You may have read about or seen VH1’s reality show Cartel Crew , which began in January and is entering its second season. The Crew cast is formed of close relatives of dead or imprisoned narcos . These offspring may themselves have been in the joint, or benefited directly or indirectly from their parents’ illegal wealth, but now, they are putatively on the straight and etc.
My last blog for CSTonline (a response to Toby Miller’s first blog of this academic year) talked about my experiences of moving to America and setting up a new life. Whereas Toby hadn’t quite got wired up for TV, I had, but that still didn’t stop me bemoaning the loss of familiar UKTV and bellyaching about how difficult it was to negotiate the amount of channels available to me in the US. ‘Spoilt brat’ some might say.
It’s all happening around Sky at the moment. The first was an unexpected bid from the US giant Comcast, disrupting the cosy deal that the Murdoch and Disney groups had planned. The second was Sky’s own doing: to offer Netflix subscriptions on the Sky and Now TV platforms… which now incorporate voice recognition. One is a fascinating business saga that will impact on user choice in the long term.
The CW network offers a compelling coming of age story reflective of its changing demographic. In 2006, the network was launched as a joint venture of CBS and Warner Bros. Entertainment and next generation to The WB and UPN (1995-2006), which followed Fox’s success and shift in television broadcasting away from the Big Three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and toward young viewers.
The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, or BARB, tells us the who what, when, where, and how of watching British TV and computer screens. Jointly owned by ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and the BBC, it has been going in its current form for many years, shifting as required to keep track of changes caused by deregulation and the proliferation of consumer technologies.
A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Friday nights were (all too briefly) enlivened by a pair of young scamps with a penchant for critiquing popular culture, whether mounting toy-based parodies of contemporary film and television, utilising Star Wars figurines to skewer trash TV formats, or dispensing Vinyl Justice to the mad, bad and (occasionally) dangerous of rock ‘n’ pop.
When I moved from the UK to Ireland in 2015/16 my transition in terms of the availability of television was relatively easy. Given that many of the same channels, subscription packages and streaming services span both the UK and Ireland, it felt more that my television viewing was enhanced by the re-introduction of Irish terrestrial broadcast channels such as RTE 1 &
It was a bold scheduling move on the part of ITV, the UK’s main commercial television channel. Shifting the nightly news programme to make way for Britain’s latest attempt at a US-style late night talk show was always going to be risky.
Canon: A collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine: ‘the biblical canon’; The works of a particular author or artist that are recognized as genuine: ‘the Shakespeare canon’ (Oxford Dictionaries. Online) Apologies, but I’ve marked an awful lot of student essays recently (and I do mean awful). This stylish trend for opening one’s work with an easily Googled dictionary definition is infectious. In the worst possible sense. See?
I’m back living in the US, courtesy of five months researching with the Latin American studies folks at Tulane U in New Orleans. After the banal surveillance and corporate vocabulary of English higher education, it’s an incredible tonic to be in a genuinely intellectual and largely progressive environment.
