Book review: Consumerism on TV: Popular Media from the 1950s to the Present

[First paragraph] n the twentieth century, the development of consumer society in the West was inextricably bound up with the development of television, and the medium continues to be a key site where the culture of consumerism impacts upon and even becomes part of our subjectivities. This is one of the central claims of the new edited collection Consumerism on TV: Popular Media from the 1950s to the Present, which presents original chapters on the multiple, complex and historically shifting relationships between television and consumption from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary moment. In the preface, the editor Alison Hulme argues that there is ‘a psychology of consumption built into the very fabric of much popular television in the twenty-first century’ (xiv), and it is this complex intertwinement that the diverse range of chapters seeks to interrogate. It is not just the representations of consumerism on television screens that the collection is concerned with, but also how the very modes of television continue to shape thinking around consumption and subjectivity.