In this book, Nathanson examines how contemporary American television and associated digital media depict women's everyday lives as homemakers, career women, and mothers. Her focus on American popular culture from the 1990s through the present reveals two extremes: narratives about women who cannot keep house and narratives about women who only keep house. Nathanson looks specifically at the issue of time in this context and argues that the media constructs panics about domestic time scarcity while at the same time offering solutions for those very panics. Analyzing TV programs such...

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction?

Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral...

Since the early 2000s, Disney Channel has been dominated by original live-action programming popular among tween girls. The shows successes rely not only on their popularity among girl audiences, but also on the development of star personae by girl performers, such as Raven-Symone, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez. In addition, these programs and their performers have spawned lucrative media and merchandising franchises for the Walt Disney Company. This book, then, includes analyses of this Disney Channel programming, as well as Disney corporate reports and executive statements, and Disney...

Anna Froula is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at East Carolina University, USA

Stacy Takacs is Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at Oklahoma State University, USA

Contemporary television has been marked by such exceptional programming that it is now common to hear claims that TV has finally become an art. In Appreciating the Art of Television, Nannicelli contends that televisual art is not a recent development, but has in fact existed for a long time. Yet despite the flourishing of two relevant academic subfields the philosophy of film and television aesthetics there is little scholarship on television, in general, as an art form. This book aims to provide scholars active in television aesthetics with a critical overview of the...

Bringing together well-established scholars of media, political science, sociology, and film to investigate the representation of Washington politics on U.S. television from the mid-2000s to the present, this volume offers stimulating perspectives on the status of representations of contemporary US politics, the role of government and the machinations and intrigue often associated with politicians and governmental institutions. The authors help to locate these representations both in the context of the history of earlier television shows that portrayed the political culture of Washington...

As American television continues to garner considerable esteem, rivalling the seventh art in its "cinematic" aesthetics and the complexity of its narratives, one aspect of its development has been relatively unexamined. While film has long acknowledged its tendency to adapt, an ability that contributed to its status as narrative art (capable of translating canonical texts onto the screen), television adaptations have seemingly been relegated to the miniseries or classic serial. From remakes and reboots to transmedia storytelling, loose adaptations or adaptations which last but a single...