Steven Zaillian’s Ripley (2024), available on Netflix, arrives with the familiar signals of prestige adaptation: a canonical literary source (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley), European locations, meticulous production design, and a controlled tonal palette. Yet one of its most distinctive features is not narrative content but tempo.
Timing does often seem to be everything, particularly when there is a very limited foreknowledge of events.
What do television shows look like in our mind’s eye? Let me start with a personal experience. Two shows that I enjoyed immensely – Sex Education and The Mandalorian – seemed, to me at least, to have reached satisfying conclusions in their third and second seasons, respectively. But not in the same way.
The fourth episode in the third series of Blue Lights begins in the home of Police Constables Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke) and Stevie Neill (Martin McCann). They are colleagues at the fictional Blackthorn station in Belfast and, surely to the relief of anyone witnessing their tentative courtship over series one and two, are now finally […]
There are a million stories in the Second City. This is just one Happy New Year! I hope that you’ve all had wonderful holidays spent with those dearest to you, doing things that you enjoy. And now it’s time to start imparting/absorbing (delete as applicable) wisdom, knowledge and experience about television again as you all head back to your campuseses campi places where all those university buildings are grouped together.
Like, I suspect, many of you reading this blog, I often find myself watching some kind of nature webcam.
Though Canadian multiculturalism is often more an aspirational ideal than practice as I’ve found in earlier research (Beattie 2025), as the above quotes shows, the Canadian government have included it as part of their legal code. It is also the case that Canada is a common location for American media productions and has been for some time (Matheson 2005).
Though perhaps most recently in the public eye due to one of its co-creators’ appalling transphobia, Father Ted (1995-1998, Channel 4) is still considered to be one of the most popular British sitcoms (Harrison 2018). And it is that aspect of the series, its perceived-British identity, that I shall discuss in this blog.
This blog was originally published on WFTHN As part of my PhD research, which explores and analyses representations of women in the Third Golden Age of Television,[i] I have been watching many female-centric series. During this research, I have noticed the recurring presence of a narratological device that was virtually non-existent before this period: the voiceover.
Special Issue edited by Amandine D’Azevedo, Anissa Medjebeur and David Roche (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, Institut Universitaire de France) This special issue of Mise au point will focus on fight choreographies in films and television series.
Last week, I was in the incredibly privileged position of attending a panel discussion on the future of the BBC in the House of Lords, brought together by the British Broadcasting Challenge, a group of academics and industry insiders who’d like to see the continuation of the BBC, though they recognise that some reforms are […]