Abstract
Sports TV is a recent addition to the Routledge Television Guidebooks series. The eight titles in that series identify a particular genre of television and engage it from a cultural studies perspective. Other titles in the series include Lifestyle TV (Laurie Ouellette 2016) and Reality TV (Jon Kraszewski 2017). They are concise and presented as a kind of intellectual travel guide. Each 5 × 8 edition contains 4 to 6 chapters and typically runs about 200 to 250 pages with a list of questions for discussion and a curated bibliography. They include several images to illustrate the examples and are clearly designed for classroom use by advanced undergraduate or graduate students.
The broad scope and portability of the concept makes these books ideal for classroom use (although the price point is a bit high), but these are very difficult books to write well. The job requires an ability to provide a broad scope while resisting the sea of references that can stifle a narrative. This work by Victoria E. Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Irvine, is engaging, clearly and tightly argued, and offers important insights even to those with no interest in sports.
In the book’s introduction, Johnson notes that while sports have been central to the history of television from the beginning, screen studies long displayed a curious neglect of sports TV. The cultural impact of sports has widened, but TV scholarship has only recently engaged it in a sustained way. As a result, Johnson notes, “sports, is both culturally omnipresent and academically marginalized” (p. 5). The author provides an overview of the early work in critical sports media studies, highlighting the important contributions of feminist sport studies scholars in examining hegemonic masculinity in sports TV. She positions such work at the center of the field, arguing that “not only can one be a feminist scholar of sport media but. . .feminist analysis is required to do such work” (p. 9). Engagement with sport media, Johnson argues, is central to critical screen studies because sports TV is “a unique site within US media culture in which the hard work of hegemonizing often becomes visible, exposing instabilities in dominant ideals regarding race, gender, sexuality, and geography” (p. 12).
Chapter 1 offers a brief regulatory and commercial history of sport media, focusing on the court ruling United States v. National Football League (1953) and Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 which together helped to establish sports TV as a public good in the eyes of the law and paved the way for the pursuit of a national sports audience. As she does throughout the book, Johnson offers a few contemporary examples to demonstrate the significance and possible applications of each chapter’s concepts. Here, she focuses on the development of Fox Sports’ multichannel investment in sports TV to illustrate both the central place that sports has come to occupy in major media fare, where sports’ essential “live-ness” serves as an antidote to the challenge of time-shifting.
The next chapter explores the technical development of sports TV. It includes a discussion of the implementation of slow-motion replay to the careful casting of the studio team on ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” then examines various experiments with graphics, including Fox’s failed “glow-puck” innovation for its NHL coverage, and ESPN’s more successful “1st & Ten Line.” The chapter also includes a consideration of how video game graphics have influenced sports TV production practices, as exemplified by CBS’s deployment of TopTracer’s “videogamegraphic,” which offers an arcade-like arrow tracing the flight of the ball.
Chapters 3 and 4 seek to “interrogate competing understandings of sports as a diversion from or an ideal form for engagement with potentially contentious social issues and political expression” (p. 85). Specifically, Johnson engages questions of gender and racial equality in and beyond sports, and the interesting way that sports “both preserve cultural conventions and provide a space that persistently challenges them” (p. 85). In chapter 3, she focuses on the television sports documentary as a site where ambivalences over women athletes and notions of empowerment are negotiated. In the IX for IX series produced by ESPN in 2013, Johnson traces the articulation of a neoliberal, postfeminist framework that both (obviously) celebrates and (more subtly) constrains the possibilities for women’s freedom. In the series of documentaries, women are largely presented as exceptional individuals or groups who mostly reinforce conventional femininity and “status quo norms as idealized” (p. 101). Chapter 4 considers the long history of racial protest in sport, as well as the backlash athletes can face when they blur genres, as she details in a nuanced and revealing exploration of LeBron James’ 2010 announcement on ESPN that detailed his future plans in The Decision. For Johnson, these and other incidents illustrate the fact that “sports remains the most prominent weekly and seasonal space for the idealization of homosocial bonds and the conservation of consensus, while also, increasingly, serving as a primary social institution at the forefront of civil discourse, calling for systemic transformation” (p. 118).
The book’s final chapter reviews some developments regarding sports TV and the construction of place. Johnson identifies and examines the establishment of sporting third places—not the stadium or arena and not the home—where sports TV is consumed. She offers an analysis of closed-circuit exhibitions of sports; the contemporary sports bar, where members of far-flung geographic locations reconstitute and manage ideas of home through televised sports; and the creation of urban sports districts such as St. Louis’ “Ballpark Village.” Each example works to illustrate how “shared community is now, fundamentally, imagined and defined through sports, particularly in public ‘third spaces’” (p. 144).
There is a lot to admire about Sports TV. It covers a great deal of ground very effectively, and it imagines not only the history and present of sports on television, but also the other related forms—cinema and video games for example—that both influence and draw inspiration from sports TV. The writing is lucid and engaging, and the arguments are fascinating and beautifully composed. Of course, a concise overview such as this one must make choices, and there is room to quibble about these choices. One area that does not receive much consideration is the growing number of scripted television drama and comedy series that take sports as their setting. Some of these, such as Friday Night Lights (NBC 2006–2011), The League (FX and FXX 2009–2015), and Ted Lasso (Apple TV+ 2020–present) have become notable successes. Admittedly though, scholarship on this aspect of sports TV is not as developed as the other areas that Johnson details. Perhaps that will have changed in time for a second edition. In any case, Sports TV offers a concise, sophisticated, but accessable introduction that makes it an ideal starting point for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as other interested readers.
When I first learned about sports media scholarship some twenty years ago, it was something of a niche area. Sports TV is a powerful reminder of how far sports media scholarship has come. Johnson’s review of the research offers examples of the high quality of much recent work in sports media scholarship. The author makes the powerful and convincing argument that sports TV is an important topic not merely because of its size and ubiquity, but because it is a vitally important site for understanding contemporary media and their relationship with society, even for those who are apathetic or even sports anti-fans. Johnson connects the too-frequently abridged or ignored interdisciplinary scholarship on sports media—from sport sociology, gender studies, racial and ethnic studies, American studies, and other areas—with that in communication and media studies. In doing so, she shows how this intellectual diversity has contributed to a robust and innovate field of inquiry that has much to teach us about media, as well as race, gender, class, and disability and other important concerns. Johnson demonstrates how a “humanistic, television studies perspective” can serve as a lens that brings these threads together in ways that encourage us to productively rethink fundamental questions, not only of media, but of contemporary life and power more generally. For students encountering the field for the first time, as well as for those who have worked in it for decades, this is an illuminating and generative work.