Home Box Office Research Articles

Stand-up documentary: An emerging narrative device in Yvonne Orji’s comedy

Stand-up documentary—the inclusion of video film footage in stand-up performances—is a growing trend in comedy specials. Gary Gulman in The Great Depresh and Whitmer Thomas in The Golden One are some of the earliest comedians to employ documentary clips in creating portraits of their real-life circumstances on stage. More recently, Yvonne Orji’s comedy special for Home Box Office (HBO) entitled Momma, I Made It! also utilizes documentary video films of the comedienne’s experience in Nigeria to bring the Nigerian experience closer to her American audience. In this article I bring to the academic mainstream the understudied subject of stand-up documentary in humour studies. Through close reading and nuanced analyses of the gig, I examine stand-up documentary as a novel device of narration through which Orji introduces her audience to life in Nigeria through an exposition of her experiences growing up. Accentuating the differences between Nigerians and Americans and playing on Nigerian stereotypes, the comedienne deploys the clips as precise proofs transitioning her American audience into the alternate Nigerian contexts in Momma, I Made It! I conclude that stand-up documentary enhances the credibility of the performance, shapes perceptions of Nigerians, and facilitates audience understanding of cultural contexts that would otherwise remain unfamiliar to them.

Sculpting Foucauldian power in Game of Thrones as a transmedia project: a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis

This study analyses the textual, visual and interactional modes employed in creating and representing Daenerys Targaryen in both Home Box Office TV show Game of Thrones and mobile game Reigns: Game of Thrones as a transmedia project to guide users’ construal of the notion of embodied power. The authors examine the structural, functional and semiotic elements that the two media orchestrate to represent how power is attained, developed and relinquished. The results indicate that the two texts/media put forward two different kinds of power (relations) and levels of users’ interactivity. The TV show employs a more linear and developmental conception of power characterizing Daenerys as a transferrable object of power while the game underlines a more dispersed and pervasive notion of power to decentre absolute power. The show deploys immersive cinematic representations/visual spectacle, converging/diverging serial narration that goes beyond the opulent mise-en-scène and complex scenes to attract users’ attention. As for the game, it deploys intellectual and emotional interactivity, choice and coherence that allow users to experience the story, mechanics and environment as users identify with Daenerys. While the show introduces a host of socipolitical tools to maintain longer reign as different forms of governmentality, the game characterizes disciplinary power where subjects/users are offered training opportunities under the designer’s gaze to internalize a series of procedures and sociopolitical tactics. The findings reiterate Foucault’s notion of power as a system of relations, a capillary power that circulates and subjectifies, whilst subjects/users are spaces where subtractive and productive power are wielded, enacted and/or resisted. Each medium deploys its semiotic-specific resources to create meaning differently. While the TV show relies heavily on visual resources and narrative techniques to make meaning, the game mobilizes certain verbo-visual and interactive resources to make meaning. With the growing attention given to transmedia projects as a social practice with social meanings, this article claims to offer critical implications for social semioticians, film creators and game designers through a systematic analytical framework with a special focus on visual meanings.

Analysis on Apple TV+: Future Development Direction of Streaming Media Platform

Streaming media had been a popular form of entertainment since 2019 due to COVID-19. Netflix, Home Box Office, and other streaming media offer an abundance of media resources to all kinds of audiences. Notwithstanding that streaming media had been flourishing, they still had trouble constructing sustainable profitability. Apple TV+, being one of the streaming media corporations, found out a way to achieve sustainable profitability. The platform also benefited from the flourishing of the streaming media industry. In order to promote the sustainable development of the streaming media industry, the article is mainly about Apple TV+ achieving sustainable profitability by adapting short and quality streaming media products and making proper use of the parent Company Apple Inc’s financial support. SWOT analysis will be used to make a further explanation. The advice is offered in the article to expose the revelation of future development for both Apple TV+ and the industry, which is to combine franchises with short series and make use of co-branding to enlarge its media resources. Additionally, the research also reveals the weakness of Apple TV+ that Apple TV+ has difficulty in retaining loyal customers due to the lack of rich and attractive streaming media resources.

CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY “THE WRATH OF AN ANGEL”: Analysis of the documentary in the light of Psychoanalysis

"The Wrath of an Angel," a Home Box Office production released in 1992, is a remarkable documentary that offers a deeply moving look into the life of Beth Thomas. From a young age, Beth was subjected to physical and sexual abuse by her biological father, an experience that left deep emotional scars. Through recordings and collaboration with renowned professional Dr. Ken Magid, the work explores the challenges Beth faced as a result of these traumatic experiences. Beth Thomas, at a young age, developed perverse traits and psychological disorders resulting from the abuse she suffered. These traumas manifested in aggressive and self-destructive behaviors, which became a part of his life journey. To this end, the objective of this research was to prepare a Critical Review of the Book – The Wrath of an Angel and present an analysis in the light of psychoanalysis.

Spectator Experience Goes Over-the-Top during the Pandemic: From Cinema House to the Home Box Office

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnupama A. P.Dr. Anupama A. P, Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, VIT-AP University, Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh.Vinod BalakrishnanDr. Vinod Balakrishnan, Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu.

ALABAMA SNAKE. Directed by Theo Love. 2020. Home Box Office.

ALABAMA SNAKE. Directed by Theo Love. 2020. Home Box Office.

“And Not That It Matters, but I'm 5 F**king 2 and I Will Rock This Dress”. Ageing and its (Re)Imagining of the Female Body in HBO's Sex and the City , with Samantha Jones

Cet article s'appuie sur les théories de la performativité du genre et des corps (Butler, Tasker) et sur celles de la sexualité (Foucault) pour analyser l'évolution du personnage de Samantha Jones, incarné par l'actrice Kim Cattrall dans la série Sex and the City et les deux films qui lui ont fait suite. La voix et le corps de Samantha Jones cristallisent le rejet des normes – en particulier celle du vieillissement (« aging ») – qui régissent, stigmatisent ou contraignent les corps féminins. Personnage transgressif, Samantha Jones propose, au fur et à mesure des épisodes, et via ses performances vestimentaires, verbales et sexuelles délibérément provocantes et provocatrices, un discours performatif sur l'âge et le vieillissement si prégnant qu'il en devient méta-textuel, s'appliquant à la chaîne câblée HBO et reflétant, voire anticipant, l'évolution des médias (sériels, télévisuels, etc.) et de leur stratégie de marque.

Screen production on the ‘biggest set in the world’: Northern Ireland Screen and the case ofGame of Thrones

The publicly funded screen development agency, Northern Ireland Screen, has been the key institutional actor in the exponential growth of the screen industries in Northern Ireland. The most prominent production to be based in Northern Ireland has been Home Box Office’s Game of Thrones, which had much of its eight seasons filmed in the region. Significant amounts of public finance have been offered to the screen industries, with direct funding provided to augment United Kingdom-wide tax breaks. However, there has been a lack of critical analysis of the recipients of this finance, on the precarious nature of many of the jobs that have been created, or on the stated benefits to the economy. This article subjects the role of Northern Ireland Screen to policy analysis to attempt to fill this scholarly gap. Setting the subject into the context of public support for film and television across the United Kingdom, it is argued that the economic argument for providing direct financial support to the screen industries needs to be viewed in the context of the overall impact on society.

“The game is rigged”: framing real life metaphorically in the TV epicThe Wire

AbstractThe aim of the paper is to show the extent to which thegamemetaphor shapes the Home Box Office (HBO) show (2002–2008)The Wire, which sets out the interconnection of the systems of drug dealing/trafficking, police department, court, organized labor, media, public school, and local policy, as well as the similar structure which all those systems are built upon. As our theoretical-methodological framework we will adopt cognitive and cultural linguistics as a starting point for a contextually embedded sequence analysis. We will focus on the multimodal ubiquity ofgameas a cultural model, as well as the contextual frames in which this metaphor is embedded with regard to the everyday life of the protagonists on the TV show and the institutions they are part of. Therefore, we will first analyze a specific metaphorical scenario where the conventionalized source and target domainschessanddrug businessare inverted, which has cultural-contextual implications, before we come to a second scene where the same domains are again accessed, this time in reverse.

This great stage of androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the world as stage

Abstract This article sets out to explore how the world-as-stage metaphor and metatheatrical elements are employed in Home Box Office’s (HBO) 2016 television series Westworld and Shakespeare’s plays. In Shakespeare, the world-as-stage metaphor is pervasively used to unsettle the audience’s conceptions of reality and personal identity. Westworld similarly employs the metaphor to question identity and agency. By adapting many of the metatheatrical devices and motifs used by Shakespeare to a science fiction setting and to humanoid androids, Westworld explores new facets of ancient questions on role-play, reality, fiction, freedom and determinism. Whereas in Shakespeare metatheatre is confined to the stage, the world in Westworld has literally become a stage and the audience members have turned into players. Incorporating ideas drawn from cognitive linguistics, the history of theatre, neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, current debates about free will and determinism and early modern protestant theology, this article seeks to demonstrate how in both Westworld and Shakespeare’s plays, theatre and reality ultimately become one because they run against the same final boundary: death.

A comparison of non-concussive head impacts in young athletes vs. concussion-causing impacts in adult american footballers

ObjectiveCollect head impact dose data in young athletes, using an instrumented mouthguard validated per NFL specification. Compare theses doses with published concussive head impact data.DesignProspective, cross-sectionalSettingCalibrate an instrumented mouthguard head impact dosimeter in laboratory on Hybrid III (HIII) dummy. Collect young athlete non-concussive head impacts on playing field using this dosimeter. Compare these doses to published concussion doses from adult American footballers.ParticipantsYoung American footballers and boxers, n=12, ages 10–21. IRB #13–899.Assessment of risk factorsSingle head impact doses, signs/symptoms of concussion.Outcome measuresNational Football League (NFL) validity specifications for laboratory testing, head kinematics, presence/absence of concussion.Main results177 non-concussive head impact doses were identified. Apparent overlap between non-concussive mouthguard doses and published concussion helmet doses from Rowsonet al, (2012) was found. Mouthguard dosimeter meets NFL validity specifications set forth by Siegmund & Guskiewicz et al. (2016) up to 123 g and 7320 rad/s2.ConclusionsThe mouthguard dosimeter meets the NFL laboratory validity specifications. In human tests, 177 non-concussive, asymptomatic head impacts were measured. Young athlete mouthguard-measured head impact doses (up to 62 g, 4470 rad/s2) had apparent overlap with concussion doses reported from adult athletes wearing instrumented helmets. The overlap may be due to individual concussion tolerance variability, differences in dosimeter accuracy, or peak acceleration magnitude being an insufficient concussion metric. Accurate dosimeter monitoring may be useful in the future to limit play once a certain dose is reached, or to identify dangerous impacts that may have not been observed by the caregiver.Competing interestsBartsch/Samorezov/Benzel/Miele – Cleveland Clinic has entered into an exclusive license agreement with Prevent Biometrics for Intelligent Mouthguard technology on which the Authors (AB, SS, EB, VM) are inventors. AB & SS are also paid consultants of Prevent Biometrics.AB, EB and VM are – members of Prevent Biometrics’ Scientific Advisory Panel. Under terms of these agreements there is potential for fee-for-service payments, royalties and/or equity arising from commercialization of head impact measurement and/or head impact safety product(s). The conflicts disclosed here are managed by the Cleveland Clinic Conflict Management Board. Complete details can be found at https://my.clevelandclinic.org/ccf/media/files/About/COI.pdf. These authors also receive research support from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Transportation, Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University and Rawlings Sporting Goods.Alberts – as of 4/30/2015, Dr. Alberts has reported a financial relationship and may receive future financial benefits from the Cleveland Clinic for inventions or discoveries commercialised through i-COMET Technologies, IncBernick – as of 5/10/2016, Dr. Bernick has reported financial relationships as a paid consultant, speaker or member of an advisory committee for the following companies: Allergan. Dr. Bernick also receives research support from Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Haymon Boxing, Spike TV, Home Box Office Inc. (HBO) and Top Rank Boxing Inc.Brett – Dr. Brett is an Officer in Prevent Biometrics, and sub-awardee on federally funded grants from Cleveland Clinic.Figler, Gray, Russman – None.

Editors' Note

Editorial| November 01 2016 Editors' Note The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2016) 14 (1): vii–xiv. https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.14.1.vii Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Editors' Note. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 November 2016; 14 (1): vii–xiv. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.14.1.vii Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search Back in 2011 Home Box Office announced a project guaranteed to catch the attention of literary scholars. The cable-TV pioneer had signed a new deal with one of its major creative mainstays, writer/producer David Milch, to weave various works by William Faulkner into both full-length movies and an episodic TV show.News of the film angle did not necessarily excite. With the exception of The Story of Temple Drake, a 1933 spin on Sanctuary starring Miriam Hopkins and Jack La Rue often cited as one reason rigid Hays Code strictures against sex and violence were instituted in Hollywood, the track record of Faulkner film adaptations has always been abysmal. (Does anyone remember The Sound and the Fury from 1959, starring an uncharacteristically full-haired Yul Brynner as Jason Compson and Joanne Woodward as Miss Quentin?) A Yoknapatawpha-set TV series, on the other hand … now that seemed such a cleverly... You do not currently have access to this content.

War in the Tropics

In the Home Box Office mini-series Band of Brothers (2001), one of the soldiers on a troop ship bound for England remarks: "Right now some lucky bastard's headed for the Pacific, get put on some tropical island, surrounded by six naked native girls, helping him cut up coconuts so he can hand feed them to flamingos". This paradisiacal view of the Pacific and tropical areas has existed for centuries, and despite European settlers' developing familiarity with the area, it is a misconception which has continued to be propagated in war films set in the tropics. These war films depict the tropics as antipodean utopias which become corrupted by the ravages of war. Thus, while many of these films attempt to display war realistically, they still hold to the historical view of the tropics as unspoiled and pure—until, of course, war intrudes onto the scene. These films rarely examine the effect of the war on the local inhabitants, but rather deal with soldiers coping with the disjunction between their preconceived notions of the area and the reality before them. Crucially as well, war is depicted as a greater crime against nature (both human and environmental) when fought in the tropics rather than in Europe. This view is promulgated in the representation of battles fought in these films. In films set in the Pacific theatre during World War Two, and more recent ones set during the Vietnam War, the battle for American and Australian soldiers is as much about coping with their surroundings as with fighting the enemy, who are often rarely seen, or only viewed in long shot. War films set in the tropics depict 'war as hell' because of the environment, which is by turns remote, mystifying, and generally rural, rather than urban, 'civilised' and familiar, as it is in the case of the majority of war films set in Europe.

Home on Home Box Office: Sound, home, and disaster in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and David Simon’s Treme

Abstract This article focuses on the ways two HBO productions, David Simon’s television series Treme and Spike Lee’s documentary film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Three Acts, rely upon sound to construct senses of loss, home and place. Drawing upon personal experience, textual analysis and interviews, the article examines the conditional possibility for television and film to function as ‘reckoning texts’ in relation to Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s a New Day”:The Intuitionist,The Wire, and Prophetic Tradition

Both Colson Whitehead’s debut novel, The Intuitionist (1999), and David Simon’s Home Box Office (HBO) series, The Wire (2002-2008), are driven by tensions that undercut vertical hierarchies and the promise of technology in failing urban landscapes. Indeed, these works reveal and then subvert how embedded technologies shape urban spaces: The Wire takes its title from the wiretaps the police set up in each season to attempt to break their cases, and The Intuitionist’ s plot involves the structural soundness of “theoretical elevators.” The Intuitionist centers on rival factions of elevator inspectors; the vertical potential of their elevators is a primary concern of the novel, as is the novel’s greater upending of traditional “uplift” discourse. 1 Each season of The Wire examines the intertwined verticality of Baltimore’s various infrastructures. In the drug culture, one rises from a “hopper” (coined from “grasshopper,” the apprentice children working the lowliest jobs on the drug corners and in the “low-rises”) to a lieutenant in the high-rises and, ultimately, to a drug kingpin, although the positions are precarious ones; these trajectories have parallels in the rise up the ranks and spectacular free falls of police commissioners, union leaders, or mayors. 2 Given the catastrophic failures of each city, Whitehead and Simon critique the notion that purely technological advances in surveillance or building construction will fix broken cities. In order to prevent the physical and metaphorical collapse of American cities, these works suggest that we must recognize the importance of prophecy and the written word in order to restore visibility and voice to the urban underclass.

Revisiting Stoker’s Dracula: No Brave Good Villains Left

This article considers the implication of the main character, Count Dracula, the villain/anti-hero in Stoker’s text, as a starting point to analysing the approaches deployed in the novel that introduce new stratagems to uncover the motives which allow the readers to find excuses to deny “pure” evilness. Stoker’s Dracula (1897) introduced the plausibility―in the realm of the gothic horror novel―of finding heroes in modern day “villains”. This paper will argue this influence by introducing connections with modern “pop” vampires: from the teenage vampires in the Twilight saga both the texts (2005, 2006, 2007, & 2008) and the film versions ( 2008, 2009, 2010, & 2012), to the grown-up fantasies of Charlaine Harris in the True Blood saga (both the 13 books published between 2001 and 2012 and the Home Box Office TV series that started in 2008 and, so far is in its 7th season in 2014) and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows (2012), the remake of the 70s American Broadcasting Company Gothic soap opera (which ran between june 1966 to April 1977). Bearing in mind the history of the vampire, through a brief account of its constant presence in the contemporary film and television industry, we will attempt to unveil the cultural reasons that bring light to the fact that modern society is out of brave good villains. The presentation will retrieve some theoretical support from Cristopher Frayling’s analysis of the vampire myth, David Punters’ ideas on the modern gothic and Maggie Kilgour’s assumptions on the rise of the gothic.

Narrating “White Slavery!” In The Wire: A Generic Genealogy

Home Box Office's The Wire is a cop show that boldly seeks to explore the tensions in the grand narratives that we brought with us into the twenty-first century—mythologies regarding the safety our state can provide us, the postracial society many thought we had built in the United States, the stability of the United States as a superpower, our unshakable economy, the undeniability of social mobility, our unlimited individual potential, our pursuit of the true and the good. Focusing specific attention on the representation of modern slavery in season 2, Laura Murphy locates The Wire in a long tradition of representing slavery that can further inform our reading of the program's interrogation of early twenty-first-century American life, cultures, and literary traditions. Read in the context of two modes of representing slavery in particular—the African American slave narrative tradition and the “white slavery” narratives of the early twentieth century—The Wire becomes an inheritor of and contributor to our ever-changing picture of slavery in the United States and the cultural norms and anxieties that allow it to exist. This article traces some of the cultural contexts that inform the depiction of slavery in the last few centuries of American writing as a way of historicizing and critiquing the way The Wire takes up slavery as its subject in the twenty-first century. This reading reveals the deep-rooted and persistent cultural anxieties regarding race, ethnicity, and sex that intersect in our discourse on forced sex work, a troubling discourse that is alternatingly highlighted by the program and inadvertently replicated.

Understanding Management, Trade, and Society Through Fiction: Lessons from The WireThe Wire, produced by Blown Deadline Productions and Home Box Office, 2002–2008.

Academy of Management ReviewVol. 39, No. 4 Book Reviews: What the Academy is ReadingUnderstanding Management, Trade, and Society Through Fiction: Lessons from The WireRobin Holt and Mike ZundelRobin HoltUniversity of Liverpool and Mike ZundelUniversity of LiverpoolPublished Online:8 Oct 2014https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0087AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail View articleREFERENCES Alvarez R. 2009. The Wire: Truth be told (revised ed.). Edinburgh: Cannongate. Google Scholar BBC. 2009. The culture show. Interview with The Wire's David Simon. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEkfSx8hujw. Google Scholar Bolaño R. 2009. (First published in 2004.) 2666. London: Picador. Google Scholar Camus A. 1970. Lecture given in Athens on the future of tragedy. In Thody P. (Ed. & Trans.), Selected essays and notebooks: 192–203. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Google Scholar Eagleton T. 2002. Sweet violence: The idea of the tragic. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar Gadamer H. G. 2004. Truth and method (2nd ed.). (Translated by Weinsheimer J.Marshall D. G..) London: Continuum. Google Scholar James W. 1907. Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longmans. Google Scholar Lemann N. 2010. Charm City USA. New York Review of Books, September 30: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/charm-city-usa/. Google Scholar Love C. 2010. Greek gods in Baltimore: Greek tragedy and The Wire. Criticism, 52: 487–507. Google Scholar March J. 2006. Rationality, foolishness, and adaptive intelligence. Strategic Management Journal, 27: 201–214. Google Scholar Musil R. 1952. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The man without qualities]. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Google Scholar Newcomb H. , Hirsch P. M. 1983. Television as a cultural forum. Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 8(3): 45–55. Google Scholar Park R. 1928. Human migration and the marginal man. American Journal of Sociology, 33: 881–893. Google Scholar Ronell A. 1992. Crack wars: Literature, addiction, mania. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Google Scholar Searle J. 1975. The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History, 6: 319–332. Google Scholar Sennett R. 2006. The culture of new capitalism. London: Yale University Press. Google Scholar Simmel G. 1971. (First published in 1908.) The stranger. In Levine D. (Ed.), On individuality and social forms: 143–149. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar Simon D. 1992. Homicide: A year on the killing streets. New York: Ballantine Books. Google Scholar Simon D. 2013. The audacity of despair. http://davidsimon.com/the-koch-brothers-and-the-baltimore-sun/. Google Scholar Simon D. , Burns E. 2009. (First published in 1997.) The corner: A year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood. New York: Random House. Google Scholar Townley B. , Cooper D. J. , Oakes L. 2003. Performance measures and the rationalization of organizations. Organization Studies, 24: 1045–1071. Google Scholar Tsoukas H. , Chia R. 2002. On organizational becoming. Organization Science, 13: 567–582. Google Scholar Van Maanen J. 1979. The fact of fiction in organizational ethnography. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24: 539–552. Google Scholar Von Wright G. H. 1971. Explanation and understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Google Scholar Whitehead A. N. 1926. Science and the modern world. New York: Free Press. Google Scholar Whitehead A. N. 1938. Modes of thought. New York: Macmillan. Google Scholar Williams R. 1966. Modern tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Google Scholar Zuckerman E. W. 1999. The categorical imperative: Securities analysts and the illegitimacy discount. American Journal of Sociology, 104: 1398–1438. Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited ByThe Leviathan of Rationality: Using Film to Develop Creativity and Imagination in Management Learning and EducationDamian O’Doherty26 October 2020 | Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 19, No. 3Organizational Readiness: Culturally Mediated Learning Through Disney AnimationMartyn Griffin, Mark Learmonth and Nick Piper15 February 2018 | Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 17, No. 1 Vol. 39, No. 4 Permissions Metrics Downloaded 10 times in the past 12 months History Published online 8 October 2014 Published in print 1 October 2014 Information© Academy of Management ReviewWe thank Chris Quinn Trank for her helpful and encouraging feedback.PDF download

‘A City upon a Hill’:The Wireand Its Distillation of the United States Polity

The Home Box Office's series The Wire (2002–2008) provides an informed critique of the decline of the democratic American ideal of the ‘city upon a hill’. From its inception as a police procedural, it expanded its interests across the dystopian city of Baltimore to consider the linkage between drug crimes, policing, the collapse of blue-collar life, social deprivation, institutional compromise, the public school system, media compliance and political self-interest. Therefore, this article will situate The Wire into the debates that have defined the US polity and will discuss how it employs the narrative conventions of a contemporary thriller to offer an alternative view of American democracy.

And the beat goes on: The continuing influence of The Singing Detective

Abstract From the 25 years of its original broadcast on British television in December 1986, this article aims to assess the continued influence of the British TV serial, The Singing Detective (BBC). It aims to clarify many of the major techniques employed in the programme and suggest ways in which its particular style and non-naturalistic aesthetic (with its roots dating back to the early 1960s) has influenced a whole generation of TV drama since. In particular, it will draw direct parallels between writer Dennis Potter’s work and serials such as Twin Peaks, Oz, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, citing various sources that suggest these connections are more than just hypothetical. The American cable channel HBO (Home Box Office) will come under particular focus, with the author drawing links between its current remit to produce experimental and adult-themed drama and Potter’s own work. It will then investigate the state of contemporary British television drama and suggest why it arguably refuses to take as many risks as some of its American counterparts, citing various sources which suggest that contemporary British hard-hitting drama appears to have been forsaken for a plethora of heritage and period-based serials. In conclusion, it will argue that while the influence of The Singing Detective appears to have been profoundly significant elsewhere, its dramatic legacy is now surprisingly missing from British TV screens.