In the late 1970s, the well-known Hungarian sociologists György Konrád and Iván Szelényi pointed to a seeming depoliticization of private life in state socialist societies; a process in which television played a crucial role. In their contemporary view, the “sanctity of private life has been restored,” whereas “the doorbell-ringing agitator has given way to the television screen” (Konrád and Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1979, 199–200). The political implications of the process were different, but on both sides of the Iron Curtain, contemporaries perceived that people were retreating into their private spheres. The privatization of ordinary people's life coincided with the rise of television: TV sets basically transformed the material and emotional arrangement of domestic spaces while watching television quickly became a broadly accepted pleasure-giving leisure habit. This new texture of everyday life and private media use was a phenomenon coming up in the east and west at almost the same time and with a comparable intensity, as several studies on state socialist countries have already demonstrated. From a steadily growing range of studies, see Michael Meyen, Einschalten, Umschalten, Ausschalten? Das Fernsehen im DDR -Alltag (2003); Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (2010); Christine E. Evans, Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (2016); Kristin Roth-Ey. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (2011); Kirsten Bönker, “‘Dear television workers … ’: TV Consumption and Political Communication in the Late Soviet Union,” Cahiers du monde russe 56, no. 2, 2015: 371–99.

Hence, this highly valuable book ties into a buoyant ongoing debate on popular culture, media use, and political communication in eastern Europe during the Cold War. Its comparative focus on socialist television considerably enriches our understanding of the impact the medium made on socialist and post-socialist media cultures. The authors, Sabina Mihelj, Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University, and Simon Huxtable, now lecturer at the History Department of Goldsmiths University of London, set up an ambitious and intriguing research design analyzing the media cultures of five state socialist countries, namely the GDR, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The authors promote a systematic approach to television studies. Therefore, they dedicate the first of three parts of their book to outline an analytical framework drawing on a broad range of methodological concepts. The study's approach is sophisticated, based on seven dimensions aiming to analyze the variations of media cultures. Mihelj and Huxtable define media cultures as “patterns of ideas and practices tied to specific forms of mediated communication, which shape processes of meaning-formation across instances of production, reception, and use.” More precisely, they focus here on the way television culture developed within the specific political system of state socialism in eastern Europe (28).

The seven analytical dimensions–publicness, privacy, gendering, transnationalism, temporal orientation, extraordinary temporality, and secularization–structure the book's other two parts and guide the narration of how to understand socialist television. The authors apply a tripartite typology of market state socialist, reformist state socialist, and hardline state television to frame the variety of developments. Thus, it becomes apparent that TV producers in these five countries designed the TV genres and schedules to promote an “informed, educated and ‘cultured’ working class.” The consequence was that they only reluctantly paid more attention to entertainment programs but lastly opened the floor for family and even crime series, at least if they adhered to “communist” principles and norms. Apart from open ideological purposes, the mere everyday scheduling patterns and program structures resembled those of western public TV channels. Not surprisingly, the relation between state socialist television and ideological purposes remained ambiguous, although the regimes clearly aimed to use television to closely intertwine everyday life with ideologically saturated programs. Mihelj and Huxtable showcase that the state socialist regimes substantially benefitted from television, providing issues to talk about and giving people a new sense of state socialist normality. With certain national varieties, TV producers learned to link traditional communist norms and values to certain transnational narratives of private life and normality. Thus, television might have considerably contributed to the stability of the state socialist regimes (299). Nevertheless, the new domestic routines and rituals that television helped to establish did not mean to produce real believers in the communist project.

To sum up, the conceptualization of television studies and the discussion of suitable research categories against the historical background of the Cold War is one of the book's great achievements, as it facilitates the systematic comparison of developments in television history across and beyond the Iron Curtain. For everybody receiving German-speaking research, however, the authors' recurring and in this context not very productive discussion of Jürgen Habermas's model of the public sphere seems quite obsolete. Furthermore, the book presents many highly relevant findings on watching television in eastern Europe during the Cold War, although the authors missed some pertinent publications, for example on Soviet and East German television. Assembling the results of the existing research on different national televisions, the monograph acquires the character of a handbook but also presents the results of the authors' own research. In contrast to many other media scholars, Mihelj and Huxtable do not disregard the TV viewers. Considering the important question of how the media consumers used the medium and how their media use affected on their perceptions of space and time at least to a certain extent, they explored a sample of 161 oral history interviews from all five countries. Everyone who wants to delve into state socialist television shall want to read this book.