Critical Approaches to Television

I didn't like how overly complicated the language was in this book, but it has some great sample television critiques that gets you started on thinking about TV in a whole new way. The book discusses several different categories of criticism, such as genre and ideological. This book also treats TV as art, even if the average person would not. It encourages you to look beyond the surface features of a show to the underlying themes or messages being subliminally relayed to the audience. For instance, one criticism states that The X-Files "reaffirms the privileged position of science within Western culture...Faith is called into question." I highly recommend it.

This text came in very handy while writing a paper criticising a telelvision program. The samples critiques are the most helpful, but the book isn't the easist to just browse through...the reading is pretty heavy.