Television Drama Series Research Articles

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

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

Violation of the Principle of Cooperation and Implicature in the Drama One Liter of Tears

The objective of this study is to provide a description of the various instances where the cooperation principle is violated and implicatures are present in the drama One Litre of Tears. The data on violation of the cooperation principle and implicatures are analyzed using Grice's theory of cooperation principle (1975) and Yule's theory of implicatures (2006). This research is a descriptive study conducted using a qualitative approach. The primary data source utilized in this study is the television drama series titled "One litre of tears." The research data consist of utterances that include breaches of the collaboration principle and encompass implicatures. Data gathering approaches employ the method of listening and recording. Data analysis techniques employ intralingual and extra-lingual correspondence methods, utilizing advanced comparison linking techniques to achieve both equalization and differentiation. The study findings indicate that there are 8 instances of violating the quantity maxim, 6 instances of violating the quality maxim, 6 instances of violating the relevance maxim, and 6 instances of violating the way maxim. These violations result in a total of 10 general conversational implicatures, 6 specialized conversational implicatures, 6 scaled implicatures, and 4 conventional implicatures.

Sitcom as refuge, sitcom as prison: Nostalgia, anti‐nostalgia, and the embedded multi‐camera sitcom inWandaVisionandKevin Can F**k Himself

AbstractThis article claims that the recent trend in television and web streaming drama series to feature segments shot in the style of a multi‐camera sitcom, a phenomenon which is termed “embedded sitcom,” reflects the current popularity of nostalgia in popular culture. Situating the sitcom in the context of television history and theories of nostalgia, the article argues that embedded sitcom reveals the nostalgic quality of the sitcom genre as well as of the medium of television, and negotiates a larger cultural conflict between the lucrative potency of nostalgia for past media formats and a wariness of nostalgia as politically regressive.

From Dazzle to Diesel

The rise of Turkish television drama series—or dizi as they are known in Turkey—is one of the most notable media phenomena of the past decade in francophone West Africa, particularly Guinea. This is taking place at a time when Turkey has significantly ramped up its economic, political, and cultural investments in Africa, with countries such as Guinea, rich in natural resources and with geostrategic sea access, rapidly emerging as new targets for Turkey's outsized ambitions. This article asks what we can learn about the global circulation of Turkish modernity—a unique blend of tantalizing consumerism and piety conceptualized as “neo-Ottoman cool”—in francophone West Africa by analyzing the hugely popular dizi alongside public debates on Turkey's investments in energy, transportation, energy, culture, or construction. Drawing on Joseph Tonda's notion of éblouissement (dazzlement), it argues that Guineans, like other West Africans, encounter the dazzling images of Istanbul's rich and famous that permeate dizi in stark contrast with Turkish investments in floating power plants and public transport or the Turkish-built Abdul Hamid II Mosque in Bambeto, a popular quarter of Conakry. The article proposes the phrase dazzle-to-diesel to account for the constant oscillation between blinding power and toxic fumes that accompanies encounters with neo-Ottoman cool in West Africa.

Classicist Drama in Digital Times

This article begins with an overview of the rise of internet drama, or web drama, in China in the past fifteen years. The new platform boasts several advantages, which accounts for its rapid development. Web drama has become so popular that it is replacing television drama series as the mainstream. The article then examines a major genre of web drama: stories set in traditional China. While costume drama or period drama, whether based on history or fiction, has always been popular, classicist web drama series in recent years stand out for their authenticity and creativity. Based on two case studies, the article explores two distinct themes. The first is Royal Nirvana (2019), a pseudo-historical drama that integrates Song-dynasty culture into the plot. In doing so, it beautifully demonstrates the appeal of “Chinese style” or “Asian aesthetics” in popular imagination. The second case study is The Untamed (2019), a fantasy martial arts tale that features two male protagonists who start out as diametrically opposed but end up as soul mates and loyal allies. The drama series skillfully transforms danmei or BL (boys’ love) in the original story into a subtly titillating relationship between two men. The article concludes with a discussion of the new business model that web drama has successfully introduced into the entertainment industry in contemporary China.

Nationalization of Spatiotemporal Artifacts: National Chronotope, Authenticity, and Local Colors in Danish TV Dramas

This article investigates the conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in television drama series in the age of extensive digital media consumption by focusing on Turkish audiences’ reception of Danish TV dramas. Based on the empirical data collected through extended fieldwork in Turkey, and relying on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (spacetime), I analyze how research participants negotiate socio-geographical features, as well as both spatial and temporal textual representations signifying Danish culture and society by delineating “authenticity” and “local color” to distinct spatiotemporal cues in Danish TV drama series. This study reveals that by critically articulating notions of authenticity and local color as distinguishing markers of a particular spacetime, Turkish audiences employ these concepts as strategies to define “national chronotope” which provides a middle ground for reconciliation between the facticity of the geographical place and mediated images of space, as well as factuality of time and local temporalities on screen.

Top Boy에 드러난 공영주택단지와 흑인 공동체 재현

Council estates, the multi-storey tower blocks in Britain, were built in the early 20SUPth/SUP century in order to improve housing affordability for the low-income inner-city working class. Throughout the post-war era, however, they have degenerated into the poorest and the most marginalized communities. Dominant media discourses which stigmatize council estates, highlight the sensational behaviors of the estates residents, eliminating their ‘quotidian’ experience and thus reducing the lived realities of the community to a dangerous, violent space. Top Boy, a British television drama series set in the housing estates of East London, moves beyond the generic conventions of crime drama and entails a piquant critique of the British society in the 21SUPst/SUP century. The series focuses on the social inequalities and economic deprivation of the black community in the social welfare blind spots. This paper understands Top Boy as a challenge to the existing council estates discourses and evaluates the way the series attempts to represent the most underprivileged space in the interactions of class tension, racism and neo-liberalism. The paper examines the council estates as class-segregated and racialised space, focusing on cinematography in Top Boy. It also explores the way the quotidian experiences in the estates are reinstated through the narrative of Ra’Nell, a black teenager, and demonstrates how Top Boy revises the moralistic, behavioural aspects of the existing council estates discourses. Finally, the paper discloses how community solidarity in Top Boy challenges the established discourses which reduce the complex realities of the council estates to a simple tale of social dysfunction.

Actors Who Play Outlaws Can Be Good for Endorsing Products

Negative, or outlaw, characters, such as the drug dealer Walter White from the television drama series “Breaking Bad,” have appeared in advertising campaigns endorsing actual products, despite their fictional status and questionable traits. This research finds that, although these character endorsers are liked and trusted less and are perceived as a worse fit than their real-world actor counterparts (<i>e.g</i>., Bryan Cranston, who plays Walter White), they work equally well. The authors argue that because the characters are better known and understood, they facilitate meaning transfer between endorser and brand, offsetting their drawbacks. Negative characters appear well suited to product endorsement, opening the door to a novel and creative marketing tactic, and may be particularly effective when promoting more controversial products.

Changing Features of Hallyu in Vietnam and Ways of Cooperation for Cultural Development

Since the official establishment of Vietnam – South Korea diplomatic relations in December 1992, the exchange and cooperation in the field of culture have also been expanding. One of the essential marks is the introduction and spread of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) in Vietnam. This article documents the transformation of Hallyu in Vietnam in the mid-2000s from television drama series to K-pop. It then summarises the changes in Hallyu's reception among the Vietnamese public simultaneously. Finally, the article suggests some prospects for bilateral cooperation in the field of culture in general by studying the achieved results of cultural exchanges between the two countries. Based on the demands and capabilities of both countries' cultural sectors, this article proposes a plan to promote further cooperation in the field of culture between the two countries. The article uses analytical methods to synthesize materials from books, newspapers, blogs, and surveys on the cultural exchanges between Vietnam and South Korea. It also utilizes the opinions of both countries' experts on the cultural interaction between two countries related to the subject matter.

The Impact of Selected Film Productions on the Development of Film Tourism and the Tourism Attractiveness of the Region

This paper examines how a Polish television drama series Father Matthew is used for promoting the town of Sandomierz and its vicinity. It aims to identify the tourism values presented in the film production and to describe promotional activities related to film tourism based on the results of surveys. The empirical part presents the results of surveys conducted in 2022 investigating the respondents’ interest in film and its effect on travelling for tourism. It was established which cultural and natural values were used to promote the town by exhibiting them in the TV drama series. Reference was made to the quantity and nature of information directly regarding the plot of Father Matthew published by national and regional media in Poland. It was demonstrated that the indicated film production is the main form of the town’s promotion – used for building a complete tourism product. It enhances the town’s attractiveness and recognisability and increases the use of its tourism facilities – thus stimulating the development of film tourism.

Women and Crime: The Egyptian Women's Prison in Drama

When the television drama series The Women's Prison (Sijin al-Nisā’) was aired in Egypt during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in 2014 (covering thirty episodes, each around 30 to 40 minutes), it became a hit and attracted a huge audience (Fig. 1). This was partly due to the popularity of its major theme, which focused on women and crime through characters inhabiting the famous al-Qanatir al-Khayriyya women's prison, located on the outskirts of Cairo. Another reason for its success was the group of creative women who produced it: director Kamla Abu-Zikri, scriptwriter Maryam Naʿum, art director Shirin Farghal, costume designer Rim al-ʿAdil, and director of photography Nancy ʿAbd al-Fattah. Abu-Zikri and Naʿum had collaborated on earlier works, most notably for their 2009 acclaimed film One-Zero (Wahid-Sifr) and the drama series Zaat, adapted from a famous novel of the same name by the veteran Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, which aired during Ramadan in 2013. Moreover, the key female role in both Zaat and The Women's Prison was played by the popular star actress Nelly Karim, guaranteeing high viewing rates.

Sexual Health on Television

Television drama series have the potential to create awareness about sexual health problems and solutions. This study deployed a qualitative analysis of framing to understand how the Netflix show Sex Education framed sexual health concerns. Findings indicate that some sexual health concerns were depicted in the context of teaching sexual responsibility and destigmatizing processes such as seeking information or coming out as LGBTQ+. The show also portrayed the negative consequences of sexual violence and how people might choose to seek help related to sexual trauma. Overall, this study discusses how Sex Education frames sexual health issues in both expected and novel ways compared to those previously explored in public interest communications research.

Frequency of Adjectives in Male and Female Speech in the Contemporary Television Drama Series "Homeland"

The paper addresses issues related to language and gender, and discusses research on the frequency of adjectives in language of male and female characters in a TV drama series “Homeland”. The empirical part of the study uses as its theoretical background the classic works in the field (Lakoff 1975; Butler 1990; Meyerhoff 2006), which identify gender specific language features and define factors that determine male-female language differences. The research was conducted manually, with minor help of electronic tools, on a personally created language corpus consisting of dialogue lines from the TV show. The results clearly show that the frequency of adjectives in female speech is higher than in male speech in the studied corpus

Fashion-forward killer: Villanelle, costuming and queer style in Killing Eve

Costuming within the BBC television drama series Killing Eve (2018–) functions as a spectacular dressing-up box to support the representation of Villanelle (Jodie Comer) as the glamorous globe-trotting assassin. This article will argue that Villanelle’s fashion-forward wardrobe offers a multifarious representation of contemporary queer styling. Her costuming is characterized by gender fluidity and a play with the dominant codes and signifiers of lesbian style and identity. Villanelle’s looks move beyond the stereotyped constraints of the butch-femme binary to construct a polymorphous representation of femininity with broad cross-over appeal. In offering a striking silhouette that draws attention away from the material body onto costuming, Villanelle’s representation highlights the fluidity of gendered and sexual identities. Her costuming may appear to reduce Villanelle to a series of surface appearances, yet these iterations result in a significant queer representation on mainstream contemporary television.

“Down-to-Earth TV dramas”: The reception of authenticity, reality, and modality in Danish TV dramas

This article investigates how Turkish audiences conceptualize authenticity in their engagement with foreign television (TV) productions in the case of Danish TV dramas. The theoretical notion of authenticity is juxtaposed with empirical material from fieldwork interactions, focus group interviews, and one-on-one interviews conducted with Turkish audiences between 2016 and 2018. By employing a semiotic analysis of fieldwork data, I argue that Turkish audiences attribute authenticity to the Danish TV drama series according to a socially created modality (truth value of a sign). This article draws on accounts about modality markers in TV drama series such as authentic portrayals of Danish TV characters and plausible-realistic depictions as a verisimilitudinous representation of everyday life. In the context of cross-cultural television viewing practices, the way Turkish audiences attribute meaning to Danish TV series in terms of authenticity, realism, and modality reveals a distinct differentiation between Danish TV dramas and other nationally and globally circulating media products.

Cultural Citizenship, Popular Culture and Gender: Examining Audience Understandings of The Handmaid’s Tale in Hungary

This article examines how audiences engage with popular culture in ways that forge political awareness and civic engagement. Through exploring the various levels of engagement of Hungarian women with the 2017–2020 television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, this study answers questions such as: How do Hungarian female audiences engage with topics raised in The Handmaid’s Tale? How does their engagement with the show encourage cultural citizenship? Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-two Hungarian women, this qualitative empirical research sheds light on the role of television drama series in facilitating the manifestation of cultural citizenship as an arena of identity-construction and community-formation.

Humour support and emotive stance in comments on Korean TV drama

Viewers on viki.com comment on Korean television drama series while watching: They produce timed comments tied to the timecode of the audiovisual stream. Among the functions these comments have in the community, the expression of emotive stance is central. Importantly, this includes humour support encoded in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. Our study identifies a range of humour support indicators, which allow us to find comments that are responses to humour. Accordingly, our study explores how commenters make use of the affordances of the Viki timed comment feature to linguistically and paralinguistically encode their humorous reaction to fictional events and to previous comments. We do this both quantitatively – based on a multilingual corpus of all 320,118 timed comments that accompany five Korean dramas we randomly selected (80 episodes in total), and qualitatively based on the in-depth analysis of two episodes. What we contribute is a typology and the distribution of humour support indicators used in a novel genre of technology-mediated communication as well as insights into how the viewing community collectively does humour support. Finally, we also present the semi-automatic detection of humour support as a viable strategy to objectively identify humour-relevant scenes in Korean TV drama.

First as Tragedy, Then as Television Series: Teaching the Presentation of History in A French Village

Americans and Europeans increasingly look to the television drama series for their historical education, whether about Chernobyl or the struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. We have long shown documentaries to students and fact-checked docudramas and dramatic films set in the past, but the television drama series offers new opportunities and challenges. The extended viewing time and the sustained involvement the audience has with a television drama series distinguishes it from documentaries, docudramas, and dramatic films. While there is an extensive literature on the presentation of history in film, much less scholarly analysis exists on the television drama series and how it communicates ideas about the past. The feuilleton quality of episodes and hiatus between them (unless binge-watched on a streaming service) leaves viewers to think through the narrative of the series itself as they wait for the next episode. Edgar Reitz’s Heimat: A Chronicle (1984) presented continuity and change in a twentieth-century German village over several generations, but Frédéric Krivine and his team’s A French Village (2009-2017) has a different ambition: to permit viewers to interpret a particular historical event—the German occupation of France during World War II—in ways they had not before. Can a television series present the complexities of this history and the issues it raises? Can it convey these debates to a large audience? What impact does this form of presentation have on viewers’ understanding of the past? A diverse group of first-year students addresses these questions in a seminar I teach on A French Village. Students learn about the occupation of France during the Second World War, and they study postwar debates about its history and memory. However, the primary goal of the course is to develop students’ abilities to analyze the presentation of history outside of books or documentary films by examining a work in a genre that most of them engage with more often and perhaps more deeply, the television drama series. Students ask when imagination could (or could not) enable an audience to see what happened in the past in revealing new ways.

Promoting Citizen Participation through Television Drama Series: A Case of Makutano Junction Viewership among Pioneer Location Residents in Kenya

Promoting Citizen Participation through Television Drama Series: A Case of Makutano Junction Viewership among Pioneer Location Residents in Kenya

Police as cop show viewers

Despite the popularity of Australian television drama and reality series featuring police, there has been a paucity of research into what these programs communicate about real world policing. These ‘cop shows’ are productive forms of public relations for police agencies, particularly the co-produced reality TV variety, and as such are valuable broadcasting and policing commodities. As complex audio-visual texts, cop shows can generate myriad meanings and messages. As cultural objects these programs also rely upon and generate expressions of national identity. Drawing on 25 interviews with policing students and serving and retired police officers, this qualitative research provides insight into how prospective, current and retired police interpret televisual representations of the profession. It was found that interviewees more deeply embedded in the police culture were more cynical of the public relations messages and contested the role of women, while aspirants to the profession were more likely to endorse depictions of a diverse work force. Although interviewees regarded Australian cop shows as reflecting national attributes and cultural context, they reflected on aspects of cop shows produced in other countries to articulate what locally produced cop shows were not.