ABSTRACT
At a time when communication behaviorists, ethnographers, political economists, and media critics are finally speaking to each other with some civility (“paradigm dialogue”), Deming’s call for a television-centered television criticism could not be more welcome. Besides sketching how such a synthesis of approaches could illuminate the complex phenome- non of television, the essay also inflects that synthesis with a distinctly feminist perspective. Surely the strengths of the essay lay in its multifaceted and multilayered approach to the problem of television in general and to television criticism in particular. Further, in arguing for this new agenda, Deming adroitly avoids two errors common in media criticism: She treats criticism neither as intellectual gymnastics whereby the clever critic elucidates the text’s “real” meaning nor as imaginative projections whereby the critic deduces the response that marginalized readers might construct from the text. Thus Deming constructs a role for the critic that avoids the twin traps of critical elitism and elistist polysemy, traps into which most film and television critics have fallen. Instead, Deming argues that the careful, sensitive, and systematic study of both television series and their audiences is necessary in a television- centered television criticism. But more important, she demonstrates that such an approach is possible by drawing from audience research and textual analysis in order to contextualize her own original research on television melodrama. The result is a powerful case for a television criticism that “mediates between textuality and social realities” (p. 171).
