"A comprehensive analysis of contemporary US television series. Combining an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, Monika Bednarek brings together linguistic analysis of the new Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue with analysis of scriptwriting manuals, interviews with Hollywood scriptwriters, and a survey undertaken with university students about their consumption of TV series. In so doing, she creates five new and original empirical studies. The focus on language use in a professional context (the television industry), on scriptwriting pedagogy, and on learning and teaching provides an applied linguistic lens on TV series that is complemented by perspectives taken from media linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociocultural linguistics/sociolinguistics. Throughout the book, multiple dialogue extracts are presented from a wide variety of well-known fictional television series including The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy and Bones. Researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, CDA, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and media linguistics will find the book both stimulating and unique in its approach"--