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.
In 2013, Carol Vernallis published a brilliant book called Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video and the New Digital Cinema . In it, she eloquently describe the ‘media swirl’ which characterises the contemporary audiovisual landscape: characterised by heightened sonic and visual aesthetics in music and YouTube videos, these forms are impossible to sort into neat generic categories.
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.
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.
It might still seem strange, after all these years, to say that Horace and Pete is television, since it is not available, at the moment, from any network, cable provider or software application. To see it one has to pay for each episode and download it from Louis C. K.’s website. But it is clearly a television show.
I feel I should start this blog with an admission: I am a lifelong X-Files fan. I first watched it at the age of 12, and over 20 years later I’m as obsessed with Mulder and Scully as I was then. The news last year that the series was coming back for a 6 episode event season was met with a combination of excitement and consternation by fans (me included). Would Season 10 pick up where I Want to Believe (2008) left off?
It’s 2015, and from Hollywood’s Black Mass (2015) to TV’s The Americans (FX, 2013-), Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014-) and Show Me a Hero (HBO, 2015) – the 1980s as an era have become one of the hottest cultural sujets de jour.
The burning question was who goes and who gets left behind. — Former U.S. Army Captain Stuart Herrington in the American Experience’s ‘Last Days of Vietnam’ Award-winning producer-director, Rory Kennedy’s latest documentary, ‘Last Days of Vietnam,’ dramatically recreates the chaotic endgame and resulting moral quandary that accompanied America’s involvement in the Second Indochina War.
The current U.S. television season has seen the introduction of two new network sitcoms with the same basic premise: Fox’s Dads and CBS’s The Millers both revolve around retired parents who, due to a change in their own circumstances, move in with their grown-up children – a situation that results in constant intergenerational conflict.
Confronted with the challenge of editing an article I had submitted a year ago, writing a paper for a conference for the week after next and starting work on my (now long overdue) book, it was with some horror that I realized I had put myself down to write a blog this week. What was I thinking?
