Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry, and Fans

The perfect anthology does not exist, either because not every contribution to a collection comes up to the standard of the finest essays or not every essay appeals to the interest of the reader. Nonetheless, this group of recent essays on the current state of television is an above average collection. Only one essay is truly awful, while most or all of the others will appeal to most general readers. The loose concept around which the essays are constructed is that of "Must See TV." The editors did not dictate what each writer was to understand by that concept, though for the most part the writers choose to ignore the NBC understanding of what many television wags have called "must flee" television, i.e., the NBC Thursday night line up of shows that command a large popular viewership but that are usually not among the most critically acclaimed shows on TV. Some of the writers understand by the term shows such as BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER or THE X-FILES, which some in the industry refer to as "appointment" television, shows around which fans structure their entire week in order to watch. Others focus on prime time shows perceived as ratings successes. In most instances the writers, whether writing in England, the United States, or Australia, focus primarily on Hollywood produced shows. The collection is fairly distributed between articles that focus on various aspects of the television industry and articles that focus on specific television shows. For instance, we get articles that talk about the effects of deregulation in the United States in the last twenty-five years has impacted the medium, the role that the media producers play in fostering and interacting with fandom, and the production of mini-series. Specific shows receive special attention, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (in one of the best essays in the collection by Lisa Parks, about what the show had to say about violence in the wake of the Columbine killings, which caused the postponement of two of BUFFY's episodes), STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, MARTIAL LAW, ELLEN, and THE ADVENTURES OF LOIS AND CLARK. These essays are written from a variety of perspectives. Only one did I find completely without value. The essay "'Must See TV': Programming Identity on NBC Thursdays" embraced many of the worst aspects of much cultural criticism, most significantly that of metaphoric reduction, i.e., taking the straightforward meaning of various shows and metaphorically reinterpreting them to get at a deeper or more real or hidden meaning. It takes very much a "queer" reading of things, but that isn't the problem; distorting the texts into readings that the original artifacts could not support is. There has always been a tendency among some variants of academic writing to delve into occult readings of texts. A "queer" approach certainly doesn't require this and, indeed, later in the collection is an essay on the difficulties attending queerness in ELLEN that is one of the most