ABSTRACT
There are a number of questions raised by the previous chapter’s discussion of realism and the construction of the viewing subject, particularly ones about its pertinence to television. For its origin is in film theory, and although film and television share many characteristics, they also have crucial differences. The most important of these cluster around the different conditions of viewing, but there are also related differences in the nature of the text, and in the conditions of production. These form the substance of later chapters in this book. For the moment I wish to discuss the relevance of the concept of a radical text to mainstream broadcast television.
