Television studies after GT: reflections on Graeme Turner's television research

Understanding television in transformation

Graeme was the most senior figure of the first generation of cultural studies scholars to really take on how television was changing with curiosity, and without a normative frame. Television was central in Graeme's work, and yet he avoided all the ways scholarship about television narrows its relevance. For around 20 years, as scholarship on rising digital technologies grew in quantity and influence, Graeme's measured approach required tolerating, and frequently writing back against, simple utopian claims of how wonderful the digital future would be. Such discourses about the promises of digital media were more popular than scholarly and were unnervingly similar to today's corporate-driven AI boosterism, as many paraded with glee over the apparent ‘death of broadcasting’.

‘Television’ in its traditionally recognisable form (in Australia, as he’d be keen to specify) would retire at a gradual pace that matched Graeme's over the decade of the 2010s. He continued to publish important, even field-defining, work through this period that provided much-needed perspective to the evolution of thinking required to match the technological and related social adjustments. As first and foremost a cultural studies scholar, for most of Graeme's adulthood, television had been the cultural forum (Newcomb and Hirsch, 1983) or electronic hearth (Fiske and Hartley, 1978) that gathered ‘the nation’. His early work uncovered an uncommon range of forms of television in that era – news, talk shows, in addition to drama – as well as form-crossing topics such as celebrity, and the cultural forum created by talkback radio in the early twenty-first century.

But when television's role began to evolve and scholars globally began to query ‘what is television’?, Graeme engaged with these debates and explored the implications of those changes. Just as had been the case in the late 1980s when he wrote, ‘We need to know more about the ideological and social functions of this kind of television’ (Turner, 1989: 34), he continued to make sense of television's shifting role in culture with a pragmatism that contrasted with the abundant revelry for new media or head-in-the-sand refusal that was pervasive. As part of that sensemaking, Graeme collaborated with other scholars to broaden the regional vision and methodological options that enabled him to follow those cultural shifts, including into digital realms and across Asia and the Americas.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, at a time when commercial broadcasters still dominated in Australia, and it was much more difficult to see the comprehensive readjustment made apparent in just the last few years, Graeme, along with collaborator Jinna Tay, took on the challenge of ‘Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era’. Although that era had yet not fully arrived by the volume's publication in 2009, decades of examining the nexus of socio-political and industrial differences among Australia, the UK, US and other nations allowed Graeme a lens on what was coming. The Television Studies After TV (Turner and Tay, 2009) collection may have not been as well-known as Spigel and Olsson's Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (2004), but it has held up better due to its insistence on embracing the variability of television evident beyond the US and Western Europe. As he and Tay note in their introduction, ‘the television landscape presented in this book is not dominated by the usual topography’ (Turner and Tay, 2009: 4), as contributions about Latin America, the Middle East and Asia figured alongside the smaller English language markets of Australia and Canada.

Few saw it coming then, but the erosion of the US as a global television hegemon has proven to be a key feature of the post-broadcast era. At a moment when the scale of disruption led to heightened insularity among many American scholars, Turner and Tay (2009: 8) proclaimed, ‘the answer to “What is television?” very much depends on where you are’. They identified that the transformations of digital and new media produced different outcomes for societies tied to a range of existing cultural, historical, and economic factors. Turner and Tay asserted, ‘Now it is absolutely clear that we can no longer talk about “TV” as if it were a singular entity, if we have any chance of adequately understanding the contemporary social, cultural and political functions of the media’ (Turner and Tay, 2009: 3). This was a crucial rebuke of the scholarly emphases and flows that mapped onto twentieth-century assumptions about television. Their intervention was also crucial to preparing ways of thinking about what would become a massively fragmented video ecosystem.

Recognising the fluidity of the moment, Turner and Tay acknowledged, ‘at the very least, new media are recontextualizing television, changing what it is that television can do, for whom it can do it, and under what conditions’ (Turner and Tay, 2009: 3), issuing a roadmap for continuing the cultural studies project in a new context. But they also appreciated the cracks in the existing foundation of inquiry, writing that ‘media and cultural studies has built its theories of television upon the model of a broadcast television system that addresses a national culture, and is one way or another fundamentally connected to the governance of the nation-state’ (Turner and Tay, 2009: 4). Though the evidence of television's role in producing that national culture had begun to vary across different countries, their approach of investigating the multiplicity of ways ‘change and continuity’ were being experienced helped surface the many forces at play.

Graeme retired from formal academic employment just as television's complicated transition started to get really interesting, but he did not step back from writing at this inflection point. Rather, the conclusion of his salaried ‘working’ career became the foundation of another decade of scholarship and intellectual leadership. In Re-Inventing the Media (Turner, 2016a), one of several monographs he published in so-called retirement, Graeme took what he observed of television's change and saw the core cultural implication that required attention: the erosion of the mass media paradigm. He didn’t yet have a fully developed alternative to that paradigm, and to be fair, a decade later, the decline is still not as fully appreciated as it should be, and no better alternatives have surfaced. Turner ends Re-Inventing the Media articulating the core challenge:

the media has re-invented itself, this has involved major changes and the social and political implications of these changes are varied but increasingly concerning. However, the current state of media studies is no longer fit for the purpose of properly understanding these changes, accurately assessing their implications, and then addressing these concerns. That needs to be fixed. (Turner, 2016a: 136)

Television and the nation

Graeme's work of ‘re-imagining’ was not limited to the media. An enduring interest in the nation was a thread throughout Graeme's work, and television was a key site for that exploration (2023: 83). He contributed important thinking anew about the role of the nation in media studies broadly, including the concept of ‘nationing’ (Turner, 2018b). Working in collaboration with colleagues as part of a larger project (Australian Cultural Fields), Graeme considered how former practices of developing cultural policies as an explicitly national agenda were in decline. As Australian governments reduced their investment in national television, the technological shifts that were reshaping media created an unapologetically commercial agenda that drove television content production away from any explicit contribution to ‘something like a common national culture’ (Turner, 2018b: 98). However, this decline in national cultural policy did not make the nation as subject of exploration redundant. Just as Graeme warned against premature declarations that the digital age had killed television, he also expressed scepticism about the tendency in media and cultural studies of the 2010s to turn away from analysis of the national (Pertierra and Turner, 2013: 45). Graeme did acknowledge, of course (and very succinctly narrated across his publications), that scholars needed new approaches to studying the media-nation nexus in a post-broadcast era. But in Locating Television, with Anna Cristina Pertierra, he argued that the nation continued to be significant in understanding the function of television even with the decline of broadcast domination:

television still works towards the construction of a national community, notwithstanding (and sometimes precisely thanks to) the significant shifts that have occurred in television and its relation to the state (Pertierra and Turner, 2013: 59)

Characteristic of Graeme's writing about television and nation during this period was a deliberate connection with work that considered a rich diversity of national and regional contexts. Making efforts to go beyond the most frequent examples of Anglophone television studies, Graeme built his arguments and analysis in explicit dialogue with emerging waves of television research on many world regions. These efforts were at their most visible in the work generated by his Federation Fellowship research (2006–2011), which enabled multi-year collaborations with colleagues working on television in Asia (Jinna Tay), India (Sukhmani Khorana) and Mexico (Anna Cristina Pertierra). They were also clear in Graeme's engagement with the concept of commercial nationalism via the work of Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic (Turner, 2016b). He relished being able to contrast and compare his work on Australia with a wider range of places than the familiar old comparators of the United Kingdom and the United States. Such transregional explorations both expanded and sharpened Graeme's ability to look at television and the nation: by writing with others and holding multiple regional examples in mind, his own ideas about Australia were effectively clarified.

Alongside his interest in the nation, Graeme also argued for a critical evaluation of the term ‘community’, which can often be carelessly used in discussions of media audiences. He and Pertierra called for caution in overstating the degree to which the niche audiences emerging from television's fragmentation were generating new or better communities. While the experience of consuming digital content within a niche group may result in feeling like a community, it was not really a community; practices like sharing information and networking are significant but are not sufficiently socially imbricated in everyday life to constitute all the attributes of a national or local community (Pertierra and Turner, 2013: 81). Writing on community, Graeme also offered a prescient concern that scholars should not conflate the multichannel fragmentation of television that was underway with any assumption that it would create a dilution or diversification of media ownership (Pertierra and Turner, 2013: 64). These early discussions on the political effects of the fragmentation of television audiences, and on the difference between a multiplication of options and a diversified political economy of media, were ideas that took fuller form in Graeme's later work on reimagining the media in this post-broadcast, post-pandemic world.

Television and Australia's shrinking nation

We consider the 2023 book The Shrinking Nation to be a culmination of Graeme's lifelong work on the interrelations of media, politics and the nation. Although it was not explicitly focused on television, much of the argument relies on his deep understanding of how television and national culture were intertwined. In our view, Graeme could not have come to the comprehensive analyses in The Shrinking Nation without those decades of engagement with television. This is not only because Graeme turns to television for many of the book's examples – although he certainly does that. It is also because his astute analysis of where Australia sits today, as a society that has ‘shrunk’ and fragmented, results from what he observed and tracked through his attention to the changing role of television.

In building his argument that Australia is a shrinking nation, Graeme reminds readers of the role that television has historically played as a key space in which the common project of representing and reflecting Australia was manifested (Turner, 2023: 37). Television's function as a builder of national community was very clear in 1980s Australia due to its ‘unique capacity to gather the collective attention of the national audience’ (Turner, 2023: 157). This unique capacity was partly because higher levels of media concentration and less diversity of programming existed then; but it did nonetheless build national community in a more straightforward and recognisable way than can be seen in more recent multi-platform environments. In recent decades, the shrinking of news media and public service television, and the degradation of political debate into a form of sport or entertainment, has had profound effects on Australia's civic values (Turner, 2023: 47). Graeme acknowledged that television does still provide a public service function at the national level intermittently: notably, in key moments of crisis or celebration, such as bushfires or sporting competitions. Australian broadcasters do still compete to claim the mantle of the national network (Turner, 2023: 161). But overall, a widespread erosion of trust in media and information, and the deliberate shrinking of the public broadcasters’ resources, has left television organisations with a smaller pool of resources to compete in an increasingly complex environment: in short, television has to do more than ever before, with less money, reduced ambition and weak leadership (Turner, 2023: 131).

While much of The Shrinking Nation is devoted to analysing how and when Australia's declining national vision and capacity unfolded, Graeme does also offer starting points to rebuild a better version of national culture. The book's subtitle, after all, is How we got here and what can be done about it. There are glimpses in Australia's recent history that show how citizens can engage in positive ways with challenging public debates, and to find these glimpses, Graeme mostly turned to television. The Shrinking Nation includes discussions of the scripted series Fires, about the Black Summer bushfires, and Look What You Made Me Do, a documentary series investigating family violence, as examples of public service television that harness and convey national debates. NITV is also acknowledged as an example of contemporary cultural nation-building. Woven in among the other elements of his political and cultural analysis, Graeme clearly felt that television remains a foundation, not only for understanding how Australian civil society has shrunk, but also for offering hope as to where and how we might find improvements. Upon rereading The Shrinking Nation, it is quite touching to see some of Graeme's favourite examples of Australian popular television included in his analysis. The globally successful children's cartoon Bluey, the Australian franchise of Masterchef, and the dating series Love on the Spectrum are all offered as case studies of the kind of cultural work that continues to make positive, progressive contributions to an identifiably Australian landscape of national popular culture. While Graeme's work never shied away from critique – and indeed, his sharp political acuity was increasingly called upon in his final years – Graeme's scholarship on Australia's most pressing contemporary issues was deeply interwoven with his own belief in the productive joys that can come from watching television.

It is difficult to imagine television studies without Graeme's voice. The study of television and culture is relatively young, and Graeme's death makes him one of the earlier losses of the architects of the field. Although notable figures have already gone such as Stuart Hall, Roger Silverstone, and John Fiske, the loss of a voice like Graeme's from the conversation is also profound because he provided a human connection to the humans who developed the foundations of television research. The identifiable coherence of television studies as a field has certainly begun to fracture for reasons of technological changes and disciplinary shifts, as well as generational succession. It may be that Graeme's body of work has tracked almost the entire life of scholarship that located television research within cultural and media studies; as a founder of the field, whose projects traversed the highs and lows of nation-building policies, popular television as a builder of national audiences, the rise of video, cable, streaming and digital platforms, and the proliferation of regional and global flows, Graeme might have left the field just as it was disappearing. However, we suggest taking a cue from Graeme's own tendency to see the enduring relevance of television: as these brief explorations suggest, the legacy of Graeme's analysis will clearly remain important for those who are studying the twists and turns of the diverse sub-fields of research with which television today must intersect. Having never accepted television as only one thing, but rather as a series of practices, technologies and institutions operating across diverse and specific sociocultural contexts, Graeme's approach to studying television has already demonstrated an enduring value – and long may it continue to do so.