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:

In 1969 Alan Lovell wrote a seminar paper on ‘British Cinema: The Unknown Cinema’, ‘unknown’ because of the paucity of scholarly work on British Cinema at the time – a situation which, in 1997, Lovell noted was no longer the case. Until relatively recently the same could have been said of British Television, given the paucity of academic study of television.

On 5 March, the BBC announced that BBC3 would become an online-only channel, subject to  approval by the BBC Trust. It would be replaced on the digital broadcast spectrum by a new BBC1+1 service, following the success of ‘plus one’ channels for the other terrestrial broadcasters. This move has huge implications for the BBC.

A great deal of hand-wringing has taken place since the decision to cut BBC3 as a terrestrial television channel, particularly on the pages of The Guardian – where everyone from Steve Hewlett to Boyd Hilton to Mark Jackson has mused on the implications of the decision for the Corporation’s commitment to youth audiences, weighed against the relatively minor cost savings that will be made (Hewlett’s

Hey there marshmallows!  Veronica Mars is back. I’ve been thinking about *Veronica Mars.  *On the 12 April 2013, I blogged about the exciting news of the *Veronica Mars *Kickstarter campaign, in which TV creator Rob Thomas and actor Kristen Bell sought crowd funding to produce a cinema reunion film for their much loved teen hardboiled detective series.

Stylistic Excess and the Aesthetics of Violence in Spartacus In her book Now a Major Motion Picture (2007), Christine Geraghty addresses the notion of the circular, and describes it in terms of narratives coming back to life and being re-interpreted for their specific time.

When thinking about TV in relation to horror/SF/fantasy I tend to think in quite simple terms. Its modern incarnation starts with the arrival of Twin Peaks in 1990.

Rake is an Australian television series that airs on ABC1 on Sunday nights. Now into its third series, it centrally features Richard Roxburgh as Rake Cleaver Greene, a charismatic but anti-establishment, criminal defence barrister.

At a time when a growing number of older persons in the United States are living with their adult children (between 2000 and 2011, this figure rose from 2.2 million to 4.6 million ^[1] ), the U.S. broadcast networks Fox and CBS have each launched a new situation comedy about retired parents invading their children’s homes.

Danny Dyer is best known for low-budget, critically reviled films and has a reputation (whether deserved or otherwise) for a particularly misogynistic style of laddism. He is also known for his expletive laden outbursts and self-confessed drug use, so he may not seem like the most obvious casting choice for the BBC’s flagship soap opera.