This is a taster of a chapter I have just published about unusual and expressive uses of sound in TV.[1] The chapter is in one of the Moments in Television series books that I blogged about recently, and focuses on an episode of the science fiction series The Twilight Zone : ‘The Invaders’ (1961). The episode has no dialogue, though it has some narration spoken to camera and some music, and the absence of speech made me think about what

Two years ago, I wrote a provocation for CST about the problems that the continued tendency to priorities research on a particular kind of television creates for the academy. I argued that all we do is underpin existing hierarchies of gender and race in the academy and that a solution could be that we look at other television.

My TV Dictionary entry, on the show American Bandstand (ABC, 1952-1989) was born of a struggle I experience as a scholar and videographer in being able to grasp, study and say something about daily television programs. Televisual fiction genres are usually studied as a single text, comprised of several or many episodes.

Brian’s music taps into the same source that gospel music taps into.  That deep, fundamental sadness or darkness that we all carry.  It’s like it finds you there and it takes you up out of it.  That was just innately in the music.  The harmonies, the sound, offered a way out and a transcendence. — Jim James, lead vocalist and guitarist for My Morning Jacket

As a film, television and digital media scholar, videographic criticism is a format that I was aware of but had not yet put into practice. My interest in this medium led me to Ariel Avissar’s “TV Dictionary” which for me became a form of practical access into this world of videographic criticism. Participants familiar and new to this medium create content through a specific rubric, or algorithmic guidance: a tv show;

The “TV Dictionary” is a collaborative collection of videos premised on a simple prompt: each video attempts to capture the essence of a television series using a single word, by juxtaposing the dictionary definition(s) of that word with a clip or several clips from the series. It is currently comprised of 48 videos by 25 makers, and has been warmly embraced by the academic videographic community, receiving numerous mentions on Sight &

Now, I’m sure that, like me, you have fond memories of The World of Eddie Weary , the massively popular private investigator series of a few decades back. Fig. 1: Down these mean streets.

Much of the fictional television content targeting children and young audiences is currently made specifically for them, targeting their particular interests and intended to be watched on their private screens or together with friends rather than in the company of parents or other adults.

As we all know by now, Netflix is in trouble. Initial reactions to last week’s news that Netflix lost 200.000 subscribers, the first loss of subscribers reported in a decade, included a drop in share values of 35% in one day. The reasons are complex, as, perhaps, best outlined by Josef Adalion in Vulture . After the gains made in pandemic lockdowns, Netflix lost subscribers once people started to go out again.

Quite often these days, I’m asked about the possibility of reprinting some of my earlier articles from fanzines and long-defunct magazines… and my instinct is almost always to say ‘no’. And the main reason for this is that I, as a reader, would rather read a new piece on a given subject rather than a rehash of something that was originally written when we only had a fraction of the research materials that we do now.