45. How to Watch Television edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell
How to Watch Television is an academic book composed of 40 essays written by television scholars teaching and researching in this area. Each essay focuses on a single television show and how that show contributed to the history of television including such things as the style of the show, the way it treats political subjects, or how the show was produced. It covers a wide range of shows both past and present. This book is definitely for people interested in media criticism or uber-television nerds as it goes much beyond the kind of television criticism and analysis you find on the internet or in more mainstream books on the subject. I enjoyed reading it, but I both love television and am a nerdy librarian who doesn’t mind reading scholarly writing for fun. I give it a 6 out of 10.
Around the Year in 100 Books 