When we are on stage, we are in the here and now. —Konstantine Stanislavski In a pivotal scene of Fringe ’s “Over There,” Part 1 (2.21), Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) meets his now-graying mother for the first time since he was a child. Ordinarily you would not need years of training at the Actors Studio to know how to play such an emotionally-rich encounter.
One of the aims of the ‘Spaces of Television’ project is to explore the relationship between sites of production and the content and form of (British) television drama. We have already seen, in the papers at our two symposia to date, how there is much more to this relationship than the overly simplistic dichotomy between live studio-based drama on the one hand and drama shot using film and film production methods on the other.
At the moment I’m rather glad that I’m not teaching one of my favourite courses, ‘Contemporary Issues in Television Studies’. This was the kind of course in which you try and persuade students that learning about legislation, regulation, governance and institutional structures is not boring but actually more relevant (as viewers and aspirants to a television career) than almost anything else they will do. Thanks to willing volunteers from the
I think when Alex [Gansa] and I first conceived the series, it seemed obvious that we couldn’t take the show with Brody as a character beyond the first season. But then we realized how rich that mine was and how much more there was left to get out of it. — Howard Gordon, co-creator of *Homeland *(Milzoff)
If there is something ultimately distinctive about television it has to be in its strange handling of time and in our apprehension of this fact. I don’t mean merely its ability to transmit live images, or its collusion with the rhythms and seasonal adjustments of the local and national everyday, although its relations with these things is certainly odder than is usually acknowledged.
I’ve been catching a number of butterflies on my television in the last year or so, but they bear little resemblance to the ones that I see from time to time in my backyard. Sitting through an episode from Season Three of Dexter last fall, I was struck by the self-reflective serial killer’s sudden contemplation of “the butterfly effect,” that “a butterfly [could] beats its wings in Brazil and set off a storm in Florida.”
October 2008 At the Quality American TV conference in Dublin back in 2004 Maire Messenger Davies highlighted a key problem in studying television: namely, the question of availability. She mentioned NBC’s critically acclaimed series I’ll Fly Away (1991-93), which lived on in memory but not in any tangible form like DVD or video.
March 2009. On July 5 2008, the National Film Theatre in London played host to a remarkable event. It was a talk given by one of the central figures in the history of British television drama, David Rose.
Making and Remaking Television Classics, 20 March 2009, University of Warwick Rachel Moseley writes: Most people have a sense of what might count, for them, as ‘classic television’. From long-running serial drama like Coronation Street , to Sunday evening dramas such as Upstairs Downstairs and Pride and Prejudice , or the nostalgic pull of 1960s children’s programming
In this short reflection on the study of television fictions, I endorse and qualify the recognition by several commentators in recent years that the boundaries between cinema and television have become blurred and require a re-visiting of key concepts.
THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS Someone once asked me “What’s the difference between apocalyptic fiction and dystopia?” I had to think about it for a bit, but then I came up with, “The world goes to hell suddenly in apocalyptic fiction and the people who remain have to deal with it. In dystopias the world has been hellish for quite some time and dealing with it has become a routine.”