Reviewed by: Television Scales by Nick Salvato Mimi White (bio) Television Scales by Nick Salvato. punctum books. 2019. 148 pages. $20.00 paperback; also available in e-book. In Television Scales, Nick Salvato performs an eccentric (his word) version of television studies through a reckoning with anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's writing. This, at least, is how Salvato describes the project.1 In the introduction, Salvato proposes that "the central, unresolved, and finally irresolvable challenges for television studies are indeed scalar ones: how to approach the vast archive of historical television materials, how to reckon with the staggering rate and volume of contemporary televisual output, and, most important, how to decide on a sound negotiation of the many different scales at which one may investigate the ontologically dense and variegated field that is 'television.'"2 Salvato offers Strathern's work, especially her 1991 monograph Partial Connections, as a productive approach to scalar complexity, highlighting Strathern's understanding of objects of analysis and their analytic frames as irreducibly complex and "partial connection" as a way to navigate the complexity.3 "For television studies," Salvato writes, "the implications of such work of Strathern's are thrilling. What could it mean to find, through a Strathernian approach, a rigorous, responsible—yet adventurous, weird—method through which not to compare but to connect items and, in so doing, to short-circuit the conservative or boring uses to which the standard television taxonomies may tend?"4 In chapter 1, "Strathern (in) Television," Salvato carefully glosses her work, with particular emphasis on aspects of Strathern's writing that address [End Page 228] the challenges of working with partial connection in contexts of "staggering complexity."5 Briefly, three crucial ideas help navigate complexity as a supra- and trans-scalar problematic: knowing and marking reflexively that one knows, that the connections are partial; understanding connections are about compatibility, not comparability; and knowing that partial connection includes the capacity to connect components at different—or sliding—scales. Salvato also discusses Strathern's idea of the "remainder": leftover material that opens up new questions or exposes gaps in understanding.6 In his subsequent chapters—"Three Binarisms," "Five Keywords," and "Suturing 'The TV Studies Sutras'"—Salvato turns his analysis from Strathern's theories to television and television studies. Salvato forges partial connections, often premised on wordplay, across the field of television. These chapters make good on the prospect that a Strathernian approach could be adventuresome and weird yet also responsible and rigorous. The method and the insights they yield are disarmingly productive, especially as Salvato works through varying scales of partial connections among programs and between programs and viewers while also reflexively highlighting the process of constructing these constellations. The "Three Binarisms" of chapter 2 are in/on, flip/flop, and binge/purge. In/on is prompted by Salvato's inner grammarian confronting the various uses of these prepositions to account for what transpires in or on television. An episode of I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957) during which Lucy places herself in a television console to perform for Ricky as if she were on TV provides a felicitous manifestation of the vexed status of being in/on TV. Flip/flop echoes the title of an HGTV show and engages diverse aspects of TV culture ranging from animated character flip books to comedian Flip Wilson to programs in which characters flip their lids or flop onto couches, not to mention other flips and flops. Salvato hereby constructs a constellation that includes television's predilection for flipping from norm-affirming to norm-disrupting. Finally, binge/purge considers one way of watching TV contra different forms of purging, with specific attention to The Biggest Loser (NBC, 2004–2016; USA, 2020–). Given the flip/flop attention to property TV, and television's storied status as a domestic apparatus, I was surprised that Hoarders (A&E, 2009–2013; Lifetime, 2014–2015; A&E, 2016–) was not part of Salvato's binge/purge analysis. However, this very response demonstrates how partial connections produce generative remainders. Salvato's "Five Keywords" play with scale and constitute a constellation among themselves: weight, rule, map, interval, and ladder. In his words, "the five sections of this chapter are meant, themselves, to...