ABSTRACT
“Theorizing television,” whatever that eventually might come to mean for the field of film, requires a radical reformulation of the questions and answers that compose contemporary film theory. This reorientation of perspective and method is necessary because of differences between the two media themselves: in institutional form, program formats, economics, audiences, indeed, in the form of the discourse and in the practical and critical languages that have traditionally been associated with research and analysis in these domains. In contrast to the formalist definitions of “film” constructed by traditional film theory (with accent on its ontological status and aesthetic forms) or by contemporary film theory (through the notion of its language and codes), constituting American network television as an object of theoretical and critical study means characterizing the status and form of the television discourse specifically in relation to economic and social processes.
