Television Drama Research Articles

Streaming bloody murder: documentary celebrity and Sophie Toscan Du Plantier anniversary media (SAM)

ABSTRACT In 2021, three documentary series revitalised the unsolved murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996 in West Cork, Ireland, for a global audience of true crime enthusiasts. This article analyses the podcast West Cork (Audible 2018/iTunes 2021) and two streaming series, Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie (Sky Crime 2021) and Sophie: A Murder in West Cork (Netflix 2021) and argues that they conferred documentary celebrity on their central figures, Sophie Toscan du Plantier and Ian Bailey. The celebritisation of these individuals as victim and villain, was achieved through the development of a convergent narrative across the three series, one salted with the plot twists, end-of-episode cliff hangers, emotional confrontations and supernatural speculation familiar to viewers of true crime, reality television and serial drama. Moreover, the gendered discourse deployed by these documentaries posthumously transformed Sophie Toscan du Plantier into a world-famous victim while providing an opportunity for Ian Bailey, who remains the prime suspect, to self-brand as a Gothic villain. Bailey’s 2022 announcement that he would launch a podcast and television series and his self-promotional activity on TikTok confirm the cultural capital associated with documentary celebrity, even, or especially, for the infamous.

Nostalgia, adaptation and ethnic reconciliation: narratives of Juancun Mainlanders in the TV drama A Touch of Green

ABSTRACT Military dependents’ villages, also known as juancun, are unique cultural landscapes in Taiwan. These compounds were established during the 1950s in order to house the defeated Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers and their families. There have been numerous literary and cinematic representations of juancun since the 1970s, but television dramas on the related topic did not appear until the 2000s. This article delves into the highly acclaimed 2015–2016 TV drama A Touch of Green (yi ba qing), directed by Tsao Jui-yuan, which is an adaptation of the mainlander writer Pai Hsien-yung’s canonical literary work of the same name in 1971. It examines how Tsao turns Pai Hsien-yung’s China-centric, nostalgic literary work into a TV drama that is aligned with contemporary Taiwanese values, in a bid to seek ethnic reconciliation between Taiwanese and mainlanders.

Muslim Household, Nation and Urdu in Television Dramas of Pakistan

The article explores the genealogies of Muslim cultural and Urdu language reform in late nineteenth century colonial India and traces its post-colonial trajectories in contemporary public culture in Pakistan. It does so by analysing the language and gender politics of Urdu in two Pakistani TV dramas, Aangan Terha (Crooked Courtyard), written by Anwar Maqsood and screened on the government-run Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) channel in 1984, and Quddusi Sahab ki Bewah (The Widow of Mr. Quddusi), scripted by Faseeh Bari Khan, which was telecast on ARY Digital, a global private satellite channel, in 2012. The article emphasises the gendered language and performative politics of Urdu and respectability in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

Al-Andalus fictionalized for television in the Arab world: (re-)viewing the historical musalsal Mulūk al-Ṭawāʾif

ABSTRACT The present article deals with a popular 2005 Arabic historical drama television series, or musalsal, titled Mulūk al-Ṭawāʾif (The Taifa Kings), whose events take place in eleventh-century al-Andalus during what is termed the taifa period. To deconstruct the different dramatic-historical narratives generated by this musalsal, this qualitative analysis of its thirty episodes explores both the sociopolitical norms and the historical sources its script draws on. The musalsal’s representation of taifa al-Andalus is assessed for its potential function of commentary on the modern reality of the Arab world.

“Show, Don’t Tell”: Pious Visual Culture in Pakistani Dramas

AbstractThis article explores how the Pakistan television drama industry mediates collective notions of piety through visual registers. Explicit religious discourse is tightly regulated in the industry, and producers themselves often disavow producing religious content. However, the leakiness of production practices generates religious visual idioms that are transparently circulated and taken up by audiences. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi with production teams in this culture industry, I argue that dramas are a central yet overlooked feature of religious publics’ formations in the digitalizing Pakistani mediascape. Focus on religious media in the anthropology of Islam has treated publics as mostly engaged with traditional sources of authority. Attending to scenes from three popular dramas—Meri Zaat Zarra-e-Benishan (2009), Shehr-e-Zaat (2012), and Khaani (2017)—elucidates how visuality is a central facet of how cross-media interactions enregister piety. Observations of cinematographic negotiations and reflections by creators on the ambiguity and efficacy of pious visuality contextualize how religious scenes in these productions come together. While the visuality of prayer scenes across these dramas emphasizes private personal piety, tracing how these images are scripted, depicted, and circulated online offers insights into how religious digital publics are shaped in contemporary Pakistan.

Research on Copyright Protection of Film and TV Series in the Era of Short Video Deluge in China

Film and television works refer to audio files with or without words and video files that can be recorded, which also enjoy copyright. In this era of short video fast food, movies and TV series have become the benchmark in the cultural field with their mature scripts, careful shooting and large investment of funds and personnel. The copyright protection of movies and TV series is the foundation for the long-term development of China’s film and television industry, and has a great impact on the development of China’s cultural industry. With film and television dramas becoming increasingly popular subjects for short-form video creation on the Internet, short-form video users and film and television drama creators have formed a fierce collision of rights. However, in practice, the copyright protection of film and television series is faced with such problems as high creation costs and low transport costs, high difficulty and high cost for platforms to identify infringing videos, and no clear standards for judicial identification of infringement issues. Therefore, based on the concept of the haven principle and the principle of proportion, this paper uses the method of empirical research to analyze the current situation of film and television play copyright protection in our country by combining the Copyright Law and the short video infringement case of the popular the film “Nagatsuko”. Specifically, this includes legislation to clarify the limits and scope of judicial determination, refine the legal responsibilities of the three main parties, establish a legal risk prevention and control mechanism, and establish a benefit sharing mechanism between creators and short video users, thus promoting coordinated coexistence and win-win cooperation between users of short online videos and creators of TV dramas.

The Country Boy: Investigating the Dennis Potter Archive, Forest of Dean, England

This article presents scholarship relating to work conducted in the Dennis Potter Archive, Dean Heritage Centre, Dean Museum Trust, England. It argues that the Dennis Potter Archive is a significant archive consisting of handwritten manuscripts and notebook drafts of virtually all of the work of famed writer Dennis Potter (1935–94), allowing us unique access to the engine room of his creativity. The article focuses on the ‘discovery’ of Potter works previously unknown and/or inaccessible, including completed drafts of unproduced television plays and unproduced film screenplays. It also sheds new light on the genesis of perhaps Potter’s most famous work, The Singing Detective (BBC TV 1986). It shows how this began as a ‘last’ television play, but that as it developed, Potter reached back to themes and preoccupations he first explored as a young man in an unpublished novel, written decades earlier. Marrying research in the archive with statements Potter gave about his work during his lifetime, the article uses accumulated Potter scholarship, together with manuscript critical analysis and dating, in order to piece together a clearer and fuller understanding of the working life of one of the most famous names in British television and film history.

The Bridgerton effect: Introduction to a Special Issue on Netflix’s TV series

This special mini-issue on Netflix’s TV series, Bridgerton (2020–present), highlights the power of period drama television in its interrogation of historical and contemporary issues. The authors represent different disciplines, from literature and history to communications and media studies, and the formal and reflective essays that follow, combine our perspectives as both academics and fans of the period romance genre. Lastly, this issue describes how the ‘Bridgerton experience’ represents the multiple ways in which fans consume this series as it continues to shape our fantasies about the past.

‘Isn’t It a Bit Rough?’ – Vietnamese Audience Reception of Wrist-grabbing in Korean Television Dramas, Feminist Consciousness, and Fantasy

Over the past two decades, Korean television drama (K-drama), which stands at the forefront of the Korean Wave, the popularisation of South Korean pop culture worldwide, has raised controversy over male characters’ sexist and patriarchal behaviours. At the centre of such controversy is the trope of wrist-grabbing, characterised by a man’s attempt to grasp a woman’s wrist to drag her to another place and force a conversation. Previous studies about international fans have revealed strong disapproving reactions, especially from feminist-identified viewers. This article on Vietnamese audience reception showed variations: some enjoyed wrist-grabbing, some condemned the act, while others exhibited ambivalence. These varied responses expose many influencing factors: Confucian-inflected patriarchal values, feminist discourses, lived experiences, and suspension of disbelief in media consumption. This analysis of the audience readings of fiction reveals some truth about gender politics in Vietnam, including a certain level of patriarchal celebration and weak feminist consciousness. The article contributes to contemporary Vietnamese studies, gender studies, research of the Korean Wave, and media audience research.

Featuring Fiqh: the Representation of Islamic Law in Egyptian Historical Dramas

Abstract Although they may have learned the norms and practices of fiqh at home and in school, most Muslims have scant knowledge of the ways in which their religious laws and mores were practiced in pre-modern times. Indeed, when it comes to imagining and understanding the role of fiqh in earlier Muslim societies, many contemporary Muslims get their information through fictional treatments, particularly from films and television dramas. For Arab Muslims, the relevant medium here is the musalsal, the 30-episode Ramadan drama. This article is a preliminary investigation into the role of fiqh in Egyptian historical films and musalsalāt. Based on collected scenes of fiqh – judges passing sentences, muftis issuing fatwas, teachers instructing, and student discussions – it identifies the issues at stake and analyzes the style of argumentation, the exercise of authority, and the general image of a fiqh-based society created in films and dramas. While the fuqahāʾ only play a minor role in Egyptian film, they are prominent in Arabic historical and religious musalsalāt, often, but not exclusively, produced in Egypt. In these two genres, we have biopics of major religio-legal figures, such as the founders of the four legal schools, major theologians, 19th century reformers, and a few modern ʿulamaʾ. Tracing the evolving treatment of fiqh and fuqahāʾ from the early dramas of the 1980s up to today, this article focuses on the themes of judicial independence, justice for the poor, corruption, and the intellectual process behind rulings. It argues that, overall, the lesson of the musalsalāt is a positive one: Shariʿa works, authoritarian rule has the capacity to be enlightened, and the key to effective leadership is appointing the right people to govern, or judge. The article concludes by discussing these messages in a contemporary Egyptian setting.

“Military Ethic Washing” - De-Politicization and Dis-Militarization in Representations of Internal Targeted Killings in Israeli Narrative Films and Television Drama

ABSTRACT The term “Military Ethical Washing” 1 is used to describe ways in which military ethics clears military organizations from moral responsibility for their actions in a post-national liberal militarism era. Film and television, now even more than in the past, serve as agents of ethics in general, and of military ethics in particular. Using the terms of the “Just War Theory,” the study shows how through processes of De-Politicization and Dis-militarization enhanced by fictional audio-visual narrative representations, narrative films and television dramas express the ethical-liberal turning point of our times, while at the same time using it to ratify national militarism. The process of “Military Ethical Washing” is illustrated in the paper in the Israeli context through cinematic and televised representations of internal targeted assassinations that took place during the constitutive national period of the struggle for Israel’s independence – a case study having critical potential for discussing current military practices and ethical issues being dealt with by the Israeli military, but also relevant to other cases.

Rape in Period Drama Television: Consent, Myth, and Fantasy. KatherineByrne and Julie AnneTaddeo. Lexington Books, 2022. 143 pp. $95.00 hardcover.

Rape in Period Drama Television: Consent, Myth, and Fantasy. KatherineByrne and Julie AnneTaddeo. Lexington Books, 2022. 143 pp. $95.00 hardcover.

“The rookie and the fallen elite”: an examination of the portrayal of female lawyers in the Japanese legal drama “Onna wa sore wo yurusanai”

ABSTRACT While most Japanese legal dramas feature a male protagonist as the hero, a significant amount of screen time is allocated to the courtroom heroine as well. This is in spite of statistics that show that women are still underrepresented in the Japanese legal profession. Surveying post-2000 Japanese legal television dramas reveals that televisual female legal professionals conform to two stock character types and corresponding narrative arcs: the rookie lawyer, and the elite but “fallen” lawyer. While most shows only feature one such heroine, Onna wa sore wo yurusanai (2014) features two, representing both types. This paper closely examines how the two stock characters are portrayed in this drama and the relevance of each to the larger narrative which reveals the difficulties female legal professionals face while navigating Japan's male-dominated legal domain. The paper concludes that the increasing presence of the heroine in legal dramas and her overall positive portrayal, reflects the Japanese government's goal of raising the number of legal professionals and women's participation in all public sectors by 2020, and also indicates changing attitudes on the part of Japanese society toward the need to give greater recognition and social acceptance to female legal professionals.

“This is not the place to bother people about BTS”: Pseudo-synchronicity and interaction in timed comments by Hallyu fans on the video streaming platform Viki

The community of users on Viki.com, a video streaming platform distributing Asian television to an international audience, use the site to engage with streams of television dramas. Rather than just being passive consumers, viewers interact in a range of different ways, among them the use of Timed Comments (TC). TCs are comments viewers post while viewing dramas. Subsequent viewers can read these comments when streaming the same episode. Users can read and respond to comments by previous viewers as if they were written at the time of watching (similar to Danmaku). Building on our previous work on Viki-TCs, we have framed the community mainly as a harmonious collective engaging with artefacts from a different cultural and linguistic context. In this study, we focus on the creation of pseudo-synchronicity by looking at interactivity between TC writers and in particular on those TCs that construct conflict. Our corpus consists of 320,000 multilingual, but predominantly English comments. We make use of an exhaustively annotated sample of 8,930 comments to extract and formalize patterns of implicit and explicit interaction and locate them in the larger corpus using corpus linguistic methods. Special attention is given to conflictual interaction in connection with plot spoilers, judgments on co-viewers’ analytic and experiential skills and inappropriate language usage, negative comments on actor appearance, commenters using the space for fan interaction outside of the drama-scope and the technical use of the platform. These conflictual interactions often function as negotiations of the platform norms, socialize viewers into how the space works and can thus also be linked to community building. Our study contributes to understanding better how online fan community norms are built and behavior is sanctioned or (implicitly) condoned through interaction. In this way we contribute both to the study of interaction in a context that works online and asynchronously and to the study of online fan communities.

Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism

Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism Alvin K. Wong (bio) In March 2022, in the midst of a fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong that generated more than 10,000 new cases per day, two colleagues invited me to take a short weekend trip to Tai O, a fishing village located on the western side of Lantau Island. At first, I was not very excited about the trip: I had already been to Tai O several times, and in recent years the fishing village has been overtaken by tourists. It's just another village that is commodified for its traditional and exotic appeal, I thought. My colleagues soon proved me wrong by taking us on a hiking trail that overlooks the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. While pleasantly rejuvenated by the breathtaking view, I was also struck by how regionally integrated Hong Kong is with the rest of mainland China within the spatial imaginary of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. After the hike, we decided to take a rest at a local café. Our server was a talkative, middle-aged, sporty-looking woman who gave off queer vibes. Once she found out that one colleague was from Taiwan, she shared her own experiences of working in Taipei and how much she missed Taiwan. On our way out, I spotted a postcard of Anson Lo and Edan Lui, the protagonists of the latest hit Boys' Love (BL) television series Ossan's Love (ViuTV, 2021), which is adapted from the highly successful 2018 Japanese BL television drama of the same name. As we passed by the Tai O Heritage Hotel, another lesbian butch-femme couple passed us by. I half-jokingly told my friends, "Tai O is becoming a gay Mecca of Hong Kong!" I recount my trip to Tai O to focus three ideas that might not appear related to one another at first glance: queer media, the Sinophone, and [End Page 159] regionalism. What kind of regional imaginary comes into view when we name Tai O as the new gay Mecca of Hong Kong? How does the critical framework of queer regionalism disrupt the conventional narrative of Hong Kong as a capitalist Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC)? To tackle these questions, I deploy queer Sinophone media as a critical concept that tracks the circulation and mediation of queerness within both Sinitic-language communities in the Sinophone worlds and across regional connections in Asia. In recent years, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have revived the concept of regionalism for different ends. Prasenjit Duara perceptively distinguishes several historical formations of regionalism, including the imperial regionalism of the British Empire in the nineteenth century; anti-imperial regional blocs of the early twentieth century among advocates of Asianism; economic regionalism and securitization via entities such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); and, finally, the economic polarity of regional migration resulting in the large flow of both professional expats and underpaid workers to the capitalist cities of Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.1 While Duara mentions that "there is increased sojourning by women employed as domestic workers, nurses, entertainers, and prostitutes," issues of women and feminism seem like an afterthought to his theorization of regionalism.2 If dominant frameworks of Asian regionalism marginalize women, sexuality, and queerness, recent work in transnational queer studies offers some promising directions. For instance, queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath has coined the term queer regional imaginary to demonstrate "the possibility of tracing lines of connection and commonality, a kind of South–South relationality, between seemingly discrete regional spaces that in fact bypass the nation."3 Expanding on Gopinath's theory of queer regionalism through Sinophone studies, which is defined as "the study of Sinitic-language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions," in this short essay I invoke the term queer Sinophone media to show how queer medial forms produced in Sinophone locations are inflected through regional formations.4 Specifically, I first examine how the Hong Kong media enterprise ViuTV's adaptation of the Japanese TV series Ossan zu Rabu (Ossan's Love, TV Asahi, 2018) gains popularity...

Femmes fatales, saints, empowered women: Female biopics in Italian public television

Joining the current scholarly dialogue between biopic studies and gender/feminist/media studies, this work is meant to retrace the evolution of gender politics as expressed in the biographical genre which has played the role of the mainstay of domestic television drama since the origin of Italian broadcasting. Through a historical perspective that aims to track continuity and change over time, this work places a major focus on the 2000s, during which time women’s biographies experienced considerable growth on Italian television and more importantly began to replace traditional figures of saints and femmes fatales with female professionals in positions of leadership (journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists and artists). Based on the examination of several biopics and the close analysis of the most watched recent biopic about an ‘empowered woman’ (Luisa Spagnoli [2016]), this article seeks to explore whether the new wave of female biopics breaks crystallized generic conventions and foregrounds new representational strategies influenced by feminism or post-feminism.

Millennial Messiahs, Female Fixers, and Corporate Boards

This article explores how television dramas function as a cultural forum on the workplace power dynamics of US tech startups. Focusing on the limited series, Super Pumped and WeCrashed, which are about Uber and WeWork, the authors analyze how relations of race, class, and gender/sexuality emerge in these narrativized techworlds via several “figures,” including white male founders/CEOs or “millennial messiahs,” “female fixers” that range from executives to silent service providers, and the “corporate board.” These figures are important because they circulate across fictional and non-fictional contexts and become a means by which publics make sense of the power relations of tech startups. Even as these shows center on the trials and tribulations of egomaniacal, power-hungry CEOs, they raise crucial questions about corporate corruption, gender/racial discrimination, and labor exploitation in the tech workplace and challenge viewers to reckon with the unchecked power of the big US technology companies.

The Change of TV Series Targeted Chinese Female Audiences and Its Reflection on the Women’s Movement in China

Chinese female audiences’ attitudes towards TV dramas have changed. They are no longer inclined to the romantic themes of idol dramas and criticize male characters in previous TV dramas. The current research on television dramas has not carried out special research from the perspective of female audiences. This research will supplement this research perspective and further explore the connection between the changes in female audiences’ consciousness and the Chinese women’s movement. This research will guide television workers to produce works that can better respond to the demands of female audiences, and inspire female audiences to be aware of women’s issues in real life expressed in television dramas, so as to further promote the development of the Chinese women’s movement. This research uses quantitative and qualitative research to analyze the changes in the genre of television dramas and the changes in audience evaluations, and concludes that female audiences have an increased awareness of feminism, and they are using social media to deal with misogyny, beautify men, and ignore women’s social value in television dramas.

Watching Turkish television dramas in Argentina: entangled proximities and resigned agency in global media flows

Abstract For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas (dizi) in Latin America, the land where the telenovela was born. Drawing from 25 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Argentina, we develop the notion of “entangled proximities” to explain different viewership positionalities. Moreover, we show that audiences adopt a “resigned agency”: they experience pleasure while recognizing the role of market forces. Finally, we build on the cultural proximity theory by arguing that these contemporary audiences are instead driven by a desired proximity with both the past genre of the telenovela and with the past society depicted in it.

Rendering slow ecological crisis in a popular medium: Hyperobjects and Sámi resistance in the Swedish-French TV series Midnight Sun


 
 
 The article examines the ways in which the slowly evolving and invisible processes of the ongoing ecological crisis can be represented in the format of a contemporary serial television drama. The author argues that despite heavy reliance on spectacular and captivating character-born plots, the long-form storytelling of new television narratives can be well suited to representing the complex and unspectacular temporalities of the ecological crisis. With the Swedish-French Arctic noir TV series Midnight Sun as a case study, the analysis shows how a highly spectacular criminal plot is developed to reveal the invisible temporal action and nonhuman agency of a special kind of waste paradigmatic of the era of the Anthropocene, defined by Timothy Morton as a hyperobject (2013). This idea is established in Midnight Sun not only by placing radioactive waste at the center of the narrative but also by gradually foregrounding its nonhuman agency behind the events. The aim of the analysis is to demonstrate that by both using and reimagining the conventions of the television crime drama (Arctic noir), Midnight Sun translates into quotidian terms the unspectacular and long-term aspects of human-induced ecological destruction, which surpass the individual human scale and evade our cognition. An important strategy adopted in Midnight Sun is bringing together two levels of criticism: ecocritical and postcolonial. The slow ecological violence (R. Nixon, 2011) and nuclear colonialism (G. Schwab, 2020) exerted by the powerful against regions and people who are globally less visible are depicted as a continuation of the history of colonization, and more specifically, the systemic and longstanding ill-treatment of the indigenous Sámi people in Sweden.