"An unusually rich, ambitious, and engaging work. McCarthy has produced a significant piece of scholarship that will have wide impact upon the way television is taken up in the academy and elsewhere."--William Boddy, Baruch College

Introduction: The Public Lives of TV 1
Part I. Histories and Institutions
Rhetorics of TV Spectatorships Outside the Home 27
1. TV, Class, and Social Control in the 1940s Neighborhood Tavern 29
2. Gendered Fantasies of TV Shopping in the Postwar Department Store 63
3. Out-of-Home Networks in the 1990s 89
Part II. Places and Practices
Reading TV Installations in Daily Life 115
4. Shaping Public and Private Space with TV Screens 117
5. Television and Consumption at the Point of Purchase 155
6. Television While You Wait 195
7. Terminal Thoughts on Art, Activism, and Video for Public Places 225
Notes 253
Works Cited 287
Index 305

Anna McCarthy is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.