Television culture is conceptualized as a repertory of textual forms, a site of cultural representation, a story teller and a communal arena for the performance and negotiation of collective values, priorities and contradictions. This seminar traces a recurring paradigm on the Israeli screen- big and small: the group. It examines its dynamic-historic instances, which manifest changing priorities and agenda in the culture; it compares the cinematic and televisual variations of the story, in order to characterize distinctive features of Israeli television culture; it compares Israeli and American variants of this narrative, generic and mythic paradigm, hence considering local variations of a global format as well as distinctive national myths as materialized on television.