Combining thematic analysis and stimulating close readings, 'The Collar' is a wide-ranging study of the many ways - heroic or comic, shrewd or dastardly - in which Christian clergy have been represented in literature, from George Herbert and Laurence Sterne, via Anthony Trollope, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, and Graham Greene, to Susan Howatch and Robertson Davies, and in film and television, such as 'Pale Rider', 'The Thorn Birds', 'The Vicar of Dibley', and 'Father Ted'. Since all Christians are expected to be involved in ministry of some type, the assumptions of secular culture about ministers affect more than just clergy. Ranging across several nations (particularly Britain, the U.S., and Canada), denominations, and centuries, 'The Collar' encourages creative and faithful responses to the challenges of Christian leadership and develops awareness of the times when leadership expectations become too extreme.Using the framework of different media to make inquiries about pastoral passion, frustration, and fallibility, Sue Sorensen's well-informed, sprightly, and perceptive book will be helpful to anyone who enjoys evocative literature and film as well as to clergy and those interested in practical theology.

The past decade and a half has seen an impressive resurgence of popular interest in the Middle Ages. In particular, television presents us with a wide and diverse array of ""medieval"" offerings. Yet, there exists very little scholarship on the image of the Middle Ages in television. Unlike film, whose use of the medieval has been examined repeatedly by scholars, television medievalism has garnered little critical attention. This collection begins to fill this gap by focusing on the depiction and utilization of the Middle Ages in popular culture and by questioning the role of television in shaping contemporary ideas about past and present. Each of the ten essays that make up the volume celebrates the currency and power of television medievalism, emphasizing the need for anyone interested in contemporary medievalism to pay attention to its manifestations on the small screen. Despite this shared common goal, each contributor addresses the topic from a unique perspective, and the collection covers a wide range of issues such as genre, gender, sexuality--amongst others--in Anglophone and European programs. The collection's ten chapters thus complement each other, collaborating and engaging with one another to bring to light the very special nature of television medievalism.

Alan Schroeder's big-picture history recounts the phenomenon of American televised presidential debates and its evolution over the past half century. From pundits to political operatives, from debate moderators to the viewing public, Presidential Debates reveals how the various stakeholders make and experience this powerful event. For this third edition, Schroeder analyzes the presidential debates of 2008 and 2012 and the crucial role that social media and contemporary news outlets had in shaping their design and reception. He also expands his coverage of previous campaigns, including the landmark meetings in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Schroeder details an insider's view of the key phases of the debate: anticipation, in which the campaigns negotiate rules, formulate strategy, and steer press coverage; execution, in which the candidates, moderators, panelists, and television professionals create and project the event; and reaction, in which the commentators, spin doctors, and viewers evaluate the performance and move story lines in new directions. New chapters focus on real-time debate responses and the extent to which postdebate news coverage influences voters' decision making and candidates' behavior.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Impasse and Innovation in Psychoanalysis offers a rare perspective on the technical difficulties and creative responses to them that typify clinical psychoanalysis. The four seminars at the heart of this volume are not case reports in the usual sense. Rather, each seminar revolves around the challenges of translating an understanding of difficult process issues into an effective therapeutic response. What emerges in each case is a vivid picture of an analyst's subjective experience in conceptualizing and managing a particularly demanding treatment, supplemented by data about the patient's history and free associations and enlivened by seminar leader John Gedo's challenging questions and clinical commentary. Each seminar is framed by Mark Gehrie's introduction and commentary, the latter addressing the interplay of theory and technique in the preceding case. Gehrie's commentary is then followed by Gedo's notes, which are keyed to specific points in the seminar transcript. Gedo not only clarifies issues left in doubt by the original discussion but offers his own second thoughts about the clinical material and its technical handling. The uniquely dialogic format of this volume brings different voices to bear on issues at the forefront of the evolution of clinical psychoanalysis. Edifying reading for practicing analysts and analytic therapists, Impasse and Innovation in Psychoanalysis is a wonderful teaching tool, introducing candidates, residents, and students to the demands of coping with stressful transferences and enactments and sparkling, throughout, with Gedo's wit and wisdom.

Netflix's Speculative Fictions: Financializing Platform Television argues that Netflix's scaled expansion has hinged upon its ability not only to create, but more importantly to communicate, new forms and flows of potential value in platform capitalism, wherein capital is mobilized not only from direct revenue streams but also the new value assigned to inputs and investments of data, debt, attention, behavior, taste, time, sociality, and speculation. To interpret and critique these new communications and projections of value, Colin Jon Mark Crawford performs a discursive analysis of the platform television industry leader Netflix and its 'investor lore': the multi-sited narrative of value found in the company's investor relations materials and corporate communications, such as letters to shareholders, financial earnings reports, executive interviews, press releases, and blog posts. Netflix best represents the increasingly ubiquitous nexus of culture, tech, and finance industries that is platform television. To better understand the emergent financial logics of this relatively new media industry, we must first understand the speculative narratives and discourses of value which organize it. Scholars of media studies, television studies, technology studies, and economics will find this book particularly useful.

While some have argued that we live in a 'postfeminist' era that renders feminism irrelevant to people's contemporary lives this book takes 'feminism', the source of eternal debate, contestation and ambivalence, and situates the term within the popular, cultural practices of everyday life. It explores the intimate connections between the politics of feminism and the representational practices of contemporary popular culture, examining how feminism is 'made sensible' through visual imagery and popular culture representations. It investigates how popular culture is produced, represented and consumed to reproduce the conditions in which feminism is valued or dismissed, and asks whether antifeminism exists in commodity form and is commercially viable. Written in an accessible style and analysing a broad range of popular culture artefacts (including commercial advertising, printed and digital news-related journalism and commentary, music, film, television programming, websites and social media), this book will be of use to students, researchers and practitioners of International Relations, International Political Economy and gender, cultural and media studies.

Scholars and teachers from all disciplines will find practical examples of how to implement HBO's The Wire in any course using this, the first book length project dedicated to teaching The Wire in the college classroom. Each chapter details the pedagogical goals behind the choice to teach the show, how the show was employed in class, and student response to it. Some chapters address using a whole season; others focus on how to teach a specific episode; all of them detail how they utilized the show to engage students in critical and creative intellectual inquiry. As a whole, the book provides disciplinary and theoretical frameworks for using The Wire within the disciplines of Media, Writing and Narrative, Ethics and Rhetoric, Education and Literacy. Fans of The Wire--inside and outside of higher education--will be interested in how it is being leveraged in classrooms across the country and how these discussions are shaping cultural criticism.

Binge and Bingeability: The Antecedents and Consequences of Binge Watching Behavior examines how the television industry has transformed over time to create the circumstances in which binge watching as a mass behavior can emerge, and what role audiences have played in the rising prevalence of this behavior. Arienne Ferchaud, recognizing that this behavior did not spring, fully formed, from streaming services, ties cultural approaches to binge watching with media psychology-oriented theories, including the concept of "bingeability"-the likelihood that a specific sow will be binge watched-alongside the psychological impacts binge watching may have on viewers over time. Scholars of media studies, television studies, sociology, cultural studies, and psychology will find this book particularly useful.

Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator turned rebel leader, endures as a near-mythic hero who fought for the oppressed against a Roman oligarchy built on the backs of slave labour. The image of Spartacus as a noble if doomed avenger is familiar and his story has been retold through history as a cautionary tale about social injustice. The series Spartacus takes a different view, with a graphically violent depiction of the man and his times and a focus on the archetype of the gladiator--the physically powerful, courageous and righteous man. This collection of new essays studies the series as an exploration of masculinity. In the world of Spartacus, men jockey for social position, question the nature of their lives, examine their relationships with women and with each other, and their roles in society and the universe. As an adaptation, the series also offers a compelling study in the composite nature of historical narrative in television and film, where key facts from original sources are seamlessly interwoven with period embellishments, presenting audiences with authentic history beside fiction that may as well be.

One of Britain's foremost TV practitioners, Andrew Davies is the creator of programmes such as 'A Very Peculiar Practice', 'To Serve Them All My Days', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Othello' and 'The Way We Live Now'. Although best known for his adaptations of the work of writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, he has written numerous original drama series, single plays, films, stage plays and books. This volume offers a critical appraisal of Davies's work, and assesses his contribution to British television. Cardwell also explores the conventional notions of authorship and auteurism which are challenged by Davies's work. Can we identify Davies as the author of the varied texts attributed to him? If so, does an awareness of his authorial role aid our interpretation and evaluation of those texts? How does the phenomenon of adaptation affect the issue of authorship? How important is 'the author' to television? This book will appeal to both an academic readership, and to the many people who have taken pleasure in Davies's work. -- .

This book employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique examination of the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but the material conditions under which those meanings are formulated. Using ethnographic and interview data, Anita Lam considers how textual representations of crime are assembled by various people (including writers, directors, technical consultants, and network executives), technologies (screenwriting software and whiteboards), and texts (newspaper articles and rival crime dramas). The emerging analysis does not project but instead concretely examines what and how television writers and producers know about crime, law and policing. An adequate understanding of the representation of crime, it is maintained, cannot be limited to a content analysis that treats the representation as a final product. Rather, a television representation of crime must be seen as the result of a particular assemblage of logics, people, creative ideas, commercial interests, legal requirements, and broadcasting networks. A fascinating investigation into the relationship between television production, crime, and the law, this book is an accessible and well-researched resource for students and scholars of Law, Media, and Criminology.

ESPN has grown from a start-up cable network in a small Connecticut town to a $50 billion global enterprise. For the past 35 years, ESPN - along with its sister networks - has been the preeminent source for sports for millions around the globe. Its 24-hour coverage of sports news and programming has cultivated generations of sports consumers, utilizing multiple ESPN platforms for news and entertainment. The pervasiveness of the company's branded content has influenced how sports fans think and feel about the people who play and control these games. In The ESPN Effect, leading sports media scholars examine ESPN and its impact on culture, sports journalism, audience, and the business of sports media. The final part of the book considers the future of ESPN, beginning with an interview with Chris LaPlaca, ESPN senior vice president. As the first academic text dedicated to the self-proclaimed "worldwide leader in sports", this book contributes to the growth of sports media research and provides a starting point for scholars examining the present and future impact of ESPN.

This book explores the paradox of mediated authenticity - the idea that our understanding of society is based on mediated representations of reality. Enli argues that mediated authenticity is established through negotiations between producers and audiences in what is coined the 'authenticity contract'. Sometimes the contract is broken, leading to authenticity scandals and the need to renegotiate this contract. These moments of truth, some of which are analysed in this book, are important moments in media history. Through case studies, this book examines mediated authenticity in broadcast and online media, from the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, quiz show scandals, to manufactured reality-TV shows, blog hoaxes and fake social media, and the construction of Obama as an authentic politician. The book demonstrates that authenticity has become an increasingly important factor in the media, and that solving 'authenticity puzzles' - separating the fake from the real - has become an inherent practice of media use.

At last, a collection in one volume informing the citizenry about a phenomenon that has existed for nearly a quarter century: community television represents our single source for media access in the United States. With more than 2,000 community groups providing some 15,000 hours of original programming each week--more than the annual output of ABC, CBS, and NBC combined--Community Television compares and contrasts broadcasting and grassroots cablecasting in the form of public, educational, and government (PEG) access. Fuller describes community television in terms of its history, its technical characteristics, and its legal, economic, political, and social concerns, highlighting the work of more than 150 related organizations and local television efforts from 100 cities and towns. She analyzes how competing exigencies and emerging communication technologies might threaten access in the future. Students, scholars, and professionals in television, communications, and public policy will find this reference a definitive one.

Created around the world and available only on the Web, internet ""television"" series are independently produced, mostly low budget shows that often feature talented but unknown performers. Typically financed through crowd-funding, they are filmed with borrowed equipment and volunteer casts and crews, and viewers find them through word of mouth or by chance. The third of five volumes on Internet TV series, this book covers 335 alphabetically arranged gay and lesbian programs, giving casts, credits, story lines, episode descriptions, websites, dates and commentary. A complete index lists program titles and headings for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and drag queen shows.

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity and quantity of 'quality' television programs, many of which featuring complicated versions of masculinity that are informed not only by the women's movement of the sixties and seventies, but also by several decades of backlash and debate about the effects of women's equality on men, masculinity, and the relationship between men and women. Drawing upon studies of contemporary television programs, including popular series viewed internationally such as Mad Men, The League, Hung, Breaking Bad, Louie, and Girls, this book explores the ways in which popular cultural texts address widely circulating discourses of the ostensible 'crisis of masculinity' in contemporary culture. A rich study of masculinity and its representation in contemporary television, Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, popular culture, television studies and cultural sociology with interests in gender, masculinities, and sexuality.

Television opera - that is, opera commissioned for television - was one of the earliest attempts by television to bridge the distinction between high culture and popular culture: between 1951 and 2002, in Britain and the United States, over fifty operas were commissioned for television. This book discusses three case studies, the first a live broadcast, the second a video recording, and the third a filmed opera made for television: Gian Carlo Menotti's 'Amahl and the Night Visitors' (NBC, 1951; Benjamin Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' (BBC, 1971), taking into account Britten's earlier television experiences with 'The Turn of the Screw' (Associated Rediffusion, 1959) and 'Billy Budd' (NBC, 1952 and BBC 1966); and Gerald Barry's 'The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit' (1995), part of Channel 4's decision in 1989 to embark upon a series of six hour-long television operas. In each case, the composer's response to the demands of television, and his place within the production's hierarchy, are examined; and the effect of the formats and techniques peculiar to television on the process of composing are discussed. JENNIFER BARNES is Assistant Principal and Dean of Studies at Trinity College of Music, London.From its beginnings, television has relied on music to signal its message to the broadest market, and opera was a significant part of that plan. But whereas in opera the role of the composer is paramount and his vision provides the driving force, in opera commissioned for television there are other priorities, both practical and artistic. Over the decades, conflict of expectations, methods and authority have influenced the production of many television operas. To chart these changes, this work examinesthree, commissioned at twenty-year intervals - Menotti's 'Amahl and the Night Visitors', Britten's 'Owen Wingrave' and Barry's 'Triumph of Beauty and Deceit.Over fifty operas have been commissioned for television since the early 1950s. Examining changes in television techniques, Jennifer Barnes considers their impact on the role of the composer and questions whether television, in its rapid evolution, has abandoned early indigenous production methods, and with that its secrets of writing and producing opera for television.

Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini, born Lombardy, 1940) is an Italian popular music icon who throughout her sixty-year-long career has come to represent a range of diverse meanings. She is one of the best-loved popular music stars in Italy and abroad, with a large fan base across Europe, Asia, and South America. Her career began in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite having retired from public appearances at the end of the 1970s, Mina remains popular and successful today, and continues to release new albums that consistently debut in the number one spot of the Italian charts. As an Italian popular music star, she is exemplary of the way in which stardom is constructed by different media and has come to represent different local and global identities, values, ideologies, and ways of behaving. This is because whilst Mina is first and foremost a popular music star, she has also been a film star and a television personality during different phases of her career. She has advertised successful Italian brands on television, and she has been a magazine writer and agony aunt. Her star persona is the product of her work in many different areas, as well as of the promotional materials and commentaries that are produced in response to her work. This book explores these different 'mediums' that Mina has been involved in and which have shaped her career and significance. It traces the process by which she has come to embody a diverse range of meanings that reveal something of the values and ideals at work within contemporary Italian society. Rachel Haworth is a researcher of Italian popular music and culture of the twentieth century, and Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull, UK. The primary market for this book is students and academics in the following subject areas: Italian Studies; Popular Music Studies; Stardom and Celebrity Studies; Media Studies; Cultural History. Also scholars and researchers working on music divas. The book is suitable for use on courses and modules at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, which deal with Italian cultural studies, Italy's post-war history, and the role of women in Italy, as well as the wider study of popular music and the construction of stardom and celebrity. The secondary audience for this book will be fans of Mina around the world, accessibly written, this will appeal to fans in Italy who are able to read in English.

Russia, one of the most ethno-culturally diverse countries in the world, provides a rich case study on how globalisation 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 centralised 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 ethnonationalism 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.

Test your expertise on Friends -- from the characters and food, to Central Perk, quotable lines and the funniest, most awkward situations -- with a one-of-a-kind trivia collection based on the classic episode "The One with the Embryos." First, brush up on your knowledge with the Friends A to Z Guide, a book packed with encyclopedic entries on the show's characters, inanimate objects, places, and situations, featuring full-colour photography throughout. The book is 3x5", 88 pages, and paperback.Next, gather your own favourite friends for a lightning round of trivia with a set of cards featuring hundreds of questions to test your skills. The set is based on the game created by Ross in the episode "The One with the Embryos."Keep it all together in the full-colour printed magnetic closure box.

First published in 1992, Images of Disability on Television examines the frequency and nature of disability on British and American television and how it is perceived and presented by programme makers. Attitudes held by those closest to the issues - disabled people, their carers, and television producers and writers - are presented as the result of interviews and discussions. There is an increasingly strong sentiment that television has got it wrong as far as disability is concerned and does not play its proper role in allowing the non-disabled to understand fully the world of disabled people. This book provides information to promote greater understanding of the needs of the disabled people in television portrayal and opens up possibilities for a change in attitudes. It will be valuable reading for students, researchers and lecturers in the social sciences, communication studies, and media studies.

This book explores the collaborative sitcoms of two of British television's most well-known comedy writers. Written over a period of twenty-five years, the four series 'Dad's Army', 'It Ain't Half Hot, Mum', 'Hi-de-Hi!' and 'You Rang M'Lord?' have endured as much-loved and often-repeated classics. The book explores the themes of Perry and Croft's writing in terms of their own biography, and as articulations of British cultural and televisual history. Focusing on issues central to the concept of identity in British culture, class, gender, sexuality and race and analysing individual episodes and scenes in the four series, 'Jimmy Perry and David Croft' evaluates the contributions made by these two writers to the genre of situation comedy, and locates the programmes in the immediate contexts of their production. Including new interview material from David Croft, this book will be invaluable to students and lecturers of television studies and cultural studies. -- .

This is the first in-depth study of the science fiction television devised and written by Terry Nation. Terry Nation was the inventor of the Daleks and wrote other serials for 'Doctor Who'; he also wrote the BBC's 1970s post-apocalyptic drama 'Survivors' and created the space adventure series 'Blake's 7'. Previously television science fiction in Britain has received little critical attention. This book fills that gap and places Nation's work in the context of its production. Using Terry Nation's science fiction work as a case study, the boundaries around the authorship and authority of the television writer are explored in detail. The authors make use of BBC's archival research and specially conducted interviews with television producers and other production staff, to discuss how the programmes that Terry Nation created and wrote were commissioned, produced and brought to the screen. The book makes an important contribution to the study of British television history and will be of interest to enthusiasts of Terry Nation's landmark drama series as well as students of Television Studies. -- .

Curly Watts is a TV icon - for twenty years appearing on millions of TV screens around the country in Coronation Street. Kevin Kennedy is one of the UK's most successful soap actors, although behind the scenes and high-profile appearances, he faced a painful personal battle. Kevin shares his experiences of alcoholism, rehab and IVF as well stories from the set and stars he worked with during some of the brightest, and darkest moments of his life, through to his music career and current roles. This brutally honest autobiography provides a rare glimpse into life behind the scenes, the power of addiction, and his battle with recovery.