François Jost is a French semiologist and emeritus professor of information and communication sciences at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Holding a doctorate in narratology, he first turned to filmmaking before beginning his academic career in Montpellier and later in Paris where he collaborated with Bernard Stiegler (INA). 

In the 1970s, television experienced a dual movement: a “television at play,” open to experimentation and reflexivity, and a “television of play,” shaped by entertainment and scheduling logic. This shift was enabled by broader social, cultural, and technological changes that encouraged both innovation and structured programming.

François Jost: Yes, the notion of play is central to this complex period, in which a major creative dynamic emerged. On the one hand, there was what I call the television at play—that is, a television open to experimentation, to reflexivity, to more self-aware forms of broadcasting. On the other hand, emerging also was the television of play—which means a television shaped by the logic of the game, of the slot, of entertainment; one marked by scheduling, by audience logic, by formats that accommodate competitive time-slots and viewer retention. These twin movements were made possible by a number of interlocking factors.

First, the institutional and technological stability that television had achieved by the late 1960s: in France, for instance, the public monopoly broadcaster Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF) had become a familiar presence; viewership was massifying; the habits of TV consumption were more settled. With that massification came a push for renewal—television could no longer afford to be purely a vehicle for old formats; thus new shows emerged, attempts at launching new channels, new ways of engaging the audience.

Second, the arrival of new financial models and promotional practices. For example, television advertising in France was first introduced in October 1968. That commercial turn changed the logic of television: now television schedules, formats, and genres had to accommodate not just public-service goals but also audience-metrics, sponsor demands, and competitive time slots. Thus the television of play logic: formats tailored to audience retention, segmentation, scheduling, repetition, branding.

Third, there was also the explosion of cultural reflexivity—television began to look at itself, to play with its own form, to allow for more self-referential shows, more experimental programmes, more playful hybrids of genres. This is the television at play side. In the 1970s, one can observe programmes that consciously disrupted the classical flow, that inserted debates, that mixed high-culture references with mass-media forms. The intellectual climate—semiotics, media studies, the influence of thinkers like Roland Barthes (

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