Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling ...vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society riven by racism and inequality. In Connecting The Wire, Stanley Corkin presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social “givens." In The Wire’s gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life, and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.
The BBC America series Orphan Black (2013-2017) won acclaim for its compelling writing, resonant themes and innovative special effects. And for the bravura acting of Tatiana Maslany, who plays an ...ever-growing number of clones drawn into an increasingly dangerous world of cutting-edge science, corporate espionage, military secrets and religious fanaticism. Heir to pioneering shows centered on strong female characters, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dollhouse, Lost and Xena: Warrior Princess, Orphan Black models the current Golden Age of serial-form storytelling, with themes of identity, bodily autonomy, gender and sexuality playing against corporate greed and its co-opting of science. This collection of new essays analyzes the diverse clone characters and the series, covering topics including motherhood, surveillance culture, mythology, eugenics, and special effects, as well as the science behind cloning.
How to reckon with the staggering volume of television materials, past and present? And how to comprehend all the potential, complex scales at which to grapple with television, from its tiniest units ...of audiovisual content to its most massive industrial coordinates and beyond? In Television Scales, Nick Salvato demonstrates how the problem of scale in the field of television may be turned into a resource and a method for a television studies that would pay better attention to messy medial complexities, peripatetic critical practices, and vulgar psychogeographies. Modeling his investigative practice on the meta-critical writing of social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in Partial Connections and elsewhere, Salvato composes surprising, partial constellations of television’s elements. In the process, his consideration ranges from classic television sitcoms like I Love Lucy to contemporary reality series such as The Biggest Loser, Iron Chef, and House Hunters International. He simultaneously pores over a number of key television phenomena, including technological mystification, performers’ charismatic displays, binge viewing, and devoted fandom. An experiment in style and form, Television Scales maps, weighs, and rules television, while also undoing these very strategies for evaluating the medium.
World Television Straubhaar, Joseph D
2007, 2007-05-18, 2007-05-01
eBook
This new assessment of the interdependence of television across cultures and nations brings together the most current research and theories on the subject. By examining recent devlopments in the ...world system of television as well as some of the theories of culture, industry, genre, and audience, the author brings new insights to the topic. The author argues that television is being simultaneously globalized, regionalized, nationalized, and even localized the book therefore looks at all these levels of operation. Drawing on both quantative and cultural studies perspectives, the author provides a new model which attempts to move beyond the current controversies about dependency and globalization.
Other books on Television tend to ignore ′ordinary′ television - lifestyle programmes and ′reality TV′, just the sort of programmes which increasing dominate the schedules. Bonner provides a ...distinctive angle on the content of television and the relations between television genres and audiences.
Global TV Bielby, Denise; Harrington, C
08/2008
eBook
A reporter for the Los Angeles Times once noted that I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day. That Lucy's madcap antics can be watched anywhere at any time is ...thanks to television syndication, a booming global marketplace that imports and exports TV shows. Programs from different countries are packaged, bought, and sold all over the world, under the watch of an industry that is extraordinarily lucrative for major studios and production companies.In Global TV, Denise D. Bielb and C. Lee Harrington seek to understand the machinery of this marketplace, its origins and history, its inner workings, and its product management. In so doing, they are led to explore the cultural significance of this global trade, and to ask how it is so remarkably successful despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences. How do culture-specific genres like American soap operas and Latin telenovelas so easily cross borders and adapt to new cultural surroundings? Why is The Nanny, whose gum-chewing star is from Queens, New York, a smash in Italy? Importantly, Bielby and Harrington also ask which kinds of shows fail. What is lost in translation? Considering such factors as censorship and other such state-specific policies, what are the inevitable constraints of crossing over?Highly experienced in the field, Bielby and Harrington provide a unique and richly textured look at global television through a cultural lens, one that has an undeniable and complex effect on what shows succeed and which do not on an international scale.
Maps the development of the crime drama on international television
As a genre, the television crime drama has long been a constant of the television landscape since it first migrated from film and ...radio onto the small screen in the 1950s. Since then, fromDixon of Dock GreentoThe Wire, fromMindertoThe SopranosorCrackertoDexterandThe Killing, it has continued to attract large audiences even as the depiction of the crime, the perpetrators and the investigators may have changed. In order to track these changes, this book provides an historical analysis of the TV crime series as a genre by paying close attention not only to the nature of TV dramas themselves, but also to the context of production and reception.
Rather than simply providing an overview, this book offers a series of case studies to illuminate key issues in the trajectory of the genre. Particular attention will be paid to the transnational career of the television crime drama, including the British and American product, as well as attention to crime drama series produced in other national contexts such as Europe and Australia. In terms of reception, this book includes original research on how the TV crime drama is perceived by audiences within the particular national context of Australia where American, British and European crime dramas vie for attention in the TV schedule alongside the local product. Finally, the future of the TV crime series is canvassed in a discussion of the changing television landscape and the shift to other forms of TV consumption enabled by new digital technologies.
Genre and Television Mittell, Jason
2004, 20040802, 2004-06-01, 20040618, 2004-08-02
eBook
Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of ...television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The
Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
This book examines the economic, political, and technological forces that are shaping the future of broadcasting in advanced industrialized nations by comparing the transition from analog to digital ...TV in the US and Britain. Digital TV involves a major reordering of the broadcast sector that requires governments to rethink governance tools for the digital media era. By looking at how the transition is unfolding in these nations, the book uncovers the political underpinnings of the emerging governance regime for digital communications and explores the implications of the transition for the development of the Information Society in the US and Europe. The findings challenge much conventional wisdom about media deregulation and the globalization of communications. The transition to digital TV has not weakened but rather reinforced government control over broadcasting. Moreover, contrary to what many globalization theories would predict, it has reinforced preexisting differences in the organization of media across nations.
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