The origin of genre studies dates back to the ancient Greeks, as Aristotle's theory of literature distinguished between major categories like epic, tragedy, and comedy. As literary studies developed in the modern era, scholars looked at genre fiction as a facet of popular culture, considering categories like romances and mystery as key popular genres. Film scholars adopted this approach, examining the underlying structure and cultural meanings of important film genres like westerns and musicals. As television developed into the prevalent storytelling medium it is today, genre categories like sitcoms and game shows became part of a broader generic vocabulary.

Genres may be categorized by a broad range of criteria; probably the most central approach focuses on narrative structure. Thus the detective genre is predicated on a puzzling criminal disruption of the status quo, which the detective hero investigates and eventually solves. Likewise, romances and thrillers are dependent on their own familiar narrative structures. Another important way genres have been defined focuses on setting and iconography. Westerns, for example, might have a variety of plots (some even resembling detective stories or romances), but they are all set in a common era and locale, featuring horses, guns, and frontier decor. Medical shows, legal dramas, science fiction, workplace comedies, and espionage programs are all distinguished by their common set of locations, characters, and iconography. Other genres may be categorized by their intended audience reaction: the goal of comedy is laughter, while horror wishes to provoke a frightened reaction.

Television challenges these differing models of categorization. Unlike film and literature, the television schedule regularly features both narrative and nonnar­rative programs, and both fictional and nonscripted shows. A key aspect of genre categorization that transects both scripted and unscripted programming is a reliance on particular conventions. Some of these conventions are tied to plot (such as the overheard misunderstandings typical of many sitcoms) while others are rooted in the setup of a given genre (game shows featuring prizes and contests of luck and skill). Thus a talk show might be identified by a number of conventions such as the empathetic (or controversial) host, an active studio audience, guest experts, and sensationalist issues. But there is little uniformity in what types of conventions are relevant across genres, as the importance of conventions like setting or intended emotional affect in one genre may have no relevance in another.

On the one hand, these different criteria for categorization are easily understood. Once viewers see enough of any genre, they can identify the common ground without even noticing inconsistencies between genre categories, as they soon learn to identify typical traits as part of a general set of expectations. But problems can arise with these various modes of categorization. For example, how might genre critics examine a program like The X-Files? The narrative follows detective story structures, but the setting draws upon science-fiction traditions, while the audience reaction often invites horror (and even occasionally comedy). Does the show belong to all of these genres? Or is it a program that makes genre categories irrelevant? In some ways both are true. Like many programs, X-Files mixes genres to a point that it cannot be viewed as a pure case of any one genre, but it still draws upon genre traditions to play with the form and formulas that are commonplace across television. To understand some of the show's more creative moments, it is important for viewers to be familiar with the conventions of horror, detective shows, and science fiction that X­ Files tweaks in original ways.

This points to one of the functions of genre within television: it allows producers and programmers to more efficiently create and schedule television shows. Given the sheer number of hours that any network or channel must program, shortcuts are essential. Genres provide a shorthand set of assumptions and conventions that producers can draw upon to make a new program familiar to audiences and easier to produce. Some critics see this facet of television in a negative light, pointing to the formulaic nature of television programming and devaluing its creativity and originality. For example, Todd Gitlin has argued that television programming is inherently "synthetic," featuring originality primarily in the "recombination" of formulas and conventions. It is undoubtedly true that genres of­ ten serve as baseline formulas for producers, creating a core set of assumptions and patterns that can be drawn upon to make the production of so many hours of original programming more efficient and streamlined. Producers face the tension between originality and sameness, needing to rely upon formulas to make programs accessible and recognizable to fickle audiences, while still making shows original enough to distin­guish themselves from the pack.

However, many of the finest works of popular cul­ture have been rooted in genre traditions, from Sherlock Holmes detective stories to John Ford's cinematic westerns. This is true for television as well, as classic sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show, detective dramas like The Rockford Files, and science fiction like the multiple Star Trek series all accepted the conventions of their genres and sought to explore the creative possibilities within generic boundaries. Even programs that seem to rebel against strict genre categorization, like The X-Fi!es, use the conventions of their multiple genres to elicit and often contradict audience expectations. Thus a celebrated "art" program like Twin Peaks does not dismiss genres in exchange for a purer, original creative vision, but rather plays with the assumptions and conventions of soap operas, detective dramas, and supernatural horror to highlight the limits of formulas, while still embracing some of their conventional pleasures. It is hard to imagine television programming that operates outside of the system of genre, not because all television is too formulaic and unoriginal, but because genre categories are immensely useful to both the industry and audience.

The question of what meanings genre categories have for audiences and their broader cultural contexts has been the focus of much genre analysis from a variety of theoretical positions. One school of thought follows the pejorative vision of genres, pointing to the ways in which particular genres embody cultural ideologies and dominant norms. Following this ideological approach, genres serve as factory-produced formulas that standardize culture and limit the possibilities of both artistic expression and viewer stimulation. This position stems from the Frankfurt School theories primarily of Theodor Adorno, who asserted (before the era of television) that mass culture is inherently formulaic, repetitive, and lacking in social uplift and intellectual engagement. An ideological analysis of a genre like sitcoms would point to its inherent conservatism, as trite problems are treated as major crises and then unrealistically solved over the course of a half-hour narrative, often by promoting dominant ideals like consumerism and traditional familial structures. Ideological analyses of genres have looked at narrative structures as a central means of perpetuating dominant ideals through repetition and conventions, while some have considered nonnarrative genres like game shows as formulaic celebrations of capitalism and consumer culture.

     Ideological approaches to genre assume a one-way flow of meaning from producers to programming and into collective audience consciousness. Other approaches pose the question of what uses genres serve for audiences themselves. An important development in television criticism focused on the ritual facet of gen­ res, working through the particular cultural anxieties of a society through the repetitive narratives of a given genre. Horace Newcomb pioneered this ritual approach, examining a number of genres to explore their cultural function for American television viewers. He argues that, while sitcoms may feature exaggerated narrative closure that could reinforce dominant ideologies, this may not be their central appeal to audiences. Rather, the particular disruptions to the status quo offered by sitcoms serve as an arena or "cultural forum" to debate various positions concerning anxieties over assumed gender roles, generation gaps, and the balance between domestic and office life. Newcomb contends that the narrative closure may not be the dominant appeal for audiences. Instead, the ritualistic working through of cultural issues allow genres to function as sites of social engagement rather than escape.

This audience-centered approach has been developed further under the theoretical rubric of "cultural studies." Under this paradigm (as explored by John Fiske), television programs are viewed as open to multiple interpretations; while they often present a dominant ideological message, most viewers do not accept those meanings in full, as they make little sense to their own lives and contexts. Instead, the majority of viewers negotiate with the meanings encoded in programming, accepting some as relevant and rejecting others out of hand. A sitcom viewer might accept the consumerist messages in her favorite programs, but disregard the family values presented if they seem out of touch with her own contexts. Research on actual audience practices have often supported these theories, as people rarely see the messages of television genres as completely compelling and accurate depictions of their worlds; instead, most viewers pick and choose the facets of programs and genres that they find most pleasurable and relevant to them, while rejecting other messages as unrealistic or unpleasant. Cultural studies acknowledges that both ideological and ritual readings can be accurate for some contexts, but that to truly understand the possible meanings offered by a genre, we must look at the wide-ranging practices of diverse audiences.

The cultural studies perspective highlights one of the pitfalls of genre analysis: it is easy to overstate the uniformity of any genre category. As genres are a shorthand highlighting the similarities between shows-and thus glossing over differences-genre programs can often be misread as more consistent and uniform than they actually are. Looking at a genre historically is one key corrective to this position. The evolution of the American police drama demonstrates the wide range of differences possible within this seemingly uniform category. Programs from the 1950s, such as Dragnet and Highway Patrol, highlighted a fully functional criminal justice system, effectively upholding law and order with little personality or conflict. By the 1970s, the conventions of the maverick cop, bucking the unyielding system to more effectively dole out justice in unconventional terms, found its way onto programs like Baretta and Starsky and Hutch. The genre mixing of Hill St. Blues incorporated melodramatic serial storytelling into its gritty vision of urban crime, both humanizing the individual officers and the system itself, which teetered on the edge of breakdown for many seasons. The 1990s returned to more procedural concerns, with Law and Order and Homicide: Life on the Street focusing on the casework of humanized police, while questioning simplistic divisions between criminal and legal behaviors. All of these programs clearly belong to the police drama genre, yet they offer widely divergent meanings, conventions, and assumptions as to what the police drama says about its cultural context. Genre analysis has to look at the historical evolution of gen­ res, rather than thinking of genre categories as transhistorical unchanging definitions.

One way of thinking about genres that alters the terms of the debate somewhat is to consider how genres operate as categories themselves, rather than as shorthand for their collected programs. Thus instead of examining the evolving meanings of police shows, we might examine how the television industry, critics, and audiences have made sense of the category of "police drama" throughout different contexts-whether police dramas are assumed to be critical or supportive of social norms, tied to real-life cases or functioning as escapist fantasies. Obviously these cultural assumptions filter into programs, as producers shape their work to convey their own take on the genre, and successful programs then reshape the assumptions linked to genre categories. But genre categories can be shaped outside of the process of production as well. Jason Mittell considers how the cartoon genre has shifted throughout its history on television via practices like scheduling on Saturday mornings in the 1960s and channel branding through the creation of Cartoon Network in the 1990s. As a set of assumed meanings and values, the cartoon genre changed from a mass-audience component of theatrical film bills in the 1940s, to a lowbrow, highly commercialized kids-only genre in the I960s, to a hip, nostalgic facet of Americana in the 1990s, even when the actual cartoons themselves were consistent, as with Bugs Bunny shorts created in the 1940s. The study of television genres should look beyond just programs categorized by genre labels to consider how the categories themselves are constituted, challenged, and changed by audiences, industries, and critics.

     One case study that synthesizes many of these approaches to the television genre is Robert C. Allen's seminal analysis of the soap opera. At the formal level, Allen considers how the serialized narrative structure of the soap opera is its core definitional attribute, arguing that this structure elicits a particular form of generic pleasure for its audiences: witnessing the effects of narrative events on a community of relationships across the fictional world. To understand this generic pleasure, he suggests critics must take a viewer-centered perspective, seeing as soap opera fans regularly watch "their stories" for decades and thus experience the genre from a position quite differ­ ent from detached critics. Yet Allen acknowledges that the genre is not solely a product of the programs themselves, noting how the genre term "soap opera" is itself a pejorative label, given by critics in the 1930s who dismissed the genre's dual facets of melodrama and commercialism. He explores how the institutional basis of the genre differs from viewers' experiences, and how these categorical definitions change over time, especially with the growing serialization of prime-time television, making soap operas a component of more mainstream and less stigmatized programming. Allen's example points to the importance of analyzing genres both from within the programs they categorize and in broader circulation among viewers, programmers, and critics, all as tied to historical contexts.

     There is no doubt that genre remains an important facet of television programming and practices to this day. Even as many programs incorporate mixed genres to appeal to broad audiences and explore innovation through recombination, the importance of genre conventions and assumptions remains central. The rise of narrowcasting has foregrounded genres as a branding mechanism to label channels unified by their dedication to specific genres, from news to music videos, sports to science fiction. New technological developments, like digital program guides incorporated into cable, satellite, and digital video recorders, allow for genres to be used as a searching and sorting mechanism to find desirable programming, suggesting the continued importance of genres as an organizing principle for both the television industry and audience. Understanding the ways in which genre categories and programming continue to be used by producers, critics, industries, and audiences is crucial to the development of television into the 21st century.