Abstract

What might television ideally become, and how should we study it? From its inception, TV has been damned as ugly, dangerous, and anti-social—and proclaimed as beautiful, exciting, and transformative. Drawing on examples from past and present, near and far, this chapter seeks to reimagine television and television studies in technological, generic, and transnational terms, and from labor, environmental, multilingual, and materialist perspectives. Challenging approaches that have dominated popular debate, public policy, and both scientific and humanistic scholarship, it encourages us to look again at TV as genre, furniture, phone, screen, poison, and work.