One of the most acclaimed and popular television series of all time, Breaking Bad left an indelible imprint on the imaginations of viewers around the world. Walter White's transformation from high school chemistry teacher to meth kingpin has inspired thousands of artists to creatively reinterpret the show's stark, stylish visuals and unforgettable characters. 99.1% Pure: The Breaking Bad Artbook brings together an electrifying collection of art from around the globe, personally curated by show creator Vince Gilligan and the Breaking Bad team. Featuring a dazzling array of styles, this one of-a-kind book is the ultimate tribute to the series and its seismic impact on popular culture.

The first book in English on Chinese-language media in Australia, Digital Transnationalism explores the challenges, opportunities and development of this sector against the backdrop of China's rise, its soft power agenda, and renewed hostility between China and the global West. Situated in the Australian context, this study nevertheless is essential to understand the complex and evolving nature of Chinese-language digital media, and the role they play in fostering digital transnationalism among first-generation Chinese migrants across the globe.

After a 35 year-long career on worldwide TV screens, Lieutenant Columbo has become one of the most famous fictional detectives. Lilian Mathieu shows that the Columbo series owes its success to its implicit but formidable political dimension, as each episode is structured as a class struggle between a rich, famous, cultured or powerful criminal and an apparently humble and blunderer police officer dressed in a crumpled raincoat and driving an antique car. Highlighting the contentious context that gave birth to the series in 1968, he shows that the sociology of culture offers intellectual tools to understand how a TV detective story can be appreciated as a joyful class revenge.

In the modern world of networked digital media, authors must navigate many challenges. Most pressingly, the illegal downloading and streaming of copyright material on the internet deprives authors of royalties, and in some cases it has discouraged creativity or terminated careers. Exploring technology's impact on the status and idea of authorship in today's world, The Near-Death of the Author reveals the many obstacles facing contemporary authors. John Potts details how the online culture of remix and creative reuse operates in a post-authorship mode, with little regard for individual authorship. The book explores how developments in algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) have yielded novels, newspaper articles, musical works, films, and paintings without the need of human authors or artists. It also examines how these AI achievements have provoked questions regarding the authorship of new works, such as Does the author need to be human? And, more alarmingly, Is there even a need for human authors? Providing suggestions on how contemporary authors can endure in the world of data, the book ultimately concludes that network culture has provoked the near-death, but not the death, of the author.

Our century has seen the proliferation of reality shows devoted to ghost hunts, documentaries on hauntings, and horror films presented as found footage. The horror genre is no longer exclusive to fiction and its narratives actively engage us in web forums, experiential viewing, videogames, and creepypasta. These participative modes of relating to the occult, alongside the impulse to seek proof of either its existence or fabrication, have transformed the production and consumption of horror stories. The Ghost in the Image offers a new take on the place that supernatural phenomena occupy in everyday life, arguing that the relationship between the horror genre and reality is more intimate than we like to think. Through a revisionist and transmedial approach to horror this book investigates our expectations about the ability of photography and film to work as evidence. A historical examination of technology's role in at once showing and forging truths invites questions about our investment in its powers. Behind our obsession with documenting everyday life lies the hope that our cameras will reveal something extraordinary. The obsessive search for ghosts in the image, however, shows that the desire to find them is matched by the pleasure of calling a hoax.

Explores the ways television documents, satirizes, and critiques the political era of the Trump presidency. In American Television during a Television Presidency, Karen McNally and contributors critically examine the various ways in which television became transfixed by the Trump presidency and the broader political, social, and cultural climate. This book is the first to fully address the relationship between TV and a presidency consistently conducted with television in mind. The sixteen chapters cover everything from the political theater of televised impeachment hearings to the potent narratives of fictional drama and the stinging critiques of comedy, as they consider the wide-ranging ways in which television engages with the shifting political culture that emerged during this period. Approaching television both historically and in the contemporary moment, the contributors-an international group of scholars from a variety of academic disciplines-illuminate the indelible links that exist between television, American politics, and the nation's broader culture. As it interrogates a presidency played out through the lens of the TV camera and reviews a medium immersing itself in a compelling and inescapable subject, American Television during a Television Presidency sets out to explore what defines the television of the Trump era as a distinctive time in TV history. From inequalities to resistance, and from fandom to historical memory, this book opens up new territory in which to critically analyze television's complex relationship with Donald Trump, his presidency, and the political culture of this unsettled and simultaneously groundbreaking era. Undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of film and television studies, comedy studies, and cultural studies will value this strong collection.

This collection examines law and justice on television in different countries around the world. It provides a benchmark for further study of the nature and extent of television coverage of justice in fictional, reality and documentary forms. It does this by drawing on empirical work from a range of scholars in different jurisdictions. Each chapter looks at the raw data of how much "justice" material viewers were able to access in the multi-channel world of 2014 looking at three phases: apprehension (police), adjudication (lawyers), and disposition (prison/punishment). All of the authors indicate how television developed in their countries. Some have extensive public service channels mixed with private media channels. Financing ranges from advertising to programme sponsorship to licensing arrangements. A few countries have mixtures of these. Each author also examines how "TV justice" has developed in their own particular jurisdiction. Readers will find interesting variations and thought-provoking similarities. There are a lot of television shows focussed on legal themes that are imported around the world. The authors analyse these as well. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in law, popular culture, TV, or justice and provides an important addition to the literature due to its grounding in empirical data.

A fascinating look into what happens when comedy becomes political and politics becomes comedy Satirical TV has become mandatory viewing for citizens wishing to make sense of the bizarre contemporary state of political life. Shifts in industry economics and audience tastes have re-made television comedy, once considered a wasteland of escapist humor, into what is arguably the most popular source of political critique. From fake news and pundit shows to animated sitcoms and mash-up videos, satire has become an important avenue for processing politics in informative and entertaining ways, and satire TV is now its own thriving, viable television genre. Satire TV examines what happens when comedy becomes political, and politics become funny. A series of original essays focus on a range of programs, from The Daily Show to South Park, Da Ali G Show to The Colbert Report, The Boondocks to Saturday Night Live, Lil' Bush to Chappelle's Show, along with Internet D.I.Y. satire and essays on British and Canadian satire. They all offer insights into what today's class of satire tells us about the current state of politics, of television, of citizenship, all the while suggesting what satire adds to the political realm that news and documentaries cannot.

The election of President Barack Obama signaled for many the realization of a post-racial America, a nation in which racism was no longer a defining social, cultural, and political issue. While many Americans espouse a "colorblind" racial ideology and publicly endorse the broad goals of integration and equal treatment without regard to race, in actuality this attitude serves to reify and legitimize racism and protects racial privileges by denying and minimizing the effects of systematic and institutionalized racism.

In The Colorblind Screen, the contributors examine television's role as the major discursive medium in the articulation and contestation of racialized identities in the United States. While the dominant mode of televisual racialization has shifted to a "colorblind" ideology that foregrounds racial differences in order to celebrate multicultural assimilation, the volume investigates how this practice denies the significant social, economic, and political realities and inequalities that continue to define race relations today. Focusing on such iconic figures as President Obama, LeBron James, and Oprah Winfrey, many chapters examine the ways in which race is read by television audiences and fans. Other essays focus on how visual constructions of race in dramas like 24, Sleeper Cell, and The Wanted continue to conflate Arab and Muslim identities in post-9/11 television. The volume offers an important intervention in the study of the televisual representation of race, engaging with multiple aspects of the mythologies developing around notions of a "post-racial" America and the duplicitous discursive rationale offered by the ideology of colorblindness.

In Dining with Madmen: Fat, Food, and the Environment in 1980s Horror, author Thomas Fahy explores America's preoccupation with body weight, processed foods, and pollution through the lens of horror. Conspicuous consumption may have communicated success in the eighties, but only if it did not become visible on the body. American society had come to view fatness as a horrifying transformation-it exposed the potential harm of junk food, gave life to the promises of workout and diet culture, and represented the country's worst consumer impulses, inviting questions about the personal and environmental consequences of excess. While changing into a vampire or a zombie often represented widespread fears about addiction and overeating, it also played into concerns about pollution. Ozone depletion, acid rain, and toxic waste already demonstrated the irrevocable harm being done to the planet. The horror genre-from A Nightmare on Elm Street to American Psycho-responded by presenting this damage as an urgent problem, and, through the sudden violence of killers, vampires, and zombies, it depicted the consequences of inaction as terrifying. Whether through Hannibal Lecter's cannibalism, a vampire's thirst for blood in The Queen of the Damned and The Lost Boys, or an overwhelming number of zombies in George Romero's Day of the Dead, 1980s horror uses out-of-control hunger to capture deep-seated concerns about the physical and material consequences of unchecked consumption. Its presentation of American appetites resonated powerfully for audiences preoccupied with body size, food choices, and pollution. And its use of bodily change, alongside the bloodlust of killers and the desolate landscapes of apocalyptic fiction, demanded a recognition of the potentially horrifying impact of consumerism on nature, society, and the self.

In this book, Monika Bednarek addresses the need for a systemic analysis of television discourse and characterization within linguistics and media studies. She presents both corpus stylistics and manual analysis of linguistic and multimodal features of fictional television. The first part focuses on communicative context, multimodality, genre, audience and scripted television dialogue while the second part focuses on televisual characterization, introducing and illustrating the novel concept of expressive character identity. Aside from the study of television dialogue, which informs it throughout, this book is a contribution to studying characterization, to narrative analysis and to corpus stylistics. With its combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the book represents a wealth of exploratory, innovative and challenging perspectives, and is a key contribution to the analysis of television dialogue and character identity. The volume will be of interest to researchers and students in linguistics, stylistics and media/television studies, as well as to corpus linguists and communication theorists. The book will be a useful resource for lecturers teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in media discourse and related areas.

This book explores the theological voice of The Simpsons.Initially shunned by many in the Christian community when it made its television debut almost twenty years ago, after four hundred (and counting) episodes, and a feature-length film, few can deny that The Simpsons exhibits an astute understanding of Christianity in American culture. Its critiques of that culture are worth studying in detail. Jamey Heit's "The Springfield Reformation" investigates how The Simpsons blends important elements of contemporary American religious culture with a clear critique of the institutions and individuals that participate in and uphold that culture. Though The Simpsons is clearly a product of American popular culture, its writers offer up a well-planned, theologically informed religious climate in the cartoon world of Springfield. This world mirrors America in a way that allows the show's viewers to recognize that Christianity can hold together a family and a town that is rife with "sin," while at the same time exposing these very shortcomings.Heit focuses on distinct topics such as: god, the soul/the afterlife, prayer, the Christian ethic, evangelism, science versus religion, and faith (particularly in response to the question of why bad things happen to good people). He also explores the connections between various episodes, discussing how these connections, manifest an honest critique of Christianity in America. Engagingly written and guaranteed to appeal to smart, religiously curious fans of the show, Heit maintains that The Simpsons is not only a legitimate theological voice, but also that this voice offers a valuable addition to discussions about Christianity in America.