In 1990, American television experienced a seismic shift when Twin Peaks premiered, eschewing formulaic plots and clear lines between heroes and villains. This game-changing series inspired a ...generation of show creators to experiment artistically, transforming the small screen in ways that endure to this day. Focusing on six shows (Twin Peaks, with a critical analysis of both the original series and the 2017 return; The Wire; Treme; The Sopranos; Mad Men; and Girls), Television Rewired explores what made these programs so extraordinary. As their writers and producers fought against canned plots and moral simplicity, they participated in the evolution of the exhilarating new auteur television while underscoring the fact that art and entertainment don't have to be mutually exclusive. Nochimson also makes provocative distinctions between true auteur television and shows that were inspired by the freedom of the auteur series but nonetheless remained entrenched within the parameters of formula. Providing opportunities for vigorous discussion, Television Rewired will stimulate debates about which of the new television series since 1990 constitute “art" and which are tweaked “business-driven storytelling."
The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom explores how the fantasies of genre, marketing, and children can never fully cloak the queerness lurking within the plucky families designed for ...American viewers’ comic delight. Queer readings of family sitcoms demolish myths of yesteryear, demonstrating the illusion of American sexual innocence in television’s early programs and its lasting consequences in the nation’s self-construction, as they also allow fresh insights into the ways in which more recent programs negotiate new visions of sexuality while indebted to previous narrative traditions. Tison Pugh thoroughly explores six specific family sitcoms to illustrate how issues of sexuality intersect with other critical concerns of their respective periods and cultures.
Russia, one of the most ethno-culturally diverse countries in the world, provides a rich case study on how globalization and associated international trends are disrupting and causing the radical ...rethinking of approaches to inter-ethnic cohesion. The book highlights the importance of television broadcasting in shaping national discourse and the place of ethno-cultural diversity within it. It argues that television’s role here has been reinforced, rather than diminished, by the rise of new media technologies. Through an analysis of a wide range of news and other television programmes, the book shows how the covert meanings of discourse on a particular issue can diverge from the overt significance attributed to it, just as the impact of that discourse may not conform with the original aims of the broadcasters. The book discusses the tension between the imperative to maintain security through centralized government and overall national cohesion that Russia shares with other European states, and the need to remain sensitive to, and to accommodate, the needs and perspectives of ethnic minorities and labour migrants. It compares the increasingly isolationist popular ethno-nationalism in Russia, which harks back to ‘old-fashioned’ values, with the similar rise of the Tea Party in the United States and the UK Independence Party in Britain. Throughout, this extremely rich, well-argued book complicates and challenges received wisdom on Russia’s recent descent into authoritarianism. It points to a regime struggling to negotiate the dilemmas it faces, given its Soviet legacy of ethnic particularism, weak civil society, large native Muslim population and overbearing, yet far from entirely effective, state control of the media.
In the 1990s, American televison audiences witnessed an unprecedented rise in programming devoted explicitly to women. Cable networks such as Oxygen Media, Women's Entertainment Network, and Lifetime ...targeted a female audience, and prime-time dramatic series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Judging Amy, Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, and Ally McBeal empowered heroines, single career women, and professionals struggling with family commitments and occupational demands. After establishing this phenomenon's significance, Amanda D. Lotz explores the audience profile, the types of narrative and characters that recur, and changes to the industry landscape in the wake of media consolidation and a profusion of channels. _x000B_Employing a cultural studies framework, Lotz examines whether the multiplicity of female-centric networks and narratives renders certain gender stereotypes uninhabitable, and how new dramatic portrayals of women have redefined narrative conventions. Redesigning Women also reveals how these changes led to narrowcasting, or the targeting of a niche segment of the overall audience, and the ways in which the new, sophisticated portrayals of women inspire sympathetic identification while also commodifying viewers into a marketable demographic for advertisers.
First demonstrated in 1928, color television remained little more than a novelty for decades as the industry struggled with the considerable technical, regulatory, commercial, and cultural ...complications posed by the medium. Only fully adopted by all three networks in the 1960s, color television was imagined as a new way of seeing that was distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It also inspired compelling popular, scientific, and industry conversations about the use and meaning of color and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. In Bright Signals Susan Murray traces these wide-ranging debates within and beyond the television industry, positioning the story of color television, which was replete with false starts, failure, and ingenuity, as central to the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture. In so doing, she shows how color television disrupted and reframed the very idea of television while it simultaneously revealed the tensions about technology's relationship to consumerism, human sight, and the natural world.
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.
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.
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