ABSTRACT
The introduction sets out the book's rationale and offers an overview of its orientation and contents. It briefly surveys the history of the scholarship that has examined the relationship between film and television in the US, while noting the absence of work looking specifically at connections between American independent film and television. It also details the limited interest in notions of indie in the existing television scholarship, even that which seeks to focus specifically on the relationship between the medium and cinema in a converged media landscape. From here it turns to the limited range of work that has evidenced the significance of something that can be conceptualised as indie TV, while noting the narrow scope of its focus. After making the case for a much more complex history of indie TV in relationship to varied aesthetic, industrial and institutional trends and traditions, the introduction provides a breakdown of the volume's organisation into six parts and a guide to its various chapters.
