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.
This blog sketches out some of the ideas that account for recent TV drama’s formal strategies due to the growing complexity of television narrative.
The first month of the new year, as has been the case now since 2012, heralds the start of another new series of the BBC’s flagship and consistently highly rated Sunday night drama of community nursing, midwifery and medicine Call the Midwife . Promos and advance publicity for the seventh series have primed audiences for the introduction to the regularly recurring cast of characters of a nurse of colour, for the first time in its
The Canadian Review of American Studies (University of Toronto Press) is seeking papers for a special issue on the Game of Thrones fantasy series.
This past winter, two new Turkish online streaming services released their first Turkish original shows: In January, Blu TV released Masum and in March, Puhu TV released Fi . A look at the production and success of these shows reveals how streaming is globalizing the Anglo-American notion of quality programming—a homogenization that is contrary to multidirectionality arguments supported by the rise of new centers of production.
In an account of Roland Kirk’s appearance on the television programme Soul! , Gayle Wald argues that the mediation of a television camera “renders the affective power of Kirk’s performance more immediate and more suspenseful than it might have been in a nightclub setting” (2015: 124-125). With these words, Wald explodes dominant myths in jazz regarding the primacy of live performance and counters widely-held suspicions regarding the
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I had thought that Higher Education was for adults, albeit young ones. On the pages of CSTonline we have, from time to time, talked about the problem of teaching TV Studies at University.
The latest season of Sherlock concluded on January 15th in its unfortunately characteristic vein of ill-conceived pyrotechnics, scarcely-credible plot lines and levels of reality that test the patience of its viewers.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden by American special forces may have rid the collective American psyche of a man who at times appeared to be a ghost, but it also raised another ghost.
There is a quote I have used in my first year Media Cultures course, when I address the opening topic ‘Why study the media?’ I cannot recall where I first read it but I have always attributed it to French cultural theorist Roland Barthes. But now I am troubled that I cannot find a source for his words of advice, To be a critic one also needs to be a fan. Perhaps he never wrote such words. Maybe someone else did.
