This seminar offers a broad survey of historical and contemporary television theory while encouraging students to engage with TV viewings through a variety of critical lenses. This class aims to develop students into savvy critical theorists of television, armed with multiple theoretical toolboxes, knowledgeable about the field, and capable of challenging previous scholarship to invent new paradigms for understanding television. The first half of SAC 375 surveys texts foundational to television studies while the second half focuses primarily on TV theory and criticism produced over the last two decades. The course covers a spectrum of approaches to thinking and writing critically about television, including: semiotics; psychoanalysis; political economic analysis; ideological critique; cultural studies approaches to television consumption (audience studies) as well as production (industry studies); genre and narrative theories; theories of social representations, focusing on how race, gender, and sexuality are portrayed; and contemporary scholarship positioning TV within the contexts of postmodernity and media convergence.