‘We pretty much just watched it all back to back!’

Abstract

This article offers an empirical account of audience’s experience of television viewing and television flow, with a specific focus on parents as the audience group. It approaches the study of the medium from the standpoint of researching television as a lived experience, offering an insight into how television viewing practices and the experience of television flow are influenced by the complex experiences of parenting. In particular, this article addresses questions such as how audience’s specific experiences and circumstances, such as parenting, influence the ways in which television content is accessed and viewed; what is parents’ experience of flow when it comes to television viewing; and whether broadcast flow of television is becoming a contested and insecure concept in its own right, with audiences making a distinction between ‘broadcast television in the background’ and ‘watching television’.