The class introduces students to the contemporary discipline of Television Studies.  We will interrogate how we define and understand television—as a medium, an institution, an apparatus, and a cultural forum—by looking at some critical concepts such as narrative, genre, liveness, televisuality, intertextuality, and supertextuality, among others.  Most important, the class aims to develop further your televisual literacy by introducing ideas and models that will help you read and understand television better without diminishing the pleasure that you derive from your experience with it.
         
Our class will include examples from different genres such as drama (Lost, Dexter, The Wire), sitcoms (The Office, Seinfeld, Sex and the City), and reality TV shows (Survivor, The Hills, The Flavor of Love), as well as music videos.  Importantly, the great availability of shows on TV and in other formats (e.g. on DVD and online), will give us the flexibility to incorporate into the course texts that would appeal to everyone’s tastes and interests.