In deciding what to blog about this week, I was met by a confluence of events.

Hotel Television Room Blues Baggage: Hotel Room Television sounds as if it might be the title of a Ryan Adam or Johnny Cash love-struck ballad. A broken-hearted boy or girl returns to their transitory space to contemplate the end, caught in the slipstream of multi-channel viewing where every station reminds them of the lover just gone.

I’m now seven months into perhaps my most ambitious viewing marathon, the complete Doctor Who cycle, watched at the rate of one episode every day.

My front-runner status to be the next Chair of the BBC Trust has been jeopardized, thanks to someone named Sebastian Coe (Lord Coe to his friends). Casting around for an explanation of this otherwise incomprehensible news, I have rejected obvious reasons, such as his being a former Tory Member of Parliament and a world-famous athlete who presided over the 2012 Olympics.

Somehow, I always find myself approaching big, multi-media conferences with a faint edge of paranoia. How will television studies fare in the context of a set-up which was originally organised around Cinema Studies and in which different kinds of work is often subject to a severe (though sometimes unspoken) hierarchy of value and importance? I guess everyone feels some version of this.

Canadian TV series Orphan Black (2013-) recently reached the end of its second season. The series airs on Space in Canada, BBC America in the US and BBC Three in the UK, as well as in other countries, and has been a flagship show for all three named networks. Orphan Black had an increase in audience share during the second season.

One of the rewards of teaching first-year undergraduates is that you are constantly forced to challenge your own perceptions about the changing nature of contemporary media and society. This year, I noticed a step change in the degree to which a sizeable minority of students seem disconnected from the idea of public service broadcasting in general, and from the BBC in particular.

The UK broadcast of *Supernatural has gone all to hell. I, like many others, was deeply disappointed by the news that Sky Living will not be showing season nine , *which has just completed its broadcast in the US on the CW. At the time of writing there are rumours that Netflix will take up the series – and rumours on the Internet must be true, right?

The original line of this opening was: ‘It might seem odd to devote a television blog to books’; however, following Billy Proctor’s blog last week it now feels almost like bandwagon jumping. For me, though, the two media have always been closely intertwined. The first and most obvious connection is the huge role the literary adaptation has played in the history of television drama output, here in Britain at least.

Sitting in Dublin’s city centre bus station last week, my eye was drawn to the giant billboard advertising the recently released new season of Orange is the New Black (OITNB) (2013-) on Netflix. The poster was relatively non-descript, unlike the range of other promotional materials that feature characters and guiding taglines. The billboard was, one would speculate, intended to capture as wide a market as possible.

[The killing of one black and two white civil rights workers] was an example of what we had really been talking to the volunteers about before the three went missing—that you are going into a murderously violent state and you have to understand that the danger affects you every day, all day long.