Television Fiction Research Articles

When fiction anticipates reality. Television fiction in Chile (2012-2018)

When fiction anticipates reality. Television fiction in Chile (2012-2018)

Sentimental Solidarities

Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo surveys the history of fictional treatments of labor in US television and film and examines the frequently overlooked role played by sentimentality in media representations of labor and union organizing. Noting that sentimentality has been criticized for its deployment of suffering bodies as “other” objects for voyeuristic tears as well as for sometimes collapsing difference in an effort to construct empathy, Wanzo observes that documentary has often been a more welcoming space for the telling of sympathetic narratives about unions than Hollywood fiction films and television. This makes the depiction of labor and union organizing in Wanzo’s two case studies—the sitcom Superstore (NBC, 2015–21) and the primetime soap Homefront (ABC, 1991–93)—all the more exceptional. At a moment when labor issues are more relevant than ever, Superstore shows people why labor loses, but Homefront reminds people why labor won.

Introduction: Latin American Television Fiction in Times of Change (2015-2021)

Introduction: Latin American Television Fiction in Times of Change (2015-2021)

The showrunner’s skills and responsibilities in the creation and production process of fiction series in the contemporary North American television industry

Contemporary fiction TV series production in North America is characterized by the showrunner figure’s importance. This paper aims to study the concept of “showrunner” as executive-creative producer, analyze the competencies and responsibilities carried out by them during the production process of TV shows according to personal and professional factors, and examine their position within the current television market. For this purpose, a literature review on fiction TV series production and television authorship has been conducted. After this, adopting the focus of media production studies, a qualitative methodology based on in-depth personal interviews has been used, which was carried out with a selection of thirty-six significant executive producers and writers of contemporary American TV series. The findings indicate the relevance of this profile from a historical perspective, and particularly in recent years. Although there is a basic scheme of tasks developed by the showrunner in each phase of the production process, we find differences in this actuation due to personal –sex and nationality– and professional –format/gender and channel– characteristics in this industrial context. The showrunner develops an executive-creative dual profile to maintain the project’s coherence according to the established vision. Their influence over the TV series’ creative features contributes to reflection on television authorship and its attribution to this figure.

Playing with Star Trek in the critical geography classroom: STEM education and otherwise possibilities

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on the classroom use of the Star Trek American science fiction television franchise to teach critical and emotional geographies to undergraduates specializing in science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM). Both science fiction and STEM education are ambivalent and contradictory scenes of social reproduction, extending a promise of social transformation, but often maintaining complicity in heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and empire. Enlivening students to what Ashon T. Crawley calls the “otherwise possibilities” immanent to both science fiction and STEM education is necessarily difficult emotional work. Reflecting on teacher shame and anxiety and student resistance to course material, I turn to psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Donald W. Winnicott, to argue that Star Trek offers a richly contradictory “transitional object” for students to play with otherwise possibilities.

Pulling on Heartstrings: Three Studies of the Effectiveness of Emotionally Framed Communication to Encourage Workplace Pro-Environmental Behavior

We investigated whether the emotional framing of climate change communication can influence workplace pro-environmental behavior. In three quasi-experimental studies, we examined whether emotional displays in climate change communication affected participants’ subsequent workplace pro-environmental behavior. In Studies 1 and 2, undergraduate and master’s students viewed a fictional news video about climate change, where the newsreader displayed one of five emotions: sadness, fear, anger, contentment, and hope. The dependent variable was recycling behavior following the viewing. In Study 3, office employees viewed the same news videos online; the dependent variable was requesting further information to increase pro-environmental behavior in the workplace. The results from all three studies show that displayed emotion significantly affected pro-environmental behavior and that sadness, in particular, resulted in significantly less workplace pro-environmental behavior. These results indicate the need to study the effect of discrete emotions, rather than assuming that emotions of the same valence have similar effects. The results also underscore the importance of using experimental designs in advancing the field. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for research, theory, and practice of emotionally framed communication of sustainability messages.

Irradiated Cereal and Abject Meat: Food as Satire and Warning in the Fallout Series

This article is a close reading of food and beverages in Bethesda’s acclaimed post-apocalyptic science fiction video game series, Fallout. Through a discussion of the visual design, narrative positioning, and in-game function of food and beverage consumption, this article demonstrates how Fallout uses food to critique the unchecked technological development, rampant consumerism, and environmental devastation of post-war American atomic culture. Specifically, pre-packaged, pre-apocalypse food is presented as a focal point for satire, while the irradiated meat harvested from the mutated creatures that populate this post-apocalyptic world is presented as abject and ambiguous. In this sense, food in the Fallout series, as in much science fiction media, can reinforce or challenge ideologies, beliefs, and cultural norms by evoking real-world anxieties.

Tracing the Ephemeral

This paper examines how Greek television fiction introduced and represented lesbian characters during primetime. Drawing on feminist and queer theory and taking the codes and conventions of the comedy genre into account, the paper reveals Greek comedy’s elusive and ambiguous stances towards heteronormativity. By applying a qualitative textual approach, the paper argues that despite their subversive potentialities, the television shows in question (re)produce cultural stereotypes about lesbian identity, invest in queerbaiting strategies and play down the transgressive elements of certain lesbian characters. Despite this critique, the paper stresses the importance of recording, archiving, and further exploring such ephemeral moments in television history in understanding how small national television industries as well as audiences have engaged with the visual representation of gender and sexual diversity.

Friends or just fans? Parasocial relationships in online television fiction communities

This paper explores parasocial phenomena on social media pages related to Spanish television fiction by analysing the development of parasociality through relationships established between users and characters and the characteristics of this type of online community. The sample consisted of 4,762 spontaneous comments posted on social media pages (1,598 on Facebook and 3,164 on Twitter) linked to television series. Comments published between 1 January 2018 and 31 May 2020 were compiled the day after the premiere of each fiction. Our findings confirm those of previous researchs on the similarity between parasocial relationships with fictional characters and relationships in real life. This study also substantiates that women’s comments show a greater tendency to draw associations between parasocial relationships and daily life. We also find a link between programme longevity and audience success on the one hand, and the intensity of parasocial relationships with the characters on the other. The relationships among community members reveal a degree of narcissism, prompting more self-disclosure than interaction with the rest of the users. Therefore, such relationships are closer to consociality (Kozinets, 2015) than parasociality, although significant differences concerning gender identity are also found in this context.

Adventures between TV and film, and between Britain and America

This article explores the connections and distinctions between cinema and TV, and between the screen cultures of Britain and the USA, in British spy and detective adventure fictions of the 1960s. One such connection is the sites where films and TV series were made. Many British television adventure series of the 1960s were filmed at the same production facilities as British cinema, such as at Pinewood or at British National Studios in Elstree, near London. A second connection is that those studios’ soundstages and backlot buildings were used to represent international locations, because the export of cinema and television fiction from the UK to the USA centred on representations of international modernity, fashion and adventure. The style of 1960s adventure depended on the resources of Pinewood studios, where James Bond films were made, or the sets built at Elstree which provided simulated foreign locales for the TV adventure series The Saint, The Avengers, The Champions and Department S, for example. Each of these TV series was exported to the USA, and at the same time, American finance was used to begin the cycle of James Bond films, beginning with Dr No in 1962, which were made in British studios and also in Jamaica (a British territory). The Bond films’ spy adventures in exotic settings shared aesthetic features with TV spy and detective narratives, partly because of these similar uses of places and production facilities. The article shows how the distinctions between TV and cinema were blurred in the strange story of how James Bond first appeared on screen. It was in an American TV drama, rather than a British cinema film, and some of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels derived from ideas developed for a planned American television series.

Choose Wisely! Interactive Fiction Video Games in the English Classroom

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Iconographies of the present. Political populism, economic instability and migratory crisis in «Years and Years» (BBC and HBO, 2019)

In its six episodes, the British series Years and Years (2019) calls on images that resonate in the collective imagination of the contemporary media, although some of them have their roots in visual motifs with a strong tradition in Western visual culture. In this article, we attempt to identify these images, representing the political conflicts, social tensions, ecological disasters, and economic uncertainties of the end of the 2010s and beginning of the 2020s, and analyse their transfer from the media to television fiction. Among the references and other motifs analysed are images from the realm of contemporary photography appearing in the press and, for example, at the prestigious World Press Photo event. But an earlier pictorial and cinematographic tradition shows the survival of these visual motifs in the images from Years and Years, interweaving the public sphere with television fiction. Methodologically, we draw on contemporary image theory, including the legacy of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, and textual analysis rooted in semiotics. The visual motifs analysed crystallise around the social unease and humanitarian disasters unleashed by economic and migratory crises, the banalisation of politics in the media, the threat of authoritarian populism and the stylisation of images of war. They include the allegory of freedom and representations of popular revolt and hard times.

“See me! Recognize me!” An analysis of transgender media representation

ABSTRACT The representation of transgender characters in fictional television has often been plagued by stereotypical and negative portrayals that do not accurately reflect the real experiences of transgender people. This research thus takes as its focus more recent North American television shows in order to assess whether improved forms of representation exist. Using a combination of Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, this study analyzes how transgender characters in Orange is the New Black and The Fosters are represented. This research found that the improvement of representation in these shows is indicative of a trend toward more positive representation. The characters of Cole, Sophia, and Aaron are represented in both positive and groundbreaking ways. While there is still work to be done in terms of increasing the complexity and range of such representations, these improvements signal a step in the right direction.

A Theoretically Based Analysis of Twitter Conversations about Trauma and Mental Health: Examining Responses to Storylines on the Television Show Queen Sugar

ABSTRACT Entertainment programming in the United States has long addressed major public health issues. In the present study, we used a culture-centric approach to systematically investigate the role of television storylines in facilitating health-related conversations on social media. In particular, we examined Twitter conversations about sexual and police-involved trauma prompted by portrayals on the fictional television drama Queen Sugar. Guided by the culture-centric model of narratives in health promotion, we classified the tweets (N = 1,671) into four main thematic categories: identification, social proliferation, emotions, and intentions. The analysis also revealed several subthemes, including identification with characters and cultural elements, expressions of pain and joy, information seeking and sharing, and the need to address intergenerational trauma and promote intergenerational conversations. The data suggests that Twitter may provide a vehicle for engaging in difficult conversations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the study for mental health communication with Black Americans.

La investigación sobre series de televisión españolas de ficción. Un estudio de revisión crítica (1998-2020)

This review paper assesses academic articles published about Spanish fictional television series in scientific journals indexed in multidisciplinary databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Dialnet between 1998 and 2020. A combined quantitative and qualitative method of analysis based on the SALSA Framework was used, in order to build a systematic bibliographic review. The results showed that the most common studies were those about the representation proposed in the fictional series about certain groups or social settings. Other approaches referred to the development of television fiction genres, adaptations, as well as to audiences and how audiences had received the series. Innovative research pointed to the emerging themes of transmediality, participatory audiences, hybrid studies that explained the content from production and authorship, and feminist works. Among the gaps noted were approaches that addressed the audiovisual language and the aesthetics of television fiction as research opportunities.

Rupture with the predominant heteronormativy: construction of young characters in television fiction series

Este trabajo ofrece una reflexión general sobre la presencia de la diversidad sexual en personajes jóvenes de series televisivas que han alcanzado éxito en una plataforma de notable penetración como lo es Netflix. Para ello se ha procedido a un análisis de dos de sus series de ficción de mayor difusión y que han constituido el corpus de análisis. Ambas han sido producidas en contextos culturales muy diferentes: La casa de las flores (serie mexicana, tres temporadas, estrenada en agosto de 2018) y Sex Education (serie británica, dos temporadas, estrenada en enero de 2019). Las conclusiones de este trabajo advierten que, efectivamente y siendo la heteronormatividad el canon dominante, esta visibilidad de orientaciones sexuales y su manifestación en personajes juveniles supone un avance. De hecho, no pocos de los personajes jóvenes estudiados afrontan sus realidades personales y deseos con importantes conflictos pero con decisión. Sin embargo, las conclusiones también cuestionan el hecho de si esta presencia ha supuesto una mayor aceptación de la diversidad sexual o, al contrario, si se presentan a estos personajes en el marco de convenciones culturales establecidas reforzando el heterosexismo, valores tradicionales como la familia o la monogamia, o haciendo énfasis en la asociación entre homosexualidad y falta de masculinidad o feminidad.

Black Mirrors

Reflections on mimesis have tended to be restricted to aesthetic fictions in the past century; yet the proliferation of new digital technologies in the present century is currently generating virtual simulations that increasingly blur the line between aesthetic representations and embodied realities. Building on a recent mimetic turn, or re-turn of mimesis in critical theory, this paper focuses on the British science fiction television series, Black Mirror (2011–2018) to reflect critically on the hypermimetic impact of new digital technologies on the formation and transformation of subjectivity.

The Columbo method—A rhetoric of inquiry practiced across professions

The increasing numbers of trade articles about the almost trademark “Columbo Method” evidences a growing phenomenon. As demonstrated by the fictional television detective of Columbo 1968-2003, the method is an approach to investigation characterized by rhetorical inquiry (system of questions and timing), an antipotent persona (nonauthoritative, unassuming Everyman), and tenacity in overcoming a responder’s resistance to collaboration or influence. The essay provides a theoretical analysis of Columbo’s informed but indirect questioning, pretense of ignorance, solicitation of help, folksy congeniality, and the false exit. A literature review presents applications of the Columbo Method by professionals to describe effective workplace interaction with resistant responders (conflicting values or allegiances, lifestyle and demographic differences, shyness, anxiety, fear of change, etc.). Third, the theory is applied in an in-depth rhetorical analysis of cases of communication in academia. Most importantly, the work strives to make an impact in ethical approaches to communication with implications for developing rhetorical pedagogy. ©Journal of Professional Communication, all rights reserved.

Do Hobocops Dream of the Rule of Law?

There is little law and even less law enforcement in Martinaise—a fictional district of a fictional city on a fictional archipelago in which a fictional video game, Disco Elysium, is set. This Essay is about what Disco Elyisum’s narrative and gameplay reveal about the nature of law, the effects of its absence, and the challenges associated with transforming an illegitimate legal system. This is not the first essay to consider what a video game has to say about jurisprudence. But I break new ground by bringing video-game-inspired insights about law to bear on a particular criminal legal system: that of the United States. Specifically, I compare and contrast the limitations of law in Disco Elysium and the game’s pessimism about the prospects of systemic change within its fictional world, on the one hand; and the limitations of the U.S. criminal legal system and ongoing, radically optimistic efforts to transform—even abolish—the latter, on the other. Like that of Martinaise, the criminal legal system of the U.S. often fails to meaningfully constrain state power and suffers from crippling democratic deficits. But the U.S. is the site of emergent social movements that are committed to participatory and inclusive democracy, and is structured by a constitution that has inspired and empowered people to contest state power throughout U.S. history. In its very pessimism about the prospects of legal transformation in its own world, Disco Elysium encourages optimism about radical change in ours.

Shifting the Anthropocentric Paradigms Embedded in Film and Classification (ratings) Systems that Impact Apex Species

Human interactions with nature reveal contradictions and misunderstandings based upon anthropocentric colonising behaviours. Cultural forms such as film and media have played a key role in creating and perpetuating negative affect towards nonhuman species, particularly apex species, shark, crocodile, bear, and snake. From early Hollywood films through to contemporary online series, these majestic species have been subjected to vilification and denigration onscreen, resulting in speciesism, subjugation and colonisation of animals, whilst simultaneously extending human ‘authority’ over nature and perpetuating fear – particularly of apex species. A range of hybrid genre textual examples from screen and media, from fictional (feature) and factual (documentary) film and television (docu-nature series) will illustrate these paradigms. An ongoing issue is the anthropomorphising of species onscreen. Drawing upon extensive work since 2009 with international classifications (ratings) systems, this paper will also examine the positionality of the American Humane Association in monitoring the role and treatment of ‘animal actors’ in film; developing a compelling empirical case for the necessity for reform in classifications (ratings) systems, expanding classification Codes to include non-anthropocentric perspectives and the rights of nature with regard to nonhuman actors in public awareness. The necessity for a nuanced understanding of ontological damage to species is currently not a classifiable theme under any existing classification (ratings) systems. An outcome of this article is the proposed development and implementation of a new classification symbol designated as ‘Animal Shield’. This interdisciplinary article will be presented from the perspectives of an environmental ecologist and cultural film studies scholarship, building upon research into decolonising nature.