TV has traditionally been seen as domestic, and often as social: stereotypical images of families gathered around the television readily come to mind. While we may think such images nostalgic in an era where many households and individuals are multi-screen, even those living alone can watch in company via social media.
Ten years is not very long in the immortal life of a vampire – with or without a soul – but in the life, or afterlife, of a television series, it feels like an eternity.
There is no doubt that the 2012-2013 TV season was the year of Turkish TV series on Greek Television. This year, Turkish TV series seem to follow with mathematical precision an order of causality that leads to their gradual disappearance.
In a moment of frustration a few weeks ago I posted the following status update to Facebook: ‘Today’s teaching has felt like dealing with school children with half of my second years turning up to seminars without having done the screening or having been to the lecture.’ To be honest such moments of frustration are relatively rare for me. I love teaching and my students are inspiring individuals to be around.
Fifty years ago this weekend, BBC2 began, with a technological fiasco. Everything that could go wrong, did , from power supply to headline reading. These were the days when signals were routinely interrupted, aerials regularly required agile tweaking, and repairmen stood ready to come to your home.
WARNING – THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS. I was pleased to see Anthony Smith and CST finally engage with what I’ve described elsewhere (slightly hyperbolically) as the televisual equivalent of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe : T rue Detective . I agree with much of what Smith says about the pleasures of what he calls its genre uncertainty, but I want to take a different tack with it
Before sitting down to write, I decided to cast an eye over this week’s television schedule, alighting almost immediately on two examples of a genre which has long confounded and intrigued me: the celebrity documentary.
As the UK moves closer to the end of its annual academic teaching period and we are becoming reflective and perhaps also a bit optimistic about the future, I am struck by one big question: what does it mean to teach television today? A few weeks ago, in his CSTonline Blog, Toby Miller made a case for the continuation of television in its most traditional of forms.
For those not familiar with EastEnders , the last few months may nevertheless have yielded glimpses of Dot Cotton (Branning) via the actress, June Brown, who has played her since July 1985 and who has been publicising her autobiography.
I have taken a strange interest in ratings in the last year or so, an interest that admittedly developed not long after I started watching the first season of Hannibal . For all of its critical acclaim—here’s a recent example from Matt Zoller Seitz —the show seemed like it would meet an untimely death at the hands of network cancellation last June.
It is ten years since the final episode of HBO’s hugely popular series, Sex and the City (1998 – 2004) aired*. *This anniversary is being marked by a conference held at the University of Roehampton next week on the 4 th of April, entitled ‘ Sex and the City Ten Years On: