Over the last 15 years, Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies and other publications have featured a range of writing and scholarship about queer issues, identity and representations related to the Whedonverses but there has not yet been a publication dedicated solely to queer Whedon studies.
Television often has subtitles in my household and not just when we are watching Euro-dramas on BBC4. I hadn’t given much thought to this until I read an excellent article on the topic by Maggie Brown in the Royal Television Society’s magazine (Television, May 2016), entitled ‘Sounding off about the unheard’. I thoroughly recommend it, particularly to anyone who teaches film/video making.
In this blog post I want to challenge the separation of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ paratexts as divergent trajectories within what Jonathan Hardy (2011) has named the ‘commercial intertextuality’ of contemporary television series. To do this, I’m going to respond to Jason Mittell’s recent post for In Media Res where he suggests exploring the affective, rather than purely interpretive, meanings that paratexts generate.
I seem to be thinking about the past lately—my last post, in fact, dealt with reboots, restarts, and remakes—and this month has me traveling back there again, this time through a “rabbit hole” at the back of a diner or, more appropriately, through one in my phone and TV. (Am I preoccupied, or am I responding to a cultural preoccupation? This recent article from USA Today suggests that it’s the latter.
As The Good Wife is drawing to a close after seven seasons in the U.K. [Note: As this blog appears in the UK the series has just finished in the US], I found myself wondering why it is that Alicia Florrick has become something of a role model in my life.
A year ago Elke Weissmann wrote about finding time for television, and discussed that when we actually find that limited time in our day to sit down and watch television, we do not actually watch television. Instead we watch a specific programme, whether on DVD or on-demand, and are often prone to binge watching these programmes.
Question: What do the popular sci-fi television series’ Farscape (1999-2003) and Orphan Black (2013 – ) have in common? Answer: Neither featured in my undergraduate class ‘Science Fiction on Television’, but I can explain – I think.
One of the games played in the run-up to the BBC Charter renewal process (a process which is likely to be particularly brutal this time) is for critics to identify those programmes which can be used by BBC negotiators to put the Corporation in its best light, for audiences but particularly for politicians.
Somewhat tentatively , I set off for the gigantic 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Atlanta in early April.
Mad Men [is] arguably the dominant TV drama of its time. — Time critic James Poniewozik, 24 June 2015
