This is the first of five Telegenics that will examine the state of the American sitcom in the second decade of the 21st Century. Subsequent entries will look at How I Met Your Mother , The Big Bang Theory , 30 Rock , and Modern Family. The Community Cast.

Image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press Stanley Fish. The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show . Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Image from Entertainment Weekly Online As an admitted one-time (TV)antipathist, my first conscious encounter with the now proliferating “Television is better than the movies” meme ¹ (hereafter TViBttM ) was “TV Saves the World,” a 1995 article by Bruce Fretts in Entertainment Weekly which offered, two years before

In Tim Pratt’s short story “Impossible Dreams,” a cinephile named Pete discovers a mysterious video store from an alternative universe that appears in our reality only for briefer and briefer periods each evening near closing time. As he becomes more-than-friends with the clerk, Ally, Pete discovers the store’s amazing, not from our reality, collection, which includes: •

When we are on stage, we are in the here and now. —Konstantine Stanislavski In a pivotal scene of Fringe ’s “Over There,” Part 1 (2.21), Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) meets his now-graying mother for the first time since he was a child. Ordinarily you would not need years of training at the Actors Studio to know how to play such an emotionally-rich encounter.

One of the aims of the ‘Spaces of Television’ project is to explore the relationship between sites of production and the content and form of (British) television drama. We have already seen, in the papers at our two symposia to date, how there is much more to this relationship than the overly simplistic dichotomy between live studio-based drama on the one hand and drama shot using film and film production methods on the other.

At the moment I’m rather glad that I’m not teaching one of my favourite courses, ‘Contemporary Issues in Television Studies’. This was the kind of course in which you try and persuade students that learning about legislation, regulation, governance and institutional structures is not boring but actually more relevant (as viewers and aspirants to a television career) than almost anything else they will do. Thanks to willing volunteers from the

I think when Alex [Gansa] and I first conceived the series, it seemed obvious that we couldn’t take the show with Brody as a character beyond the first season.  But then we realized how rich that mine was and how much more there was left to get out of it. — Howard Gordon, co-creator of *Homeland *(Milzoff)

If there is something ultimately distinctive about television it has to be in its strange handling of time and in our apprehension of this fact. I don’t mean merely its ability to transmit live images, or its collusion with the rhythms and seasonal adjustments of the local and national everyday, although its relations with these things is certainly odder than is usually acknowledged.

I’ve been catching a number of butterflies on my television in the last year or so, but they bear little resemblance to the ones that I see from time to time in my backyard. Sitting through an episode from Season Three of Dexter last fall, I was struck by the self-reflective serial killer’s sudden contemplation of “the butterfly effect,” that “a butterfly [could] beats its wings in Brazil and set off a storm in Florida.”

October 2008 At the Quality American TV conference in Dublin back in 2004 Maire Messenger Davies highlighted a key problem in studying television: namely, the question of availability. She mentioned NBC’s critically acclaimed series I’ll Fly Away (1991-93), which lived on in memory but not in any tangible form like DVD or video.