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Television/Death intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead. Section One looks at the representation of death, dying and the afterlife on television, in historical and contemporary factual television (from around the world) and in US television drama. Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how the long form seriality and narrative complexity of television, from family melodramas to the ghost serial, allows for an emotionally realist representation of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma. Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of recorded sounds' and images' propensity to 'bring back the dead'. It argues that television is the posthumous medium par excellence and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.
The women on television series are spectacularly feminine. They are the most beautiful doctors, lawyers, detectives, scientists, queens, fashion-writers, moms, Victorian ladies, and witches ever seen. Focusing on series that celebrate empowered women from mainstay crime dramas such as Bones (2005-2017) and The Rookie: Feds (2022-2023) to teen dramas, with series such as Sex Education (2019-2023) and Charmed (2018-2022), to romance series such as Bridgerton (2020-), this book analyzes the onscreen portrayals of femme, femininity, and feminism. Specifically, this book maps the televisual trends that objectify femininity and those that visualize femininity as subject, working to demonstrate how televisual style constructs femininity through its onscreen portrayals.
The first volume to provide an interdisciplinary, comprehensive history of twentieth and twenty-first century Gothic culture.
Rewriting Television suggests that it is time for a radical overhaul of television studies. If we don’t want to merely recycle the same old methods, approaches, and tropes for another twenty years, we need to consider major changes in why and how we do our work. This book offers a new model for doing television (or film or media) studies that can be taken up around the world. It synthesizes ideas from production studies, screenwriting studies, and the idea of “writing otherwise” to create a new way of studying television. It presents an entirely original approach to working with practitioner interviews that has never been seen before in film, television, or media studies. It then offers a series of original reflections on form, story, and voice and considers how these reflections could shape future writing in our discipline(s). Ultimately, this is a book of ideas. This book asks “what if?” This book is an opportunity to imagine differently.
This widely-respected history of British television drama is an indispensable guide to the significant developments in the area; from its beginnings on the BBC in the 1930s and 40s to its position in the twenty-first century, as television enters a multichannel digital era. Embracing the complete spectrum of television drama, Lez Cooke places programmes in their social, political and industrial contexts, and surveys the key dramas, writers, producers and directors. Thoroughly revised and updated, this second edition includes new images and case studies, new material on British television drama before 1936, an expanded bibliography and a substantial new chapter that explores the renaissance in the quality, variety and social ambition of television drama in Britain since 2002. Comprehensive and accessible, this book will be of value to anyone interested in the rich history of British television and modern drama.
In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax. By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life.
Chris Comerford explores cinematic digital television as an artistic classification and an academic object of study, and illuminates the slippage in definitions of previously understood media forms. The growth of television as an artistic, informative medium has given rise to shifts in the aesthetic style of the programmes we watch, and this book outlines these shifts along with the contemporary debates and critical theory surrounding them. Comerford looks at the forms and aesthetics of television, the production standards influencing streaming television and the agency of audiences, and provides case studies of key TV shows illustrating these shifts, including Twin Peaks: The Return, WandaVision, Hacks and Russian Doll. Navigating the levels of production and reception in cinematic digital television, the book uses film-inspired TV as a lightning rod for understanding our narrative screen media landscape and the classifications we use to negotiate it. As an essential reading for both scholars and students of media and television studies, this book provides a much-needed consideration of the changing landscape of television.
Bringing together scholars from film and television studies, media and cultural studies, literary studies, medical humanities, and disability studies, Discourses of Care collectively examines how the analysis of media texts and practices can contribute to scholarship on and understandings of health and social care, and how existing research focusing on the ethics of care can inform our understanding of media. Featuring a critical introductory essay and 13 specially commissioned original chapters, this is the first edited collection to address the relationship between media and the concept and practice of care and caregiving. Contributors consider the representation of care and caregiving thr...
In terms of visual impact, television has often been regarded as inferior to cinema. It has been characterised as sound-led and consumed by a distracted audience. Today, it is tempting to see the rise of HD television as ushering in a new era of spectacular television. Yet since its earliest days, the medium has been epitomised by spectacle and offered its viewers diverse forms of visual pleasure. Looking at the early promotion of television and the launch of colour broadcasting, Spectacular Television traces a history of television as spectacular attraction, from its launch to the contemporary age of surround sound, digital effects and HD screens. In focusing on the spectacle of nature, landscape, and even our own bodies on television via explorations of popular television dramas, documentary series and factual entertainment, and ambitious natural history television, Helen Wheatley answers the questions: what is televisual pleasure, and how has television defined its own brand of spectacular aesthetics?
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/ philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.