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.
Every now and then, I get the proverbial swarm flying around my headgear as people announce, predict, or incarnate the end of television. This generally takes the form of remarks such as ‘My children don’t watch television,’ ‘Nobody I know does it,’ or ‘Kids today aren’t interested.’ From music to politics, television’s day is supposedly over. This isn’t only true of everyday talk, of course.
Why the parentheses? Well, the established argument is that television’s very domesticity and ‘ordinariness’ militates against any capacity to produce ‘stars’ in the sense that cinema is traditionally perceived to have done.
As a TV scholar and a science fiction fan, I enjoyed watching An Adventure in Space and Time , a drama documentary about the early years of Doctor Who when it was broadcast in November of last year as part of the series’ fiftieth anniversary celebrations.
Popular music’s relationship with TV is an uneasy one. Pop on TV, particularly in the age of talent shows like *Pop Idol *and The X Factor , lacks credibility. So why has the global megastar Prince, arguably the most enduring and respected popular music stars of his generation, chosen to embrace the small screen?