Introduction: Television in the afternoon

In this introductory essay, the editors of this special issue of Critical Studies in Television explore the existing ways in which scholars have considered afternoon television, present data which demonstrates the historical distribution of and shifts in the genres of afternoon, and make a case for the contribution to the field offered by this collection of new essays. In the process, we call for an interrogation of commonly held assumptions about gender, genre and theme around the figure of the ‘woman at home’ which have tended to be made about the programming scheduled at this time of day, and which the essays here begin to do through carefully historicised, close analytic work.