Television Culture Research Articles

Book Review: Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia (Education, Psychoanalysis, Social Transformation)

Book Review: Television and Youth Culture: Televised Paranoia (Education, Psychoanalysis, Social Transformation)

EUROPEAN CRIMEWATCHES

Before the commercialization of national broadcasting systems and the domination of popular television programming in Europe by international formatted television, many national television channels regularly adapted successful programmes of foreign origin. This paper investigates the history of the West German crime appeal show Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst (File XY … Unsolved) and its Dutch, British and French adaptations. It shows that the programme was adapted to the different national television cultures depending on the specific institutional framework and public debates about the show. Against this background, this paper raises questions regarding the comparative historiography of European television and the contribution of the transnational circulation of television shows to national identities. It argues that the adaptation of transnationally circulating television formats can be best understood as a process of negotiation in which national television cultures redefine their identities.

THE ‘NORTH ATLANTIC TRIANGLE’

This paper examines a few key moments in television's navigation of the competing demands of the national and the transnational in the 1950s, focusing on the relationship between Great Britain, the USA and Canada. Three figures whose careers demonstrate the complex currents of transnational exchange in this ‘North American triangle’ are discussed: Alistair Cooke, British commentator on American life, selected in 1952 to host the BBC-inspired experimental programme Omnibus (1952–61); Hannah Weinstein, the Hollywood independent producer whose historical adventure series filmed in Britain gave employment to blacklisted writers during the coldest years of the cold war; and Sydney Newman, the Canadian drama producer whose career spanned the CBC, NBC, ABC (in the UK) and the BBC. The troubling but productive role of transnational influences within national television cultures is explored along with the challenges it presents for media historiography.

<i>Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet Karen Hellekson (bio) Sharon Marie Ross, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 280pp. £19.99 (pbk). The subtitle hints at the focus of Sharon Marie Ross' book: Beyond the Box analyses what Ross calls teleparticipation, or opportunities to engage with television outside the show itself, mostly online. Such engagement implicates more than the viewer, who is presented here as an active participant in making meaning: joining the viewer are the show's writers, producers and marketers, among others, no longer lurking, invisible, behind closed doors but now reading the boards and forums where fans congregate to discuss the show – Television without Pity being the most famous example (www.televisionwithoutpity.com). This smart, accessible book can be read usefully with Jason Mittell's various publications on narrative complexity, particularly in terms of Lost (2004–); Matt Hills' analysis of Fan Cultures (2002); Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture (2006); Sara Gwenllian-Jones' work in Cult Television (2004); Annette Kuhn's 1984 study of audience published in Screen 25.1, 'Women's Genres'; and Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein's edited volume on Teen Television (2008). Ross interviewed and surveyed fans – her sample limited, as Ross admits, in that most were white American women – in an attempt to understand how consumer relates to producer. In her analysis, she explores the notion of an Internet-connected social audience for a television show, now that such a connection is practically a given; how fans, fandom and engagement with the source text might have changed; and how consumption of television has altered. The shows Ross analyses include Xena: Warrior Princess (US 1995–2001), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (US 1997–2002), American Idol (US 2002–), Lost (US 2004–) and the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup of cartoons geared to adults, such as Family Guy (US 1999–2003, 2005–) and King of the Hill (US 1997–). One chapter is given over to analysis of teen expectations of teleparticipation. Some, but definitely not all, of these shows might be classified as cult television, a difficult-to-define term that revolves around the (lack of) a programme's perceived mainstream acceptability. Ross describes cult television as a show that tends to invite active fan engagement, such as writing fan fiction. Cult texts often have nonrealistic elements, perhaps supernatural, perhaps fantastic, perhaps science fictional, as well-known examples Buffy and Xena demonstrate. But as Ross rightly points out, although much scholarship has explored the notion of the cult show, in part because the engaged fans create artworks that fan studies scholars like to analyse, the notion that can be drawn from it – a social audience – transcends the cult status and the genre of a programme. [End Page 142] Ross chooses to focus on television rather than other visual media, such as film or Internet-released, visual texts, because she wishes to emphasise the ongoing nature of the extended narrative, which comprises many episodes and perhaps many seasons. Ross argues, following Walter Benjamin, that 'the Internet as an extension of the TV text may be contributing mightily to a revitalization of storytelling' (25), which, thanks to teleparticipation, extends beyond the source. The move from beyond the screen to an ancillary source, the Internet, imbricates an already extended narrative. Further, Ross wants to deal with the fans of the show, a stance that places her book firmly within the realm of fan studies as well as the more general field of media studies. Indeed, her conclusion describes the empowerment of fans in various fan-spearheaded, save-the-show campaigns, driven in part by a sense of the emotional connections experienced by the fans. Affective engagement results in feelings of ownership, yet at the end of the day, The Powers That Be are still the storytellers and the true owners of the text. Despite this, however, if TPTB decide to engage with fans, they must be prepared to have an actual conversation. They can not drop in, make a pronouncement, and leave: Ross speaks of heightened 'expectations for intimacy and connectedness; and while this dynamic revolves primarily around the community online, it applies to anyone entering that space' – writer, producer or fan...

<i>Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television Whitney Strub Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. By Elana Levine. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 320. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). Because it fills two significant gaps in scholarly literature, Elana Levine's Wallowing in Sex will surely be heavily read and cited for years to come. And because it engages with the "new sexual culture" of 1970s American television with expansive research and analytical acumen, it merits the attention. While numerous articles have addressed various aspects of 1970s TV, the period has not received the sustained, book-length attention that other periods have, as witnessed by the roster in the Console-ing Passions series published by Duke University Press, which Levine's book joins. While Aniko Bodroghkozy's Groove Tube narrativizes 1960s television in regard to youth rebellion and Jane Feuer's Seeing Through the Eighties situates that decade's TV efforts as a dialogue with Reaganism, Wallowing in Sex now frames the seventies as a decade in which networks struggled to assimilate, and ultimately contain, the ongoing sexual revolution, which at least seemingly threatened to restructure American culture and society.1 As such, the book provides an overview of tremendous importance for television historians. More broadly, though, it also provides a necessary corrective for historians of the sexual revolution who have collectively failed to assign television a place of prominence among the standard litany of phenomena that define the period. The breakdown of censorship and university in loco parentis restrictions, the birth control pill and increased reproductive rights, the women's and gay liberation movements, and the sexualized cultures of pornography, rock music, and disco have all received extensive attention, but television has generally occupied a marginal role at best in published narratives of the sexual revolution. Levine makes her case for its importance quickly and persuasively, arguing that TV did "as much as any cultural form to bring an acceptance of sexual change to the American mainstream" (2). While going to a movie theater and watching The Devil in Miss Jones and dancing at Studio 54 served as markers of participation in the emerging cultural formations of the sexual revolution, she notes, many more Americans encountered these changes via their TV sets. Because of this cultural centrality, TV became the medium through which many Americans negotiated challenges to the sexual status quo. Its legacy, Levine contends, is mixed: while television helped normalize recognition of youth and queer sexuality, for instance, it also toned down any radical components, rendering counternormative sexualities palatable to mainstream audiences. Ultimately, this dilution served the interests of preserving the traditional hegemony of [End Page 347] heterosexual sex within marriage, as sexual dissent was simply commodified and assimilated into a consumerist representational economy. Levine begins with a useful industrial overview, charting the general shape of 1970s American television network history as perpetually third-ranked ABC made a stunning mid-decade ascension to claim the top from established industry champion CBS. This quick rise, she argues, was fueled by its use of sex to attract viewers; while all three major U.S. networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) had begun to recognize the use-value of sexuality by the early 1970s, Fred Silverman's defection from CBS to the presidency of ABC's Entertainment Division in May 1975 spearheaded a concerted effort, reliant on so-called jiggle TV, to capitalize on sex, which paid off when ABC took the lead in the 1976–77 season. By 1978 even the once-hesitant CBS had adopted the tag line, "Turn us on, we'll turn you on" (36). In describing this corporate sex frenzy, Levine deftly conveys the oligopolistic industrial structure of the networks, in which ostensible competition substantively amounted to mutual benefits all around. Because Wallowing in Sex will surely reach general readers, she might have explained relationships between networks and local affiliates a bit more clearly, but attentive readers should be able to ferret out the general outline, and Levine more than compensates with some wonderfully attentive research, even going back to Silverman's 1959 Ohio State University master's thesis to uncover his...

Narractivity and the narrative database

Wikis, websites designed for the communal creation of media content, have previously been theorized using the work of Levy (1997) as knowledge communities. In this conception, wikis are seen as storehouses of data that communities can use to organize and explicate their encyclopedic “communal intelligence.” In this paper, I expand on Levy’s argument to examine the narratological possibilities of wikis. Using as examples fan-created wikis for the cult television shows Lost and Heroes, I show that these media-based wikis highlight the fan community’s interactive construction of a narratological database. Using the interactivity omnipresent in wikis, fans articulate a new conception of narrative construction, a conception I term “narractivity.”

Television and culture in Putin's Russia: remote control

This book examines television culture in Russia under the government of Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the growing influx into Russian television of globally mediated genres and formats has coincided with a decline in media freedom and a ratcheting up of government control over the content style of television programmes. All three national channels (First, Russia, NTV) have fallen victim to Putin’s power-obsessed regime. Journalists critical of his Chechnya policy have been subject to harassment and arrest; programmes courting political controversy, such as Savik Shuster’s Freedom of Speech (Svoboda slova) have been taken off the air; coverage of national holidays like Victory Day has witnessed a return of Soviet-style bombast; and reporting on crises, such as the Beslan tragedy, is severely curtailed. The book demonstrates how broadcasters have been enlisted in support of a transparent effort to install a latter-day version of imperial pride in Russian military achievements at the centre of a national identity project over which, from the depths of the Kremlin, Putin’s government exerts a form of remote control. However, central to the book's argument is the notion that because of the changes wrought upon Russian society after 1985, a blanket return to the totalitarianism of the Soviet media has, notwithstanding the tenor of much western reporting on the issue, not occurred. Despite the fact that television is nominally under state control, that control remains remote and less than wholly effective, as amply demonstrated in the audience research conducted for the book, and in analysis of contradictions at the textual level. Overall, this book provides a fascinating account of the role of television under President Putin, and will be of interest to all those wishing to understand contemporary Russian society.

War on Terror war on democracy?

This article deals with the effect of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror in media in the United States, the United Kingdom and Denmark. The focus is particularly on documentary films and programmes and the investigative genre. Structural and long-term media developments in both the United States and Europe have, since 2000, undermined and weakened the role of critical, investigative documentaries. The effect of the War on Terror on media and democratic, public dialogue and criticism was clearly a further weakening of dissenting, documentary voices. The strong tradition in Europe for public service film and television cultures had to face up to severe political criticism and attacks on their independence when broadcasting critical documentaries on the War on Terror, and in the United States the independent voices were even more marginalized from the mainstream media.

Replaying the Old Stereotypes into an Artistic Role: the case of Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin is perhaps the best‐known contemporary female artist in Great Britain today. In recent years, she has been listed as one of the most important people in the art world before many established male artists. However, she has also featured on the list of the Worst Britons. Emin combines her unusual public status with notoriety. Emin’s public image is considered here and its construction in relation to a generation of young British artists that emerged in the booming years of reality television and tabloid culture in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Emin’s artistic persona is situated in the context of art history and her position in relation to art icons such as Mary Kelly, the feminist artist, and Andy Warhol, the pop artist who mastered the art of the public self. However, the article also questions this emphasis on Emin’s persona rather than considering her artistic strategy and self‐construction. Is a true understanding of Emin’s persona necessary, desirable, or even possible?

Reviews: The League of Gentlemen, Star Trek, Seinfeld, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, Sex and the City, Angel, Masculinity and Popular Television, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Characters

Reviews: The League of Gentlemen, Star Trek, Seinfeld, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, Sex and the City, Angel, Masculinity and Popular Television, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Characters

On the Mythic Qualities of Television Culture

The purpose of this study is to discuss the mythic qualities of television culture. The basic assumption for the study is that to enrich our understanding of television culture in terms of its mythic qualities will be helpful to those who are interested in the production and the studies of television contents in developing their creative ideas. The study discusses the theoretical conceptions of myth and ritual and their applicability to the study of television culture from the multi-disciplinary perspective. So, it deals with significant theoretical works by a number of great contemporary social or cultural thinkers including Carey, Cassirer, Durkheim, van Gennep, Turner, and Eliade. After all, the result of the study identifies three key features of mythic qualities of television culture including ‘commonsensicalness,’ ‘emotionalness,’ and ‘mediatorialness.’

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2007: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons, and Pop Culture

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2007: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons, and Pop Culture

Entertaining television: the BBC and popular television culture in the 1950s

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Public Service and the Popular: Debates and Developments 2 'Neighbours to the Nation': 'Soap Opera', the BBC and (Re)visiting The Grove Family (1954-57) 3 'The Give-Away Shows - But Who is Really Paying?' Rethinking Quiz and Game Shows on 1950s British Television 4 The Problem Show - 'An. Unmarried mother sat in a wing-backed chair on TV last night.'BBC Television asks Is This Your Problem? (1955-57) 5 From 'Serialitis' to 'Torture, Treacle, Tears and Trickery': Framing Television Fame 6 Conclusion: 'There's nothing really better than what you're used to, is there?' Bibliography

III. Sex and Censorship: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In this article, I will discuss the impact that television fiction may have upon our understanding of women’s sexuality and sexual oppression. Using the cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) (Whedon, 1997–2003) as a case study, I argue that some censorship deprives viewers of the opportunity to reflect upon and debate sexual mores. Public concern over the effects of television on young people has led to much empirical investigation, principally regarding television violence and, to a lesser extent, sexual content. There is no evidence to suggest that sexual material directly influences young people’s sexual attitudes or behaviour (Donnerstein and Smith, 2001; Malamuth and Impett, 2001); furthermore, research has been criticized for using ‘simple exposure’ to sexual scenes (Bauserman,1998) as measures; the relationship between television viewing and behaviour is likely to be complex, mediated through historical, cultural and social contexts. Young viewers ‘read’ sexual scenes through the lens of their own prior experiences and developing sexual identities and are capable of interpreting moral messages underlying scenes of a sexual nature; their views are often influenced by broader moral values such as trust and mutual respect (Brown, 2000; Levine, 2002; Bragg and Buckingham, 2003). Indeed, it has been argued that the overarching moral messages contained in television fiction are more important than specific content. Selnow (1990) analysed a range of prime-time television programmes and concluded that although they contained scenes of sex and violence, they also conveyed many positive values; people view the whole programme, not just the controversial scenes. Arguably all but the youngest of viewers understand the values being conveyed.

Ciudad, televisión y fantasías: Vírgenes del Sol Inn Cabaret de Alexis Figueroa

The Chilean poet Alexis Figueroa's Virgenes del Sol Inn Cabaret (1986) recreates the complexity of relationships in the television culture, in Latin American...

Fantasising Masculinity in <i>Buffyverse</i> Slash Fiction: Sexuality, Violence and the Vampire

No aspect of fan culture has received as much academic attention as the infamous genre of “slash”, a form of fan-generated erotic literature which centres on the relationship between two or more same-sex (usually male) characters appropriated from the realm of popular television. Scholarly criticism surrounding slash fandom has made significant inroads into explaining the persistence and popularity of this predominantly female-authored literary practice (Penley 1991, BaconSmith 1992). However, the enormously varied and changeable nature of these fictions (which surround a multitude of popular texts) has meant that much scholarly work still remains to be done on the subject. This article examines online fan authored slash fictions inspired by Joss Whedon’s cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and its spin-off Angel: The Series (1999-2004). My chief concern here is to examine the multivalent ways in which slash authors or ‘shippers’ (derived from the word ‘relationship’) articulate discourses of aggressive or violent (homo)sexualised masculinity in Buffyverse slash, and to

Restricted confessions? Blogging, subcultural celebrity and the management of producer–fan proximity

In this article we argue that “citizen journalist” debates surrounding weblogs, or “blogs”, have tended to displace attention from the ways in which specific media professionals (e.g. those working on television drama) have used blogging as a promotional tool. Rather than challenging forms of media power, we suggest that this blogging actually reinforces the cultural and symbolic power of media producers, positioned as knowledgeable “insiders”, versus fans strictly defined as “consumers”. Our particular focus is on cult television media professionals who can be thought of as “subcultural celebrities”. We contrast two different approaches to subcultural celebrity blogging, which we term “official” and “unofficial”, considering how these differential registers of formality/informality and strict gatekeeping/apparent accessibility both work to reify cultural differences and inequalities between subcultural celebrities and their fans. Rather than enabling confessions from behind-the-scenes of television production, these blogs remain significantly restricted in their confessional form. Our analysis suggests that professional identities are conserved and protected, meaning that any information that could potentially damage television brands or careers is kept firmly off-stage, either through controlled interaction with fans via an “official” blog, or via the less formal cultivation of codes of privacy/professionalism in “unofficial” blogs.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Toward a Sociology of Reality Television

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Toward a Sociology of Reality Television

Television's New Engines

Internationalization is a key to the success of television formats. To understand format trade it is necessary to draw out distinctions between formats and genre. Engines— innovations in programming engineered by format devisors—allow formats to regenerate and hybridize across genres. The core principle of formats, however, is the practice of franchising. Causal relations can be established between formats, engines, and the tradability of television culture. The article shows how formats have impacted platforms, markets, labor, audiences, and distribution of TV content.

African Video Film Arts Festival, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

October 28-31, 2007 I was invited to be a discussant at this two-day conference held at Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, the 140-acre campus near the brownroofed, medieval town of Ile-Ife. All screenings and panels took place in the spacious, cool auditorium of Oduduwa Hall, a beautiful, gargantuan building of black and white architecture, built in 1960 with round holes cut into large flat walls set amidst floating, wide, cement staircases and multiple terraces. This conference was targeted to be the first in an annual series, focused on African video and film arts. Though work from other countries on the continent was screened, from the outset opinions clustered around the muchmaligned, much-adored Nigerian video industry, also known as Though twenty years old, the Nigerian video industry is a frontier world and poses remarkable possibilities around economies, national identity, and a new renaissance of the film industry working with today's destructions, reconstructions, and technologies. The conference looked beyond Nollywood. It called up an examination of consciousness with open questions about identity, art forms, and colonial impact. Younger people vocally challenged the idea of a precolonial character that could be found intact. The welcome address by conference organizer, Dr. Foluke Ogunleye, set a practical, enthusiastic tone. She encouraged a new perspective of this video industry, currently Africa's largest-as a foundation on which to rejuvenate cinema. The Nigerian video world is very profitable, very multiple in its sources, production values and quality, and is very international, exporting around the world. It is an in-house national product, which finances its own pictures and recycles its profits quickly. Its major backers are scrap-metal businessmen, so its economy is hands-on and financially canny. Ogunleye pointed out that art already exists in these popular videos as well as messages of Africanness and that, easy as it is to dismiss the videos as shallow and poorly made, they nevertheless hold the seeds of a future African, specifically Nigerian, cinema, one both lucrative and artistically successful. The indigenous structures of identity and prosperity are there: many of these videos are in languages (Yoruba and Hausa), many are built on traditional folktales or on the young men's fiction of the 1950s Onitsha market literature, and the industry itself arose from the illustrious Yoruba theater, whose players needed work when the economy (and the theater) collapsed in the 1980s and so turned to video acting. It also owes much to the Mexican and Brazilian soaps that have engrossed television viewers for decades. This makes the Nigerian video industry a special mishmash of global culture, oral and epic folk culture, routine culture, television culture, and new culture. Many contemporary features and documentaries from Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda as well as classic Nigerian videos, such as Tunde Kelani's Thunderbolt (2001) were screened. The students loved the torrid Ghanaian youth soap opera Caravans of Dreads, made by twentysomething director, Sam Atsu Akbo, as both amusing and hip, and, equally loved and hip, the gentle Mee (2006), a spiritual documentary on finding one's self, by Ugandan nun, Sister Dominica Dipio. Ogunleye wanted students to see films on a large screen and in a large audience as few had experienced this. In most countries, movie houses are almost nonexistent, often too difficult or dangerous to get to, too costly and not worth the hassle of leaving home when a TV screen will do. This important detail allowed the phenomenon of film history and its reliance on the big screen to hover in the conference. In every approach to a revived film industry were debates about identity per se, about identity as the basis for new cinema, about Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo traditions as the crux of a Nigerian film culture, and about the future of celluloid versus digital or video. …