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.
It might still seem strange, after all these years, to say that Horace and Pete is television, since it is not available, at the moment, from any network, cable provider or software application. To see it one has to pay for each episode and download it from Louis C. K.’s website. But it is clearly a television show.
Channel 4’s recent foray into foreign-language television drama, Deutschland 83 , highlights a preoccupation of contemporary culture, and of contemporary television, with identity. The mediation of this theme/meme through popular television in particular has taken many dramatic and representational forms.
I feel I should start this blog with an admission: I am a lifelong X-Files fan. I first watched it at the age of 12, and over 20 years later I’m as obsessed with Mulder and Scully as I was then. The news last year that the series was coming back for a 6 episode event season was met with a combination of excitement and consternation by fans (me included). Would Season 10 pick up where I Want to Believe (2008) left off?
The theory/practice ‘divide’ has long bedeviled media studies. But this divide cannot be sustained in the face of new concerns in the field. Studies of gaming and computing emphasize issues that studies of audiovisual media have been able to suppress: questions of the body, of the haptic, of physical engagement, of technologies and their complicated relationship with the humans who use them… or are used by them.
A decade ago, Bernie Sanders and I arrived on the same plane from New York to a public event in the mid-west. We were allocated shared transport from the airport, so I spent maybe forty minutes with him. The event we were headed to was about media reform. Other speakers included Jesse Jackson, Amy Goodman, Billy Bragg (whom noone had heard of), and Phil Donahue. My friend Bob McChesney was our presiding guru.
** ** For many, Lisa Kudrow will forever be associated with *Friends *(NBC, 1994-2004), the epitome of conservative network television. And yet, with both *The Comeback *(HBO, 2005; 2014) and *Web Therapy *(L Studio; Showtime: 2008—), the performer-writer-producer has shown great willingness to embrace developments in TV brought about by new media, as well as proving herself to be a subtle cultural satirist.
My eyes lit up when I saw her – I’d dreamt of seeing her in the flesh since I first laid eyes on The Bridge ’s detective Saga Noren. Long, fashionably uncombed hair, ethereal beauty, flicking crumbs from her cinnamon bun off her ankle-grazing khaki military coat and leather trousers – this bewitching brunette was the ultimate Saganaut right down to her lace-up ankle boots.
Cast your minds back, if you will, to the year 2010, when the BBC was poised to launch a brand new detective on our screens. Dark and tousle-haired, his deductive powers would prove a constant source of amazement to his more grounded partner (and the viewing audience), while causing the local constabulary no small amount of irritation.
At the moment I’m editing a book on Music in Comedy Television. As part of the project I decided to go back to iconic pieces of comedy television I remember having had a musical impact, starting with 80s sitcoms (judge me, go on). I was expecting that some of the bits would have aged badly – comedy often does, particularly as standards for social and political correctness develops.
Christmas is long gone and some of its televisual pleasures have been explored in the CST blogs by Kenneth Longden (https://cstonline.net/bbc-christmas and https://cstonline.net/sherlock-abominable) and Lorna Jowett (https://cstonline.net/not-so-cosy). But one Christmas special which began on Boxing Day on BBC1 still lingers on. Dickensian (Red Planet Pictures) made the usual Christmas use of a Charles Dickens’