Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - This course focuses on the variety of ways we watch television beyond the cable subscription and/or broadcast antenna. Starting with VHS distribution and continuing through DVD distribution and eventually streaming and digital on-demand, the course will critically examine if and how these distribution shifts are changing television as we know it. This course will also make connections between these new distribution outlets and practices with antecedents and legacy industrial practices to historicize these shifts. In this class, we will explore ideas of on-demand television and its effects on how television is made and marketed, paying particular attention to narrative structures and assumptions about viewer attention and practices. Additionally, we will look at how taste, class, race, and gender are inflected through which audiences are targeted as cord-cutters or additional subscribers and which audiences and genres are left out of the streaming TV discourse. This course fulfills the additional TV Studies course requirement. Pre-req: FT303.

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