone as junior as I was alone)
• I got to think through issues of fandom and audiences in an intense way, thereby improving the state of my thinking on both
• I met Roberta Pearson, Henry Jenkins, and Aswin Punathambekar, three wonderful people who have been great friends, advisors, and advocates throughout my career, and who have been on panels with me and worked on other projects with me
• I also met other wonderful contributors and strengthened bonds with some who I already knew
• As noted above, a significant number of grad students or at least prospective graduate students came to know who I was
• When Kristina Busse met me at Flow, she accosted me about the exclusions in the book, and this led to a great discussion at the time, and many since. Last year, we wrote a chapter together, and Nina’s a good friend. That’s just one example of how it started discussions for me
• I got to publish some extremely talented junior scholars alongside some bigger names, thereby quite literally placing the younger lot right next to the older lot and giving them an early venue for their ideas
• I established a relationship with NYU Press that continued into a single-authored book and another co-edited collection
• I was able to intervene in a sub-field (fan studies) and try to slightly change the direction of future research (in particular, I wanted to have sections on high culture fandoms and anti-fans, and they’re both there)
• I learned a bunch of skills of diplomatic review writing that I have since been able to use with grad students, journal reviews, and such
• At a junior point in my career, I was able to pull a chair up to a bunch of bigger names and realize I belonged. Post-Fandom, therefore, I think I was a lot less timid about asking people I didn’t know to be on a panel, or so forth
• And yeah, yeah, it may not count as much as a single-authored book to many, but it certainly counts for something

~~

The “moral” of this post is not that everyone should do edited collections. But I don’t like to see them maligned. There are some wonderful edited collections in our field: Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren’s Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method and Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Caldwell’s Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries together carved out a new sub-field and gave it legs most recently; Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette’s Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (both editions) is not only the best one-stop shop on the genre but also superb for teaching television in general; and please don’t tell me that Horace Newcomb’s Television: The Critical View didn’t play a key role in making Newcomb one of the more known and respected figures in our field along the way of helping endless undergrad classes get why and how television matters. And that’s just skimming the surface. All of the above editors who went up for tenure got it, and all helped our field. That works for me.

My chapter, “The Reviews Are In: TV Critics and the (Pre)Creation of Meaning” takes the press reviews for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Heroes, and Friday Night Lights, and looks at how they attempted to pre-decode the shows. While of course other paratexts played an important role in creating the texts of each show, I became fascinated when reading through the reviews for all three shows by how much they tried to funnel readers into a rather narrow set of interpretations. So, for instance, and as discussed in Show Sold Separately too, Friday Night Lights‘ reviewers overwhelmingly tried to insist on it not being a football show and not being a high school drama; in the process, they may have killed the show’s chances at tapping into two other huge audience segments.

Anyways, I’d highly recommend the book, not because I’m in it, along with my embarrassingly large bio (you even find out where I did my BA. tmi indeed), but because it’s full of wonderful work from wonderful scholars. Thanks to the editors for wrestling the beast to the ground and getting it out.

My book on paratexts is finally out: Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Paratexts. ($22, but I see Amazon’s selling it for $14.85. That’s cheaper than a season of Two and a Half Men on DVD! What are you waiting for?). I thought I’d give some tasters of it with a selection of paratexts. The cover, obviously enough is above.

The Contents

Introduction – Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies

Chapter 1 – From Spoilers to Spinoffs: A Theory of Paratexts

Chapter 2 – Coming Soon! Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

Chapter 3 – Bonus Materials: Digital Auras and Authors

Chapter 4 – Under a Long Shadow: Sequels, Prequels, Pre-Texts, and Intertexts

Chapter 5 – Spoiled and Mashed Up: Viewer-Created Paratexts

Chapter 6 – In the World, Just Off Screen: Toys and Games

Conclusion – “In the DNA”: Creating Across Paratexts

The Back Copy

It is virtually impossible to watch a movie or TV show without preconceived notions because of the hype that precedes them, while a host of media extensions guarantees them a life long past their air dates. An onslaught of information from print media, trailers, internet discussion, merchandising, podcasts, and guerilla marketing, we generally know something about upcoming movies and TV shows well before they are even released or aired. The extras, or “paratexts,” that surround viewing experiences are far from peripheral, shaping our understanding of them and informing our decisions about what to watch or not watch and even how to watch before we even sit down for a show.

Show Sold Separately gives critical attention to this ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon, examining paratexts like DVD bonus materials for The Lord of the Rings, spoilers for Lost, the opening credits of The Simpsons, Star Wars actions figures, press reviews for Friday Night Lights, the framing of Batman Begins, the videogame of The Thing, and the trailers for The Sweet Hereafter. Plucking these extra materials from the wings and giving them the spotlight they deserve, Jonathan Gray examines the world of film and television that exists before and after the show.

Word Clouds, courtesy of wordle.com, of Chapters 2 & 3

The Endorsements

“Show Sold Separately will rewrite the rules of what we look at when we want to understand how audiences make meaning of media franchises. Gray, who has long established himself in the top ranks of contemporary scholars of popular culture, writes with particularity about these varied media properties and their paratexts, yet also writes with a theoretical sophistication which feels effortless.”

- Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Exploring the myriad connections and connotations of a wide array of paratextual materials ranging from movie trailers to action figures, Gray deftly challenges established conceptions of textuality, and opens up intriguing and important new dimensions in media and cultural studies. This is an invaluable contribution, and will change how we think about, and make, media.”

- Derek Kompare, author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television

And a bit of the Work – the first par.

A common first line for books on contemporary media, and for many a student essay on the subject, notes the saturation of everyday life with media. Certainly, my list of available cable channels seems to grow every month, while the list of movies in cinemas, on television, for rent, or available for purchase similarly grows at a precipitous rate. However, media growth and saturation can only be measured in small part by the number of films or television shows – or books, games, blogs, magazines, or songs for that matter – as each and every media text is accompanied by textual proliferation at the level of hype, synergy, promos, and peripherals. As film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet not all of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature. Rather, these cities are also made up of all manner of ads, previews, trailers, interviews with creative personnel, Internet discussion, entertainment news, reviews, merchandising, guerrilla marketing campaigns, fan creations, posters, games, DVDs, CDs, and spinoffs. Hype and synergy abound, forming the streets, bridges, and trading routes of the media world, but also frequently forming many of its parks, beaches, and leisure sites. They tell us about the media world around us, they prepare us for that world, and they guide us between its structures, but they also fill it with meaning, take up much of our viewing and thinking time, and give us the resources with which we will both interpret and discuss that world.

At the 2008 Flow Conference, several commentators bemoaned the lack of work on such classics as AtJ. I’ve heard these complaints before, but everyone nods their head and looks to someone else to write it. Well, enough. Jim Belushi and the creative masterminds that are Tracy Newman and Jonathan Stark will finally get their day in the media studies sun.

At the moment, I plan for the volumes to break down this way:

• Welcome to the JimVerse: World Building in 22 Minutes aims to bring my growing interest in transmedia storytelling and world-building to a head, by examining the most complex transmedia entity known to modern television
• A Genealogy of Genius, Or, Dude, Where’s My TV Show? will chart how AtJ came to be, examining the thought that went into the series. This will be the shortest volume in the collection
• A Thousand Plateaus: Of Said, Lacan, and Belushi will offer a host of theoretical approaches to understanding the show. I am particularly intrigued by the text as a mouthpiece for a new postcolonial sentiment that is sweeping across television
• Finally, The Man With No Surname: Jim and the Dickensian Aspect will study the depths of Jim, the character. Amidst excited discussion of an age of complex male leads, and with the general hoopla surrounding the multi-dimensionality of Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, and Horatio Caine, Jim eclipses them all. Belushi’s performance is revolutionary in style, and well worth its own volume

I’m also in the process of applying for NSF funding for an According to Jim conference, and have received early commitments from such luminaries as bell hooks, Rob McChesney, Rob Schneider, Raymond Williams, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha (all of whom are big fans) to offer keynotes.

It’s a wonderful day, one I will circle in my calendar and long remember.

I’m really excited to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, a collection co-edited with the brilliant duo of Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson. Just as Jon Stewart smacks down Cramer and CNBC, it seems a fine time for the book to come out.

I hope you’ll agree that the cover is really top-notch. We found the picture, but NYU Press did a great job of framing it, and it looks very snappy. After Routledge’s botching of my Simpsons book cover (if only you could see what it was meant to be, you’d share my pain), I guess I was owed some paratextual good fortune, and here it is.

The book began at the Flow conference in 2006, as (by my memory) a result of two walks between the University of Texas and the Dog and Duck Pub. One of them was with Ethan, the other with Jeff, neither of whom I’d met before. If you know Austin, you know that it’s not all that long a walk, but each trip was long enough for us to immediately get along with each other and for us to agree that there wasn’t enough good stuff on satire out there. So we floated the idea of doing a collection, and a month later we were working on it. Jeff and Ethan were an absolute joy to work with, always on the ball, fiercely intelligent, and darn funny guys, thus making the whole process a lot more enjoyable.

We also worked with a great group of contributors. Let me share with you the table of contents:

Foreword by David Marc

Part I: Post 9/11, Post Modern, or Just Post Network?

• “The State of Satire, the Satire of State” (Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, Ethan Thompson)
• “With All Due Respect Satirizing Presidents From Saturday Night Live to Lil’ Bush” (Jeffrey P. Jones)
• “Tracing the ‘Fake’ Candidate in American Television Comedy” (Heather Osborne-Thompson)

Part II: Fake News, Real Funny

• “And Now… the News? Mimesis and the Real in The Daily Show” (Amber Day)
• “Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: I Thought You Were Going to Be Funny!” (Joanne Morreale)
• “Stephen Colbert’s Parody of the Postmodern” (Geoffrey Baym)

Part III: Building in the Critical Rubble: Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction

• “Throwing Out the Welcome Mat: Public Figures as Guests and Victims in TV Satire” (Jonathan Gray)
• “Speaking ‘Truth’ to Power? Television Satire, Rick Mercer Report, and the Politics of Place and Space” (Serra Tinic)
• “Why Mitt Romney Won’t Debate a Snowman” (Henry Jenkins)

Part IV: Shock and Guffaw: The Limits of Satire

• “Good Demo, Bad Taste: South Park as Carnivalesque Satire” (Ethan Thompson)
• “In the Wake of ‘The Nigger Pixie’: Dave Chappelle and the High Cost of De Facto Crossover” (Bambi Haggins)
• “Of Niggas and Citizens: The Boondocks Fans and Differentiated Black American Politics” (Avi Santo)

It was a great group to work with, and they made our job so much easier. Ultimately, we made this book since it was one that we wanted to read, and the contributors didn’t disappoint.

So, if you’re teaching a class (or just a section: NYU Press price their books to sell, so this one’s list price is $22, yet I note that Amazon’s selling it for $14.85 right now) on popular politics, satire, or comedy, please consider the book. Or you don’t need to be teaching the book to enjoy it, so grab a copy yourself. It’s set to be released on April 1, no joke.

Here are the endorsements on the back:

“This smart and savvy crew has noticed something creeping up on us, something with bite. Now we have to take satire TV seriously; it turns out to be the bearer of the democratic spirit for the post-broadcast age. In this field-shaping book, some of the brightest talents in TV studies show us how the marginal has become the model for a much-needed media make-over. See what happens when entertainment bares its teeth.”
— John Hartley, author of Television Truths

“It has been said that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny.  This wonderful collection proves that nothing could be farther from the truth.  Satire TV takes the study of comedy in new directions, expanding beyond earlier work done on classical Hollywood cinema and the sitcom.  In politically trying times, the contributors to this volume reveal through analysis of programs such as South Park, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, laughter is not the best medicine—it is the surgeon’s scalpel.”
— Heather Hendershot, editor of Nickelodeon Nation

First, though, a word on categorization – if I saw it in 2008, it’s on this list, even if it came out earlier; and if I saw it on the Internet, it’s web video not television.

Television

10. Chuck. The show is infinitely silly, but that’s the point. Like Pushing Daisies, it kept me sane in hard times. Adam Baldwin, Awesome, Lester – fun stuff.

9. Food Network in HD. I knew when I got my HDTV that I’d love travel shows all the more, and nature shows. But I didn’t count on how much food porn I could stomach on a daily basis, and how that threshold would increase with HD.

8. Obama’s DNC Speech. Quickly forgotten because of the rise of Palin, it was excellent and worthy of greater remembrance. It began with meat and potatoes, then rose to his characteristic rhetorical heights at the end. I watched it in Canada and felt hopeful that with someone like this as President, I wouldn’t need to flee to Canada.

7. The Daily Show’s interview of the sitting mayor of Wasilla. The interview was strong satire, easily proving how woefully unprepared a Wasilla mayor would be for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency. But above and beyond the content was the fact that TDS scooped the mainstream news. This was a moment that proves why America needs TDS and Colbert – since the press is largely lazy, flabby, and inept. Why did we need a comedy show to tell us what the mayor of Wasilla or a community organizer actually does? For all those who worry about an America that gets its news from TDS and Colbert, look no further than this incident for evidence of why such worry is displaced when the press can hardly tie its shoelaces on a good day.

6. Stephen Colbert’s election coverage. I like Colbert, but am much more of a Stewart man. That said, Colbert soared in the election, with deep, cutting, Juvenalian satire at its best. On many a night, he really showed how satire is meant to work. I especially loved his interview of the actual Socialist Presidential Candidate in a week when the Republicans had spuriously decided that Obama was a Marxist. For an entertainer whose act is occasionally mistaken as the real thing, his bile was palpable these last few months, and I love me some good satire.

5. Man vs. Wild. I discovered this show late this year, and fell in love. Bear Grylls is hilarious, an amusing paragon of the British, “oh well, let’s give it a go, lads” attitude, and the show does a lovely job of balancing cringe-TV, travel TV, educational TV, and comedy.

4. Pushing Daisies. I don’t know if I could take more than two episodes back to back, but this show is so delightful, so refreshing, and so fun, all things that I really needed this semester. It was a balm, and ABC’s cancellation of it is a crying shame. One of my fellow Extratextuals ain’t a fan of whimsy, but when it’s done right, I sure am.

3. Lost’s 4th Season. This was a great season for the show. After “tapdancing” for the last two seasons, this one really got down to business. Half of what they’re doing is completely stupid in the abstract, but most of it is really working in practice. And I like shows like Lost or The Wire where I love enough of what’s going on that I can have long discussions about what’s not working without losing my love of the show.

2. Obama’s Victory. Jesse Jackson’s tears were a poignant reminder of the historical resonance of the moment. And the press were, understandably, quick to tout the first African American president angle too. But even without the older history, this was an important victory. When the McCain/Palin strategy devolved to the worst form of fear-mongering that has been the hallmark of Bush’s scourge of a presidency, surely I wasn’t alone in feeling that voters were determining the very soul of the nation, and the tenor of public discourse for years to come. Obama will no doubt disappoint me (which is why it’s #2, btw), but that night offered at least the hopes of an antidote to an eight year-old sickness. Hearing my neighborhood erupt as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and eventually the nation were called, too, made it all the more magical. Serial television comes no better than this year’s election campaign, and what a great ending!

1. The Wire’s penultimate episode, “Late Editions.” Season 5 wasn’t as great as it could’ve been, but this episode was the best hour I’ve spent in front of a television. Ever. Granted, it had to work to get me to this point. So, for instance, I’m sure Bubbles’ speech, Marlo’s monologue, or Dukie and Michael’s exchange wouldn’t mean much to non-Wire fans, but for those of us who were there for the whole ride, all three were remarkable, and devastating. As was Snoop’s last scene. The final episode wasn’t anything special, but this episode was pure beauty, television writing and acting at its best.
Honorable Mention – Hole in the Wall. This show must have been made for very drunk and/or very high people, since it’s completely whacked. But how can one not laugh at a show that announces to a full arena audience, “It’s time to face the hole!”?

Reading

In terms of leisure reading, I don’t tend to read many books anymore, odd since I love lit. For academic stuff, 2008 was mostly a year for writing, without as much reading outside my duties as co-editor of Popular Communication, or as reviewer for various presses and journals. So I apologize for the lack of books. Also, I won’t count academic articles, only books and websites.

10. Mike Newman’s Faves 2008. The list to end all lists. Love it. Thanks Mike.

9. Metacritic.com. A review aggregator, for movies, film, and games. Very helpful.

8. Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan’s an odd creature politically, but that’s why I like reading him. DailyKos and HuffPo can only go so far before one wants to rattle the cage. Sullivan makes me miss British Tories – people whose politics are quite opposed to mine, yet who I can have a discussion with that doesn’t begin and end with the note that I’m going to Hell and am enabling the terrorists with my beliefs.

7. Better Living Through Reality TV, by Laurie Ouellette and James Hay. Excellent analysis of reality television as a tool of neoliberal governance. I hate the word “neoliberal” (because nobody outside academia gets it, and so I question its utility), and thus for Ouellette and Hay to make me override my dislike of the word for the duration of the book is testament to how it is composed.

6. The Chutry Experiment. Chuck Tryon’s blog is great. I’m a waffler, as you’ve no doubt seen if you read this blog. So my posts are long. But I really like how Chuck’s stubs point me towards all sorts of things. And when he does extend a post, the analysis is reliably strong.

5. Heartland TV, by Vicky Johnson. This book is really good, mixing television history, textual analysis, policy discussion, and good, revelatory cultural analysis. It captures brilliantly the odd paradox whereby American transform the “Heartland” into the site of authentic, warm, (white), honest American virtue, while also making it a backward hinterland.

4. Great Lies to Tell Small Kids, by Andy Riley. Riley’s Bunny Suicide books are hilarious, and so too are these. Well worth the read, especially if you have friends with kids, and you want to mess with them.

3. Ethan Thompson’s What Me, Subversive? Television and Parody in Postwar America. Okay, so I’ve only seen the manuscript, and it’s early days yet, which means it may not be out till late 2009 or possibly 2010, and it may be even better when it’s out, but let me be the first to hype the thing. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that South Park, Jon Stewart, and Dave Chappelle were the first to find inappropriate, edgy, smart humor a home on American television, but Ethan’s historical look at subversive comedy in postwar America shows the lineage with great skill. When released, it will be a major work of comedy studies, and of television history. Keep your eyes open for it.

2. Facebook status updates. I know what 200+ nice people are doing with ease. How cool is that?

1. FiveThirtyEight.com. Nate Silver probably had as much of my time as did my wife between August and November, as I checked his stats and analyses about twenty times a day. Addiction doesn’t come close to characterizing my relationship to this site. In Winnicottian terms, it was a transitional object to beat all transitional objects.

Back later with more …

I wanted to let readers know of my new book, Television Entertainment. It’s out from Routledge and costs $33.76 at Amazon, $33.95 direct from Routledge.

Though it may be changed by the time you read this, Amazon (or Routledge) seem to have made an error, since their review of it currently reads:

Deepen your understanding of your patients, your partner, and your own process by giving yourself the wisdom of Robert Lee’s The Secret Language of Intimacy. I’ve been learning from Robert for years; welcome to the group. – Gordon Wheeler, Ph.D.

Hey, whether it’s about The Simpsons, paratexts, or how to snuggle, I aim to illuminate and inform

If you want to know more (not advice on intimacy, but about the real book, that is), I waffle on a bit below the fold.

While I respect the utility of the old industry-text-audience tripartite structure of media studies, and while I occasionally ape it, it has bugged me a lot. And let’s be honest, there’s no shortage of “intro to television”-style books. So, instead I decided to structure the book thematically. As a result, this is the table of contents:

Introduction: What Is Television Entertainment?
Chapter 1 – Art with Strings Attached: Creativity, Innovation, and Industry
Chapter 2 – Broadcasting Identities: Affect, Fantasy, and Meaning
Chapter 3 – Television Unboxed: Expansion, Overflow, and Synergy
Chapter 4 – Keeping it Real: Reality and Representation
Chapter 5 – Plugging In: Politics and Citizenship
Chapter 6 – Channel Interference: Television and Power

The two very flattering “puff” quotations on the back cover are from two scholars for whom I have immense respect and admiration (and to whom I now clearly owe multiple pints of good beer!):

Even as media research internationalizes and digital convergence shifts earlier assumptions, US television remains a crucial reference-point. In this elegantly written book, Jonathan Gray confirms he is one of our most sure-footed guides through television’s complex intersections between politics and entertainment, economics and signification, pleasure and power. Highly recommended!
- Nick Couldry, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and author of Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age, and Inside Culture: Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies

Television Entertainment is masterful in both its breadth and detail. Gray compellingly and accessibly weaves together the current thinking on television entertainment and skillfully engages an extraordinary range of the most recent literature. The book provides an essential starting point for understanding the past and present of many key topics in television studies.
- Amanda Lotz, University of Michigan, and author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era

The book began when James Curran and I met for lunch on a wonderful Berkeley day. I was teaching at Berkeley, James was visiting at Stanford, and since we’d known each other during my PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, we met up. If you know James, it’s because of his work as one of England’s premier political economists, as an editor of a massive number of books, and/or because he’s a charming guy. He primarily studies news and politic, but a semester teaching undergrads at Stanford had him convinced that media entertainment needed to be discussed more. James edits the Communication and Society series for Routledge, and he asked if I’d write a book on media entertainment, primarily for classroom use.

He wanted it to be readable, interesting, maybe even amusing at points, but to cover a wide range of issues to do with entertainment. A tweak or two later, it became a book specifically about television entertainment (media entertainment as a whole seemed too large a topic, and would have required me stepping well out of my comfort zone). But both of us felt that entertainment is a category that while salient to audiences, programmers, and analysts, isn’t treated as a distinct category all that often in academic work. Rather, a lot of stuff either looks at a specific series or genre, or else there’s the cottage industry of work that invokes entertainment as not what is currently under analysis (not news or not educational in particular) yet doesn’t bother to spend the time to work out what entertainment is, and hence offers crude and silly binaries (important news vs. frivolous entertainment; socially meaningful education vs. the Devil’s entertainment; etc.). It deserves its own book, and so we made it happen.

As said, it’s aimed for classroom use. That means that it doesn’t represent stunning new research, but instead it attempts to bring together and synthesize some of the smart things that others have said, and to direct and apply this to numerous cases.

Most of the examples are taken from American television, though since James and his series are English, and since I’m part English, part Canadian, I wrote it with the hope that it could be used by non-Americans too. Ultimately, though, American television travels as does little else, and thus if I was to use examples with which a broad range of students, instructors, and researchers could interact, and with which they’d be familiar, I needed to stick mostly to American shows. The book aims to start discussion, not end it, so I felt it important that its examples be ones that readers could discuss. At the same time, it’s the ideas behind the examples that matter, not the definitive understanding of the series in question per se. Shows used include The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Lost, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The West Wing, The Daily Show, and The Wire.

It was really hard to write at first, partly since it wasn’t drawing heavily on my research, and so I felt unoriginal. But eventually I got over that hump and really enjoyed writing it. I also workshopped every chapter with my students at Fordham, and had some wonderful colleagues read draft chapters (immense thanks for this go to Jason Mittell, Derek Johnson, Allison Perlman, Jeffrey Jones, Avi Santo, Will Brooker, Matt Hills, and James himself). So I like to think it’s quite useable. It’s best suited to an Intro to Television class, to an Intro to Media class (with non-TV, non-entertainment stuff used too), or to an upper level television course.

That said, let me recommend that if you’re planning on using it, since I went for the thematics, it will work best with another book that covers specifics much better. I used it this last semester with Amanda Lotz’s The Television Will Be Revolutionized and was very happy, though since neither Amanda nor I are huge policy wonks, I’d also recommend supplementing it with a few readings there.

Such is the nature of publishing classroom books that they may get your name out there but they’re unlikely to give you a reputation for being a brilliant scholar. Which isn’t to say they necessarily give you a bad reputation (or at least I hope they don’t!). But I worked on this because I want it to work in classrooms. So if you’re interested in it, let me know, and I can give you more info, or if your class size is rockin’, I can try to hook you up with a freebie. Routledge proudly told me that they exhibited it face-out at ICA, but they also forgot to bring it to SCMS (advance copies had just been published, yet not even the proofs were there), and it was off the Routledge desk by day 3 of ICA (cool: did someone steal my book?), so they’re not leaping out of their seats to market it, meaning I’ll pick up their slack if need be.

If you use it, let me know how it worked, or didn’t.

And hey, though I’m pitching it for classrooms, please read it yourself. Maybe there are some ideas you’ll like too?

My colleague and friend Robin Andersen asked me to edit it with her, and while much of the task was a giant cat-herding act (trying to get about 70 academics to do anything on a deadline is impossible. Sometimes I think Noah had an easier assignment), and involved more lists and spreadsheets than even a Class A OCD graphophile such as myself enjoys. But it was also great fun. We got to work out which issues we wanted included, and then find the people to write them. Robin and I run in very different circles, which helped the process, and ensured that the final product represents a variety of different takes on things. And Robin’s a treat to work with, an excellent editor, scholar, and person.

Entries cover issues across the mass media, though inevitably any given reader will think of others that should’ve or could’ve been added. Some writers dropped out at the last minute, leaving us stranded and the topic dead in the water. Some topics were non-starters, or at least with our contacts (and their contacts, and theirs, and theirs, and so on). And some things were important but Robin and I couldn’t find a way to frame them as controversial, battleground topics.

As is Greenwood’s style, the book will primarily be marketed to libraries, university, high school, and public. The $175 price tag will surely cause you to think twice before ordering one yourself, I’m sure! But given how accessible the articles are, we hope to reach a wider audience than just researchers and undergrads, and to introduce them to what academics are saying about these topics. Meanwhile, if your library does get a copy, some entries make for an effective, quick introduction to a topic, and hence might work well in Intro classes.

Oh, and yes, the cover stinks. But as several people have told me charitably, the spine looks great!

A few highlights after the fold:

• Representing two thirds of The Extratextuals, the entry on Transmedia Storytelling is by Ivan and I
• Yours truly also has entries on Audience Power to Resist, Dating Shows, Nationalism and the Media, News Satire, and Political Entertainment
• Blog buddies: Bollyspace 2.0’s Aswin Punathambekar wrote on Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora; Convergence Culture Consortium’s Joshua Green wrote on User-Created Content; Just TV’s Jason Mittell penned our entries on Innovation and Imitation in Commercial Media, and TiVo: Timeshifting America; MediaCommons’ (and Flow guru) Avi Santo wrote, aptly enough, on Online Publishing; and Flow alum Allison Perlman wrote Regulating the Airwaves
• Robin has entries on Advertising and Persuasion, Embedding Journalists, Hypercommercialism, Media and Election Campaigns, Paparazzi and Photographic Ethics, Presidential Stagecraft and Militainment, and World Cinema
• Some other names of contributors and entries that might be known to my known readers (sorry, lurkers, I don’t know who you are): Mark Andrejevic on Surveillance and Privacy; Heather Hendershot on Children and Effects; C. Lee Harrington on GLBT and Queer Representations on TV; LS Kim on Representations of Race; Tom McCourt on The iTunes Effect, and on NPR; John McMurria on A La Carte Cable Pricing, and on Cable Carriage Disputes; Laurie Ouellette on PBS, and on Representations of Class; Cornel Sandvoss on Celebrity Worship and Fandom, and on The Public Sphere; Serra Tinic on Runaway Productions.
• and much more. Pornography, Violence, TV in Schools, Global Community Media, Net Neutrality, Digital Divide, Media and the Crisis of Values, Public Access Television, Online Digital Film and Television, Independent Cinema, Body Image, Conglomeration and Media Monopolies, Disabilities and the Media, etc, etc.

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.