Creating Television (Routledge Communication Series) - Softcover

Kubey, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805810773 ISBN 13: 9780805810776

Publisher: Routledge, 2003

Synopsis

Creating Television brings television and its creators to life, presenting fascinating in-depth interviews with the creators of American TV. Having interviewed more than 100 television professionals over the course of his 15 years of research, Professor Robert Kubey presents here the 40 conversations that provide the most illuminating insights about the industry and the people working in it. These interviews bring television's creators to life, revealing their backgrounds, work, and thoughts about the audience and the television programs they create. Each interview tells a compelling tale of an individual's struggles and successes within a complex collaborative and highly commercial medium, offering readers rare insights on the human component in television's development.

Featured in this volume are actors, agents, writers, directors, producers, and executives, representing television's earliest days through to the present day. Spanning shows from I Love Lucy and The Tonight Show through to Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos, these creators share the stories of how they gained entry to the industry and built their careers, offering readers a rare opportunity to meet, up close, the people involved in creating many of the most famous and successful programs in the medium's history, and linking the creators' personal histories to the television programs they create.

With its unique insights on the people responsible for making television, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in television history, sociology of culture, human creativity, television production, media studies, and mass media ethics. It will also be a popular reader for undergraduate and graduate students in courses addressing television, mass culture, media and society, American Studies, creativity, television history, and media ethics.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Kubey

From the Back Cover

"Entertainment Tonight...Access Hollywood...The E! True Hollywood Story...Inside TV Land: television these days spends a lot of time examining itself. Still, most viewers know comparatively little about the complex workings of creativity in this medium. Millions of people who never read Oliver Twist could tell you who wrote it but couldn't name the creators of Friends, which they watch every week.... In Creating Television, Robert Kubey, long known for his thought-provoking and innovative ways of thinking about the media, recognizes both the polyauthorial nature of television and the fact that individuals, not corporations, make the programs we watch. This volume offers a significant contribution to the emerging field of television studies. -Robert Thompson Director of Center for the Study of Popular Television, Syracuse University

This is a masterful and unprecedented voyage into the minds of some 40 of television's most important, thoughtful and creative forces thanks to Robert Kubey's insightful interviews. Never before has television's vital human capital--people representing all of the key roles in the industry over a 50 year period from writers and producers to actors, directors, even agents--been cross examined to such useful and impressive ends. Professor Kubey with a scholar's deft touch proves that television is more than a message or an industry, but most critically the creative work of the people behind the box. Anyone remotely interested in television will find this book instructive and inspiring. -Everette E. Dennis Felix E. Larkin Distinguished Professor of Media & Entertainment Industries Fordham Graduate School of Business, New York

The voices and activities of media producers are too often absent from academic writing about media and communications. But, as Professor Kubey is well aware from his work on media literacy, literacy must encompass writing as well as reading. These interviews with television workers are a fascinating record of some of the key shapers of our popular culture over the last five decades. The interview format is respectful, critical and illuminating. This book will be a valuable and necessary addition to the growing academic field of media production studies both in the USA and internationally. -Maire Messenger Davies School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Few tribes are as strange, or talented, as the people who make TV. Robert Kubey has penetrated the world behind the tube and coaxed candid, revealing interviews from a wide range of successful players. Anyone who wants to understand the reality of making television would be fortunate to have him as their sherpa and this book as their field guide. -Martin Kaplan Director, The Norman Lear Center, Associate Dean, USC Annenberg School for Communication

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805810773
• ISBN 13: 9780805810776
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 524