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The complete and groundbreaking "The L Word" is now out on DVD and this book makes the perfect companion, covering the series in its entirety. "Loving The L Word" picks up where Reading "The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television" (I.B. Tauris, 2006) left off. With new, updated chapters by many of the same television writers and scholars who contributed to the first volume, as well as essays by some newcomers, "Loving The L Word" explores the series' quantum contribution to the ongoing evolution of queer television. Whether you loved "The L Word", hated it, or loved to hate it, this book recognizes that the show transformed the post-Ellen LGBT television landscape, fulfilling a long-neglected, visceral desire for lesbian stories and images. In the process, it reshaped the communities that follow and talk about queer television and care about the narratives and characters that drive it. Including complete Character/Actor, Film/TV and Episode guides, the book also proceeds from the understanding that while "The L Word' ended in 2009 it manages to live on - in the lives of its fans, as well as in a new reality spin-off, "The Real L Word".
"The Queer Politics of Television" is a radical book, which brings together the fields of political theory and television studies. In one of the first books to do so, Samuel A. Chambers exposes and explores the cultural politics of television by treating television shows - including "Six Feet Under", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Desperate Housewives", "The L Word", and "Big Love" - as serious, important texts and reading them in detail through the lens of queer theory. Chambers makes the case for the profound significance of 'the cultural politics of television': the way in which the text of a television show itself engages with the politics of its day. He argues for queer theory's essential contribution to any understanding of the political, and initiates a larger project of queer television studies, treading the same path as queer film studies. This book makes an important and fresh contribution to queer theory and to the understanding of television as politics.
Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television’s prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection’s rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly “very special” episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.
Don and Betty Draper live in a picture-perfect world. He is a hard-living advertising executive - a 'mad man' - on the fast track. She's a Bryn Mawr graduate and former fashion model, now a suburban princess, mother of three children. If they've everything, why are they so unhappy? Why is their dream come true not enough? This book explores, analyses, celebrates the world of "Mad Men" in all its aspects, and includes an interview with it's Executive Producer and an episode guide. Every few years a new television program comes along to capture and express the zeitgeist. "Mad Men" is now that show. Since premiering in July 2007, it's won many awards and is syndicated across the globe. Its impr...
Promoted as a 'disturbingly perfect' and 'deeply shallow' television drama and created by Ryan Murphy, who is also behind the teen musical show Glee, Nip/Tuck has been one of the most popular and controversial shows on cable TV. The misadventures and soap opera-esque entanglements of the lives of plastic surgeons Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) and Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) won Golden Globes and boycotts from the American Family Association. Yet, as this first full critical examination of Nip/Tuck shows, ironically the show is an examination of the American family and its many definitions, anxieties and complications of gender and sexuality, and the class issues and illusions surrounding the American dream. It is also revealed as a glorious televisual melodrama, full of Gothic tropes and contemporary sensationalism and at the same time, a deeply misanthropic satire on the American dream with a sometimes highly problematic portrayal of women and minorities. The book also features an interview with frequent Nip/Tuck director Elodie Keene and an episode guide.
The Doctor may have regenerated on many occasions, but so too has Doctor Who. Moving with the times, the show has evolved across fifty years...New Dimensions of Doctor Who explores contemporary developments in Doctor Who's music, design and representations of technology, as well as issues of showrunner authority and star authorship. Putting these new dimensions in context means thinking about changes in the TV industry such as the rise of branding and transmedia storytelling. Along with its faster narrative pace, and producer/fan interaction via Twitter, 'new Who' also has a new home at Roath Lock Studios, Cardiff Bay. Studying the 'Doctor Who Experience' in its Cardiff setting, and consider...
Apart from its brilliance as television, it's amazing what "Deadwood" gets away with. This acclaimed series from HBO, which premiered in 2004, is set in the teeming outlaw camp of 'Deadwood'. It has been described by "Variety" as 'a vulgar, gritty, at times downright nasty take on the Old West brimming with all the dark genius that series creator and sceenwriter extraordinaire David Milch has at his fingertips'. All this and more. The international cast of authoritative contributors assess "Deadwood's" many facets: its profane language, its characters, from Al Swearengen (who lives up to his name) and Calamity Jane, to B.B. Farnham and Mr. Wu, its place in the western genre, "Deadwood" and serial fiction, prostitution, the making of American civil society, "Deadwood's" Chinese, the opening credits, Reverend Smith and much more. Episode and character guides complete the book - the "Deadwood" companion for fans and students to swear by.
Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form. Television Aesthetics and Style provides a unique and vital intervention in the field, raising key questions about television's artistic properties and possibilities. Through a series of case-studies by internationally renowned scholars, the collection takes a radical step forward in understanding TV's stylistic achievements.
Jane Puts It in a Box
Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: magna cum laude, Dresden Technical University, language: English, abstract: Both the "crisis of masculinity" and "quality TV" have been popular discourses in academia in recent years. Many of these contemporary quality TV series feature male anti-heroes at the center of their narratives. This dissertation argues that the constructions of masculinity in series such as "Breaking Bad" and "The Walking Dead" are informed by the Western hero. Furthermore, the dissertation links this recourse to an arguably outmoded model of masculinity to recent crisis tendencies in the USA, most notably the recent economic downturn and the aftermath of September 11 2001. Moreover, the return of the Western hero can be understood as a process of remasculinization in light of the crisis of masculinity.