Drama Series Research Articles

Underwater carnival: explaining how Thai boys’ love drama series “sneak” into Chinese media cyberspace

Thai boys’ love (BL) drama series, which peddle romantic relationships between pretty male characters, are emerging as vibrant players in the global subculture market. This article investigates the intriguing phenomenon of how Thai BL drama series evade censorship and flow into Chinese media cyberspace. Our analysis focuses on two of the critical stakeholders in the geocultural flow of Thai BL genres: entertainment corporations and fan-subtitled groups. This research demonstrates that these two crucial actors have formed alliances to participate in the transnational relay of Thai boy intimate media, developing the synergistic “soft resistance” strategy centered on compromise and adaptation to counteract media censorship under the Chinese patriarchal political regime. The coordinated networks that have resulted from the interactive marketing tactics of producers and distributors have enabled Thai male bonding media to successfully penetrate the Chinese “cultural fence.” However, this successful infiltration of Thai BL drama series into the Chinese market should not be exaggerated. They remain a subdued “underwater carnival” outside the orthodox normative paradigms of heterosexuality in Chinese society.

Analisis Semiotika Pesan Moral dalam Drama Korea Twinkling Watermelon

Films or drama series are highly favored by many people, especially among teenagers. One of the most popular foreign drama series in Indonesia is Korean drama. Korean dramas depict fictional strories and portray Korean life. One of the Korean dramas that attracted public attention was Twinkling Watermelon. This drama directed by Son Jung-Hyun carries the genre of fantasy, romance, and time travel. The author's goal in analyzing this drama is to find out the meaning of denotation, connotation, and myth, as well as the moral messages contained in the Korean drama. This research employs qualitative research methods using Roland Barthes’ semiotics theory. Data for this study are based on scene and dialogues from episodes 14-16 of the Korean drama Twinkling Watermelon. The data collection techniques used are observation, documentation, and literature study. The results obtained from this study indicate that in the Korean drama there are moral messages seen from denotation, connotation and myth. The moral messages are (1) Being serious in doing something. (2) Parents' responsibility towards their children. (3) The importance of communication in every relationship, especially family. (4) Sincere love. (5) Do not force ourselves to bear burdens that are not our responsibility. (6) Never give up and keep fighting.

The future of medicine or a threat? Artificial intelligence representation in Chicago Med

The eighth season of the American medical drama series Chicago Med (2015–) represented the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in a hospital environment with multiple storylines. Born in the 1950s, medical dramas are among the most popular forms of serial television. Traditionally, the genre aims for a certain amount of accuracy and has educational goals. Former studies investigated the entertainment education and cultivation effects of these series, concluding that these dramas have the potential to contribute information and shape viewers’ opinions on various health-related topics. Chicago Med is a long-running broadcast production with a worldwide audience and considerable viewership. This paper analyzes the series’ representation of medical AI and discusses how this portrayal potentially shapes the audience’s opinion. The research started by identifying artificial intelligence-related storylines in the 22 episodes of the season. The analysis focused on the reasons and outcomes of AI applications, the character’s attitudes, and the ethical issues, including transparency, selective adherence, automation bias, responsibility gap, hallucination, unequal access, and political dimensions. The storyline analysis concluded that Chicago Med provided thought-provoking positive and negative scenarios about applying different types of AI in the surgical and emergency departments. The complex portrayal included groundbreaking opportunities, challenges, dangers, and ethical considerations. The main characters’ attitudes varied, from strong support or opposition to more nuanced, shifting opinions. The educative and engaging content has a potential for knowledge transfer and encourages critical thinking about medical AI.

Gay as cute: Unpacking cuteness in contemporary gay teen drama series

Gay as cute: Unpacking cuteness in contemporary gay teen drama series

THE REPRESENTATION OF THE MONG ETHNIC GROUP IN THE VIETNAMESE TV DRAMA SERIES “MÙA XUÂN Ở LẠI” (2020)

This research examines the representation of Mong ethnic group in the TV drama series “Mùa xuân ở lại” (2020) and discusses the implications of this representation for a wide-ranging social and cultural context. Employing the framework of Fairclough (2001) and Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006), the data analysis has revealed the following findings on the Mong people in the film: (1) Mong people’s living environment is underdeveloped and insecure; (2) Mong people’s economy is agricultural-based with a heavy reliance on nature, (3) Mong people are poorly educated, (4) Mong people still preserve backward social and cultural practices, (5) Mong people play a passive role in the interethnic relationship with Kinh people. Apparently, the way that the Mong people and their life are portrayed in the film tends to perpetuate long-held stereotypes of this ethnic group in Vietnamese media.

Semiotic analysis of Korean Wave: Journalistic practices and global impact

Background: Reportage deviations are trying to be built in drama Find Me in Your Memory. Understand the codes that show reportage deviations and the purpose of their distribution through the scenes in the drama. Purpose: This article will become a provision for the community to implement and pay more attention to the journalistic code of ethics when contributing to news reporting. Methods: The method used in this research is a content analysis by observing the scenes displaying reportage deviations in the drama Find Me in Your Memory scenes. Results: The collected data was then analyzed based on John Fiske’s semiotic theory, namely the Three Levels of Television Codes and the South Korean Journalistic Code of Ethics as indicators to identify reporting deviations. Secondary data in this study was obtained through a literature study to obtain relevant theories and data that can be used to answer the formulation of the problem. Conclusion: Various violations of the Journalistic Code of Ethics were found in several scenes showing news reporting practices. Implications: So this research suggests deviations in the news reporting shown in several scenes in this serial drama. This also deviates from one of the South Korean journalistic code of ethics points, which requires journalists always to report news objectively.

HindiPersonalityNet: Personality Detection in Hindi Conversational Data Using Deep Learning with Static Embedding

Personality detection along with other behavioral and cognitive assessment can essentially explain why people act the way they do and can be useful to various online applications such as recommender systems, job screening, matchmaking, and counseling. Additionally, psychometric natural language processing relying on textual cues and distinctive markers in writing style within conversational utterances reveals signs of individual personalities. This work demonstrates a text-based deep neural model, HindiPersonalityNet, of classifying conversations into three personality categories (ambivert, extrovert, introvert) for detecting personality in Hindi conversational data. The model utilizes a gated recurrent unit with BioWordVec embeddings for text classification and is trained/tested on a novel dataset, शख्सियत (pronounced as Shakhsiyat) curated using dialogues from an Indian crime-thriller drama series, Aarya . The model achieves an F1-score of 0.701 and shows the potential for leveraging conversational data from various sources to understand and predict a person's personality traits. It exhibits the ability to capture both semantic and long-distance dependencies in conversations and establishes the effectiveness of our dataset as a benchmark for personality detection in Hindi dialogue data. Further, a comprehensive comparison of various static and dynamic word embedding is done on our standardized dataset to ascertain the most suitable embedding method for personality detection.

Changing minds about climate change in Indonesia through a TV drama

Drama has been shown to change attitudes and inspire action on topics as diverse as health, sanitation, intergroup conflict, and gender equality, but rarely have randomized trials assessed the influence of narrative entertainment programs focusing on climate change and environmental protection. We report the results of an experiment in which young Indonesian adults were sampled from five metropolitan areas. Participants were randomly assigned to watch a condensed two-hour version of a new award-winning TV drama series #CeritaKita (Our Story)—and accompanying social media discussion program Ngobrolin #CeritaKita (Chatter—Our Story)—as opposed to a placebo drama/discussion that lacked climate and environmental content. Outcomes were assessed via survey 1–7 days after exposure to the shows, and through a follow up survey after 5 months. We find that the treatment group became significantly more knowledgeable about environmental issues such as deforestation, an effect that persists long term. Other outcomes, such as motivation to participate in public discussion on climate change, willingness to follow influencers who post about environmental issues on social media, support for policies to address climate change and support for more media coverage of this issue, moved initially after viewing but subsided over time, possibly due to lack of continued exposure and other changes in context. This pattern of results suggests that ongoing/seasonal programming may be needed in order to sustain attitudinal and behavioral change. Draw media market investments, and change public narratives at scale when it matters change.

"You Need to be Able to Stand Up for What is Right": MTV Shuga Naija's Transformative Impact on Youth Attitudes Toward Sexual Violence in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, approximately 10% of women of reproductive age report experiencing sexual violence in the past year, with potentially enduring health and social consequences. The effects can be especially severe for younger women and adolescents. MTV Shuga Naija utilizes an entertainment-education TV serial drama to promote gender equality and challenge norms around sexual violence. Using a two-wave panel survey of Nigerian youth (574 females; 317 males) aged 15 to 24 years, this study explores the impact of MTV Shuga Naija on disclosing experiences of sexual violence, reducing stigma, and fostering dialogue. Baseline data were collected in person, while endline data were collected by telephone due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey, informed by the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), examined shifts in self-reported sexual harassment and attitudes toward victims of sexual violence. A doubly robust, difference-in-differences (DID) analysis compares changes in outcomes in treatment versus comparison areas, adjusting for observed and unobserved differences and using inverse probability weighting to enhance the precision of impact estimates. DID models show significant attitude shifts and increased disclosure of sexual violence among youth exposed to MTV Shuga Naija. Agreement with victim-blaming statements dropped significantly for both men and women in treatment versus comparison areas. However, contrary to hypotheses, respondents in comparison areas were more likely to discuss sexual violence with family, although the context and content of these discussions could not be examined. This study therefore confirms that MTV Shuga Naija's entertainment-education effectively improves attitudes and behaviors concerning sexual violence. Even so, victim-blaming norms and experiences of sexual violence remain prevalent. While the program has made progress in addressing this sensitive issue in Nigeria, further research is needed to improve family and community dialogues and to enhance support for victims.

Fidelity, focalization and nostalgia: The audio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

Neil Gaiman’s superhero comic series The Sandman had never officially been adapted to any other medium when Audible released the first instalment of its audio drama series in 2020. This article reads that adaptation in the context of current media nostalgia trends while paying special attention to the production choices guided by fans’ affective engagement with popular texts. I will look at some of the adaptation strategies used to turn the comic’s verbal text and its visuals into speech and sound. The focus will be twofold. Firstly, I will explore how questions of fidelity can be applied to this comic-to-audio case, by investigating how the Sandman adaptation’s faithfulness to its source text relates to the way in which the audio drama taps into the audience’s nostalgic engagement with the text. Secondly, my reading also contributes to narratological debates over the use of focalization in both comics and audio narratives. To unpack the shifts in focalization and narrative perspective that occur between comic and audio play, I will zoom in on the function of the comic’s omniscient narrator as it translates into the audio adaptation.

The Types of Questions in TV-based Legal Drama Series "A Corpus-Based Study"

The Types of Questions in TV-based Legal Drama Series "A Corpus-Based Study"

Representasi Makna Keikhlasan Pada Series “ Layangan Putus ”

This research was conducted to analyze the representation of sincerity shown by women in the drama series "Layangan Putus." In addition to being a form of mass media that portrays the social life of the community, this series also includes cultural creations that bring important values to the audience, one of which is about marital life rumored with infidelity and how women, especially wives, demonstrate an attitude of sincerity. This study used a qualitative descriptive approach with the analysis of Roland Barthes' semiotics model. The focus of this research was to find the denotative, connotative, and myth meanings in 4 scenes that show the meaning of sincerity. The data collection techniques used were documentation, literature review, and observation. The results of the study show that the meaning of sincerity is demonstrated as an action that refers to social situations, parties harmed in the social structure take action against those who harm them. The attitude of sincerity occurs because of human behaviors that are not in line with their true feelings and conditions and harm others, including family, by surrendering what is considered best in the hope of getting something more deserving in the future. Sincerity is an attitude that women adopt to prove that not all problems need to be responded to and vented through emotions, but in this series, it highlights the sense of sincerity that has already occurred in her married life.

'These Are Not New Bigots' – Queer TV, <em>Erinnerungskultur</em> and the Potential of Unproduction Studies

The article discusses queer television using US and West-German prime-time soaps Dallas, Dynasty, Lindenstraße and drama series thirtysomething, outlining how they are in dialogue with each other through an entangled Cold War history. It places special focus on the depiction of gay and bisexual men during the HIV/AIDS crisis, as this chapter of queer history remains both decisive for public opinion on queer issues across borders, and its history is often obscured in collective memory. While the case studies consider actually produced/‘made’ work, they open up ways to engage with how systemic discrimination both on the level of production companies and audiences disrupt queer content, thus placing this in a framework of ‘unproduction studies’.

Analyzing politeness and refusal speech acts in popular Chinese television drama series

Analyzing politeness and refusal speech acts in popular Chinese television drama series

Acceptance of Sexual and Gender Minorities through Romance TV Drama Series with LGBT Characters: The Voices of College Students in Thailand

This study focused on the views of 77 current college students in Thailand on gay-related romantic TV dramas and their social impact. The survey aims to determine how gay-related romantic dramas affect the understanding of and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in Thai society and to propose solutions based on the results. The survey results suggest that gay-related romantic dramas may have an impact on social perceptions and tolerance toward LGBTQ+ people. Positive opinions emphasized that the dramas promote understanding between different generations and cultures and provide opportunities to accept LGBTQ+ identities. On the other hand, negative opinions expressed concern that the dramas are removed from reality and do not adequately reflect the real situations and issues of LGBTQ+ people. Based on these findings, this study provides valuable suggestions for improving LGBTQ+ public awareness and understanding. These recommendations aim to enhance public awareness and comprehension of LGBTQ+ matters, with the understanding that the students’ voices are crucial in this process.

Islam and Gender: Media Construction in Television Drama Series Para Pencari Tuhan on SCTV

This study examines gender equality and the principles of Islamic teachings in the TV drama series Para Pencari Tuhan. The purpose of this study is to outline how the drama series' plots and visuals portray Islam and gender narratives. The Social Construction Theory of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and theory of Gender Injustice of Mansour Fakih's serve as the foundational framework. Based on Muhammad Quraish Shihab's main concepts of Islamic teachings, the three primary principles of Islam are: aqidah, or belief; sharia, or experience of legal requirements; and akhlaq, or manners. This qualitative study used Norman Fairclough's discourse analysis approach, while data collection techniques were carried out by watching thirty episodes of the TV drama series Para Pencari Tuhan season 16 three times and interviewing the production team and correlated informants. The results of this research show that the basic values of Islamic teachings are conveyed through the narrative elements (storyline) and cinematic elements (setting, audio and appearance of the characters) of the series. Meanwhile, gender equality is shown through female characters who experience injustice. It is also shown that Women actually have potential and qualities that are no less than men. Mass media, including TV drama series, can be a means of conveying positive da'wah messages about Islam and gender equality. Until now, television is still an alternative media besides the internet, for people who want to find entertainment.

Boys’ Love (BL) Drama Series Review System for Opinion Mining with Sentiment Analysis

This research portrays same-gender relationships in media, specifically through the drama series of BL (Boys’ Love) and GL (Girls’ Love). Entertainment companies from Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are prominent producers of these series for the global market. While Thai BL dramas have been produced since 2014, they achieved significant popularity and recognition starting in 2017. The proposed system collects user review comments on the BL drama series produced by four countries from 2014 to June 2023. These reviews are compiled into a dataset named H/BL page via Facebook. The dataset comprises 276 series collected from two websites: Dramatist and BLWatcher. Sentiment analysis is utilized to classify user opinions and emotions related to these BL drama series. This technique identifies phrases and emotions within the text, categorizing them as objective (factual), positive (indicating happiness and satisfaction), or negative (indicating unhappiness, disappointment, or rejection) using the Information Gain (IG) method. The system aims to classify opinions on BL drama series and assess public sentiment towards same-gender love.

Depoliticisation of stigma: the drama series Skam (”shame”) as an instance of public religious education

ABSTRACT In the final season of the Norwegian drama series Skam (”Shame”) (2015–2017), the protagonist Sana, navigating in a secular, liberal youth culture, is a practicing Muslim wearing the hijab. The series is analysed as an instance of public religious education focusing on the issue of representation. This approach is informed by the ethical turn in narrative studies, warranting and problematising representations of the other. Stigmatisation and normalising strategies are examined and discussed as part of the plot structure with an emphasis on the portrayal of Sana. The series presents a process towards self-determination in a distinct portrait of a young, Muslim woman’s agency. Liberal values are privileged, and the issue of racism is put aside. In the development of the plot, stigmatisation is subject to depoliticisation, bringing forward a utopian vision of a liberal, diverse society. While the series turns out to be a rich, educational resource, Skam calls for critical explorations within a reflexive religious education.

Screening Greenland in Borgen—Power & Glory: The on- and off-screen contestedness of Arctic landscapes and locations

This article shows how the Arctic landscapes in the Danish political drama series Borgen—Power & Glory (2022) demonstrate Greenland as a contested land in distinct ways: culturally due to the postcolonial tension between Denmark and Greenland; politically due to the conflicted interests from Denmark and other nations for the country’s natural resources; environmentally due to the looming transformation of the Arctic landscapes due to global warming, and commercially due to increasing interest in screen production from Greenlandic tourism actors. Furthermore, we contribute to the location study method approach by focusing on location management and the contestedness of the industry itself.

Youth Violence in 'The Glory': A Social Psychological Analysis

Bullying and youth violence, when neglected, lead to troubled behaviour among children in terms of self-harm, suicidal tendencies and prevalence of emotional, mental and physical distress among children. Persistent acts of bullying and harassment can lead to emotional distress and worsening impacts of rejection, despair, depression, anxiety, exclusion and isolation. Facing severe consequences and being at greater risk for behavioural issues and mental ailments are persistent among children being bullied at school and during childhood. This is a case analysis of the Netflix drama series The Glory, highlighting the long-lasting impact of childhood bullying incidents on the emotional turmoil of children because of the lack of adult interference and interventions taken to address such violent behaviour. As Media has a huge reach across regions, through reference to this Netflix Korean drama series, this study highlights the subject of youth violence and school bullying and emphasises the need for immediate intervention.