August 17th 2023 and the Guardian ran an article entitled ‘How did Suits become America’s most-watched TV show of the summer?’  Good question.

Lockdown continues to be a bizarre experience for us all, and no less so in our household viewing experiences.

In 2016, Netflix committed to “doubling down on kids and families” [1] through increased child and family-oriented Originals [2]. Netflix’s most successful and well-known Original series, Stranger Things , (2016- ) significantly contributed to the creation of a new middle ground of shared family viewing in the subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) ecology, in which Netflix resists broadcast TV approaches to family

Fast, frenetic and a breath of fresh air from the drawn out soul searching in other zombie apocalyptic shows, Black Summer (Netflix, 2019) is a stripped bare, full throttle zombie series that sprints through eight action packed episodes. Created by Karl Schaefer and John Hyams, Black Summer comes from The Asylum, the same studio which made Z Nation (SyFy, 2014 – 2018) but the connection between the two shows is minor.

In 2006, when I started out in television studies, the discipline was reckoning with the impact of HBO’s entry into the marketplace for television drama.  Academics tended to avoid words like ‘revolution’ but journalists flung them about with abandon, and contentious debates about ideas like ‘Quality’ (McCabe and Akass, 2007) and ‘Complexity’ (Mittell, 2006) were driving much of the conversation in TV studies.

With Haunting of Hill House plugging the hole left by Stranger Things this Halloween[1], I started thinking about Netflix’s other original horror dramas and whether or not there is method to a Netflix TV horror. Is there anything common to a Netflix horror series or are they all totally and unequivocally different?

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.

Too often the joys of binge watching are only attributed to two types of people; those who are embracing a moment of solitary extreme laziness, or who are watching the new entire season of the newest thing RIGHT NOW AND TO THE EXCLUSION OF ALL OTHERS so as to talk to their friends about it. Recently I’ve discovered a third type of binge watcher – the breastfeeder.

This is a follow up to my last post for CST . Given that this is a blog about television it seems only fitting to begin with a brief recap: Previously On Quantitative Studies in Television… In my previous post I described some of my early attempts to analyse television at scale using some widely-available software and a few simple lines of code.

Issue Guest Editors: Claire Perkins (Monash University) and Michele Schreiber (Emory University) Working in television has historically been considered ‘bread and butter’ labour for female filmmakers around the world.