ABSTRACT
The previous chapter made a case for conceiving of our object of inquiry, television programming, in a particular way. I suggested that, rather than thinking of television programming as a series of “texts” or as parts of “texts,” we approach television episodes, seasons, series, and so forth as works, in a predominantly descriptive sense of that term.1 The locution “work” describes a kind of artifact, or intentionally designed human creation. I argued that, for the purposes of distinguishing works from texts, it is sufficient that the relevant intentions here are categorical intentionsintentions regarding the sort of thing one makes (for example, such as what its function is) and how that thing is to be approached. One can accept this conception of works, I claimed, regardless of one’s view on the relevance of semantic intentions-that is, intentions regarding what I referred to as “work meaning”—to the project of television interpretation.
