Brett Mills is Head of the School of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia. He is the author of Television Sitcom (BFI, 2005) and The Sitcom (Edinburgh, 2009). He is the principal investigator on the 3-year AHRC-funded research project, 'Make Me Laugh: Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry'.

David Barlow was Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication in the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan and Director of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations. He is a joint author (with Philip Mitchell and Tom O'Malley) of The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation (UWP, 2005) and co-editor (with Vian Bakir) of Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

1. Introduction Part I: Reading theory 2. What is theory? 3. What is reading? Part II: Key thinkers and schools of thought 4. Liberal press theory 5. F.R. Leavis 6. The Frankfurt school 7. Harold D. Lasswell 8. The Columbia school 9. C. Wright Mills: Mass society theory 10. The Toronto school 11. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Part III: Approaches to media theory 12. Political economy. 13. Public sphere 14. Media effects 15. Structuralism 16. Feminist media theory 17. Cultural theory 18. New Media 19. Postmodernism. 20. The information society Part IV: Media theory in context 21. Production 22. Texts 23. Audiences 24. Audiences as producers