Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture

by Todd Gitlin, Tom Engelhardt (Editor)

7 essays by leading media critics explore the politics and social implications of television. "...An important step into the past wasteland era of writing about the tube." - NYT Book Review

Genres: Sociology, Academic, Nonfiction, Essays

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Todd Gitlin was an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar, novelist, poet, and not very private intellectual. He was professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent collection of essays about television and the "too-cool-to-fail" brand of irony..

ends with this: "TV begins by offering us a beautiful hallucination of diversity, but it is finally like a drug whose high is only the conviction that its user is too cool to be addicted." (Mark Crispin Miller)

[Michael Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting now as a primary source of how US television was being critiqued in the mid-1980s. Some essays in this collection remain pretty hard-hitting, especially those on music videos and car commercials.

The standout is the final chapter "Prime Time: Deride and Conquer" by Mark Crispin Miller. This looks at the evolution of sitcoms towards being ever more self-referential and drenched in irony by the 1980s, a trend that clearly continued into the 90s and beyond with "The Simpsons" et al. This chapter was, I believe, quite an influence on David Foster Wallace's later critique of the deadening influence of irony on US culture: E Unibus Pluram.

The chapter was also memorable for using "The Cosby Show" as a prime example, particularly the Cliff Huxtable 'Dad' character, with his combination of "pure impishness" and "intimidating hardness".