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This book offers an interpretation of the myths that shape television images and reinforce this culture's dominant ideology. It provides histories of all television genres and connects developments within each genre to political, social, and cultural shifts in the larger society. This new Second Edition updates the previous edition's close textual analysis of representative series and serials to mid-1993, reflecting the significant changes that have occurred in both the business of television in the United States and in the larger society's dominant ideology. The Second Edition also reflects significant advances in critical theory related to the study of television that have occurred over the past decade, and it incorporates both the structuralist critical position (dominant in the first edition) and a post-structuralist position which moves away from a determinist textual analysis of ideology to a consideration of possible multiple decodings.

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• Preface to the Second Edition
• Television Myth and the American Mind
• The Biz: Caution!
• Mythmakers at Work Advertising: the Medium Is the Mirage
• TV Comedy And Contemporary Life: Mayfield, Mayberry, Minneapolis, and Manhattan Television's Social Comedies Television Melodrama
• Television News and the Television Documentary Live TV: Sport and the TV Event
• TV Religion and the TV Game Show: The Great American Dream in the Late Twentieth Century
• The TV Talk Show: Commodifying the Individual Psyche Toward an Oppositional Television Selected
• Bibliography
• Index

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CHOICE Review

Though the time is ripe for another analysis of the role television plays in the growth and refinement of American entertainment and culture, the second edition of this work (1st ed., CH, Jul'85) will not satisfy the seasoned reader. It makes only passing reference to CNN, pays some notice to C-Span, and ignores Court TV and the Home Shopping Club. Himmelstein does not point out that the TV sitcom, drama, and soap opera are not, and never claimed to be, real life. They are entertainment, which TV treats as fantasy. Nor does he critique TV news to explain that it is now as fake, staged, and exploitative as it is real, accurate, and essential. The author's research should explain that the only reality is perhaps some live sports, and there are problems inherent in either viewing sports as essential to the American way of life or making icons out of sports celebrities. The author tries to add authority to his work by using secondary source material, but either the study or the analysis is fatally flawed. Though this book casts its net wide, it offers no opportunity for issue analysis. Its history is predigested beyond the perspective of the chronicler, making it nonviable as a secondary or tertiary source. It is entertaining though, and deserves to be read as such. General readers; graduate students. S. A. Raucher; University of New Haven