Prime Suspect Jermyn, Deborah
2017, 2017-11-07
eBook
April 7 1991 saw the broadcast of the first instalment of Prime Suspect, a new crime series by screenwriter Lynda La Plante, starring Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison. The drama focused on the ...desperate efforts of the Metropolitan Police to catch and convict a serial killer targeting women in a series of particularly gruesome attacks, while Tennison battles male colleagues who resent her taking charge of the case. Over seven series, Prime Suspect went on to tackle issues such as racism, homophobia and child abuse, establishing La Plante as a leading TV dramatist; winning multiple industry accolades for its stars and production team (including a clutch of BAFTAs and EMMYs) and gaining distribution all over the world. Deborah Jermyn's study examines exactly what made Prime Suspect so distinctive and controversial and the role it played in transforming the TV crime drama. Jermyn places the series in the context of earlier TV crime series, particularly those such as Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch and Cagney& Lacey that featured female detectives, and traces its influence on those such as Silent Witness and CSI that came after. Jermyn also relates the institutionalised sexism and misogyny that Tennison confronts to real-life discrimination and prejudice in British policing and its attitudes to women, whether as investigators or victims, in cases such as that of Assistant Chief Constable Alison Halford and the distinction made between prostitutes and the 'innocent' victims of the Yorkshire Ripper.Through a close analysis of key scenes, Jermyn highlights the formal and aesthetic innovations of Prime Suspect, in its attention to the detail of forensic work; its unflinching portrayal of the bodies of murder victims and its cinematic shooting style. Recognising Prime Suspect as one of the most striking, acclaimed and influential texts in British television history, Jermyn acknowledges the key roles played by the original screenwriter La Plante and by Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison.
Examines the bleak television comedies that illustrate
the obsession of the white left with its own anxiety and
suffering
At the same time that right-wing political figures like Donald
Trump were ...elected and reactionary socio-economic policies like
Brexit were voted into law, representations of bleakly comic white
fragility spread across television screens. American and British
programming that featured the abjection of young, middle-class,
liberal white people-such as Broad City , Casual ,
You're the Worst , Catastrophe , Fleabag ,
and Transparent -proliferated to wide popular acclaim in
the 2010s. Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey track how these shows
of the white left, obsessed with its own anxiety and suffering, are
complicit in the rise and maintenance of the far right-particularly
in the mobilization, representation, and sustenance of structural
white supremacy on television.
Nygaard and Lagerwey examine a cycle of dark television comedies,
the focus of which are "horrible white people," by putting them in
conversation with similar upmarket comedies from creators and casts
of color like Insecure , Atlanta , Dear White
People , and Master of None . Through their analysis,
they demonstrate the ways these non-white-centric shows negotiate
prestige TV's dominant aesthetics of whiteness and push back
against the centering of white suffering in a time of cultural
crisis.
Through the lens of media analysis and feminist cultural studies,
Nygaard and Lagerwey's book opens up new ways of looking at
contemporary television consumption-and the political, cultural,
and social repercussions of these "horrible white people" shows,
both on- and off-screen.
When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades ...passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.
Mediating the Uprising: Narratives of Gender and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama shows how gender and marriage metaphors inform post-uprising Syrian drama for various forms of cultural and ...political critique. These narratives have become complicated since the uprising due to the Syrian regime's effort to control the revolutionary discourse. As Syria's uprising spawned more terrorist groups, some drama creators became nostalgic for pre-war days. While for some screenwriters a return to pre-2011 life would be welcome after so much bloodshed, others advocated profound cultural and social transformation, instead. They employed marriage and gender metaphors in the stories they wrote to engage in political critique, even at the risk of creating marketing difficulties for the shows or they created escapist stories such as transnational adaptations and Old Damascus tales. Serving as heritage preservation, Mediating the Uprising underscores that television drama creators in Syria have many ways of engaging in protest, with gender and marriage at the heart of the polemic.
The horror anthology TV show American Horror Story first aired on FX Horror in 2011 and has thus far spanned eight seasons. Addressing many areas of cultural concern, the show has tapped in to ...conversations about celebrity culture, family dynamics, and more. This volume with nine new essays and one reprinted one considers how this series engages with representations of gender, sexuality, queer identities and other LGBTQ issues. The contributors address myriad elements of American Horror Story, from the relationship between gender and nature to contemporary masculinities, offering a sustained analysis of a show that has proven to be central to contemporary genre television.
Mediating the Uprising: Narratives of Gender and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama shows how gender and marriage metaphors inform post-uprising Syrian drama for various forms of cultural and ...political critique. These narratives have become complicated since the uprising due to the Syrian regime’s effort to control the revolutionary discourse. As Syria’s uprising spawned more terrorist groups, some drama creators became nostalgic for pre-war days.
While for some screenwriters a return to pre-2011 life would be welcome after so much bloodshed, others advocated profound cultural and social transformation, instead. They employed marriage and gender metaphors in the stories they wrote to engage in political critique, even at the risk of creating marketing difficulties for the shows or they created escapist stories such as transnational adaptations and Old Damascus tales. Serving as heritage preservation, Mediating the Uprising underscores that television drama creators in Syria have many ways of engaging in protest, with gender and marriage at the heart of the polemic.
Horror has found a resurgence on television in the post-millennial years. This book will investigate the changing and challenging roles that gender has undergone in TV horror, examining a range of ...shows, including Hannibal, American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Penny Dreadful, Supernatural, The Exorcist, iZombie, and Bates Motel.
