Sports Television

Readers of the Routledge Television Guidebook on Sports will be introduced to the history of sports television in the United States, the genre's definition, and its critical significance for the business practices, formal properties, and social, cultural, and political meanings of the medium. Each chapter includes a case-study that applies critical analysis to sports television in reader-friendly and familiar, broadly-relatable examples, giving readers models by which to engage in their own critical readings as applied to other sites of sports TV and sport culture. Relying on a range of examples--from Sunday Night Football to March Madness to the Olympics -Victoria Johnson proposes that sports, as seen on TV, is the central cultural forum for working through questions of community ideals, struggles over national and regional mythologies, and questions of representative citizenship.

Victoria E. Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity.