Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Raymond Williams's TELEVISION: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL FORM is regarded as the first important book written about television. Certainly it is the oldest book that any student of television studies is expected to read. It is not a perfect book, mainly because of technological changes that have rendered many of Williams's points invalid or irrelevant. But what is amazing reading this book in 2008 is how much of television's potential Williams anticipated, as well as some of its weaknesses. Television as a form of popular art was very slow to mature. Though one can cite a few -- a very, very few -- important television series before 1981, it wasn't until the eighties and nineties that television really grew up and became a fully formed means of artistic expression. Some of the books that many people love to cite as to the awfulness of TV -- such as Jerry Mander's abysmally awful FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMATION OF TELEVISION, which could easily compete for the title of the Worst Book Ever Written award -- depended not on the potential of TV, but on the way it appeared at the time. Williams correctly understood that TV had enormous potential for artistic excellence and was able to identify some of the better shows of his time, which is astonishing given that he wrote the book in 1973, when virtually all TV shows were awful. Much of the book consists of a very accurate, very concise history of TV as a medium. Williams also sums up the various formats of TV series, even distinguishing between serials and episodic shows. I think he would have been surprised at the degree to which serials have dominated quality TV (indeed, I would argue that virtually all the very good TV series have been serials). He wrote in 1973, while the first non-soap serial in American TV was HILL STREET BLUES, which debuted in 1981. He was also extremely sensitive -- as a good Marxist, albeit a Western one -- of the role that corporate interests played in TV. Had he written the book at a later point, I'm sure he would have made a great deal out of the ludicrous assertion that the media, which is corporate owned and micro-managed, is liberal. (One of the great propaganda successes of the past forty years of the Right has been the creation of the myth of the Liberal Media, doubly ironic because media is so deeply entrenched in right winged interests and control.) It is a tragedy that Williams died at age 67, though he wrote this at age 51. The book is for the most part fundamentally solid, though seriously out of date. More needs to be said about how the book is out of date. Williams attempted in the book to anticipate the changes that were about to occur in television. He correctly anticipated the role that cable would play, though I suspect he would have been amazed at how the VHS tape would alter things. But even more he would have been astonished at how DVDs would have changed the way we view TV. Indeed, when DVDs were first introduced, even the studios