The trope of aliens visiting Earth has been a science fiction staple since long before the Lumière Brothers first recorded and (re)played a train coming into a station. Aliens coming in peace and trying to hide in plain sight in contemporary (ish) society is slightly newer and can be used to great comedic effect.

WARNING: The following article contains the words “Who” and “Doctor”, but not necessarily in that order.

Using a distinct but, to my mind, representative episode from the series, I enjoyed drawing out the way The Last of Us engages with meanings and configurations of home. “Home,” as the first part of my video essay suggests, can constitute a safe space, sometimes a place of active retreat from danger.

This video essay was created in response to a provocation given at the Critical Studies in Television Conference, 2023: ‘What strategies do marginalised audiences, individuals and communities employ to satisfy their needs?’ The essay focuses on how trans reading as a fandom activity can enrich the storyline and characters on network and cable genre television shows in the face of cisnormative and heterosexist hegemony.

I began learning about and making video essays in June 2023, a few months after I started learning how to play the harp. It strikes me that both endeavors require a certain amount of learning and un-learning: learning a new physicality and new technical skills, and un-learning assumptions about what makes a good finished product. Both the creation of video essays and playing the harp require a literal re-positioning of the body.

A few Fridays back, my wife and I had a joyous day out in Cambridge.

The research project ‘Reaching Young Audiences: Serial Fiction and Cross-Media Storyworlds for Children and Young Audiences’ (RYA) seeks to provide detailed knowledge about the production and reception of film, TV and online fiction for children, tweens and teens through in-depth analysis of the current strategies for creating engaging fiction for young audiences and extensive qualitative case studies of their media use.

Like many other contributors, I caught the TV Dictionary bug during the pandemic (bad pun intended). Making a short video and following a single idea without the pressures and efforts that go into a “traditional” video essay publication (if there is such a thing) and without the requirements of conventional scholarly-theoretical framing, appealed to me and brought a very welcome sense of play into my work routine.

The international co-production Farscape (Syfy 1999-2003; 2004) is perhaps best known for its extensive use of puppets and its (for the time) fairly explicit sexualised content. Shot in Australia with a primarily American writers room for the American Syfy Channel, the series follows American scientist John Crichton (Ben Browder) who is inadvertently thrown into deep space during a test flight.

This blog post has been sparked by the exorbitant amount of video recommendations that YouTube has offered up to me during the last few weeks after I finished season 2 of The Bear (Hulu, 2022—). In these various video essays (see list below), content creators talk about why The Bear is such a ‘perfect’ show or why certain episodes of The Bear are ‘perfect’ episodes.