Although TV distribution has undergone a massive increase in volume and value over the past fifty years, there is a systematic lack of both curiosity and knowledge on the part of both industry and ...scholars about this area. This book assists in the filling of this gap by studying what, in fact, occurs in global trade in TV program formats within international markets such as Cannes, Las Vegas and Singapore. The study investigates key components of this trade, thereby elucidating the crucial dynamics at work in the most significant contemporary transnational cultural industry.
Celebrities have come to increasingly dominate the media and its study in contemporary culture. Although acknowledged as part of this general rise in the importance of celebrity culture, television’s ...specific forms of stardom have until now remained largely under-theorised. Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen examines how television personalities function as commodities, and also function ideologically, thus relating them to issues of class, national identity, sexuality, gender and social history. Television Personalities sets out a new way of considering televisual fame, arguing that it must be understood on its own terms, and thus establishing the television personality as a particular set of performers whose celebrity is constructed through discourses of ordinariness, authenticity and intimacy. The book is divided into three sections that trace the historical development of televisual fame from the 1950s through to the emergence of ‘DIY’ celebrity in the digital era. It examines the economics, aesthetics, production, histories, futures and ideological functions of the television personality across a range of examples, including: Benny Hill, Oprah Winfrey, Cilla Black, Simon Cowell, Ricky Gervais, Alan Titchmarsh, Jamie Oliver; the stars of YouTube and television’s smaller screens; and Extras, Top Gear, The Naked Chef, The Weakest Link.
Television Personalities is an original, indispensable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media, television and celebrity studies, as well as those interested in digital culture more widely.
In recent years non-fiction history programmes have flourished on television. This interdisciplinary study of history programming identifies and examines different genres employed by producers and ...tracks their commissioning, production, marketing and distribution histories. With comparative references to other European nations and North America, the authors focus on British history programming over the last two decades and analyse the relationship between the academy and media professionals. They outline and discuss often-competing discourses about how to ‘do’ history and the underlying assumptions about who watches history programmes. History on Television considers recent changes in the media landscape, which have affected to a great degree how history in general, and whose history in particular, appears onscreen. Through a number of case studies, using material from interviews by the authors with academic and media professionals, the role of the ‘professional’ historian and that of media professionals – commissioning editors and producer/directors - as mediators of historical material and interpretations is analysed, and the ways in which the ‘logics of television’ shape historical output are outlined and discussed. Building on their analysis, Ann Gray and Erin Bell ask if history on television fulfils its potential to be a form of public history through offering, as it does, a range of interpretations of the past to and originating from or including those not based in the academy. Through consideration of the representation, or absence, of the diversity of British identity – gender, ethnicity and race, social status and regional identities – the authors substantially extend the scope of existing scholarship into history on television
In the years before the civil rights era, American broadcasting reflected the interests of the white mainstream, especially in the South. Today, the face of local television throughout the nation ...mirrors the diversity of the local populations.
The impetus for change began in 1964, when the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ and two black Mississippians, Aaron Henry and Reverend R. L. T. Smith, challenged the broadcasting license of WLBT, an NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi. The lawsuit was the catalyst that would bring social reform to American broadcasting.
This station in a city whose population was 40 percent black was charged with failure to give fair coverage to civil rights and to integration issues that were dominating the news. Among offenses cited by the black population were the cancellation of a network interview with the civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall and editorializing against the integration of the University of Mississippi.
However, muscle, money, and a powerhouse Washington, D.C., law firm were on the side of the station. Despite the charges, the Federal Communications Commission twice renewed the station's license. Twice the challengers won appeals to the federal courts. Warren Burger, then a federal appeals court judge, wrote decisions on both challenges. The first ordered the FCC to allow public participation in its proceedings. The second, an unprecedented move, took the license from WLBT.
This well-told, deeply researched history of the case covers the legal battles over their more than fifteen years and reports the ultimate victory for civil rights. Aaron Henry, a black civil rights leader and one of the plaintiffs, became the station's chairman of the board. WLBT's new manager, William Dilday, was the first black person in the South to hold such a position.
Burger's decision on this Mississippi case had widescale repercussions, for it allowed community groups in other regions to challenge their stations and to negotiate for improved services and for the employment of minorities.
Kay Mills is the author ofA Place in the News: From the Women's Pages to the Front Page,This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Need to Know about Women's History in America, andSomething Better for My Children: The History and People of Head Start. She lives in Santa Monica, California.
The surprising effects of American TV on global viewers
As a dominant cultural export, American television is often the first exposure to American ideals and the English language for many people ...throughout the world. Yet, American television is flawed, and, it represents race, class, and gender in ways that many find unfair and unrealistic. What happens, then, when people who grew up on American television decide to come to the United States? What do they expect to find, and what do they actually find?
In America, As Seen on TV, Clara E. Rodríguez surveys international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US to examine the impact of American television on their views of the US and on their expectations of life in the United States. She finds that many were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse, and that it is not the easy-breezy, happy endings culture portrayed in the media, but a work culture. The author also surveys US-millennials about their consumption of US TV and finds that both groups share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US as they have experienced them. However, the groups differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views on sex, smoking and drinking.
America, As Seen on TV explores the surprising effects of TV on global viewers and the realities they and US millennials actually experience in the US.
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.
With cases studies used throughout to help illustrate the more general points, this is an analysis of the most important characteristics of television dialogue, with a focus on fictional television. ...The book illustrates how we can fruitfully and systematically analyse the language of television.
This book redresses the balance of reality shows and the program format as a central mode of business and culture in the new television landscape. It explores topics such as reality TV, makeover ...programs, sitcoms, talent shows, fiction serials, broadcaster management policies, production decision chains and audience participation processes.
Post-TV Strangelove, Michael
Post-TV,
2015, 20150317, 2015, 2015-03-17, 2015-03-27
eBook
In the late 2000s, television no longer referred to an object to be watched; it had transformed into content to be streamed, downloaded, and shared. Tens of millions of viewers have "cut the cord," ...abandoned cable television, tuned into online services like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, and also watch pirated movies and programmes at an unprecedented rate. The idea that the Internet will devastate the television and film industry in the same way that it gutted the music industry no longer seems farfetched. The television industry, however, remains driven by outmoded market-based business models that ignore audience behaviour and preferences.
InPost-TV, Michael Strangelove explores the viewing habits and values of the post-television generation, one that finds new ways to exploit technology to find its entertainment for free, rather than for a fee. Challenging the notion that the audience is constrained by regulatory and industrial regimes, Strangelove argues that cord-cutting, digital piracy, increased competition, and new modes of production and distribution are making audiences and content more difficult to control, opening up the possibility of a freer, more democratic, media environment.
A follow-up to the award-winningWatching YouTube,Post-TVis a lively examination of the social and economic implications of a world where people can watch what they want, when they want, wherever they want.
