This book focuses on the significantly under-explored relationship between televisual culture and adaptation studies in what is now commonly regarded as the 'Golden Age' of contemporary TV drama. Adaptable TV: Rewiring the Text does not simply concentrate on traditional types of adaptation, such as reboots, remakes and sequels, but broadens the scope of enquiry to examine a diverse range of experimental adaptive types that are emerging within an ever-changing TV landscape. With a particular focus on the serial narrative form, and with case studies that include Penny Dreadful, Fargo, The Night Of and Orange is the New Black, this study is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the complex interplay between television studies and adaptation studies.

This volume explores how television has been a significant conduit for the changing ideas about children and childhood in the United States. Each chapter connects relevant events, attitudes, or anxieties in American culture to an analysis of children or childhood in select American television programs. The essays in this collection explore historical intersections of the family with expectations of childhood, particularly innocence, economic and material conditions, and emerging political and social realities that, at times, present unique challenges to America's children and the collective expectation of what childhood should be.

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.

Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes provides a new framework-the metaphor of the narrative ecosystem-for the analysis of serial television narratives. Contributors use this metaphor to address the ever-expanding and evolving structure of narratives far beyond their usual spatial and temporal borders, in general and in reference to specific series. Other scholarly approaches consider each narrative as composed of modular elements, which combine to create a bigger picture. The narrative ecosystem approach, on the other hand, argues that each portion of the narrative world contains all of the main elements that characterize the world as a whole, such as narrative tensions, production structures, creative dynamics and functions. The volume details the implications of the narrative ecosystem for narrative theory and the study of seriality, audiences and fandoms, production, and the analysis of the products themselves.

Concerns about the effects of television on young children are a recurrent focus of public controversy. Yet amid all the anxiety, children's voices are rarely heard. In this book, one of Britain's leading television researchers investigates children's own perspectives on what they find frightening, moving and upsetting. From "Nightmare on Elm Street" to "My Girl," from "The Colour Purple" to "The News at Ten," what children find upsetting is often difficult to predict. David Blackburn gives a detailed insight into children's responses to horror films, to "weepies" and soap operas, to news and to "reality programmes." He looks at how they learn to cope with their feelings about such material, and how their parents help or hinder them in doing so. This study offers a new approach to studying the role of television in children's lives, and should be of interest to parents and teachers, as well as policy makers and educationalists.

Praise for the First Edition:

aOffers the most insightful and significant scholarly analysis to date of the changes taking place in the economic aglobalizationa of television production. A delight to read, laced with wit and humor.a
--"Choice"

Praise for the Second Edition:

aProvides both the record of a strange moment in history and a contribution to contemporary cultural politics. This second, revised edition brings the story right up to the present with a compelling blend of the ancient and the modern.a
--Toby Miller, editor of "Television & New Media"

"The Apprentice," "Project Runway," "The Bachelor," "My Life on the D-list," "Extreme Makeover," "American Idol," It is virtually impossible to turn on a television without coming across some sort of reality programming. Yet, while this genre has rapidly moved from the fringes of television culture to its lucrative core, critical attention has not kept pace.

Beginning by unearthing its historical roots in early reality shows like "Candid Camera" and wending its way through "An American Family" and "The Real World" to the most recent crop of reality programs, Reality TV, now updated with eight new essays, is one of the first books to address the economic, visual, cultural, audience, and new media dimensions of reality television and has become the standard in the field. The essays provide a complex and comprehensive picture of how and why this genre emerged, what it means, how it differs from earlier television programming, and how it engages societies, industries, and individuals. Topics range from the blending of fact and fiction, to the uses of viewer labor and ainteractivity, a to issues of surveillance, gender performativity, hyper-commercialism, and generic parody.

By spanning reality televisionas origins in the late 1940s to its current overwhelming popularity, Reality TV demonstrates both the tenacity of the format and its enduring ability to speak to our changing political and social desires and anxieties.

Alison Oddey takes us on a spectator's journey engaging with art forms that cross boundaries of categorization. She questions the role of the spectator and director, including interviews with Deborah Warner; the nature of art works and performance with artists Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey and Graeme Miller. She provocatively demonstrates the spectator as centre of the artistic experience, a new kind of making theatre-art, revealing its spirit and nature; searching for space and contemplation in a hectic Twenty-First century landscape.

This book examines television drama in the age of streaming-a time when television has been reshaped for national and international consumption via both linear 'flow' and on-demand user modes. It builds on an in-depth study of the Norwegian public service broadcaster (NRK) and some of its game-changing drama productions (Lilyhammer, SKAM, blank). The book portrays the formative first decade of television streaming (2010-2019), how new streaming services and incumbent television providers intersect and act in a new drama landscape, and how streaming impacts existing television production cultures, publishing models and industry-audience relations. The analysis draws on insight gained through more than a hundred interviews with television experts and fans, hundreds of hours of observations, and unique access to industry conferences, meetings, working documents, and ratings. The book combines perspectives from production studies, media industry studies, and fan studies to inform its analysis.

Mass media portrayals of women have been identified as influential in shaping their self-image and self-esteem, as well as men's and societies' views of women. Comparatively few studies have examined mass media portrayals of men and male identity, and gender studies have often assumed these to be unproblematic. But, in a post-industrial era of economic, technological and social change, research shows mass media are projecting and propagating new images of male identity from Atlas Syndrome workaholics and 'deadbeat dads' to 'metrosexuals' and men with 'a feminine side', with potentially significant social implications. This book presents a landmark in-depth study of how mass media contribute to the making and remaking of male identity.

Why is talk about television forbidden at certain schools? Why does a mother feel guilty about watching Star Trek in front of her four-year-old child? Why would retired men turn to daytime soap operas for entertainment? Cliches about television mask the complexity of our relationship to media technologies. Through case studies, the author explains what audience research tells us about the uses of technologies in the domestic sphere and the classroom, the relationship between gender and genre, and the varied interpretation of media technologies and media forms. Television and New Media Audiences reviews the most important research on television audiences and recommends the use of ethnographic, longitudinal methods for the study of media consumption and computer use at home as well as in the workplace.

What are Arabic Europeans watching on television and how does it affect their identities as Europeans? New evidence from seven capitals shows that, far from being isolated in ethnic media ghettoes, they are critical news consumers in Arabic and European languages and engaged citizens.

Winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition, this volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to 'undo' or 'subvert' popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force. Recent examples of filmmakers and creative practitioners within and outside Hollywood as well as women working in non-directing authorial roles remind us that women are in various ways authoring commercially and culturally impactful texts across a range of genres. Put simply, this volume asks: what do women who are creatively engaged with audio-visual industries do with genre and what does genre do with them? The contributors to the collection respond to this question from diverse perspectives and with different answers, spanning issues of direction, screenwriting, performance and audience address/reception.

People are on the move across the Arab world, organizing politically in new ways. The Arab media have also undergone a transformation and are still in a state of flux. It is therefore crucial to be able to discuss political initiatives in the region in the light of media developments. This authoritative book answers key questions about the connections between media and political change in the Arab world. Using research into, for example, practices of Internet users, journalists, demonstrators and producers of reality TV, it explores the interface between public interaction over the airwaves, at the polls and on the streets. A lively group of contributors explores such issues as whether young people are served well by new media, whether blogging is an influential political tool, whether satellite news helps or hinders diasporic communities politically, and much more. Engaging with debates at the heart of public affairs and popular culture in Arab countries, this book addresses everyone who seeks to grasp the media politics of this central, often misunderstood region.

Success out of near disaster, finances taken to the edge of bankruptcy, resignations - this volume tells the dramatic stories of the major new commercial television developments in Britain between 1981-92. This is an authoritative account, from the people involved and from official documents, of the launches and first ten years of Channel 4 and TV-am, the expansion of cable television and early difficulties of satellite broadcasting.

Through American history, often in times of crisis, there have been periodic outbreaks of obsession with the paranormal. Between 2004 and 2019, over six dozen documentary-style series dealing with paranormal subject matter premiered on television in the United States. Combining the stylistic traits of horror with earnest accounts of what are claimed to be actual events, "paranormal reality" incorporates subject matter formerly characterized as occult or supernatural into the established category of reality TV. Despite the high number of programs and their evident popularity, paranormal reality television has to date received little critical attention. Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America provides an overview of the paranormal reality television genre, its development, and its place in television history. Conducting in-depth analyses of over thirty paranormal television series, including such shows as Ghost Hunters, Celebrity Ghost Stories, and Long Island Medium, author Amy Lawrence suggests these programs reveal much about Americans' contemporary fears. Through her close readings, Lawrence asks, "What are these shows trying to tell us?" and "What do they communicate about contemporary culture if we take them seriously and watch them closely?" Ridiculed by nearly everyone, paranormal reality TV shows-with their psychics, ghost hunters, and haunted houses-provide unique insights into contemporary American culture. Half-horror, half-documentary realism, these shows expose deep-seated questions about class, race, gender, the value of technology, the failure of institutions, and what it means to be American in the twenty-first century.

With his topical jokes and his all-American, brash-but-cowardly screen character, Bob Hope was the only entertainer to achieve top-rated success in every major mass-entertainment medium of the century, from vaudeville in the 1920s all the way to television in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He virtually invented modern stand-up comedy. Above all, he helped redefine the very notion of what it means to be a star: a savvy businessman, an enterprising builder of his own brand, and a public-spirited entertainer whose Christmas military tours and unflagging work for charity set the standard for public service in Hollywood. As Richard Zoglin shows in this "entertaining and important book" (The Wall Street Journal), there is still much to be learned about this most public of figures, from his secret first marriage and his stint in reform school, to his indiscriminate womanizing and his ambivalent relationships with Bing Crosby and Johnny Carson. Hope could be cold, self-centered, tight with a buck, and perhaps the least introspective man in Hollywood. But he was also a tireless worker, devoted to his fans, and generous with friends. "Scrupulously researched, likely definitive, and as entertaining and as important (to an understanding of twentieth- and twenty-first-century pop culture) as its subject once genuinely was" (Vanity Fair), Hope is both a celebration of the entertainer and a complex portrait of a gifted but flawed man. "A wonderful biography," says Woody Allen. "For me, it's a feast."