At some point during the first episode of Judd Apatow’s new Netflix series Love – co-written and co-produced with Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin – the show lost me: or rather, to be more precise, it irritated me, because in fact, it didn’t lose me at all.
Is VHS essential to the study of television? This is a debate I’m currently engaged in with the institution I work for which desires to ‘upgrade’ the audio-visual facilities in teaching rooms and sees the removal of VHS as part of this. This upgrade would result in all rooms having DVD and Blu-ray players, but video would be gone;
In the current febrile atmosphere of the debate about whether the UK should be “in” or “out” of Europe, it is interesting to look back at how TV has shown and shaped our relationships with other countries.
@james_a_bennett Television production is often thought of as taking place either in the studio, on location or in the edit suite.
When it comes to television, I have always been a ‘glancer’ rather than a ‘gazer’. Born somewhere between Generation X and Generation Y, I grew up with what is now commonly referred to as ‘traditional’ television. As a child, much of my television consumption served as accompaniment: I remember drawing pictures or setting up my toys in the living room, so I could enjoy the pleasant flow of television programmes.
Released in its entirety on Netflix on December 18 th , 2015, the 10-episode long crime documentary, Making a Murderer – directed by Columbia University film graduates Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos – quickly became the ‘must see’ global TV hit of Christmas and the New Year.
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.
Channel 4’s recent foray into foreign-language television drama, Deutschland 83 , highlights a preoccupation of contemporary culture, and of contemporary television, with identity. The mediation of this theme/meme through popular television in particular has taken many dramatic and representational forms.
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?
The theory/practice ‘divide’ has long bedeviled media studies. But this divide cannot be sustained in the face of new concerns in the field. Studies of gaming and computing emphasize issues that studies of audiovisual media have been able to suppress: questions of the body, of the haptic, of physical engagement, of technologies and their complicated relationship with the humans who use them… or are used by them.
