Citizen-Spy

x Preface
doesn’t offer easily isolable, discrete objects of study. Does one study a particular
program, an episode, a network, a studio, an advertising agency, an audience,
a star? The methods of textual analysis that film scholars adapted from
literary criticism don’t quite fit newer media. Whereas a given film might be
studied as a relatively bounded narrative, television is complicated by episodic
seriality and what Raymond Williams described as flow: an ongoing stream of
information, in which individual programs, commercial messages, news, and
public service announcements collide and combine. 1 And not only is television
broadly intertextual, its texts are impermanent. While the historical significance
of the most popular programs is disproportionately magnified by being preserved
in the electronic amber of cable network syndication, countless important
broadcasts now survive only as written transcripts or as residues in other
historical accounts. Similarly, the supporting materials (scripts, production
notes, correspondence, and so on) that offer insights into the circumstances of
production are often discarded. This is in part due to the fact that television
generates a vast amount of material, but it is also a product of the general low
esteem in which this medium is often held—both by audiences and producers.
Ironically, because television is seemingly “everywhere,” much that is important
about it is at risk of disappearing from the historical record.
But just as television is ephemeral, so too is the past. Ultimately unknowable,
a foreign country, the past lingers out of sight, conjured only in the histories we
write. 2 Hayden White suggests that the common assumption that crucial explanatory
facts lie dormant—in the archive, in memories, in some endless public
record—like little nuggets eager to be found (a-ha!) is a beguiling fallacy. We’d
like to think that history is a sage process of first gathering data, then stringing
it together in the most natural, coherent way—as if filling in the pieces of a precut
jigsaw puzzle, 500 or 1000 to a box. White insists that narrative comes first;
facts only become visible when placed in a covering framework within which
they are rendered factual. 3 That’s not to say that history is arbitrary, but a host
of assumptions—in the case of this book, about the development of the television
industry, its place within a national and/or global culture, its relationships
to other media artifacts and practices, and so on—lead toward certain
kinds of facts and away from others. Furthermore, it is not only the historian’s
narrative frameworks that shape this process; unspoken assumptions also guide
those who (whether at the studio, the network, or the archive) had to select what