he basic comic plot uses the young couple'sunion to symbolize the promise of the future, guaranteeing the possibilityof personal change and, with it, social change.

This also caused the industry to redefine the measure of the popularityof a particular genre or program. "Popularity" came to mean high ratingswith the eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old urban dweller, rather than popularity with the older, rural audience that had kept the Paul Henning sitcoms on the air throughout the 1960s. Later, the industry refined its modelaudience once again. During the "Fred Silverman years" of the mid- tolate 1970s, the audience for sitcoms was defined as mindless teenagers;the result was shows like Three's Company, Happy Days, and Laverneand Shirley. In the 1980s, the desirable audience-at least for the NBCnetwork-became the high-consuming "yuppie" audience, thus definingthe popularity of such shows as Cheers and Family Ties.

The survey found that 75 percent of viewers had remote control, andof those, 30 percent said they try to watch two or more shows at once-either occasionally or most of the time. T

Of course, it was not uncommonduring the Hollywood studio era (and it is even more common in contemporary Hollywood films that no longer exhibit the distinct genre boundaries of yore) for new genres to develop out of the recombination of previous genres

The approaches to genre that we have discussed might be summarizedunder three labels-the aesthetic, the ritual, and the ideological approaches

For example, althoughHomer did not refer to his own work as an "epic" poem, both industry andcritics employ the categories of "Western" and "sitcom?'

Heclassified fiction into modes according to the hero's power of action-eithergreater than ours, less than ours, or the same as ours-arriving at suchcategories as myth, romance, epic and tragedy, comedy, and realistic fictionaccording to the hero's relationship to the reader. Frye points out thatover the last fifteen centuries these modes have shifted, so that, for example, the rise of the middle class introduces the law mimetic mode in whichthe hero is one of us (pp. 33-35). As for genres, Frye distinguishes amongdrama, epic, and lyric on the basis of their "radical of presentation" (thatis, acted out, sung, read), viewing the distinction as a rhetorical one withthe genre being determined by the relationship between the poet and hispublic (pp. 246-47)

Aristotle implied, tragedy could then haveits ideal impact on an audience. (In a similar way, although Hollywood filmgenres are constructed from actual films, the genre itself is frequentlyspoken of as an ideal set of traits that inform individual films. Thus, although many individual Westerns do not feature Indians, Indians remaina crucial generic element.)

In a similar way,literature may be divided into comedy, tragedy, and melodrama; Hollywood films into Westerns, musicals, and horror films; television programsinto sitcoms, crime shows, and soap operas

“e style of acting in television is determined by the conditions ofreception; there is simply no place for the florid gesture, the overprojectionof emotion, the exaggeration of voice or grimace or movement, inside theaverage American living room.”

is means thatvulgarity, profanity, the sacrilegious in every form, and immorality of every kind willhave no place in television. All programs must be in good taste, unprejudiced, andimpartial.

the networks emerged from the war with abroad public relations strategy, emphasizing both their patriotic role indeveloping wartime military electronics and the philosophical defence ofcommercial broadcasting.

imultaneously with the first round of the Justice Department’s effortsto divest the Hollywood studios of their theatre ains and outlawestablished distribution practices in 1938, the two broadcast networks faceda period of unseling antitrust and regulatory scrutiny.

Broadcast regulation in the United States has been founded upon twoopposing principles: that the federal licence confers a privilege, not a right,to the broadcaster to operate in “the public interest” using public airwaves,and that the licence establishes and protects the broad de facto propertyrights of private operators of television and radio stations under restrictedoversight of network operations and programme content.

ideological and economic constraints during television’s early growth, hadinfluenced the commercial structures and programme forms of the mediumin America, as well as the relation of U.S. television to the rest of the world.

e first decade of commercial television in the United States set in place themajor economic actors, programme forms, and regulatory structures of thevast American TV industry of the next thirty years.

ave anendless stream of advice to mothers on ways to prevent their ildren frombecoming antisocial and emotionally impaired

On thefew occasions when sets did appear, they were placed either in the basementor in the living room. B

In 1949, Better Homes and Gardens asked, “Where does thereceiver go?” It listed options including the living room, game room, or“some strategic spot where you can see it from the living room, dining roomand kiten.”

In fact, the spatial organization of the home was presentedas a set of scientific laws through whi family relationships could becalculated and controlled

Television was supposed to bring the familytogether but still allow for social and sexual divisions in the home.

Mostsignificantly, like the scene from Rebel without a Cause, the mediadiscourses were organized around ideas of family harmony and discord

instead had learned of the incident through an outsideauthority, the television newscast

“bad reception,”

As the camera lingers on the TV set, Jimconfesses his guilt

Lynn Spigel is associate professor in the Department of Critical Studies, School ofCinema-Television, University of Southern California, and the author of several studiesof television, including Make Room for TV.