ABSTRACT
Within television studies, it is common to refer to TV as consisting of a variety of texts, which can include a program itself or a commercial or a newscast or any other television segment. Textual analysis, then, includes any research method that dissects those texts. Authorship studies, stylistics, genre study, and semiotics all endeavor to explain the patterns one can see within TV texts, the common elements there are among texts, and how texts have changed over the years. In Part III of this book, we have separated these approaches from ones that focus on viewer response and industry production. However, that distinction is not a hard and fast one and we will find ourselves occasionally straying into con - siderations of viewer interpretation of the text and the text’s creation by TV-industry practitioners. Our first approach below, authorship studies, illustrates this point as it links thematic, narrative, and stylistic patterns in the text with the work of specific practitioners-to varying degrees of success.
