What happens when one of history’s most feared villains meets a comparative innocent looking to enter the same line of work? In many cases, this scenario is used in media to illustrate the corruption and making of monsters.
When Canadian period crime drama Murdoch Mysteries (CityTV 2008-2012;
The US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966-7) is about television. It’s about the capabilities of the medium, its technologies and the experience of watching it. The series has a grandiose, excessive visual style, characterised by scale and spectacle, and it served to advertise colour television as colour sets became more affordable in the 1960s.
The BBC’s sitcom/comedy drama, Detectorists , centred around two middle-aged metal detectorists and their hobby, is not noticeably ground-breaking, cutting-edge, politically savvy, conspicuous in its social realism, culturally diverse, sexually promiscuous, obscene, coarse, or expletive-laden in its language, nor vitriolic and in-your-face with political rancour. It is gentle, good-humoured, almost somnambulist in its
“It’s impossible to watch HBO’s Chernobyl without thinking of Donald Trump,” tweeted the author Stephen King in May 2019, simultaneously offering a backhanded compliment to a television miniseries that was fast becoming a critical sensation and a withering takedown of Trump’s presidential capacities.
‘Say what you like about South London, but it pays all our wages’ Edwyn Cooper (ep.1) Some years ago, I immersed myself in British tales of armed robbery – blags – while researching a study of the four-part BBC series Law and Order (1978) which is based on events surrounding a wages grab in South London.
While generally marketed as the further adventures of a popular character, spin-offs generally have the industrial function of creating more saleable content for a given studio and/or network.
Last week I told of my near-encounter with Patrick ‘Jean-Luc Picard’ Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation – not at Farpoint,[1] but in an Italian restaurant in Shad Thames back in 2011. This anecdote then acted as a springboard for an account of my on/off relationship with new Trek in the 1990s and early noughties, which – by the time I returned to these shores from Italy in 2008 – had seemingly withered on the vine.
Written on 12 April, 2023 This…is going to be a very different sort of blog. I’m writing this from a small hotel on a side street in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. You’ve probably never heard of this city (unless you’ve bothered to look at my author bio;
If you have never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation , you might be better off skipping this one. Way back in 2011, I was happily in the middle of my PhD studies.
