Television Culture Research Articles

Medium Specificity, Iterative Ethics, and Algorithmic Culture in <em>The Good Place</em>

In conversation with Carl Plantinga’s persuasive account of emotion and the ethics of engagement in Screen Stories, this article considers how audiences engage with film and television in an emotive, evaluative manner that is mediated by technology. Because sensory experience and immersive technologies set screen media apart from forms of storytelling such as literature and because technological developments affect the formal strategies of screen media, I argue that the distinctiveness of and differences between film and television warrant attention. I focus on the ethical implications of sustained engagement with immersive narratives and technologies in contemporary television and algorithmic culture.

“I Don’t Think the Two Would Be the Same Without Each Other”: Portmeirion as Unintentional Paratext

This paper investigates the relationship between the fans and fandom of 1960s cult television favorite The Prisoner and its main filming location of Portmeirion in north Wales. Specifically, it explores the way in which Portmeirion has been utilized as a paratext of The Prisoner, a way in which to expand the experience and understanding of the show, and what this suggests about film tourism as a practice. It does so via an ethnographic approach, drawing upon 16 interviews with fans of The Prisoner who are regular visitors to Portmeirion, participatory observation in Portmeirion, and analysis of fan texts. Through these methods, it is shown how Prisoner fans develop their paratextual understanding of Portmeirion, exploring what elements from the narratives of the show, the show’s creation, and Portmeirion’s story are utilized, and how this has worked over time as fans make visiting a regular part of their lives. In doing so, it shows not only how place and tourism have become integral to understanding The Prisoner for many of its long-term fans, but suggests that filming locations can be more generally thought of as unintentional (as in, not designed for the purpose) paratexts, and that paratextual theory is necessary for understanding what film tourism as a practice is.

The Power Game: Business, Capitalism, and Power in Film and Television since the 1960s

Given that business as an activity and institution is a central part of the modern world, it is surprising that it is seldom the central feature of films or television dramas. The representation of business over the last sixty years has a number of common features, the main one being a deep scepticism about the moral standing of business as an activity and of the kinds of personal qualities required for success. However this should be qualified by the frequent use of the idea of the Miltonic anti-hero. There are significant changes over the period, in particular a shift in focus from the firm to the individual entrepreneur and a growing interest in one particular business (finance). Positive representations of business are becoming more popular, particularly in India, but there does appear to be something about the culture of film and television making that predisposes its participants towards a sceptical view of the moral standing of business.

Memory, Nostalgia and the Material Heritage of Children’s Television in the Museum

‘The Story of Children’s Television, from 1946 to Now’ was an exhibition co-conceived by the authors and colleagues from the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, UK, running from 2015 to 2017 through a national tour. At the exhibition, objects from children’s television history sat alongside screens showing the programmes to visitors. Our research explores how children’s television culture operates as a site of memory and nostalgia, through which we can investigate forms of (inter)generational cultural memory. This paper explores the reconnections and disconnections that emerge in encounters with the material heritage of children’s television in Britain.

Personalized recommendation of film and television culture based on an intelligent classification algorithm

Personalized recommendation of film and television culture is an important content to meet people’s daily cultural needs and social information. Promoting the personalized recommendation of film and television culture is conducive to promoting the more efficient use of network resources. However, in recent years, the film and television culture industry has developed rapidly, and the production of film and television culture has also increased year by year. How to quickly and accurately find the user’s favorite film and television culture in the massive film and television cultural data has become an urgent problem to be solved. Aiming at the shortcomings of the film and television culture recommendation system, this paper proposes a new personalized recommendation algorithm for film and television culture based on an intelligent classification algorithm. Based on the preliminary screening results of the traditional collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm, the user data and video data are used as input and the video score as output, which is further filtered by a convolutional neural network. Finally, selecting the film and television culture recommendation set that is most suitable for the current user can also make up for the cold start problem of collaborative filtering at the beginning of the system operation. The simulation experiment is carried out. The experimental results show that the personalized recommendation algorithm based on an intelligent classification algorithm improves the scoring accuracy by 0.15, which indicates that the designed film and television culture recommendation system has a good application effect.

Aesthetics of Tho­mas Newman’s Music to “Six Feet Under” TV Series

This article analyzes the aesthetics of modern Western audiovisual art by the example of the opening titles of “Six Feet Under” TV series (2001—2005). This titles sequence, as well as the series itself, were proclaimed as “cult art” and became widely influential in the US television culture. The visuals of the sequence had been created by a team of Digital Kitchen designers on the basis of music by Thomas Newman, who was a trend setter of the soundtrack genre in the 1990s—2010s. This work is of interest, being one of the most significant in modern mass culture, which allows to analyze the aesthetic trends within the postmodern audiovisual art in general. The research is based on R. Barthes’ method of analyzing objects of mass culture, in which the literal meaning of artistic ima­ges and the symbolic one (connotations, metaphors, allegories) are considered separately. T. Newman’s music is ana­lysed by using M. Chion’s view upon soundtrack as both musical work and acoustical image. The article analyzes the coherence between the music, the frame (literal) content of the video, and the connotative (symbolic) meaning of the visual images. The concept of “affect”, taken by the historians-poststructuralists G. Deleuze and F. Guattari from the aesthetic theory of Baroque art, is used to describe similar phenomena in postmodern art. Interviews, additional materials and other sour­ces that tell about the idea of the series’ creators and about its workflow expanded the source base of the study. The audiovisual composition’s analysis revealed the aesthetic techniques of artistic images’ affective (feelings-emotional) transmission, “counterpoint” of allegorical and realistic (naturalistic) images in the visuals and the music, central role of the pairs of images-antithesis (warmth/coldness, movement/static, life/death, and some others). The author concludes that the studied aesthetic model is similar, both in its content and in the form of expression, to the Baroque aesthetics in a modified postmodern form (Neo-Baroque).

Changing Relations Between Fan Cultures and Industry: The Legitimation Paradox

The study aims to observe the deconstruction of the legitimation paradox at work, as the legitimacy of authorship itself begins to be questioned. It was most clear in metatextual styles of fanfic which reflected on its own relationship with the source text, and the showrunners' attempts at containment, which were then complicated by fandom's re-(re!)appropriation of control of the narrative, often with explicit reflection on the process. This article first explains the methodology that was developed, and makes the broader case for utilizing discourse analysis as a tool in studying fanwork. Using the cult television texts Sherlock (BBC), Game of Thrones (HBO) and Supernatural (CW) as a case study, discourse theory adapted from Foucault was utilized to establish that discursive formations from the source text can be de- and re-constructed, sometimes consolidating canon's constructions, but at other times, altering other characterizations and criticizing statements from canon. Multi-modal tools of fanvids, artwork, and even musical conventions have been utilized in the current study. The findings explained how changing media affordances of sites like Tumblr critique and undermine traditional conceptions of authorship and authority through their structure as modes of engagement as much as their content, and finally suggest some strategies of engagement for industry professionals.

Veep, Invective Spectacle, and the Figure of the Comedic Antiheroine

Abstract This article approaches HBO’s Veep through the lens of what Dan Hassler-Forest (2014) has described as the meta-genre of ‘Quality TV.’ Against the backdrop of ‘Quality TV’s’ conspicuous investment in masculinity, I ask how Veep actualizes the meta-genre’s conventions of moral ambiguity and sensationalist storytelling around a female protagonist and in the genre of comedy. I focus on one key strategy I see the show employ in this actualization, a strategy I conceptualize as invective spectacle. In Veep, invective spectacle translates ‘Quality TV’s’ characteristic transgressiveness into the conventions of comedy and, in the process, constructs the figure of a morally ambiguous antiheroine. The dynamics of invective spectacle – as a poetics that appears to be booming in contemporary television culture – structure the show’s elaboration of a complex female protagonist as a morally flawed woman of power.

Finding domestic LGBT+ television in Western Europe: Methodological challenges for queer critics

ABSTRACT To challenge the Americentrism of contemporary Western queer television studies, this paper offers a peripheral perspective on the introduction of non-heterosexual and non-cisgendered subjectivities to Western European television cultures, and their subsequent mainstreaming through public service broadcasting fiction. Having established this distinct trajectory, the essay points to the challenges of bringing domestic television fiction to academic interest, discussing particular differences with European queer cinema and American television fiction. Reflecting on how these challenges can be overcome, the paper cautions against the localization of established methodological discourses, and argues for the use of descriptive methods as a way to negotiate the invisibility of domestic representations of sexual and gender diversity on television. Relating descriptive methods to public service broadcasting policies, moreover, it contends that such modes of doing research have queer political potential, and may allow for a direct engagement between queer media scholarship and public service broadcaster programming.

Expanding production value: The culture and scale of television and new media

Web, or networked, distribution technologies have challenged the power of US media corporations, which set high technical standards for production value, a measure of content quality. Legacy TV companies privilege complex, seamless technical execution supported by large crews of workers – lighting, sound, design, visual effects – but exclude as producers culturally marginalised creators perceived as too risky for the big investment necessary to execute it. The internet disrupts these dynamics by allowing for the distribution of smaller scale TV and video productions that are independently or inexpensively made. In smaller scale work, cultural production value asserts more importance, as producers create with and for their community.

Interrogating ‘disruption’: Global television culture between continuity and change

Interrogating ‘disruption’: Global television culture between continuity and change

Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, ed. Nathan Abrams

Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, ed. Nathan Abrams

Young people's resilience and post-financial crisis television: allegories of economic and social survival

ABSTRACTThe Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 added significant stress and anxieties to the already precarious lives of many young people. Despite this, there is emerging evidence that young people are able to demonstrate remarkable resilience in the midst of economic uncertainties that render the trajectories of their futures uncertain. The pressure to be resilient, to find effective ways to manage the uncertainties inherent to the liberal democracies of the twenty-first century, can be significant. The consequences of failure include deteriorating health and well-being, losses in motivation and hope, economic marginalisation, and ambivalence about the markers of what is means to be an adult. In this paper we spotlight moments in post-GFC television that have drawn on these social narratives, depicting young people's experiences of resilience and uncertainties. We view these moments as more than just television or popular culture. The stories we tell are allegorical, but they are not mere fictions. We focus on the popular television comedy Broad City (2014-) that focusses on the marginalised lifeworlds of trendy, college-educated, young hipsters Ilana and Abbi who are barely getting by in New York City.

Skeuomorphic Domestic Television’s Analog Divide: Television and Social Stratification in Singapore

Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices of forty households in Singapore, this article frames the concept of Skeuomorphic Domestic Television. This term describes the continued centrality of the traditional “living room television” amid digital media’s portability. Results from the stocktaking of the ownership of television-related devices in the surveyed households point to the narrowing of the digital divide arising from the greater affordability of media technologies. However, within the highly densely populated city-state, it was found that social distinctions from television cultures were maintained in the skeuomorphic luxury of the “TV-Sofa space” in living rooms of surveyed households. Such a space that distinguishes individuals watching television in cluttered rooms against the more communal viewing practices in designated spacious living rooms characterizes the “Analog Spatial Divide” of skeuomorphic domestic television cultures.

The Appropriation of Mythologies for Assimilation through Media

Abstract With immigration one observes how immigrant communities actively contribute to the American cultural landscape by blending their traditions and cultural identities. This is commonly seen in music, television, and food cultures. Because of the urgency to maintain hegemony the same mediums are used to attack these groups. This is especially true when it comes to the aspect of mythologies in film and television. With a failure of American culture to acknowledge its mythological identity, dominant American culture whitewashes immigrant cultural identity to force assimilation.

O Corpo Juvenil Televisual

Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar um caminho metodológico para analisar as relações entre as marcas narrativas televisivas e os audiovisuais produzidos e disponibilizados na internet pelas juventudes como ferramentas de disputas políticas. Parto do pressuposto que, na década de 1980, forjou-se no Brasil um imaginário de consumo televisivo através de uma pedagogia estética dos modos de produção vinculados ao audiovisual com a finalidade de interligar cultura juvenil e televisiva. Proponho analisar as maneiras como esse saber estético apresenta-se como uma referência importante de visibilidades juvenis em audiovisuais compartilhados nas redes sociais. O Corpo Juvenil Televisual será mapeado a partir de três eixos: 1) o momento histórico em que uma cultura televisiva e juvenil se consolidou no Brasil; 2) as maneiras de narrar através do popular e 3) a performance.

“Too Broad and Deep for the Small Screen”: <em>Doctor Who</em>'s New Adventures in the 1990s

“Too Broad and Deep for the Small Screen”: <em>Doctor Who</em>'s New Adventures in the 1990s

A Forgotten Spirit of Commercial Television? Co-Productions Between Finnish Commercial Television Company Mainos-Tv and Socialist Television

Finnish commercial television company Mainos-TV co-produced a string of documentary and entertainment programmes with television broadcasters in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. This article asks what motivated Mainos-TV, a commercial television broadcaster in a non-socialist country, to collaborate with socialist television? Based on an analysis of published and archival sources (e.g. industry documents, memoirs, television programmes and press coverage), the article argues that Mainos-TV engaged with socialist television to secure its position at a time when the operation of commercial television was still quite restricted. Finnish foreign policy placed great importance on maintaining good relations with the neighbouring USSR. In this context, the leadership of Mainos-TV viewed its collaboration with socialist broadcasters as a way to strengthen the company’s position. International entertainment programmes and co-produced documentaries on social and cultural topics offered Mainos-TV ‘quality’ programming that differed from the stereotypical image of commercial television. Collaboration with Eastern European partners was not purely strategic, however, as it also brought influences from socialist television culture to Mainos-TV’s offerings. Mainos-TV’s co-productions with its socialist partners highlight the largely forgotten complexity of the history of European commercial television.

Expansion, Excess and the Uncanny: Deadly Premonition and Twin Peaks

The influence of the cult television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991) can be detected in a wide range of videogames, from adventure, to roleplaying to survival horror titles. While many games variously draw upon the narrative, setting and imagery of the series for inspiration, certain elements of the distinctive uncanniness of Twin Peaks are difficult to translate into gameplay, particularly its ability consistently disrupt the expectations and emotional responses of its audience. This paper examines the ways in which the 2010 survival horror title Deadly Premonition replicates the uncanniness of Twin Peaks in both its narrative and gameplay, noting how it expands upon conceptualizations of the gamerly uncanny. It contends that Deadly Premonition’s awkward recombination of seemingly inconsistent and excessive gameplay features mirrors the ways in which David Lynch and Mark Frost draw upon and subvert audience expectations for police procedurals and soap operas in the original Twin Peaks in order to generate an uncanny effect. Furthermore, Deadly Premonition uses the theme of possession—a central element of the television series—to offer a diegetic exploration of the uncanny relationship between the player and their onscreen avatar. In these regards, Deadly Premonition provides a rare example of how the subversive uncanniness of Twin Peaks can be addressed through gameplay, rather than solely through the game’s narrative or representational elements.

Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television

Concentrating on the series “Girls” (2012–2017), “Fleabag” (2016), and “Insecure” (2016–), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture with specific investments in gendered value hierarchies. The article explores the format’s dominant narrative and aesthetic practices with specific focus on prestige dramedy’s “cringe” aesthetics. Cringe is increasingly mobilized as a mode of political expression following the format’s privileging of female subjectivities. As such, cringe is tasked with negotiating the tensions between drama and comedy on one hand and intersectional relations of identity politics on the other. Character “complexity,” embedded in ideological themes around identity, modifies the “comedy” in cringe and becomes associated with the more prestigious dramatic mode, this way governing the texts’ appeal to cultural value. The article demonstrates the ways the female-centered cringe dramedy expresses its politicization and “complexity” via disturbing gendered expectations of mediated femininity, and specifically body and sexuality politics.