ABSTRACT
This chapter is, in a way, a summary report of my participation in the SSRC Committee on Television and Social Behavior, for it puts together some questions and hunches that I have developed over the years that the Committee has met and worked together. In fact, the chapter consists largely of questions and hunches—although the latter may often sound like assertions. My primary concern is with the television audience, but it cannot be studied in isolation. Consequently, the chapter also deals with three other sets of participants in television. One set includes the “suppliers” of television fare, by which I mean the “creative” people such as scriptwriters, business people, and “the industry” as a whole. A second set is “the larger society,” a fuzzy term to describe not only the macroeconomic and social structural conditions that affect the television industry but also the events in society from which scriptwriters generate story and character ideas and the conditions in that society from which viewers may seek diversion. A third set of participants is us, the television researchers, because we are also, if more indirectly, involved with the audience.
