One of the rewards of teaching first-year undergraduates is that you are constantly forced to challenge your own perceptions about the changing nature of contemporary media and society. This year, I noticed a step change in the degree to which a sizeable minority of students seem disconnected from the idea of public service broadcasting in general, and from the BBC in particular.
The UK broadcast of *Supernatural has gone all to hell. I, like many others, was deeply disappointed by the news that Sky Living will not be showing season nine , *which has just completed its broadcast in the US on the CW. At the time of writing there are rumours that Netflix will take up the series – and rumours on the Internet must be true, right?
The original line of this opening was: ‘It might seem odd to devote a television blog to books’; however, following Billy Proctor’s blog last week it now feels almost like bandwagon jumping. For me, though, the two media have always been closely intertwined. The first and most obvious connection is the huge role the literary adaptation has played in the history of television drama output, here in Britain at least.
Sitting in Dublin’s city centre bus station last week, my eye was drawn to the giant billboard advertising the recently released new season of Orange is the New Black (OITNB) (2013-) on Netflix. The poster was relatively non-descript, unlike the range of other promotional materials that feature characters and guiding taglines. The billboard was, one would speculate, intended to capture as wide a market as possible.
[The killing of one black and two white civil rights workers] was an example of what we had really been talking to the volunteers about before the three went missing—that you are going into a murderously violent state and you have to understand that the danger affects you every day, all day long.
Ever since I started exploring adaptation theory as a way to discuss reboots for my PhD thesis, I have found myself knee-deep in a conceptual quandary, one which I’d like to share with you today.
Over the last few years I have been loosely following the unfolding project known as the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ (beginning with Iron Man , 2008) with a degree of interest, albeit that of a cinema-going layperson with little knowledge of comics or superheroes.
Comedian Louie CK made the statement above as part of an interview with an American radio show recently. And, interestingly, even though he’s someone whose material is high on the list of things being illegally accessed, he’s on our side. Australians are apparently the biggest television pirates in the world.
Since 1981 when Greece became an official member of the EEC (what would later become the European Union), the country has been represented in the European Parliament by many remarkable personalities deriving from the fields of politics, literature, science; in other words a group of people that is commonly referred to as the Greek intelligentsia.
Last summer, I gave a paper on the shifting star persona of Jennifer Aniston at the Console-ing Passions conference, focusing predominantly on the significance of postfeminist discourses of ageing to the construction of Aniston’s star image in the popular press.
The face of independent TV production in the UK has changed irrevocably. 21st Century Fox and Apollo Global Management together have taken over Endemol, Shine Group and Core Media and will transform them into the world’s first mega-indie.