Those of you who have been following my work for awhile may have realised that I have a certain fondness for analysing short-lived, unstudied and often poorly-regarded media texts.

A police officer who has become unpopular in his home department is seconded to a small island which is a French Overseas Territory.  He arrives in a suit, which is incongruous to his surroundings and new colleagues, develops a relationship with his new partner, a Frenchwoman, which is by turns adversarial and potentially romantic.

Brad Ingelsby struck gold with Mare of Eastown (HBO, 2021), a small town mystery series helmed by Kate Winslet and Jean Smart. His latest drama Task (HBO, 2025) also racked up critical acclaim.

I had been meaning to write something about the slowness of Pluribus (Apple TV+, 2025-present) for a while (especially after watching episode 7, “The Gap”, with my jaw on the floor for most of it, which may or may not be why the episode is named thusly), and then, there it was, a new CSTonline […]

Steven Zaillian’s Ripley (2024), available on Netflix, arrives with the familiar signals of prestige adaptation: a canonical literary source (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley), European locations, meticulous production design, and a controlled tonal palette. Yet one of its most distinctive features is not narrative content but tempo.

Timing does often seem to be everything, particularly when there is a very limited foreknowledge of events.

What do television shows look like in our mind’s eye? Let me start with a personal experience. Two shows that I enjoyed immensely – Sex Education and The Mandalorian – seemed, to me at least, to have reached satisfying conclusions in their third and second seasons, respectively. But not in the same way.

The fourth episode in the third series of Blue Lights begins in the home of Police Constables Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke) and Stevie Neill (Martin McCann). They are colleagues at the fictional Blackthorn station in Belfast and, surely to the relief of anyone witnessing their tentative courtship over series one and two, are now finally […]

There are a million stories in the Second City. This is just one Happy New Year!  I hope that you’ve all had wonderful holidays spent with those dearest to you, doing things that you enjoy. And now it’s time to start imparting/absorbing (delete as applicable) wisdom, knowledge and experience about television again as you all head back to your campuseses campi places where all those university buildings are grouped together.

Like, I suspect, many of you reading this blog, I often find myself watching some kind of nature webcam.

Though Canadian multiculturalism is often more an aspirational ideal than practice as I’ve found in earlier research (Beattie 2025), as the above quotes shows, the Canadian government have included it as part of their legal code.  It is also the case that Canada is a common location for American media productions and has been for some time (Matheson 2005).