It is not necessarily easy to write about popularization; one is dealing with perhaps tens of thousands of objects of study – in this case television programmes – and the archival sources tend to be inconsistent: rich for parts of the story and nonexistent for the rest. Writing on the page about time-based media also demands attention: the account will never be the equivalent of the programme; too short and it fails to convey much, too long and it can tire the reader. Taken together, these lead to the problem of shape: how to rise properly above the empirical detail to make a satisfactory account of the subject, one that goes beyond description to speak substantively about the public culture of science. And, as with her previous radio book, LaFollette has a more difficult brief than the historian of British television, because the commercial model of American television makes for a huge diversity of networks, stations and programmes.

Hayden White has observed that historians tend to prefigure their accounts in the shape of existing narrative forms. LaFollette, in this book, has written a tragedy. From its third sentence we know that ‘television evolved into more of an “improved means to an unimproved end” than a dynamic tool for civic education’ (p. 1). Well, the author is a scholar of journalism, and here we have an exemplary deployment of the inverted pyramid: the book's conclusion at its inception. But why is it a tragedy? Only at the end does it become explicit what she feels is missing: ‘the disappointment’, she argues,

She ‘mourn[s] the failure’ (p. 220) of scientific organizations to become involved early on to create the ethnographic-style counterfactual science television she imagines, though whether this could ever have succeeded is at best debatable. But in Britain, as I have shown, we do have a history of scientific organizations seeking to control scientific broadcasting; the result was the development of high-quality stakeholder management by the broadcasters.

In the midst of LaFollette's feast of examples the reader encounters nuanced discussions that seem to contradict her main interpretive thread. For example, there is a useful discussion of the diversity of media sources from which consumers develop their sense of science, and a criticism of the disdain with which many intellectuals viewed popular culture. Sometimes it feels to the reader that the critical and analytical author is at war with the disdainful intellectual who would have preferred television to become ‘a dynamic tool for civic education’.

LaFollette's premise, I think, links a view of science communication based on knowledge deficit – she complains that no one ever helped the viewer navigate the medium – with a despair about the trashiness of popular communication that is at least as old as Juvenal. And, as we know, North American intellectuals are often predisposed to complain about the quality of programming that the commercial imperatives of US television produce.

LaFollette is always commendably close to the archive; here she rediscovers television programmes and performers that must have been long forgotten, even in the places they were broadcast. American science television differs from that in Britain in many respects, such as the early involvement of universities in providing programming; examples include The Johns Hopkins Science Review, which ran from 1948, and Science in Action (1950–1966), which was associated with the California Academy of Sciences. Many of the archives that LaFollette mines are held at her base, the Smithsonian Institution, and across the book the reader encounters several occasions on which the institution interacted with television producers, not always with any result, as when its officials entered into long discussions, from 1948 to 1954, with the aim of establishing a formal relationship with broadcasting networks. More specific approaches at the time were declined because broadcasters wished to leaven educational programmes with humour, for example, or on the grounds of resource limitations or risks to museum objects transported to studios. Finally, from 1984 to 1991, the institution managed to get into a relationship that produced six series of the programme Smithsonian World, though not without substantial disagreement over content and form between institution staff and the television producers. In the book, the Smithsonian chapters stand as proxy for relationships between scientists and television producers more broadly. These sections are strong because the archives are strong, and here we get a view of the tensions and controversies that shaped programmes in a way that is absent in some other chapters. But the reader is also left wondering whether it is down to the absence of archives that similar discussions of mainstream science are absent from the narrative.

In sum, it is most valuable to have LaFollette's book; here we have the basis for understanding what happened in American science television, a huge lacuna in the literature up until now. The task ahead for the small band of scholars who work on the medium and its relation to science and its publics will be to draw out comparisons between the way that different national media regimes developed: what they have in common, how they differ, and how they have been linked (via co-production, for example). We will need to understand whether the determining choices of medium and context of one country – in the UK, live versus film, for example, with pressure from elite science to control its representation – are also relevant to other countries. In other words, will it ever be possible to generalize reliably about this phenomenon? If it proves impossible, we are left with mere description. There are many sections here, such as LaFollette's highly readable chapter on the long-running series Nova, which indicate that we can be optimistic about the chances of avoiding that trap.