Legitimating Television : Media Convergence and Cultural Status

Legitimating Television explores the increasingly prevalent idea that TV has gotten better. This notion, circulating in the popular press, the TV industry, and media scholarship, typically references shows like The Sopranos and new technologies like DVRs and HDTV sets. Across these sites, the cultural legitimation of television highlights the medium''s rise in status from its previous reputation as the "idiot box" to a more respectable level, especially among cultural elites. But there are troubling ideological implications to this, as the upgrade of television''s status comes at the expense of forms of TV deemed unworthy. These delegitimated forms are associated with audiences characterized by femininity and lower class status.

By locating the upgrade of television''s cultural status within the context of media convergence, Legitimating Television historicizes this development. It denaturalizes the discourses of television’s legitimation, revealing their underlying significance. In analyzing the iterations of television''s improvement, Legitimating Television considers the history of Quality TV, the rise of the showrunner-auteur, the sitcom and prime time drama, and the emergence of digital TV technologies such as flat-panel sets, DVDs, and DVRs. It calls for a critical engagement with discourses of legitimation rather than a naive acceptance of television''s natural progression toward cultural respectability.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the 21st century. Once looked down upon as a "plug-in drug" offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, with critics hailing the rise of Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a household appliance toward a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.

Newman and Levine argue that television’s growing prestige emerges alongside the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media and audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating "ordinary" television associated with the past, distancing the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the "old" TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with a more privileged viewership. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass, reinforcing cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class.

Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the question of taste—whether TV is "good" or "bad"—and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.