The Television Social Network: Exploring TV Characters

This article explores changes in television criticism through the lens of the online social network. This new lens reinvigorates television scholarship to reinterpret character relationships as central to the television text. By looking at the complex connections between text, character, and audience the network engenders, we can see how today's television links audience to character through a "social networking mode'' within the text, redefining and updating television scholarship for the twenty-first century.