Jeremy Butler’s new book Television Style offers the best case I know for the claim that there is a distinct, and valuable, aesthetic of television.

Following his own study Television: Critical Methods and Applications (third edition, 2007) and paying homage to John Caldwell’s pioneering Televisuality, Butler gets down to the details of how various TV genres use sound and image. Butler’s conception of genres is admirably broad, considering dramas, sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials, each with its own range of audiovisual conventions and production practices. His discussion of types of television lighting complements Keating’s analysis; put these together and you have some real advances in our understanding of key differences and overlaps between film and video.

Kristin has met Jeremy, but I haven’t yet. In any case, Television Style shows that he’s a kindred spirit who’s made original contributions to this research tradition. Like Jinhee [Choi], Patrick [Keating], Pat [McGilligan], and David [Neumeyer], he demonstrates that we can better grasp how media work if we study, patiently and in detail, the creative options open to film artists at specific points in history. He began thinking about these matters in 1979, as the photo attests.

None of this is to say that artistic norms or industrial processes are cut off from the wider culture. Rather, as becomes very clear in all of these books, cultural developments are often filtered through just those norms and institutions.

For example, everybody knows that in classical studio cinema, women were usually lit differently from men. But Keating notices that often women’s lighting varies across a movie, depending on story situations. He goes on to make a subtler point: there was a greater range in lighting men’s faces. Men could be lit in more varied ways according to the changing mood of the action, while lighting on women was a compromise between two craft norms: let the lighting suit the story’s mood, and endow women with a glamorous look. The fluctuations in the imagery stem from adjusting cultural stereotypes to the demands of Hollywood’s stylistic conventions.

Careful studies like these, alert to fine-grained qualities in the films and the conditions that create them, can advance our understanding of how movies work. Pursuing these matters takes us beyond both the movie in isolation and generalizations about the broader culture; we’re led to examine the filmmaker’s tasks and tools.

Television Style, front cover.

I’m pleased with how it looks and I hope readers will be, too. We chose an image from the Bettmann/CORBIS archive for the cover which we believe speaks to the notion of style and TV–albeit a stylized television set from 25 September 1952. According to CORBIS, the original caption reads:

“Designed to meet the ’space-saving’ need for a handsome, fully equipped compact unit, F. B. Arthur presents the ‘Modernaire’ [!] television-AM-FM radio phonograph (3 speed) unit. Contrast of the cordovan finish on mahogany with light texture of perforated Masonite is set off by an accent of persimmon in the free form [!] speaker opening.”

Television Style contains nearly 200 illustrations, mostly taken from DVDs and video files of television programs. Although the paper stock is not coated, we were able to work some digital magic and the illustrations are quite respectable. Plus, we decided to bleed them into the margins, allowing us to reproduce them at a good, legible size. Of course, all of those illustrations are reproduced here on tvstylebook.com–in color and enlarged from the book’s black-and-white images.

Now that Television Style has been released into the wild, we’re eager to hear readers’ thoughts about it. Please feel free to contact us with your comments and questions. Also, we will be regularly updating the material here on the Website and posting any errata.

That, I believe, is the last step before the actual printing and distributing of the book. Watch for it soon!

Today, through the miracle of modern Internet technology, I instantly submitted the proofs and index to the British company handling the layout of Television Style.

Indexing is, in general, a tedious task, but I got some small amount of pleasure from reading the book cover-to-cover once again. I’m quite pleased with how the chapters fit together. Even though they are based on essays I’ve written over the past 25 years (!), I believe they cohere to make an over-arching argument about style and its significance in television. I leave it to the reader to judge if I’ve actually succeeded!

The November release date seems plausible, although I’ve yet to see a mock-up of the cover so who knows what it might look like. Amazon.com (and others, I presume) is ready to let you pre-order it and they’ve even set up a “permalink” to get you there:

http://amzn.com/0415965128

(Don’t worry about the funky spelling [amzn]. This is not a phishing site!)

This week, Routledge sent me the page proofs (in PDF format) and I’ve diligently started compiling the index for the book.

The layout looks terrific. I think we chose just the right size images (almost 300 of them) — not so small that you can’t make out what’s in them and not so large that they crowd the text. What we did to give them a bit more room is bleed them into the margin just a little. Worked great.

I’m going to post the PDF of the Introduction here on the site soon.

Looks like the final book will run 270 pages.

Look for it in book stores soon! In fact, you can already pre-order it from Amazon and other online venders.

Thanks to everyone at Routledge who has supported this project.

• A draft copy of the Introduction, “Dare We Look Closely at Television?,” as a PDF file.
• Approximately 300 illustrations, every single image from the book–enlarged and, when appropriate, in color.
• Several illustrative tables–some découpages (sequence analyses)–that had to be reduced for print. We here provide enlarged versions of several of them, along with color images.
• 14 videos that tie in with Television Style discussions of editing, visual effects (especially morphing), sound, and camera movement.
• The beginnings of a link directory. Every online resource cited in Television Style will eventually be included, along with links to additional resources.

And, of course, we also added ordering information (now available for pre-order from Amazon.com!) and a contact form.

Let us know what you think of the site and what you’d like to see added.

It’s six months later than we planned, but still it feels good to get the production process started. My editor tells me that they plan a fast turnaround for it, hoping to get it out in November! That was a pleasant surprise.

We hope you’ll check back often. You may wish to subscribe to our RSS feed in order to receive automatic updates on our progress.