Explores how shifts in television's industrial practices and new media convergence have affected the other 80 per cent of the viewing day. This title also explores a broad range of non-prime-time forms including talk shows, soap operas, news, syndication, and children's programs, non-series forms such as sports and made-for-television movies.
Beyond Prime Time brings together established television scholars writing new chapters in their areas of expertise that reconsider how programming forms other than prime-time series have been affected by the wide-ranging industrial changes instituted over the past twenty years. The chapters explore the relationship between textual and industrial changes in particular forms such as news, talk, sports, soap operas, syndication, children's programming, made-for-television movies, public broadcasting, and local programming.
"Lotz has assembled some of television studies' very best scholars, all with their fingers firmly on the pulse of a changing medium. The result is a wonderful, must-read, must-teach collection about what's happening to the other 21 hours of television in a day."--Jonathan Gray, author of Television Entertainment and Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality
"Amanda Lotz's Beyond Prime Time is an impressive, much-needed collection that fills a significant gap in television studies. The book pushes 'beyond scholars' standard prime time preoccupation in several important ways: it details critically ignored (but economically important) off-prime programming; clarifies crucial industrial factors that most 'genre' taxonomies ignore; and carefully integrates the last two decades of new technology developments without the new media jargon that stalls other accounts. Lotz and her impressive contributors excel at providing clear, holistic accounts that show how contemporary television's many complications- aesthetic, economic, cultural- arise from format-specific institutional arrangements and programming strategies."--John T. Caldwell, author of Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television and co-editor of Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries
"Who knew the O.J. Simpson trial may have helped break housewives' addiction to soaps? Who knew the Today Show runs constantly on the Internet? Who knew Hannah Montana does wake-up calls? These authors know, and supply significant details about how everyday television provides ritual and event viewing for us. This is a fascinating and invaluable book for media scholars."--Janet Staiger, author of Media Reception Studies and co-editor of Convergence Media History