Why am I passionate about this?

I like understanding television as culturally situated. Television is constructed along a number of sites: cultural, institutional, ideological, historical, or via the different ways audiences understand it. Interrogating television and what it does as a medium was historically relevant because it was a mass medium. But how can we evaluate the medium in times of highly fragmented audiences? Because of this, exploring Netflix as a new form of ‘television’ has become so important to me. The authors all try to get to terms with how television has changed over its short existence. This helps us understand the medium better, as well as our current moment.


I wrote

Netflix and the Re-invention of Television

By Mareike Jenner,

Book cover of Netflix and the Re-invention of Television

What is my book about?

This book deals with the ways Netflix influenced the contemporary television landscape and built the infrastructures of streaming. It focusses…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status

Mareike Jenner Why did I love this book?

This is one of my favorite books about contemporary television.

It deals with the processes that changed how television was viewed following the changes in HBO-style ‘quality’ television. It also critically explores the ways legitimization and associated words like ‘quality’ work as an ultimately classist system where television works as cultural capital.

Netflix established itself on the back of this legitimization, using HBO-style ‘quality’ TV series like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. But HBO also used DVDs to ‘filter’ the individual program out from the ‘flow’ of television, which helped Netflix to establish itself as television.

By Michael Z. Newman, Elana Levine,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Legitimating Television as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the 21st century. Once looked down upon as a "plug-in drug" offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, with critics hailing the rise of Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a household appliance toward a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.

Newman and Levine argue…


Book cover of Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television

Mareike Jenner Why did I love this book?

Dunleavy explores what complexity means for contemporary ‘quality’ TV. She focusses on the narrative structures, creative strategies, and style of contemporary television.

For me, what stands out about this book is how it explores the interrelationship between recent technological changes and what we understand as television. This results in a redefinition of television.

When writing the second edition of my book, I found the different ways people have conceptualized contemporary television especially important.

By Trisha Dunleavy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book examines the creative strategies, narrative characteristics, industrial practices and stylistic tendencies of complex serial drama. Exemplified by shows like HBO's The Sopranos, AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Showtime's Dexter, and Netflix's Stranger Things, complex serials are distinguished by their conceptual originality, narrative complexity, transgressive lead characters and serial allure. As a drama form that continues to expand and diversify in today's television, HBO's Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, Netflix's Orange Is the New Black and Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale provide further examples. Dunleavy investigates the strategies that underpin the innovations, influence and success of complex serial…


Book cover of The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting

Mareike Jenner Why did I love this book?

Warner’s book is especially important to understand how colorblind casting works in contemporary television, allowing for television to use the visual signifier of race without necessarily narrativizing marginalization.

I love this book for the way it critically analyses the practice of colorblind TV casting, which until recently was understood as a way television can achieve diversity, but that is only visual diversity and doesn’t allow us to learn about the various barriers Black people in the USA face.

By Kristen J. Warner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book fills a significant gap in the critical conversation on race in media by extending interrogations of racial colorblindness in American television to the industrial practices that shape what we see on screen. Specifically, it frames the practice of colorblind casting as a potent lens for examining the interdependence of 21st century post-racial politics and popular culture. Applying a 'production as culture' approach to a series of casting case studies from American primetime dramatic television, including ABC's Grey's Anatomy and The CW's The Vampire Diaries, Kristen Warner complicates our understanding of the cultural processes that inform casting and expounds…


Book cover of Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium

Mareike Jenner Why did I love this book?

This is a short book in which Newman explores the changes in what the term ‘video’ means.

The term is closely intertwined with the history of television, describing first television broadcasts and then how taping was used to bridge the time differences between the American east and west coasts. The term then described the ways home video revolutionized how video was used in the private sphere. Today, we receive videos as the digital snippets we see on YouTube or the short clips we post on social media. 

I like Newman’s work in general. But this book tells us so much about TV history in the US; I find it an incredibly fascinating work.

By Michael Z. Newman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Video Revolutions as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Since the days of early television, video has been an indispensable part of culture, society, and moving-image media industries. Over the decades, it has been an avant-garde artistic medium, a high-tech consumer gadget, a format for watching movies at home, a force for democracy, and the ultimate, ubiquitous means of documenting reality. In the twenty-first century, video is the name we give all kinds of moving images. We know it as an adaptable medium that bridges analog and digital, amateur and professional, broadcasting and recording, television and cinema, art and commercial culture, and old media and new digital networks. In…


Book cover of Online TV

Mareike Jenner Why did I love this book?

This book came out a few months after the first edition of my book, and I remember being really frustrated because it added so many important ideas.

I still find its interrogation of interfaces and how they interact, open as different tabs, intriguing. Johnson focusses on how online TV functions within an internet ecosystem. This leads to interesting ideas about what TV distributed via the internet means.

By Catherine Johnson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Online TV as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With growth in access to high-speed broadband and 4G, and increased ownership of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected television sets, the internet has simultaneously begun to compete with and transform television. Online TV argues that these changes create the conditions for an emergent internet era that challenges the language and concepts that we have to talk about television as a medium.

In a wide-ranging analysis, Catherine Johnson sets out a series of conceptual frameworks designed to provide a clearer language with which to analyse the changes to television in the internet era and to bring into focus the power dynamics of…


Explore my book 😀

Netflix and the Re-invention of Television

By Mareike Jenner,

Book cover of Netflix and the Re-invention of Television

What is my book about?

This book deals with the ways Netflix influenced the contemporary television landscape and built the infrastructures of streaming. It focusses on various ways Netflix reconceptualises television as part of the process of TV IV. As television continues to undergo a myriad of changes, Netflix has proven itself to be the dominant force in this development, simultaneously driving a number of these changes and challenging television's existing institutional structures.

This comprehensive study explores the pre-history of Netflix, the role of binge-watching in its organisation and marketing, and Netflix's position as a transnational broadcaster. 

Book cover of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status
Book cover of Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television
Book cover of The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting

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Book cover of Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

Lyle Greenfield Author Of Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

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Why am I passionate about this?

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What is my book about?

We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike. 

My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…

Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

By Lyle Greenfield,

What is this book about?

Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.

First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…


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