You probably don’t hear it when it happens. Bobby ‘Bacala’ Baccalieri (Steve Schirripa) in ‘Soprano Home Movies’ (Episode 78 in Season 6) James Gandolfini’s death was a shocker.  It came out of the blue.  Late on a Wednesday afternoon, June 19, I was making small talk in a hotel meeting room when my eye glanced towards a large video screen on the side wall.

As part of my ongoing research into uses of ‘blue screen’ and the role of the television designer in ‘Golden Age’ television drama, I want to blog about an episode of a little-known ITV anthology series of the mid 1970s, Shades of Greene (Thames Television, 1975, 1976), which adopted this technique extensively over two series of televised Graham Greene short stories.

We may watch children’s television at two key, if relatively long, periods in our lives. Firstly, when we* are*children, and second if and when we have children.

For those of us watching on this side of the Atlantic, the end is now very nigh for Nashville , ABC’s female country music ensemble drama. With The Good Wife already finished for another season, More 4’sThursday night America drama slot is going to leave quite a gap in my TV schedule.

What is television? I’ve been trying to answer this question by turning to the morning papers. That’s assuming the phrase ‘morning papers’ is not a homonymous typo for ‘mourning papers.’ The Global North is obsessed with pronouncing the end of the medium, even though this is actually a boom time for the industry because of the growing number of dedicated readers in the Global South.

** ** ** (Warning: Contains Spoilers. But ones you can avoid.

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

ABC’s Nashville (2012) and NBC’s *Smash *(2012-13) are two new US serial dramas that have caught my attention over the past year primarily because of the innovative integral role that music and theatrical performance play in both series.

The news of the death of Mick Aston (24 June 2013) came for me with a real sense of loss.

It is often said that we live in Gothic times. In fact, I think that most generations feel this way as the Gothic embodies uncertainty, anxiety and change, emotions and experiences that so often bubble up around us individually and as a society. These unsettling emotions require expression and the Gothic is a perfect outlet.

If horror has a new name on television, then that name is actually something more familiar, something immediately recognizable.