ABSTRACT
In order to investigate why television programs look and sound the waythey do, we must understand the process by which they are made. Throughout this book, we emphasize the close analysis of the television text. We use detailed descriptions of plot points, camera angles, dialogue, lighting, set design, and so on to argue for certain interpretations of that text. And when talking about elements of visual and sound style we must often, one might say, reverse engineer the text.1 We must make assumptions about how a text was assembled in order to better disassemble it. You may notice that we don’t often guess at the intentions of the people who made a television text while we do this disassembly. We avoid those guesses on purpose, because it is extremely difficult to know with any certainty, for example, what director Pamela Fryman was thinking on the set on the day she decided to zoom out to capture some action instead of cutting to a wider shot.2 And yet, we must know some fundamental things about the production practices of the television industry in order to know that camera zooming is even possible. (It wasn’t possible when television first began to flourish in the 1940s.) If we see objects within the camera frame begin to shrink in size, we “reverse engineer” what we see on the screen and identify it as the camera zooming out.
