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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017
Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017
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Season to taste: Television cookery programmes, aesthetics and seasonality
More LessAbstractThis article considers seasonality in relation to television and its more familiar context, food. From the perspective of television aesthetics, moving beyond dominant evaluative conceptions of ‘aesthetics’ often found in studies of TV cookery shows, it argues that selected recent cookery programmes warrant and reward aesthetic attention. Specifically, considering examples fronted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Nigel Slater, this article contends that such shows evoke ‘seasonality’ in myriad ways and by varied means, many of which fall under the realm of the aesthetic. These programmes do more than offer cookery instruction or educate the viewer with regard to when particular foods are in and out of season. They stand as legitimate works of TV art which contribute to an aesthetic appreciation of changing seasons. They contribute to the perpetuation of cultural seasonality, offer vital and powerful reminders of our natural-world seasonality, and encourage the audience to celebrate both.
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Scheduling for Christmas: How an ‘ordinary’ piece of television became extraordinary
Authors: Paul Tucker, Helen Wolfenden and Howard SercombeAbstractIs Mise Michelle/I am Michelle (2011) is an hour-long television programme commissioned for BBC Alba, the BBC’s Gaelic language television channel. Filmed in the summer of 2011, the scheduling intentions were very open, as needs must where frequent replays are financially necessary. Unexpectedly, however, the programme was scheduled for the prime 9 p.m. slot on Christmas Day 2011. In the process, the programme was transformed: from ‘ordinary television’, in Bonner’s concept, to prime television. Understood originally in Lotz’s terms as ‘mainstream niche’, the programme had to carry the weight of bringing the mainstream to the niche in this high-value slot. Originally conceived as a story of ancestry along the lines of Who Do You Think You Are? (2010–), in its new Christmas clothing the programme becomes a bearer for a more universal longing for home, for family, for community and for belonging. This article explores these transformations, and the decision-making that led to them, through interviews with the primary practitioners involved in the production process, from commissioning through to scheduling. In particular, the under-researched role of scheduling in the encoding/decoding transaction (Hall [1973] 1993) gets some much needed attention.
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Festive television in the socialist world: From media events to media holidays
Authors: Simon Huxtable, Sabina Mihelj, Alice Bardan and Sylwia SzostakAbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which socialist television sought to create a sense of extraordinary temporality out of the ordinary through its coverage of historical commemorations, national days, and secular and religious festivities. To do so, it develops the concept of ‘media holidays’, which draws on Dayan and Katz’s seminal notion of media events, and the work of other scholars of media ritual, to show the ways in which socialist television created extraordinary temporalities through scheduling. Drawing on schedule analysis and archival documents, the article compares the cases of television in East Germany, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It examines a number of different kinds of media holiday on socialist television, and shows how different kinds of holidays and commemoration were marked with different kinds of programming in which entertainment played an important role.
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Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?: Mad Men and the dangers of seasonal nostalgia
More LessAbstractContinuing an association between nostalgia and Christmas that originated after the reign of Queen Victoria in England, seasonal Christmas episodes on television have traditionally woven nostalgia and characters’ journeys home into their plotlines. These plotlines seem to take a limited number of predictable forms that have remained remarkably consistent throughout television history. Regardless of the specific plot type, the episodes conclude with a heart-warming, optimistic ending that finds characters at home, happy and fulfilled. AMC’s Mad Men (2007−2010), a show often considered to be emblematic of the so-called third golden age of US television, defies this tradition through its Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes that aggressively subvert viewer expectations. It often presents situations resembling those found in traditional seasonal episodes only to lead characters to moments of distress and discord rather than contentment and reconciliation. In these episodes, nostalgia has negative consequences, and is portrayed as the disease it was originally believed to be. Meanwhile, home is a site of danger, defilement, and destruction. It is not until Mad Men’s final episode that characters are ‘cured’ of their nostalgia and the show delivers the type of uplifting ending that has been repeatedly deferred.
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Crime TV’s undercover Halloween
More LessAbstractIn order to interrogate patterns of seasonal television, this article looks at Halloween themed episodes of long-running American crime television programmes such as CSI (2000−2015), Bones (2005−) and, in particular, Criminal Minds (2005−). It argues that Halloween on crime TV is predictably transgressive – offering conventional fantasies of masquerade and consumption, rather than subversive challenges to the genre’s status quo. On crime television, Halloween has harnessed the logic of the urban legend to present nostalgic visions of a festival that has become fundamentally televisual in nature. The thematic underpinnings of this televisual holiday are anxieties around children in public space and the ritual re-imagining of the risks they face when celebrating Halloween.
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Summer loving? Female-orientated comedy drama, ITV and seasonal performance
More LessAbstractBritish summer broadcasting has traditionally been (light) entertainment focused and has been the subject of lower expectations from producers, reviewers and audiences, to the extent that a summer broadcasting slot might be considered to impair the viewing figures and critical acclaim of a series. This article examines the decisions made by the British broadcaster ITV during 2004–2009, in the first years of its unification as a single plc, to reschedule the screenings of several drama productions – including my case studies Jane Hall (2006), Monday Monday (2009) and Mister Eleven (2009) – and considers the impact of their summer scheduling in relation to gender, genre and institutional strategy. It draws on Bennett’s work on genre, television, gender and distinction, company reports, critical reviews and audience responses to argue that ITV’s historical dependence on and appeal to a populist, often feminine, audience can be seen to create friction with its ambitions. The article concludes that the default association of ‘quality television’ with masculine interests and values, as well as concerns about financial risk in a challenging economic climate, led ITV into risk-averse scheduling decisions where contemporary femaleorientated comedy-drama series are concerned, which reinforce traditional notions of scheduling and programme quality.
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Reviews
Authors: Missy Molloy, Rachel Mizsei Ward, Arin Keeble and Jilly Boyce KayAbstractCOMPLEX TV: THE POETICS OF CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION STORYTELLING, JASON MITTELL (2015) New York and London: New York University Press, 391 pp., ISBN: 9780814769607, p/bk £18.00
BRITISH TELEVISION ANIMATION 1997–2010: DRAWING COMIC TRADITION, VAN NORRIS (2014) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 231 pp., ISBN: 9781137330932, h/bk, £60.00
BREAKING BAD AND DIGNITY: UNITY AND FRAGMENTATION IN THE SERIAL TELEVISION DRAMA, ELLIOTT LOGAN (2015) New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 181 pp., ISBN: 9781137513724, h/bk £60/eBook £47.94
CONSUMERISM ON TV: POPULAR MEDIA FROM THE 1950S TO THE PRESENT, ALISON HULME (ED.) (2015) London and New York: Routledge (Ashgate), 184 pp., ISBN: 9781472447562, h/bk, £60.00
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