Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Television - History & Criticism

2016 Winner - BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) Best Book

What makes British television crime drama so perennially popular, both in the UK and internationally? What are the attractions and pleasures of these shows? How are detectives positioned in relation to viewers' national and collective experience of the 'everyday'? This book addresses these questions, examining the trends evident in a range of series - including A Touch of Frost, Lewis, Cracker, Life on Mars and the more recent Luther - in the context of their broader social...

Justice Performed: Courtroom TV Shows and the Theaters of Popular Law is the first study of the reality TV genre to trace its theatrical legacy, connecting the phenomenon of the daytime TV shows to a long history of theatrical trials staged to educate audiences in pedagogies of citizenship. It examines how judge TV fulfills part of law's performative function: that of providing a participatory spectacle the public can recognize as justice. Since it debuted in 1981 with The People's Court, which made famous its star jurist, Judge Joseph A. Wapner, dozens of judges have made...

Russia, one of the most ethno-culturally diverse countries in the world, provides a rich case study on how globalisation and associated international trends are disrupting, and causing the radical rethinking of approaches to, inter-ethnic cohesion. The book highlights the importance of television broadcasting in shaping national discourse and the place of ethno-cultural diversity within it. It argues that television's role here has been reinforced, rather than diminished, by the rise of new media technologies. Through an analysis of a wide range of news and other television programmes, the...

Anyone who was not in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city experienced the disaster as a media event, a flood of images pouring across television and computer screens. The twenty-four-hour news cycle created a surplus of representation that overwhelmed viewers and complicated understandings of the storm, the flood, and the aftermath. As time passed, documentary and fictional filmmakers took up the challenge of explaining what had happened in New Orleans, reaching beyond news reports to portray the lived experiences of survivors of Katrina. But while...

Justice Performed: Courtroom TV Shows and the Theaters of Popular Law is the first study of the reality TV genre to trace its theatrical legacy, connecting the phenomenon of the daytime TV shows to a long history of theatrical trials staged to educate audiences in pedagogies of citizenship. It examines how judge TV fulfills part of law's performative function: that of providing a participatory spectacle the public can recognize as justice. Since it debuted in 1981 with The People's Court, which made famous its star jurist, Judge Joseph A. Wapner, dozens of judges have made...

One of the most successful series of its time, Have Gun-Will Travel became a cultural phenomenon in the late 1950s and made its star, Richard Boone, a nationwide celebrity. The series offered viewers an unusual hero in the mysterious, Shakespeare-spouting gunfighter known only as -Paladin- and garnered a loyal fan base, including a large female following. In Have Gun-Will Travel, film scholar Gaylyn Studlar draws on a remarkably wide range of episodes from the series' six seasons to show its sophisticated experimentation with many established conventions of the Western....

Airing on CBS for fourteen seasons (1979-93), Knots Landing was a spinoff of the popular drama Dallas, but ultimately ran longer and took a very different tone on domestic, social, and economic issues than its predecssor. In the first full-length scholarly study of Knots Landing, Nick Salvato situates the series in its economic and industrial contexts, addresses its surprisingly progressive relationship to the American politics of its period, offers close formal interpretations of noteworthy episodes, and unpacks the pleasures of the program's sensuous...

The Sesame Effect details the wide-ranging work of Sesame Workshop and its productions across the world. With an emphasis on impact and evidence from research on projects in low- and middle-income countries, the book tells the stories behind the development of an international family of Muppet characters created for the locally produced adaptations of Sesame Street.

Each chapter highlights the educational message of international co-productions and presents the cultural context of each project. Readers will understand the specific needs of children living in a given...

In the late 2000s, television no longer referred to an object to be watched; it had transformed into content to be streamed, downloaded, and shared. Tens of millions of viewers have "cut the cord," abandoned cable television, tuned into online services like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, and also watch pirated movies and programmes at an unprecedented rate. The idea that the Internet will devastate the television and film industry in the same way that it gutted the music industry no longer seems farfetched. The television industry, however, remains driven by outmoded market-based business...