Beyond Prime Time

"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