Television Discourse and Situation Comedy

This essay is a condensed version of a chapter from the late Paul Attallah’s unpublished doctoral dissertation ‘‘TV before TV’’ (1987) at McGill University. It is published to commemorate the first anniversary of his death. It is an approach to the analysis of television discourse as one that does not question its own epistemo-ideological categories, but rather has tended to view television primarily as a technology capable of producing certain determinate effects. The author takes the example of the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies to illustrate television micro-practices below the threshold of the dominant TV discourse; for instance that, as Beverly Hillbillies refused to rise above or transcend the sitcom genre, it spoke the great absence in television criticism at the time—the recognition of TV as still fundamentally an ‘‘unworthy discourse.’’