It's a Wonderful Life is an American film classic celebrated for its inspirational character. Famously shown during the holiday season, it brings families together in the spirit of mutual love and support. It tells the story of George Bailey, who turns suicidal one Christmas Eve after decades of frustration and sacrifice in which his dreams are repeatedly shattered for the good of others. George is convinced that his life is anything but wonderful. Enter Clarence, his guardian angel, who must find a way to get George to appreciate his family, friends, and all the good he does in life. Clarence does find a way and George returns to his family at film's close. This might seem like a fairy-tale ending, but it is anything but convincing, which should come as no surprise since the film rehearses an ontological war between contending parties with rival conceptions of what it means to lead a meaningful life. It is a rather one-sided conflict as George finds himself more or less alone in the world. He has been trying to escape his hometown his entire life in order to pursue his Promethean vision in the wider world. To prevent this, God dispatches Clarence to get George to heel. He resorts to a kind of transcendental terrorism to force George to return home and believe it was his own idea. Yet what does it say about a form of life when it resorts to such means to prevail in an existential contest? From a Nietzschean perspective, it is possible to illuminate the film's extraordinary cruelty. Despite appearances, George's restoration is temporary at best and there is every reason to believe that eventually he will try to take his life again. Tragically, George must leave Bedford Falls and those who love him must insist that he go.

In this edited volume, contributors explore an essential element of the influential television series Twin Peaks: the role of music and sound. From its debut in 1990 to its return to television in 2017, Twin Peaks has amassed a cult following, and inspired myriad scholarly studies. This collection considers how the music and sound design not only create the ambience of this ground-breaking series, but function in the narrative, encouraging multiple interpretations. With chapters that consider how music shapes the relationship of audiences and fans to the story, the importance of sound design, and the symbolism embedded in the score, this book provides a range of perspectives for scholars of music and film studies, while giving fans new insight into an iconic television show.

Between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows, including Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, Catfish, and Jersey Shore, which were aimed at predominantly white youth audiences. In Millennials Killed the Video Star Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture-ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities.

Even for the casual viewer, the Netflix series Stranger Things will likely feel familiar, reminiscent of popular 1980s coming-of-age movies such as The Goonies, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Stand by Me. Throughout the series, nods to each movie are abundant. While Stranger Things and these classic 1980s films are all tales of childhood friendship and shared adventures, they are also narratives that reflect and shape the burgeoning cynicism of the 1980s. In Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in ""Stranger Things"" and 1980s Film, author Melissa Vosen Callens explores the parallels between iconic films featuring children and teenagers and the first three seasons of Stranger Things, a series about a group of young friends set in 1980s Indiana. The text moves beyond the (at times) non-sequitur 1980s Easter eggs to a common underlying narrative: Generation X's growing distrust in American institutions. Despite Gen X's cynicism toward both informal and formal institutions, viewers also see a more positive characteristic of Gen X in these films and series: Gen X's fierce independence and ability to rebuild and redefine the family unit despite continued economic hardships. Vosen Callens demonstrates how Stranger Things draws on popular 1980s popular culture to pay tribute to Gen X's evolving outlook on three key and interwoven American institutions: family, economy, and government.

This book explores how British culture is negotiating heroes and heroisms in the twenty-first century. It posits a nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation and explores this idea through British television drama. Drawing on case studies including programmes such as The Last Kingdom, Spooks, Luther and Merlin, the book explores the aesthetic strategies of heroisation in television drama and contextualises the programmes within British public discourses at the time of their production, original broadcasting and first reception. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain's problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated. By revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms, television drama employs the heroic as a lens through which to scrutinise contemporary British society and its responses to crisis and change. Looking back on the development of heroic representations in British television drama over the last twenty years, this book's analyses show how heroisation in television drama reacts to, and reveals shifts in, British structures of feeling in a time marked by insecurity. The book is ideal for readers interested in British cultural studies, studies of the heroic and popular culture.

Reversing a common science fiction cliche, Farscape follows the adventures of the human astronaut John Crichton after he is shot through a wormhole into another part of the universe. Here Crichton is the only human being, going from being a member of the most intelligent species on our planet to being frequently considered mentally deficient by the beings he encounters in his new environment. Crichton befriends a group of beings from various species attempting to escape from imprisonment aboard a living spaceship. The series, which broke many of the so-called ""rules"" of science fiction, follows Crichton's attempts to survive in worlds that are often hostile to him and his friends. Their adventures centre on each being's attempt to find a way home. The essays in this volume explore themes running throughout the series, such as good and evil, love and sex, and what it means to be a hero, as well as the various characters populating the series, including the villains and even the ship itself.

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be 'politically correct', this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to 'PC Debates', contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC 'mockumentary', The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal caregiving. Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religion, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers. A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender, programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies, and activists, funders, policymakers and practitioners.

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice presents the most current international scholarship on the complexity and subversive potential of women's comedic speech, literature, and performance. Earlier comedy theorists such as Freud and Bergson did not envision women as either the agents or audiences of comedy, only as its targets. Only more recently have scholarly studies of comedy begun to recognize and historicize women's contributions to-and political uses of-comedy. The essays collected here demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship on gender and comedy, spanning centuries of literature and a diversity of methodologies. Through a reconsideration of literary, theatrical, and mass media texts from the Classical period to the present, Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice responds to the historical marginalization and/or trivialization of both women and comedy. The essays collected in this volume assert the importance of recognizing the role of women and comedy in order to understand these texts, their historical contexts, and their possibilities and limits as models for social engagement. In the spirit of comedy itself, these analyses allow for opportunities to challenge and reevaluate the theoretical approaches themselves.

Spanning several years of research, this book compares and contrasts how public and commercial TV stations present foreign, domestic, and hybrid news from a number of different countries. It examines what viewers of television news think about foreign news, their interest in it, and what sense they make of it. The book also assesses what the gatekeepers of foreign news - journalists, producers, and editors - think about what they produce, and about their viewers. This book shows that while globalization is a dominant force in society, and though news can be instantaneously broadcast internationally, there is relatively little commonality throughout the world in the depiction of events occurring in other countries. Thus, contrary to McLuhan's famous but untested notion of the "global village", television news in the countries discussed in this book actually presents more variability than similarity. The research gathered here is based on a quantitative content analysis of over 17,000 news items and analysis of over 10,000 survey respondents. Seventeen countries are included in this research, offering a rich comparative perspective on the topic.

The contributors to Media Crossroads examine space and place in media as they intersect with sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, class, and ability. Considering a wide range of film, television, video games, and other media, the authors show how spaces-from the large and fantastical to the intimate and virtual-are shaped by the social interactions and intersections staged within them. The highly teachable essays include analyses of media representations of urban life and gentrification, the ways video games allow users to adopt an experiential understanding of space, the intersection of the regulation of bodies and spaces, and how style and aesthetics can influence intersectional thinking. Whether interrogating the construction of Portland as a white utopia in Portlandia or the link between queerness and the spatial design and gaming mechanics in the Legend of Zelda video game series, the contributors deepen understanding of screen cultures in ways that redefine conversations around space studies in film and media. Contributors. Amy Corbin, Desiree J. Garcia, Joshua Glick, Noelle Griffis, Malini Guha, Ina Rae Hark, Peter C. Kunze, Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, Nicole Erin Morse, Elizabeth Patton, Matthew Thomas Payne, Merrill Schleier, Jacqueline Sheean, Sarah Louise Smyth, Erica Stein, Kirsten Moana Thompson, John Vanderhoef, Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Horror films have traditionally sunk their teeth into straitened times, reflecting, expressing and validating the spirit of the epoch, and capitalising on the political and cultural climate in which they are made. This book shows how the horror genre has adapted itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics and the mutating role of traditional and new media in the era of Donald Trump's Presidency of the United States. Exploring horror's renewed potential for political engagement in a socio-political climate characterised by the angst of civil conflict, the deception of 'alternative facts' and the threat of nuclear or biological conflict and global warming, Make America Hate Again examines the intersection of film, politics, and American culture and society through a bold critical analysis of popular horror (films, television shows, podcasts and online parodies), such as 10 Cloverfield Lane, American Horror Story, Don't Breathe, Get Out, Hotel Transylvania 2, Hush, It, It Comes at Night, South Park, The Babadook, The Walking Dead, The Woman, The Witch and Twin Peaks: The Return. The first major exploration of the horror genre through the lens of the Trump era, it investigates the correlations between recent, culturally meaningful horror texts, and the broader culture within which they have become gravely significant. Offering a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on popular culture as a site of cultural politics, Make America Hate Again will appeal to scholars and students of American studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.

The CW's long-running series Supernatural follows the adventures of brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they pursue the "family business" of hunting supernatural beings. Blending monster-of-the-week storylines with the unfolding saga of the brothers' often troubled relationship, the show represents Gothic concerns of anxiety, the monstrous, family trauma and, of course, the supernatural. The lines between human and monster, good and evil, are blurred and individual identities and motivations resist easy categorization. This collection of new essays examines how the series both incorporates and complicates Gothic elements related to traditional tropes, storytelling, women and gender issues and monstrosity.

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be 'politically correct', this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to 'PC Debates', contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC 'mockumentary', The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

Understanding Comedy through College Comedies explains the nature of comedy through the study of college comedy films, including classics (College, The Freshman); romantic/screwball comedies (Where the Boys Are, Ball of Fire, Sterile Cuckoo); famous comedian comedies (Horse Feathers, The Nutty Professor, The Klumps); intergenerational college comedies (That's My Boy, Back to School, Old School); social comedies (The Graduate, Breaking Away, Risky Business); political comedies (Getting Straight, Strawberry Statement, Last Supper); ethnic comedies (School Daze, Soul Man, How High); and college farces (Charlie's Aunt, Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Slackers). In this book, Norman Kagan explains comic terminology, concepts, and theories, including Freud's "displaced sexual content" in Decline of the American Empires, Langer's "vitalism" in Slacker, Bergson's "anesthesia of the heart" in The Squid and the Whale, and Frye's "reversal of literary modes" in Storytelling. The reader will discover the reasons why they are laughing, new reasons to laugh, and new films that will provide new sources of laughter.

This volume examines the shift toward positive and more accurate portrayals of mental illness in entertainment media, asking where these succeed and considering where more needs to be done. With studies that identify and analyze the characters, viewpoints, and experiences of mental illness across film and television, it considers the messages conveyed about mental illness and reflects on how the different texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge sociocultural notions regarding mental illness. Presenting chapters that explore a range of texts from film and television, covering a variety of mental health conditions, including autism, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and more, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, and mental health.

In this sixth edition of Television Sports Production, regional Emmy Award-winning producer Jim Owens walks readers through the planning, setup, directing, announcing, shooting, and editing involved in covering a sports event. Originally written as a training guide for entry-level broadcast staff at the Olympics, this manual gives readers the tools they need to effectively cover sports from ice skating to motorcycle racing. Throughout, Owens breaks down all aspects of the production process, revealing the techniques that producers and directors use to bring sports to a worldwide audience. Chapters further include tips and advice on using the latest technologies and tools such as production trucks, REMIs, smart phones, mobile units, cameras, audio equipment, and lighting rigs. Featuring new instructive illustrations and sample forms, as well as testimonials from experienced professionals in the business, this new edition gives readers an inside look at how the experts produce live or recorded television and sports coverage. This comprehensive book is essential reading for intermediate and advanced students looking to learn how to successfully produce sports broadcasting.

Given the limitless freedom of animation, why would anyone use it to make a sitcom about a struggling family-owned burger place? And why would audiences embrace this greasy fantasy, not just by tuning in but by permanently decorating their legs and arms with images from the show and writing detailed backstories for its minor characters? This book-length critical study of Bob's Burgers examines the moments in which the animated sitcom exposes the chasms between generations, explores gender and sexual identity, and allows fans to imagine a better world. Essays cover how the show can be read as a series of critiques of Steven Spielberg's early blockbusters, a rejection of Freudian psychology, or an examination of the artificiality of gendered behaviors through the cross-casting of characters like Tina and Linda. By tracing the ways that the popular reception of Bob's Burgers reflects changing cultural attitudes, the essays provoke broader questions about the responsibility of popular entertainment to help audiences conceive of fantasies closer to home: fantasies of loving and accepting parents, of creative, self-assured children, and of menus filled with artisanal puns.

This book traces the history of Seinfeld's path onto NBC's schedule and rise up the Nielsen ratings, offering a fresh look at the episodes themselves. It pays close attention to the writers and writing of the show, carefully analyzing individual episodes to articulate exactly what was so groundbreaking and assessing its broader cultural impact. Since coming to an end at the pinnacle of its popularity, Seinfeld's story continues. The show's enduring appeal has helped earn its creators billions of dollars and counting. Many of the most popular and acclaimed comedy series of the twenty-first century are direct descendants of Seinfeld's style. And the show's ideas are now woven into the ways people think and behave. Seinfeld remains a living part of American culture. Yet, by all the traditional rules of television, Seinfeld never should have made it to the air. The greatest sitcom of the final years of the broadcast era, Seinfeld broke the rules, sustained another decade of NBC's dominance, and changed both television and America forever. Seinfeld: A Cultural History explores the show's past with an engaging look at the show's legendary co-creators, its supporters (and skeptics) at NBC, and its award-winning cast. It includes an extensive discussion of both the very first and very last episodes of the series, as well as many memorable moments in between. This book also dissects the show's main quartet and the other memorable characters that foursome interacted with over the show's eight seasons. With deep perception and good humor, this book considers what the adventures of Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine reveal about the nineties and what messages they pass along to twenty-first century viewers. Seinfeld: A Cultural History will lead any fan of the show back to the series to re-watch old episodes with new insights and observations. Readable and illuminating, the book's well-researched discussion of the show's background and legacy is an essential handbook for Seinfeld viewers and scholars alike. Most of all, Seinfeld: A Cultural History is an enjoyable way to engage (or reengage) with one of the funniest shows of all time.

Though it started as a British television show with a small but devoted fan base, Doctor Who has grown in popularity and now appeals to audiences around the world. In the fifty year history of the program, Doctor Who's producers and scriptwriters have drawn on a dizzying array of literary sources and inspirations. Elements from Homer, classic literature, gothic horror, swashbucklers, Jacobean revenge tragedies, Orwellian dystopias, Westerns and the novels of Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh have all been woven into the fabric of the series. One famous storyline from the mid-1970s was rooted in the Victoriana of authors like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, while another was a virtual remake of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda-with robots In Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation: Fifty Years of Storytelling, Marcus Harmes looks at five decades of the show's frequent exploration of other sources to create many memorable episodes.In this volume, Harmes observes that adaptation in Doctor Who was not just a matter of transferring literary works to the screen, but of bringing a diversity of texts into dialogue with the established mythology of the series as well as with longstanding science fiction tropes. In this process, original stories are not just resituated, but transformed into new works. Harmes considers what this approach reveals about adaptation, television production, the art of storytelling, and the long-term success and cultural resonance enjoyed by Doctor Who. Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation will be of interest to students of literature and television alike, and to scholars interested in adaptation studies. It will also appeal to fans of the series interested in tracing the deep cultural roots of television's longest-running, and most literate, science-fiction adventure.

Difficult Women on Television Drama analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or address: equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and the need for intersectional approaches. Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change. This book is a must-read for scholars of media and communication studies; television and film studies; cultural studies; American studies; sociology of gender and sexualities; women and gender studies; and international film, media and cinema studies.

This book proposes that the theory and practice of transmedia storytelling must be re-considered from a social impact and community development perspective, and that time has come for a rigorous critique of the limited ways in which it has been commonly represented. Transmedia storytelling has become one of the most influential and profitable innovations in the field of media and entertainment. It has changed the ways audiences interact with films, television and web series, advertising, gaming and book publishing. It has also shifted the practices around creation and dissemination of such content. This book asserts that the futures of transmedia storytelling for social impact or change are deeply tied to understandings of place grounded in human geography. Through a series of case studies of projects which challenge the status quo of transmedia, this book explores the elements of transmedia that can be used to amplify under-represented voices and make stories that signal a more inclusive and sustainable future. This book offers a valuable contribution to the literature in the areas of transmedia storytelling, narratology, digital fiction, electronic literature, locative storytelling, performative writing, digital culture studies and human geography.

This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that rely upon temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold the narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time play in contemporary programming, but the implications of its sometimes disorienting presence.

Drawing upon the fields of cultural studies, television scholarship, and literary studies, as well as overarching theories concerning postmodernity and narratology, "Time in Television Narrative" offers some critical suggestions. The increasing number of of television programs concerned with time may stem from any and all of the following: recent scientific approaches to quantum physics and temporality; new conceptions of history and posthistory; or trends in late-capitalistic production and consumption, in the new culture of instantaneity, or in the recent trauma culture amplified after the September 11 attacks. In short, these televisual time experiments may very well be an aesthetic response to the climate from which they derive. These essays analyze both ends of this continuum and also attend to another crucial variable: the television viewer watching this new temporal play.

Black Women in Reality Television Docusoaps explores representations of Black women in one of the most powerful, popular forms of reality television - the docusoap. Viewers, critics, and researchers have taken issue with what they consider to be unflattering, one-dimensional representations. This book discusses images of Black women in reality television during the 2011 viewing year, when much criticism arose. These findings provide a context for a more recent examination of reality television portrayals during 2014, following many reality stars' promises to offer new representations. The authors discuss the types of images shown, potential readings of such portrayals, and the implication of these reality television docusoap presentations. The book will be useful for courses examining topics such as popular culture; mass media and society; women's studies; race and media; sex and gender; media studies; African American issues in mass communication; and gender, race and representation, as well as other graduate-level classes.

Gossip Girl: A Critical Understanding provides a critical analysis of The CW's hit teen television drama Gossip Girl. Lori Bindig analyzes episodes as a set of media texts that blur the boundaries between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic content. Using political economy, textual and audience analyses, Bindig dissects how the show presents ideological content in regard to gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism, ultimately unearthing potential ramifications of Gossip Girl and other popular media texts. In addition, Bindig examines the expansive fan community and its engagement with the show through online forums and YouTube. Gossip Girl: A Critical Understanding will appeal to scholars of media, audience studies, and popular culture.