Sitting in Dublin’s city centre bus station last week, my eye was drawn to the giant billboard advertising the recently released new season of Orange is the New Black (OITNB) (2013-) on Netflix. The poster was relatively non-descript, unlike the range of other promotional materials that feature characters and guiding taglines. The billboard was, one would speculate, intended to capture as wide a market as possible.
[The killing of one black and two white civil rights workers] was an example of what we had really been talking to the volunteers about before the three went missing—that you are going into a murderously violent state and you have to understand that the danger affects you every day, all day long.
Ever since I started exploring adaptation theory as a way to discuss reboots for my PhD thesis, I have found myself knee-deep in a conceptual quandary, one which I’d like to share with you today.
Over the last few years I have been loosely following the unfolding project known as the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ (beginning with Iron Man , 2008) with a degree of interest, albeit that of a cinema-going layperson with little knowledge of comics or superheroes.
Comedian Louie CK made the statement above as part of an interview with an American radio show recently. And, interestingly, even though he’s someone whose material is high on the list of things being illegally accessed, he’s on our side. Australians are apparently the biggest television pirates in the world.
Since 1981 when Greece became an official member of the EEC (what would later become the European Union), the country has been represented in the European Parliament by many remarkable personalities deriving from the fields of politics, literature, science; in other words a group of people that is commonly referred to as the Greek intelligentsia.
Last summer, I gave a paper on the shifting star persona of Jennifer Aniston at the Console-ing Passions conference, focusing predominantly on the significance of postfeminist discourses of ageing to the construction of Aniston’s star image in the popular press.
The face of independent TV production in the UK has changed irrevocably. 21st Century Fox and Apollo Global Management together have taken over Endemol, Shine Group and Core Media and will transform them into the world’s first mega-indie.
The recent proliferation and, I might add, pervasiveness, of crime dramas like Sherlock (BBC One 2010-), Elementary (CBS, 2012-), Hannibal (NBC, 2013-), Whitechapel (ITV, 2009-2013), Ripper Street (BBC One, 2012-), and Copper (BBC America, 2012-2013), just to mention a few, all indicate an interesting albeit not unprecedented
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. Muriel Rukeyser This is an intimate account of the ways in which the moving image enters and energises the stories that we tell one another on Facebook. It is not meant to be a taxonomy of the different audio-visual forms that are shared, liked and commented upon.
Television has long been accused of creating zombies….breeding an audience that sits transfixed in front of their TV screens, hypnotized by the presumed-to-be mind-numbing qualities of this ‘mindless’ entertainment. This idea continues to haunt popular culture, so much so that it has been used, quite ironically, within such cult TV series as Angel (WB 1999-2004) and Doctor Who (BBC1 2005-) to comment upon the negative potential of television.