Why is rudeness such a prominent feature of contemporary broadcasting? If broadcasting is about the enactment of sociability, then how can we account for the fact that broadcasting has become a sphere of anger, humiliation, anger, dispute and upset? And to what extent does belligerence in broadcasting reflect broader social and cultural developments? This book reflects upon and analyses the development of 'belligerent broadcasting' beginning with an examination of belligerence in its historical context and as an aspect of wider cultural concerns surrounding the retreat of civility. With attention to the various relations of power expressed in the various forms of belligerent conduct across a range of media genres, the authors explore its manifestation in political interviews, in the form of 'confrontation' in talk shows, in makeover television, as an 'authentic' means of proffering opinion and as a form of sociability or banter. Richly illustrated with studies and examples of well-known shows from both sides of the Atlantic, including The Apprentice, The Fixer, American Idol, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, DIY SOS, The Jeremy Kyle Show and Dragon's Den, this book reflects on the consequences and potentialities of belligerence in the media and public sphere. It will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, communication and popular culture.

Tony Garnett is the first book-length study of one of the most respected and prolific producers working in British television. From ground-breaking dramas from the 1960s such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home to the 'must see' series in the 1990s and 2000s such as This Life and The Cops, Garnett has produced some of the most important and influential British television drama. This book charts his career from his early days as an actor to his position as executive producer and head of World Productions, focusing on the ways in which he has helped to define the role of the creative producer, shaping the distinctive politics and aesthetics of the drama he has produced, and enabling and facilitating the contributions of others. Garnett's distinctive contribution to the development of a social realist aesthetic is also examined, through the documentary-inspired early single plays to the subversion of genre within popular drama series. -- .

All studio directors need to know the basics of studio directing, whether they go on to direct news, drama, children's programmes or light entertainment. Learning the ropes on air can be costly: this book gives you all the practical and technical guidance you need to deliver a trouble free programme. All studio directors need to know the basics of studio directing, whether they go on to direct news, drama, children's programmes or light entertainment. Learning the ropes on air can be costly: this book gives you all the practical and technical guidance you need to deliver a trouble free programme. Starting with an emphasis on the skills that make a good director, the essential day to day know-how is outlined - from different presentation formats to the roles of the production team, camera technology, composition, lighting, digital video, chroma key, make-up and wardrobe. Whether you are a student or practitioner wishing to sharpen up your technique, this manual is an excellent guide to the technology and skills required. This book: * Provides essential day to day information in one handy source * Offers a combination of theory and practice, technical data and intuitive skill * Is an excellent introductory text for anyone embarking on a career in directing Contents: Networks * Cameras and Pictures * Pre-Production * Cutting and Combining Pictures * The Studio Team * Interviews * Magazines * Script Layouts * Electronic Newsrooms * Practical Directing * Communications * Directors Technology * Dealing with Problems. Rod Fairweather is a freelance director and has worked for companies such as SKY TV, GMTV, ITN and MTV Europe. He conducts training courses on directing all over the world including Singapore, India and Australia.

Television has historically been largely ineffective at representing queerness in its various forms. In the 21st century, however, as same-sex couples have seen increasing mainstream acceptance, and a broader range of queer characters has appeared in the media, it seems natural to assume TV portrayals of queerness have become more enlightened. But have they? This collection of fresh essays analyzes queerness as depicted on TV from 2000 to the present. Examining Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The L Word, Modern Family, The New Normal, Queer as Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, RuPaul's Drag Race, Spartacus and Will & Grace, among others, the contributors demonstrate that queer characters in general have achieved visibility at the expense of minimizing much of their queerness-with a few eye-opening exceptions.

Film and video have grown to be as significant in our time as books, newspapers and magazines. Documentary film-making is fast becoming as important and useful a skill as the ability to write well. Like writing, it can be learned by anyone. Film and video have grown to be as significant in our time as books, newspapers and magazines. Documentary film-making is fast becoming as important and useful a skill as the ability to write well. Like writing, it can be learned by anyone. Documentary for the small screen is both for those who are new to documentary film-making but want to know how to create productions of a professional standard, as well as for those already working in the medium who wish to improve their skills by taking a closer look at the way they carry out their tasks. It is written in a logical, straightforward way, the first half taking the reader through an analysis of what documentary actually is, to constructing it through developing the story and assembling the appropriate building-blocks. In the second part, the pre-production stages of preparing proposals, costings and outlines, and researching the subject are all carefully examined, as are production planning and the shoot, followed by the post-production stages involved in editing and reviewing the completed film. Paul Kriwaczek is an award winning documentary maker who has a wealth of experience to pass on, having worked for many years at BBC Television where he wrote, directed and produced documentary, drama, music and science programmes.

In this book, Nathanson examines how contemporary American television and associated digital media depict women's everyday lives as homemakers, career women, and mothers. Her focus on American popular culture from the 1990s through the present reveals two extremes: narratives about women who cannot keep house and narratives about women who only keep house. Nathanson looks specifically at the issue of time in this context and argues that the media constructs panics about domestic time scarcity while at the same time offering solutions for those very panics. Analyzing TV programs such as How Clean is Your House, Up All Night, and Supernanny, she finds that media's portrayals of women's time is crucial to understanding definitions of femininity, women's labor, and leisure in the postfeminist context.

Single Season Sitcoms of the 1980s is the logical sequel to an earlier work also by Bob Leszczak titled Single Season Sitcoms 1948-1979, A Complete Guide. The decade of the 80s is presently being viewed with much reverence, and television programs, especially the situation comedies from that era, are enjoying renewed interest. Because of the increase in the number of available channels as a result of the exploding cable television industry at that time in history, the number of failed programs was also on the rise. For every successful sitcom from this period, such as The Golden Girls, Family Ties and Newhart, there were dozens upon dozens of almost forgotten flops such as Take Five with George Segal, Annie McGuire with Mary Tyler Moore, One Big Family starring Danny Thomas, and Life with Lucy starring Lucille Ball. A big name star didn't always equate with long-running TV success. Many of the short-lived shows addressed in this volume were mere springboards to bigger and better things for future stars such as Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, George Clooney, Jim Carrey, Brian Cranston, and Sarah Jessica Parker. A player's short stay with a major league baseball team is referred to as ""a cup of coffee."" The programs written about in Single Season Sitcoms of the 1980s drank from the very same mug, and the behind-the-scenes stories from cast members, guest stars, writers, producers, directors and musicians affiliated with these short-lived shows are the cream and sugar. Turn back the hands of your Swatch Watch and relive those Single Season Sitcoms of the 1980s.

Robin Nelson's State of play up-dates and develops the arguments of his influential TV Drama In Transition (1997). It is equally distinctive in setting analusis of the aesethetics and compositional principles of texts within a broad conceptual framework (technologies, institutions, economics, cultural trends). Tracing "the great value shift from conduit to content" (Todreas, 1999), Nelson is relatively optimistic about the future quality of TV Drama in a global market-place. But, characteristically taking up questions of worth where others have avoided them, Nelson recognizes that certain types of "quality" are privileged for viewers able to pay, possibly at the expense of viewer preference worldwide for "local" resonances in television. The mix of arts and cultural studies methodologies makes for an unusual and insightful approach. -- .

TV Scenic Design is a comprehensive resource for aspiring and practicing set designers. Summarizing the principles and practices of scenic design, it details design approaches, structures, and staging methods. TV Scenic Design is a comprehensive resource for aspiring and practicing set designers. Summarizing the principles and practices of scenic design, it details design approaches, structures, and staging methods. The information contained in the book can be applied to a variety of design situations, from campus or network TV studios, to exhibitions, audio-visual presentations or window displays. Whatever the scale, space or budget, the methods described in TV Scenic Design will ensure professional results. Now expanded to cover 'virtual' set design, this new edition continues to be an invaluable aid to anyone involved in creating effective sets. Contents: The background of design * The basics of design organization * Scenic construction * Staging techniques * Staging practices * Shoestring staging * Scenic effect * Electronic reality * Scenic operation * The designer on location * Controlling the tone and color * Lighting and the designer * glossary * Index Gerald Millerson's books on television and video have been acknowledged as among the best ever published. His other titles for Focal Press are Video Production Handbook, The Technique of Television Production, The Technique of Lighting for Television and Film and, in the Media Manual series, Effective TV Production and Video Camera Techniques.

Winner of the National Communication Association's 2018 Diamond Anniversary Book Award With the exception of slave narratives, there are few stories of black international migration in U.S. news and popular culture. This book is interested in stratified immigrant experiences, diverse black experiences, and the intersection of black and immigrant identities. Citizenship as it is commonly understood today in the public sphere is a legal issue, yet scholars have done much to move beyond this popular view and situate citizenship in the context of economic, social, and political positioning. The book shows that citizenship in all of its forms is often rhetorically, representationally, and legally negated by blackness and considers the ways that blackness, and representations of blackness, impact one's ability to travel across national and social borders and become a citizen. This book is a story of citizenship and the ways that race, gender, and class shape national belonging, with Haiti, Cuba, and the United States as the primary sites of examination.

The CW's long-running series Supernatural follows the adventures of brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they pursue the "family business" of hunting supernatural beings. Blending monster-of-the-week storylines with the unfolding saga of the brothers' often troubled relationship, the show represents Gothic concerns of anxiety, the monstrous, family trauma and, of course, the supernatural. The lines between human and monster, good and evil, are blurred and individual identities and motivations resist easy categorization. This collection of new essays examines how the series both incorporates and complicates Gothic elements related to traditional tropes, storytelling, women and gender issues and monstrosity.

Superheroes have been an integral part of popular society for decades. Over time, superheroes have developed their own mythology. Though scholars and fans have recognized and commented on this myth, the structure of the mythology has gone largely unexplored until now. The lexicon at the heart of this book gives a structure that can be used to identify the mythology as it applies to characters, stories, and other forms of narrative. The lexicon is the first effort to codify the mythology and how it works. Included are specific and detailed examinations of the myth in several narratives, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Green Arrow, especially in the CW series Arrow; and Beowulf. It also draws on examples from characters as diverse as Batman, Wolverine, Invincible, and John Constantine. This book is a first step toward recognizing the structure of the superhero and helps explain why the myth matters so much in current popular society, not only in America, but worldwide.

For more than 30 years, Lifetime has aired a broad range of programming, including original movies, sitcoms, dramas and reality shows. As other networks dedicated to women have come and gone, Lifetime continues to thrive in an ever-expanding cable marketplace, exploring such sensitive topics as race, commercialism, eating disorders, rape and domestic violence. This collection of new essays is the first to focus on Lifetime and the programs that helped define the network's brand that appeals to both viewers and advertisers. Series like Project Runway, Girlfriend Intervention and Army Wives are explored in depth. The contributors discuss the network's large opus of original films, as well at its online presence.

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner's Mad Men, Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a "plastic" form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

This is the first full-length study of the screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin, whose work for film and television includes Z Cars, The Italian Job, Kelly's Heroes, The Sweeney, Reilly - Ace of Spies and Edge of Darkness. With a career spanning six decades, Troy Kennedy Martin has seen the rise and fall of the television dramatist, making his debut in the era of studio-based television drama in the late 1950s prior to the transition to filmed drama (for which he argued in a famous manifesto), as the television play was gradually replaced by popular series and serials, for which Kennedy Martin did some of his best work. Written in an easily accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in television drama, screenwriting, and the history of British television over the last fifty years. -- .

This comprehensive reference to TV cartoon shows covers some 75 years. In the decade or so since the first edition, the industry has grown and expanded to previously unimagined heights, thanks in great part to the upsurge of cable TV services catering to animation fans. In the ten-year period since the first edition, nearly 450 new cartoon series premiered in the U.S. Alphabetically arranged by title, the book discusses each cartoon show in detail, providing full production credits and offering commentary on such elements as development, characters, style, and the show's significance in the overall scheme of television animation.

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience's reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of 'Quality TV' impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Representing Youth with Disability on Television is a complex and multidimensional mainstream cultural discourse that examines specific stereotypes in fictional programming. The book draws attention to the group labeled as disabled, which is often marginalized, misrepresented, and misunderstood in the media, by analyzing the popular television programs Glee, Breaking Bad, and Parenthood. To obtain a more rigorous account of the way that youth (9-18 years of age) with disability are framed on television, this analysis examines the following issues: how research on popular culture is contextualized within social theory; the theoretical perspectives on representations of disability in popular culture; and the various contexts, genres, media, representations, and definitions of youth with disability in popular culture. The text also outlines the historical growth of disability, which is crucial for a discussion regarding the changing dimensions of popular culture. Critical hermeneutics, content analysis, and methodological bricolage are the melange of methodologies used to closely examine the dominant models of disability (social vs. medical) used in the portrayal of disabled youth on television today.

The first book of its kind to introduce the problems of location lighting for single camera operators and provide an insight into the technology and techniques required to solve those problems. The approach is of a basic and introductory nature, geared toward the student and trainee cameraman. Professionals needing a refresher course on the subject will also find this an invaluable reference packed with key information, theory and practical approaches to different lighting situations.

Many female figures in recent fiction, film and television embody the Artemis archetype, modeled on the Greco-Roman goddess of the hunt. These characters are often identified as heroines and recognized as powerful and progressive pop icons. Some fit the image of the tough resourceful female in a science fiction or fantasy setting, while others are more relatable, inhabiting a possible future, a recent past or a very real present. Examining both iconic and lesser-known works, this collection of new essays analyzes the independent and capable female figure as an ideal representation of women in popular culture.

Gothic television is the first full length study of the Gothic released on British and US television. An historical account, the book combines detailed archival research with analyses of key programmes, from Mystery and Imagination and Dark Shadows, to The Woman in White and Twin Peaks, and uncovers an aspect of television drama history which has, until now, remained critically unexplored. While some have seen television as too literal or homely a medium to successfully present Gothic fictions, Gothic television argues that the genre, in its many guises, is, and has always been, well-suited to television as a domestic medium, given the genre's obsessions with haunted houses and troubled families. This book will be of interest to lecturers and students across a number of disciplines including television studies, Gothic studies, and adaptation studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the Gothic, and in the history of television drama. -- .

This inside look at the production of 20th century television commercials begins with a review of advertising's beginnings in the late 19th century and describes its development through the 1960s and early 1970s. The author, a career ""Mad man,"" recounts his experiences on commercial productions - both live and film - in theaters and studios in New York City, on the White House Lawn, along Rome's Appian Way, in Lady Astor's dining room and on the Tryall Golf Course in Jamaica, among other places. The technical challenges and solutions involved in producing high-end commercials for America's major corporations are detailed. The broadcast community's single-minded targeting of advertising at specific audiences is highlighted.

During its 33-season run, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968-2001) left an indelible mark on millions of children and their caregivers. With television, Fred Rogers found the perfect medium for disseminating his prosocial messages to a mass audience of young people, helping them to better understand themselves and their world. Perhaps no series in the history of children's television has done more to develop the identity and ethics of the child. More than a decade after Rogers' death, he continues to attract an audience online. Yet despite the show's lasting impact it has been largely ignored by scholars. This collection of new essays focuses on Rogers' contribution to children's lives and media and to American culture. The contributors discuss his stance on the individual and the perception of self, his ideas about meaningful participation in a community and his use of television to accomplish his goals. At a time when the demands of a highly technological, media-dense world have diminished our capacity to listen carefully and to be present to others, Rogers' ideas still resonate.