This volume takes up perspectives from object relations theory and other psychoanalytic approaches to ask questions about the role of television as an object of the internal worlds of its viewers, and also addresses itself to a range of specific television programs, ranging from Play School, through the plays of Jack Rosenthal to recent TV blockbuster series such as In Treatment . In addition, it considers the potential of television to open up new public spaces of therapeutic experience. At the same time, however, the pitfalls of reality programming are explored with reference to the politics of entertainment and the televisual values that heighten the drama of representation rather than emphasizing the emotional experience of reality television participants and viewers. A recurring theme throughout is that television becomes a psychological object for its viewers and producers, maintaining the psychological "status quo" on the one hand and yet simultaneously opening up playful spaces of creative, therapeutic engagement for these groups. This collection of essays arises from a conference organized by the Media and the Inner World research network in collaboration with the Freud Museum."

The fourteen essays featured here focus on series such as Space Patrol, Tom Corbett, and Captain Z-Ro, exploring their roles in the day-to-day lives of their fans through topics such as mentoring, promotion of the real-world space program, merchandising, gender issues, and ranger clubs - all the while promoting the fledgling medium of television.

This is the most complete and compelling account of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture to date. Engaging with the study of media, gender and celebrity, and sensitive to history and the contemporary scene, these interdisciplinary essays cover male and female idols, production and consumption, industrial structures and fan movements.

This book is an exploration of the extent to which young people in the UK are disaffected with traditional politics, and particularly the role played by televisual representations of the political process. The authors look at how television represents young people themselves, and at how young people use new forms of media to inform themselves politically --

Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea is a new and original investigation into how screenwriting works, showing how to understand, study and research screenwriting and screen narrative production. It explores three facets - the practices, the creative 'poetics' and the texts - to re-conceptualise and join together our understanding of screenwriting and development. These facets serve the 'screen idea', that sense of something that might become a film or television show, and the focus for the beliefs and received wisdom behind the poetics. Macdonald applies a range of film, media and creative theories to the study and research of screenwriting, and includes three new, original case studies: story development in the successful ITV soap Emmerdale, the silent film work of Hitchcock's first major screenwriter Eliot Stannard, and David Lean's last, unfinished 'magnum opus', Nostromo.

First published in 1990, this title presents a rich account of how television intersects with family life in American and other world cultures. From an analysis of the political and cultural significance of China's most important television series to detailed descriptions of how families in the United States interpret and use television at home, James Lull's ethnographic work marks an important stage in the study of the role of the mass media in contemporary culture. This title will be of interest not only to those in media and communications, but also to those in the broader fields of cultural anthropology and sociology.

Working Regions focuses on policy aimed at building sustainable and resilient regional economies in the wake of the global recession. Using examples of four "working regions " regions where research and design functions and manufacturing still coexist in the same cities the book argues for a new approach to regional economic development. It does this by highlighting policies that foster innovation and manufacturing in small firms, focus research centers on pushing innovation down the supply chain, and support dynamic, design-driven firm networks.

This book traces several key themes underlying the core proposition that for a region to work, it has to link research and manufacturing activities namely, innovation and production in the same place. Among the topics discussed in this volume are the issues of how the location of research and development infrastructure produces a clear role of the state in innovation and production systems, and how policy emphasis on pre-production processes in the 1990s has obscured the financialization of intellectual property. Throughout the book, the author draws on examples from diverse industries, including the medical devices industry and the US photonics industry, in order to illustrate the different themes of working regions and the various institutional models operating in various countries and regions.

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."

Film noir reflects the fatalistic themes and visual style of hard-boiled novelists and many ?migr? filmmakers in 1940s and 1950s America, emphasizing crime, alienation, and moral ambiguity. In The Philosophy of TV Noir, Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble argue that the legacy of film noir classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Sleep is also found in episodic television from the mid-1950s to the present. In this first-of-its-kind collection, contributors from philosophy, film studies, and literature raise fundamental questions about the human predicament, giving this unique volume its moral resonance and demonstrating why television noir deserves our attention. The introduction traces the development of TV noir and provides an overview and evaluation of the book's thirteen essays, each of which discusses an exemplary TV noir series. Realism, relativism, and integrity are discussed in essays on Dragnet, Naked City, The Fugitive, and Secret Agent. Existentialist themes of authenticity, nihilism, and the search for life's meaning are addressed in essays on Miami Vice, The Sopranos, Carnivale, and 24. The methods of crime scene investigation in The X-Files and CSI are examined, followed by an exploration of autonomy, selfhood, and interpretation in The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Millennium. With this focus on the philosophical dimensions of crime, espionage, and science fiction series, The Philosophy of TV Noir draws out the full implications of film noir and establishes TV noir as an art form in its own right.

Television as we knew it is irrevocably changing. Some are gleefully announcing the death of television, others have been less sanguine but insist that television is radically changing underneath our eyes. Several excellent publications have dealt with television's uncertain condition, but few have taken the specific question of what television's transformations mean for the discipline of Television Studies as a starting point. The essays collected in this volume aim to fill this void. Two fundamental questions string the various contributions together. First, is television really in crisis or is the present not so extraordinary when revisiting television's development? Second, should we invent new theoretical concepts or are our old ones still perfectly relevant? To answer such questions the authors in this volume take up diverse case studies, ranging from the academic series Reading Contemporary Television to Flemish Fiction, from nostalgic programming on broadcast television to YouTube, from tell-sell television shows to public television art in the 1980s.

This book is the first scholarly exploration of the daytime serial television drama. The primary focus is on the social world as reflected in soap operas. Among the major areas examined within the society of daytime drama are the people, their problems, environment, and interactions.

First published in 1994, this book examines the extent to which television affects the people who watch it. Television is frequently blamed for increased violence, shortened attention spans, the decline of literacy and political indoctrination. In this book, the author considers the theories and evidence against television and argues that much of the panic is unfounded. Instead, he asserts that the danger of television is that it is the central apparatus of consumer society. He states that the success of television is measured not in terms of the enjoyment we get from programs, but by how much money we spend as a result of watching them.

"Beyond the Box" gives students and couch potatoes alike a better understanding of what it means to watch television in an era of profound technological change.
Charts the revolution in television viewing that is currently underway in living rooms across the world
Probes how the Internet's development has altered how television is made and consumed
Looks at a range of topics and programmes - from voting practices on American Idol to online forums for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans
Offers a fresh and innovative perspective that focuses on the shift in audience experience and how it has blurred established boundaries

This Brief Guide is a comprehensive guide to P.G.Wodehouse's two best-loved comic characters, Bertram ("Bertie")Wooster and his valet Reggie "Jeeves," Bertie's many friends and relatives, and their life of country houses and champagne. Cawthorne offers fascinating insights into Wodehouse's world, his Jeeves and Wooster stories, and the many adaptations for stage and screen.

More than 150 million Americans have seen Ken Burns's documentaries on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz. With their signature blending of images and interviews, Burns's series have redefined documentary television--and no one, before or since, has made history so popular. Gary R. Edgerton takes the full measure of Burns's accomplishments--with an inside look at the workings of Burns's Florentine Films production company, a genealogy of Burns's style and sources, and a critical account of Burns the historian--how his powerful programs define (and misdirect) our sense of past and present. Ken Burns's America will be essential reading for history buffs and viewers of Burns's immensely popular television documentaries.

Television had, until recently, a social and cultural purpose. In Britain, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, were committed to develop and maintain these purposes. With the enlargement of the range of choices for viewers by digital television and the provision of access to cable and satellite TV and the Internet, the role of the terrestrial television channels is being diluted. The authors examine these effects and consider what can be done to maintain the standards and quality of television at a time of unlimited competition.

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.

Music in Television is a collection of essays examining television's production of meaning through music in terms of historical contexts, institutional frameworks, broadcast practices, technologies, and aesthetics. It presents the reader with overviews of major genres and issues, as well as specific case studies of important television programs and events. With contributions from a wide range of scholars, the essays range from historical-analytical surveys of TV sound and genre designations to studies of the music in individual programs, including South Park and Dr. Who.

Over twenty years since its low-profile debut and Friends is the most streamed show on UK Netflix. But has it stood the test of time? Are some parts of it more problematic than we remember? And who was the cast's least favourite guest star?

Join Kelsey Miller as she answers all of these questions and more. And as she relives the show's most iconic moments, examines some of its controversies, and shines a light on the many trends it inspired - from oversized coffee cups to the much-copied 90s haircut, `The Rachel'.

Weaving incisive commentary, revelatory interviews and behind-the-scenes anecdotes involving high-profile guest stars, I'll Be There for You is the most comprehensive take on Friends yet, and the ultimate book for fans everywhere.

Television Personalities offers an exciting, engaging approach to studying and understanding the most prominent and popular performers in television and celebrity culture. It is an original, indispensable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media, television and celebrity studies, as well as those interested in digital culture more widely.