Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process
By (Author) Gary C. Burns
By (author) Robert Thompson
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Praeger Publishers Inc
27th September 1990
United States
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Television
791.450232
Hardback
224
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
510g
Part of Praeger's "Media and Society" series, this contributed volume is a collection of essays on television authorship. It includes work of some of the most prominent scholars in television studies. Rather than assigning one author to individual television texts, the contributors probe the relationship between the various authors at work within the institutional, cultural and economic settings that characterize the television industry. This book analyzes and defines the candidates for authorial accountability, allowing the medium to enter the realm of contemporary criticism. The first part of the volume provides a case study in four chapters on authorship issues surrounding "Frank's Place", the short lived but compelling situation comedy. This is followed by three chapters focusing on issues of authorship in international television. The book then probes the studio's role as author, including essays on Warner Brothers, "Desilu", and Screen Gems. Finally the contributors examine individual TV authors and cover such topics as point of view in music video, television production as collective action, and unconventional television.
This valuable collection includes essays by Horace Newcomb and David Marc. Authorship' is posited variously in the writer who controls a soap or a sitcom, the studio, the star who takes control, the executive producer, or the networks' methods of exerting control. Four essays are centered on the critical economy success Frank's Place, ' including Moorehouse's overview of the absence of black music in series television. Boyd-Bowman discusses the different production systems of France where auteur theory and nationalism consciously shaped several documentaries. Plasketes analyzes the late-night/prime-time experiences of outsider' Canadian Lorne Michaels. Together, the essays also supply a useful historical overview of the particulars of the broadcasting climate as well as case studies of individual series and serials, including The Wonder Years, The Prisoner, The Young and the Restless, The Avengers, and Cheyenne. A reader who knew little of the variables behind the cameras that shape television would learn much from this book; those who think those variables make it impossible for an individual sensibility to read through the collective art should be persuaded to reconsider. Useful references.-Choice
"This valuable collection includes essays by Horace Newcomb and David Marc. Authorship' is posited variously in the writer who controls a soap or a sitcom, the studio, the star who takes control, the executive producer, or the networks' methods of exerting control. Four essays are centered on the critical economy success Frank's Place, ' including Moorehouse's overview of the absence of black music in series television. Boyd-Bowman discusses the different production systems of France where auteur theory and nationalism consciously shaped several documentaries. Plasketes analyzes the late-night/prime-time experiences of outsider' Canadian Lorne Michaels. Together, the essays also supply a useful historical overview of the particulars of the broadcasting climate as well as case studies of individual series and serials, including The Wonder Years, The Prisoner, The Young and the Restless, The Avengers, and Cheyenne. A reader who knew little of the variables behind the cameras that shape television would learn much from this book; those who think those variables make it impossible for an individual sensibility to read through the collective art should be persuaded to reconsider. Useful references."-Choice
ROBERT J. THOMPSON is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, at Cortland. GARY BURNS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University.