Returning to an Old Question : What Do Television Actors Do When They Act?

This article argues for acknowledging and exploring actors’ processes in critical considerations of television drama. Theatre Studies boasts a tradition of research privileging the actor, including a century’s worth of actor-training manuals, academic works observing rehearsals and performances, and actor accounts. However, such considerations within Television Studies are relatively nascent. Drawing upon continuing drama as a fertile case study for investigating the specificities of television acting, the article concludes that the only way to understand television acting is through the analysis of insights from actors themselves, in combination with the well-established practices of analysing the textual end-products of television acting.