It’s been one of those days. The Christmas holidays had been lurking around the corner, and finally I had some free time on my hands, between the formal end of the academic calendar of 2015, and the big celebration rush that we tend to throw ourselves into, meeting up with family and long-time friends.Free time – priceless. And somewhere, somehow, I had come across an announcement that a new SciFi show would be airing on SyFy;

Mad Men [is] arguably the dominant TV drama of its time. — Time critic James Poniewozik, 24 June 2015

Episode 4 of the Icelandic drama Trapped (2015), currently showing on BBC 4, finished with a spectacular avalanche. The avalanche had been predicted by one of the characters who then triggered it in the hope of diverting it away from the town. But the event itself generated hardly any suspense about the fate of characters who might be caught in its path.

Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black (OITNB) (2013 –) has gained a reputation for unabashedly screening female faces and body-types that centric media often overlooks. From its opening sequence, OITNB spotlights a vast array of female bodies.

In our ‘post-television’ age when the appearance of television drama and film, both shot on digital camera, is increasingly homogenous, ‘old’ multi-camera studio drama must seem like more of an oddity than ever before.

At some point during the first episode of Judd Apatow’s new Netflix series Love – co-written and co-produced with Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin – the show lost me: or rather, to be more precise, it irritated me, because in fact, it didn’t lose me at all.

Is VHS essential to the study of television? This is a debate I’m currently engaged in with the institution I work for which desires to ‘upgrade’ the audio-visual facilities in teaching rooms and sees the removal of VHS as part of this. This upgrade would result in all rooms having DVD and Blu-ray players, but video would be gone;

In the current febrile atmosphere of the debate about whether the UK should be “in” or “out” of Europe, it is interesting to look back at how TV has shown and shaped our relationships with other countries.

@james_a_bennett Television production is often thought of as taking place either in the studio, on location or in the edit suite.

When it comes to television, I have always been a ‘glancer’ rather than a ‘gazer’. Born somewhere between Generation X and Generation Y, I grew up with what is now commonly referred to as ‘traditional’ television. As a child, much of my television consumption served as accompaniment: I remember drawing pictures or setting up my toys in the living room, so I could enjoy the pleasant flow of television programmes.

Released in its entirety on Netflix on December 18 ^th , 2015, the 10-episode long crime documentary, *Making a Murderer *– directed by Columbia University film graduates Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos – quickly became the ‘must see’ global TV hit of Christmas and the New Year.