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How to Watch Television Ethan Thompson and Jason Mitteil, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
Imagine you've just purchased a new TV. You haul it home, open the box, set it up. You may or may not glance at the instruction manual. But once you've got the power on, chances are you never think about how to watch TV again. It just happens. Yet the way in which one watches television matters deeply, both to individual viewers and to our collective culture. In their 2013 book, How to Watch Television, editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell offer a new kind of guide, one that explores "different ways of watching, methods for looking at or making sense of television" (1). This book, unlike the manual that comes with your TV set, is utterly readable, highly engaging, and worth referring back to, long after you've switched on your favorite channel.
Where other collections have considered emerging genres (Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture [2004]), the global functions of television (Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders [2011]) and the changing nature of the medium in the digital era...