As Halloween came and went, various images of costumes circulated on social media. One of my favourites showed a mini-Predator with the caption ‘Not every girl wants to be a princess.’ My first response was to laugh in recognition. My second was to think about the kind of princess I might have wanted to be. The ones who were around in popular media when I was young were Leia and Diana Prince.

Spying on Spies was an international conference held in London over 3-5 September 2015, organised collaboratively by myself and Toby Manning (Open University).  The aim was to bring together a diverse array of international research on the spy thriller, one of the defining popular genres of the 20 ^th and early 21 ^st centuries which has provided an alternative lens onto broader cultural and geopolitical shifts

A few months ago the LA Times ran a piece entitled ‘Women at the CW work to keep sexual violence off their shows’. It detailed the discussions of the ‘Running the Show: The Women Executive Producers of the CW’ panel held at The CW Summer TCA Tour in August.

It was a quiet TV night and New Tricks (2003 – 2015) was coming to an end. In the Cold Case office, the three police detectives, brought out of retirement, and their younger boss were solving the case.

On July 18, 2015, Lena Dunham shared the following diagnosis for the title character from Daria (1997-2002), MTV’s cult animated series, with her two million Instagram followers: ‘I love Daria just as much as the next child of the 90s but I am also concerned not enough of us realized she was rude and almost definitely had clinical depression/could have benefitted from therapy and maybe some medication.

Mapping medical television is a complicated task.

The doctoral thesis is the most problematic aspect of academic endeavour, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unlike the sciences, where a doctoral student is typically part of a team attached to a research project, in our area it is typically a lone pursuit… and a very lonely one at times.

Mapping medical television is a complicated task.

Actors of East Asian descent have traditionally not received much screen time in Anglophone television drama: high-profile roles for such actors in British television drama have been, and continue to be, elusive (Knox forthcoming). Across the Atlantic, as Darrell Hamamoto established in 1994, ‘Asian Americans on network television programs exist primarily for the convenience and benefit of the Euro-American lead players.’ (206). And still today,

(Cat)Fishing for Love Catfish: The TV Show (MTV, 2012-) is a reality programme based on the documentary film Catfish (2010) which followed a young man building a romantic relationship with a woman he had met on Facebook, but never seen in real life.

In this post, I want to explore television programming. Not the kind of programming we might typically associate with TV (i.e. the content, or the act of commissioning and scheduling) but the sort of programming that happens behind-the-digital-scenes; the computer programming, or coding , of the interfaces, databases and algorithms which increasingly frame our experiences of television today.