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

Winner of the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association

Two well-known experts-Newton N. Minow is a former chairperson of the FCC-suggest bold new ways to think about television and its influence on American life and, most urgently, on American children. The authors argue that to defend an unrestricted freedom to broadcast by invoking the First Ammendent is an improper use of constitutional principle. They remind us that broadcasters are required by law to serve the public interest, and that the Supreme Court and Congress have affirmed that service to children is a...

Film noir reflects the fatalistic themes and visual style of hard-boiled novelists and many emigre filmmakers in 1940s and 1950s America, emphasizing crime, alienation, and moral ambiguity. In The Philosophy of TV Noir, Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble argue that the legacy of film noir classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Sleep is also found in episodic television from the mid-1950s to the present.

In this first-of-its-kind collection, contributors from philosophy, film studies, and literature raise fundamental questions about...

The evolution of television news, as told by industry insiders

News is People: The Rise of Local TV News and the Fall of News from New York explores 50 years of television broadcasting to discover the cultural transformations that built the news media we know today. Interviews with 200 station managers, news directors, producers, anchors, and other insiders cover everything from the post-war transition to local news, to the rise of women in broadcasting, to media criticisms and more. Anyone pursuing a career in journalism will find valuable insight in this engaging...

The Rifleman is perhaps the most significant and intelligent of the TV westerns from the late 1950s-an era when the western was the dominant television genre. With its story of a single father raising a son in 1880s New Mexico, The Rifleman offered many alternatives to the conventions of the western. It also embodied many of the genre's contradictions, setting its ideas about domesticity and level-headedness alongside the gun violence adopted by westerns as central to the settling of the West and the creation of America. With its initial episodes written and directed by celebrated auteur...

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company's network television series Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color. The series, part of Walt Disney's quest to re-create American entertainment, premiered October 27, 1954 on ABC and was the longest-lived program in television history. Over the years, Walt Disney's visions have evolved into family-oriented cinema, television, theme parks. From the lovable Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to magical places like Frontierland, Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color generated some of the most popular fads of the era.

In Disney...

One of the most innovative comedic programs to air on television, Monty Python's Flying Circus was a mix of the carnivalesque and the critical. The show has become famous for eschewing many of the conventions of situation comedy, the fully formed and coherent script, narrative closure, predictable characters, and the decorum associated with presentation. Its curious transatlantic popularity defied the assumption that comedy is regional and exclusive, and the show's cult status still lives on in the United States and United Kingdom through reruns, videos, DVDs, and continual reappearances...

Perry Mason was one of the most successful television programs from the 1950s and remains one of the most influential crime melodramas from any period. The show's influence goes far beyond its nine-year tenure (1957-66), the millions of dollars it generated for its creators and for CBS, and the definitive identification it provided its star, Raymond Burr. Perry Mason has become a true piece of Americana, evolving through a formulaic approach that law professors continue to use today as a teaching tool.

In his examination of Perry Mason, author Thomas Leitch looks at why this series has...

The classic situation comedy Bewitched chronicled the everyday lives of Samantha, a witch, and Darrin Stephens, her mortal husband, dramatizing the often-humorous troubles caused by their "mixed marriage." For much of its eight-year run, Bewitched enjoyed strong popularity because of its broad appeal. A parade of magical characters, animals, special effects, and gimmickry used to portray witchcraft ensured that the series appealed strongly to children, while its domestic tensions, feminist undertones, and hints at gay and lesbian subculture grabbed the attention of adult viewers. Bewitched...

Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award

The Midwest of popular imagination is a -Heartland- characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively --; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American--or negatively--as backward, narrow-minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch--the myth of the Heartland endures.

Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to television's promotion and development, programming and...