Jackie Gleason once said, ""Television critics are men who report traffic accidents to eyewitnesses."" But aren't we all TV critics? It's a question that overlooks the importance of professional critics whose print and online columns reach large audiences. Their work helps viewers engage with programming and shapes the conversations that arise. This book covers more than five decades of American criticism, from the early days to the present. Whether praising or condemning programming trends, evaluating production and ratings, analyzing storylines or weighing in on policy decisions, a television critic's work is more than a consumer guide - it is part of a rich history that offers an insightful view of American culture.

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.

This book presents serious academic scholarship on ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer"". It differs from other works because it uses ""Buffy"" as a primary text and not as a secondary instrument to explore other concepts. In doing so, it demonstrates that popular culture studies should be approached with the same serious attention paid to classic philosophy and other long-established fields. Essays assemble the ""Buffy"" canon and explore how ""Buffy"" treats Shakespeare, comics, power, sisterhood, apocalyptic revisionism, folklore, feminism(s), redemption, patriarchy, identity and education.

Originally published in 1996, ethnic minorities in the UK made up over 5% of the population yet were hardly represented in the hundreds of hours of terrestrial broadcast television each week. The blatant racism of The Black and White Minstrel Show was over, but more subtle forms of racism were piped into our living rooms in an endless stream of white-dominated programming. 'Comedies' and soaps presented non-whites as a sort of joke humanity - stereotypical, simple and amusingly childish. Serious programmes swelled on the negative aspects of ethnicity: race as a problem, cultural clashes and language barriers. Above all - not white equals not normal. For many years critics of popular television argued that such imbalance was harmful. The lack of positive non-white TV role models for children to identify with was leading to growing alienation and disaffection. Ethnic minorities increasingly defined themselves in opposition to white institutions. They were turning towards separate channels - narrow-casting - provided to meet their own TV needs. Based on both extensive survey research and interviews with actual viewers, Not a Pretty Picture investigates the whole issue of TV and ethnic minority viewers at the time: their viewing choices, their criticisms, their feeling about the way they are portrayed. The conclusions are damning: for most of Britain's ethnic minority communities TV was a white medium, predominantly controlled by whites, portraying white culture and denying non-whites a voice. Not a Pretty Picture, however, provides a voice for these views and a valuable insight into the way ethnic minorities see TV. Today it can be read in its historical context, to see how far we have come, as well as what still needs to be done.

From its opening moments featuring the aftermath of a plane crash on a tropical island, the television series Lost (2004-2010) became one of the most intriguing and talked about programmes in the era of digital media. This contribution to the Constellations series is the first full-length account of Lost and explores in detail what made this series both a popular hit with critics and the public (as 'quality' or 'must-see' TV), and also a series accruing intense fan scrutiny (as cult telefantasy). Lost is discussed in terms of its generic hybridity, and in particular how it incorporates and reframes familiar tropes of science fiction in the context of a Survivor reality TV-style plot on the one hand and as a 'mystery box' of extremely complex hermeneutic codes and hyperdiegesis on the other. Further, it explores the ways in which Lost uses science fictional narrative approaches to the intersections between themes of gender, identity, community, science, faith and philosophic thought. The book also discusses the series' relationship with its narrative extensions in online games, merchandise, secondary texts and paratexts. Constellations: Lost is thus an important retrospective examination of a significant television series that was also a pioneering transmedia text.

This collection of papers examines the evolving relationship between the motion picture industry and television from the 1940s onwards. The institutional and technological histories of the film and TV industries are looked at, concluding that Hollywood and television had a symbiotic relationship from the start. Aspects covered include the movement of audiences, the rise of the independent producer, the introduction of colour and the emergence of network structure, cable TV and video recorders. Originally published in 1990.

Documentaries have recently become a favourite format for Chinese state-directed media to present an officially sanctioned view of history. Indeed, this is not confined to Chinese national history. In stark contrast to the earlier self-centred preoccupation with Chinese history, there has been an upsurge in interest in foreign history, with a view to illuminating China's role not only in world history, but also on the global stage today, and in the future. This book examines three recent Chinese documentary television series which present the officially sanctioned view of the rise of the modern West, the reasons for the end of the Soviet Union, and the legitimisation of the present-day Chinese government via a specific reading of modern Chinese history to argue for a 'Chinese rise' in the future. With a focus on these documentaries, Gotelind Muller discusses how history is presented on screen, and explores the function of visual history for memory culture and wider society. Further, this book reveals how the presentation of Chinese and foreign history in a global framework impacts on the officially transmitted views on Self and Other, and thus provides a keen insight into how the Chinese themselves regard their 'global rise'. Documentary, World History, and National Power in the PRC will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a number of fields, including Chinese studies, East Asian studies, media studies, television studies, history and memory studies.

Branded Women in U.S. Television examines how The Real Housewives of New York City, Martha Stewart, and other female entrepreneurs create branded televised versions of the iconic U.S. housewife. Using their television presence to establish and promote their own product lines, including jewelry, cookware, clothing, and skincare, they become the primary physical representations of these brands. While their businesses are serious and seriously lucrative, especially reality television enables a certain representational flexibility that allows participants to create campy and sometimes tongue-in-cheek personas. Peter Bjelskou explores their innovative branding strategies, specifically the complex relationships between their entrepreneurial endeavors and their physical bodies, attires, tastes, and personal histories. Generally these branded women speak volumes about their contemporaneous political environments, and this book illustrates how they, and many other women in U.S. television history, are indicative of larger societal trends and structures.

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.

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set's status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with 'television' without ever turning a television set on. Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of 'the television audience'? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry's development of emerging new media technologies, and what 'television' now means for its audiences.

From the Foreword by Bob Schieffer:"This is a real 'how to' book by two people who really know how. But it is more than just a fine manual on broadcast journalism, journalists and non-journalists alike will find it good read, a treasure chest of anecdotes, stories and a tall tale or two from the most exciting profession of all-reporting the news." Reardon's On Camera: How to Report, Anchor & Interview teaches you how to become professional and effective on camera. You'll learn how to appear and feel at ease whether doing an interview, reporting in the field, reading from a prompter, or giving a video presentation. It'll give you the nuts and bolts of how to do the job at the network level or as a backpack journalist, so you feel confident that when you're standing in front of the camera you will know what you're doing. Whether new to television or experienced in front of a camera, you will improve on your current skills through career-focused tips and tried-and-true principles-all oriented to skills development-in this book.

In this original study, Thompson explores the complicated relationships between Americans and television during the 1950s, as seen and effected through popular humor. Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture documents how Americans grew accustomed to understanding politics, current events, and popular culture through comedy that is simultaneously critical, commercial, and funny. Along with the rapid growth of television in the 1950s, an explosion of satire and parody took place across a wide field of American culture-in magazines, comic books, film, comedy albums, and on television itself. Taken together, these case studies don't just analyze and theorize the production and consumption of parody and television, but force us to revisit and revise our notions of postwar "consensus" culture as well.

First Published in 1989, this work is based around a monthly TV column which Raymond Williams wrote for The Listener between 1968 and 1972. Those were the years of the Prague Spring, of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, of fighting in Cambodia and Northern Ireland, of hope for McGovern in the United States and attacks on the Wilson Labour Government in Britain. In The Listener articles Williams comments on all of these events, providing a rare glimpse not only into the events of his daily life but also into the continuing development of a personal sociology of culture. The articles also discuss such television forms as detective series, science programmes and sports, travelogue, education, gardening, and children's programming. The book also includes Williams' key lecture "Drama in a Dramatised Society", which sets a framework for his analysis; a London Review of Books piece on the Falklands/Malvinas adventure as a "tele-war"; and an interview with Williams on television and teaching. Cited by The Guardian as "The foremost political thinker of his generation", Williams' writing amounts to a primer on ways of watching television and of critiquing its profound social and political impact.

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.

Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audience provides previously absent analyses of Korean TV dramas' transnational influences, peculiar production features, distribution, and consumption to enrich the contextual understanding of Korean TV's transcultural mobility. Even as academic discussions about the Korean Wave have heated up, Korean television studies from transnational viewpoints often lack in-depth analysis and overlook the recently extended flow of Korean television beyond Asia. This book illustrates the ecology of Korean television along with the Korean Wave for the past two decades in order to showcase Korean TV dramas' international mobility and its constant expansion with the different Western television and their audiences. Korean TV dramas' mobility in crossing borders has been seen in both transnational and transcultural flows, and the book opens up the potential to observe the constant flow of Korean television content in new places, peoples, manners, and platforms around the world. Scholars of media studies, communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this book especially useful.

Locating Television: Zones of Consumption takes an important next step for television studies: it acknowledges the growing diversity of the international experience of television today in order to address the question of 'what is television now?' The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways: by situating the consumption of television within the full range of structures, patterns and practices of everyday life; and by retrieving the importance of location as fundamental to these structures, patterns and practices - and, consequently, to the experience of television. This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television - in particular, the use of the notion of 'zones of consumption' as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts. Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba, and the Chinese language markets in Asia - -Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo-American television studies are highlighted. Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field.

Students will find this book interesting and relevant as it offers the most up-to-date accounts of the Korean Wave examples and interdisciplinary analyses, including the 2019 film Parasite, the Korean boy band BTS and recent TV dramas, such as Kingdom (2019, 2020), Crash Landing on You (2020) and Mr. Sunshine (2018). With it's coverage of film, TV and popular music, this collection will have interdisciplinary appeal and can be used on courses in Korean and Asian studies as well as film, media, and cultural industries. Includes scholars from a range of disciplines and a series of case studies from Asia, the USA, Europe and the Middle East.

The music for science fiction television programs, like music for science fiction films, is often highly distinctive, introducing cutting-edge electronic music and soundscapes. There is a highly particular role for sound and music in science fiction, because it regularly has to expand the vistas and imagination of the shows and plays a crucial role in setting up the time and place. Notable for its adoption of electronic instruments and integration of music and effects, science fiction programs explore sonic capabilities offered through the evolution of sound technology and design, which has allowed for the precise control and creation of unique and otherworldly sounds. This collection of essays analyzes the style and context of music and sound design in Science Fiction television. It provides a wide range of in-depth analyses of seminal live-action series such as Doctor Who, The Twilight Zone, and Lost, as well as animated series, such as The Jetsons. With thirteen essays from prominent contributors in the field of music and screen media, this anthology will appeal to students of Music and Media, as well as fans of science fiction television.

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 History on Television will be essential reading for all those interested in the complex processes involved in the representation of history on television.

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 History on Television will be essential reading for all those interested in the complex processes involved in the representation of history on television.

The twentieth anniversary edition of Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers brings this now-canonical text to a new generation of students interested in the intersections of fandom, participatory culture, popular consumption and media theory. Supplementing the original, classic text is an interview between Henry Jenkins and Suzanne Scott in which Jenkins reflects upon changes in the field since the original release of Textual Poachers. A study guide by Louisa Stein helps provides instructors with suggestions for the way Textual Poachers can be used in the contemporary classroom, and study questions encourage students to consider fan cultures in relation to consumer capitalism, genre, gender, sexuality, and more.

Since the first series of Pop Idol aired in the UK just over a decade ago, Idols television shows have been broadcast in more than forty countries all over the world. In all those countries the global Idols format has been adapted to local cultures and production contexts, resulting in a plethora of different versions, ranging from the Dutch Idols to the Pan-Arab Super Star and from Nigerian Idol to the international blockbuster American Idol. Despite its worldwide success and widespread journalistic coverage, the Idols phenomenon has received only limited academic attention. Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity and Performance in a Global Television Format brings together original studies from scholars in different parts of the world to identify and evaluate the productive dimensions of Idols. As one of the world's most successful television formats, Idols offers a unique case for the study of cultural globalization. Chapters discuss how Idols shows address particular national or regional identity politics and how Idols is consumed by audiences in different territories. This book illustrates that even though the same television format is used in countries all over the globe, practices of adaptation can still result in the creation of unique local cultural products.

An actor written out of a television series leaves a void on the screen which the audience anxiously waits to see filled. From The A-Team to Zorro, this authoritative guide covers 50 years of cast changes and character replacements, including Jeff to Timmy on Lassie, Bub to Uncle Charley on My Three Sons, and the two "Darrens" on Bewitched. Photos.

The early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new style of television drama in Britain that adopts the professional practices and production values of high-end American television while remaining emphatically 'British' in content and outlook. This book analyses eight of these dramas - Spooks, Foyle's War, Hustle, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Downton Abbey, Sherlock and Broadchurch - which have all proved popular with audiences and in their different ways represent the thematic and formal paradigms of post-millennial drama. James Chapman locates new British drama in its institutional and economic contexts, considers their critical and popular reception, and analyses their social politics in relation to their representations of class, gender and nationhood. He demonstrates how contemporary drama has mobilised both new and residual elements in re-configuring genres such as the spy series, cop show and costume drama for the cultural tastes of modern audiences. And it concludes that television drama has played an integral role in both the economic and the cultural export of 'Britishness'.