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 Britain since the 1960s television has been the most influential medium of popular culture. Television is also the site where the Western Front of popular culture clashes with the Western Front of ...history. This book examines the ways in which those involved in the production of historical documentaries for this most influential media have struggled to communicate the stories of the First World War to British audiences. Documents in the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Berkshire, the Imperial War Museum, and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives all inform the analysis. Interviews and correspondence with television producers, scriptwriters and production crew, as well as two First World War veterans who appeared in several recent documentaries provide new insights for the reader. Emma Hanna takes the reader behind the scenes of the making of the most influential documentaries from the landmark epic series The Great War (BBC, 1964) up to more recent controversial productions such as The Trench (BBC, 2002) and Not Forgotten: The Men Who Wouldn't Fight (BBC, 2008). By examining the production, broadcast and reception of a number of British television documentaries this book examines the difficult relationship between the war's history and its popular memory.
In Tracking the Audience: The Ratings Industry From Analog to Digital, author Karen Buzzard examines the key economic, political, and competitive factors that have influenced ratings methods dominant ...in each of the markets for radio, TV, and the Internet, tracing the practice¹s history from its early beginnings up to its most recent advances. Beginning with the birth of the industry in 1929, Tracking the Audience traces the establishment of a standardized ratings &dquotecurrency&dquote as it evolved to meet the needs of the analog broadcast system, and explores the search for new gold standards necessitated by the devastating effects of the digital revolution. Buzzard examines key challenges to the established system by discussing the movement from traditional sampling methods to new, more transparent measurements. More than a history of the ratings industry itself, it also tracks the evolving business model for the broadcast industry.
Tracking the Audience: The Ratings Industry From Analog to Digital shows how the development of conceptual tools designed to measure and package radio, TV, and Internet audiences is the result of a variety of historical factors. With a detailed examination of ratings providers, their methods, and their attempts to adjust to meet new demands a digital age, this volume explains how a standardized broadcast system of audience measurement ratings has evolved, and where it is going in the future.
An engaging and original study of current research on television audiences and the concept of emotion, this book offers a unique approach to key issues within television studies. Topics discussed ...include: television branding; emotional qualities in television texts; audience reception models; fan cultures; 'quality' television; television aesthetics; reality television; individualism and its links to television consumption. The book is divided into two sections: the first covers theoretical work on the audience, fan cultures, global television, theorising emotion and affect in feminist theory and film and television studies. The second half offers a series of case studies on television programmes such as Wife Swap, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under in order to explore how emotion is fashioned, constructed and valued in televisual texts. The final chapter features original material from interviews with industry professionals in the UK and Irish Soap industries along with advice for students on how to conduct their own small-scale ethnographic projects.Key Features:*An accessible guide to theoretical work on emotion and affect, this book is key reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates doing media studies, communication and cultural studies and television studies.*Case studies on emotion and television in British and US media contexts demonstrate new research and provide a starting point for readers undertaking their own research.*Each chapter includes exercises, points for discussion and lists for further reading
Television provides a unique account of the development of a homosexual identity across the western world, emerging as it did when ideas around sex and sexuality were themselves only just beginning ...to be publicly discussed. From the very earliest surviving drama featuring homosexuality in 1959, Homosexuality on the Small Screen explores each decade's programming in turn, looking at homosexual themes, storylines, and characters, situating them historically, and relating them to the broader events in British history. By doing so it examines the interactions between the medium and the reality of gay lives, showing how television mirrored the changes taking place in British society. For those with a homosexual - or emerging homosexual - sexual orientation, they were seminal in early personal and social development. For heterosexual viewers, these images were equally important in exploring a sexual other which otherwise remained hidden from them. They included positive storylines which helped improve public ideas about homosexuality, but also stereotypical images which propagated negative attitudes in the public consciousness. Homosexuality on the Small Screen charts this fascinating journey and television's role in the construction of a gay identity.
To dismantle negative stereotypes of fans, this book offers a media ethnography of the digital culture, conventions, and urban spaces associated with fandoms, arguing that fandom is an area of ...productive, creative, and subversive value. By examining the fandoms ofSherlock,Glee,Firefly, and other popular television-based franchises, the author appeals to fans and scholars alike in her empirically grounded methodology and insightful analysis of production hierarchies, gender, sexuality, play, and affect.
From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are ...increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.
During the fertile decade 1955–65 the television institution emerged in a form which would be familiar for the next half century: this book attends to two aspects of its formation. The first entails ...the production strategies, programmes, schedules, and emergent generic modes as these were invented through a process of trial and error, allied to a close attention to building the mass audience – in short the question of how television invented itself. The second aspect concerns the place of women and the concept ‘feminine’ in the new institution. Television offered women access to the public sphere in ways that were potentially disruptive to the order prevailing in mid-1950s Britain. Apart from new employment opportunities, images of women and definitions of the feminine were purveyed nightly to a heterogeneous audience of millions, an audience that was itself under construction throughout the period. Through close attention to three discrete areas of programming (women’s programmes, news and current affairs, and popular drama), the book aims to convey a sense of the excitement entailed in establishing the institution and to ask where and how it may have posed challenges to the prevailing patriarchal hegemony. Hence the productive interplay of two terms, television and the feminine, both of which were evolving rapidly during the period, is explored in the context of the contemporary discursive climate.
Distribution revolution Curtin, Michael; Holt, Jennifer; Sanson, Kevin
2014., 20140905, 2014, 2014-09-05
eBook
Distribution Revolution is a collection of interviews with leading film and TV professionals concerning the many ways that digital delivery systems are transforming the entertainment business. These ...interviews provide lively insider accounts from studio executives, distribution professionals, and creative talent of the tumultuous transformation of film and TV in the digital era. The first section features interviews with top executives at major Hollywood studios, providing a window into the big-picture concerns of media conglomerates with respect to changing business models, revenue streams, and audience behaviors. The second focuses on innovative enterprises that are providing path-breaking models for new modes of content creation, curation, and distribution—creatively meshing the strategies and practices of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And the final section offers insights from creative talent whose professional practices, compensation, and everyday working conditions have been transformed over the past ten years. Taken together, these interviews demonstrate that virtually every aspect of the film and television businesses is being affected by the digital distribution revolution, a revolution that has likely just begun. Interviewees include: • Gary Newman, Chairman, 20th Century Fox Television • Kelly Summers, Former Vice President, Global Business Development and New Media Strategy, Walt Disney Studios • Thomas Gewecke, Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Warner Bros. Entertainment • Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer, Netflix • Felicia D. Henderson, Writer-Producer, Soul Food, Gossip Girl • Dick Wolf, Executive Producer and Creator, Law & Order
