Book Review

In 1992 Lynn Spigel, professor of cinema and television at the University of Southern California, published a splendid, innovative history of television, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. What made the book refreshingly welcome was its contrast to the histories of television written up to that point that concentrated pretty much on the production side of the medium: economic organization, the struggle for control of the television spectrum, government regulation, and, to a lesser extent, the content of the medium. Professor Spigel's book turned those histories upside down by introducing a new vocabulary focused on reception and, therefore, on the site in which television found its primary residence and characteristic content: the domestic space of the middle-class family. Spigel attentively and incisively explored that space and the social relations dialectically embedded within television content and the suburban family home. In doing so she relied on some hitherto unexploited material, namely, popular discourses about television, principally in women's magazines, and in particular architectural renderings of the place of television within the home.

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