Television Episodes Research Articles

Quando as crianças viadas interpelam a docência

O presente ensaio se propõe a pensar as relações de gênero e aspectos da diversidade sexual a partir das contribuições de um episódio televisivo, um texto de Eve Sedgwick e outro de Giancarlo Cornejo: enunciações em torno dos meninos efeminados. Postulamos que nos debruçarmos sobre as “crianças viadas” pode nos ajudar a compreender as hierarquias de gênero que provocam e sustentam as assimetrias entre distintas posições. Assim, a partir desse analisador, interroga-se a escola e a formação de professores e professoras para pensarmos como nos posicionarmos frente a essas crianças como expressões da diferença.

Portrayals of Vaccination in Entertainment Television: A Content Analysis

ABSTRACT Entertainment media have been found to influence viewers’ health perceptions and behaviors, yet little is currently known about how vaccination, an issue that has become controversial, is being portrayed in fictional television. The present study combined constructs from the health belief model and entertainment theory to conduct a quantitative content analysis of 51 television episodes released in 2000 or after. Results indicate that vaccination is portrayed in a variety of different program types including, but not limited to, medical dramas. The tone of vaccination portrayals was mostly positive across the episodes examined. Episodes with a positive vaccination tone tended to have more information than those presenting vaccination negatively, but overall there was little information provided. Pro-vaccination characters tended to be cast as the protagonists in a main starring role, whereas anti-vaccination characters played supporting characters, typically as parents making vaccination decisions for their children. The majority of episodes featured anti-vaccination arguments, such as those perpetuating the link between vaccines and autism.

Public awareness of tetralogy of Fallot after Jimmy Kimmel Live! television episode: A cross-sectional analysis

AbstractBackgroundPersons with rare disorders, such as tetralogy of Fallot, often feel socially isolated due to poor public awareness of the disorder. On 1 May 2017, Jimmy Kimmel aired a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! highlighting the impact of tetralogy of Fallot on his son and how the public can learn more about the disorder.MethodsWe tracked public interest in tetralogy of Fallot using Google Trends and Twitter after the episode and constructed an autoregressive integrated moving average algorithm to calculate search volumes had Kimmel not aired the episode.ResultsGoogle searches and the number of Tweets for tetralogy of Fallot increased by 3063.27% and 4672.62%, respectively, above expected.ConclusionsOur findings indicate that television talk shows may represent strong outlets for increasing public awareness of rare disorders.

Theatre and Citizenship: Performing the Myths of We, the People

Theatre and CitizenshipPerforming the Myths of We, the People Charlotte M. Canning (bio) Prologue Beautiful evening at a #MAGARally with great American Patriots. Loyal citizens like you helped build this Country and together, we are taking back this Country—returning power to YOU, the AMERICAN PEOPLE. Get out and Vote. GOP! —Donald Trump, Twitter, November 1, 2018 I want to acknowledge what a harrowing time this is in US history, as well as an especially challenging one in which to be thinking about citizenship. The current multiple calamities—election fraud, numerous violations of both the Hatch Act and the emoluments clause,1 the courts packed with unqualified, ideologically driven judges, the appointment of incompetent cabinet officials, and the open embrace of white supremacy are just a few of the horrors the country has endured since 2016—have forced everyone in the United States to confront what the rights and responsibilities of citizens are and should be. Perhaps nothing has prompted that confrontation more than the treatment of immigrants, particularly those seeking to cross the United States’ southern border to request legal asylum. The federal government has separated families at the border, caged children, and opened concentration camps.2Fear is palpable—especially within Latinx communities—and that fear has been met with utter callousness from those who believe the camps are necessary. During a 2018 episode of the conservative television show Fox and Friends, host Brian Kilmeade argued: “Like it or not, these are not our kids.... These are people from another country.”3 The idea that [End Page 12] those who are citizens of a country deserve better treatment or at least different treatment in that country is not new to the twenty-first century nor unique to the United States. The tension between citizen and non-citizen has been part of the United States since its founding. Introduction We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. —Preamble, US Constitution, 1789 From the “beginning,” a word I put in quotations since there are no singular beginnings (only deeply ramified origin stories), citizens were interpolated through live performance. Written in 1776, the Declaration of Independence first reached the public as a broadside created by John Dunlap, a twenty-nine-year-old Irish printer in Philadelphia. The initial run of about two hundred copies was distributed as widely as possible at the time and read aloud to the public. Most of those who within a few years would cease to be subjects of the king and be cast as citizens of a democratic republic never read the Declaration. For them it was not a written document but an oral performance. The ideas it promulgated were embodied by the reader, and the nation it called into being populated by the same multitudes gathered together in towns and cities across the thirteen colonies, each person straining to catch every fateful word. Thirteen years later a more attenuated performance called forth “We the People of the United States” as the Constitution was defended by the Federalist Papers and debated on its way to ratification by the states. In 1789 “the people” could be taken for granted as an already existing discrete body hailed into being by the Declaration. “The people” were vaguely assumed to be citizens as the Constitution did not define them in any practical way. In her general history of the United States, written as an “old-fashioned civics book,” historian Jill Lepore asks, “What is a citizen? Before the Civil War, and for rather a long time afterward, the government of the United States had no certain answer to that question. ‘I have often been pained by the fruitless search in our law books and the records of our courts for a clear and satisfactory definition of the phrase “citizen of the United States,”’ Lincoln’s exasperated attorney general wrote in 1862.”4 Needless to say, Attorney General Edward Bates did not find anything that helped...

Anxiety (of influence) and (absent) fathers in Sorrentino’s English-language narratives

This article examines the role of damaged or absent fathers – actual, metaphoric and artistic – as represented in Sorrentino’s works that are filmed in English: This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015) and The Young Pope (2016). The (non-biological) father figures that appear in these films and television episodes function sometimes as extensions of a failed father, and at other times as correctives to a failed father. The psychoanalytic thesis of the anal father as developed by Žižek (via Freud and Lacan) as a postmodern response to Lacan’s symbolic father paired with Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of artistic influence serve as my theoretical structure. Any deficiencies, failures or crises depicted by father figures on-screen is countered by the success of Sorrentino himself off-screen, as extradiegetic elements make their way into the diegesis, complicating the relationship between the filmmaker and his creations, but also with his cinematic forebears with whom he is frequently judged.

Interacting with television in one's own home: The development of a cognitive stimulation television pilot episode for older people with dementia (Innovative Practice).

Cognitive Stimulation Therapy is a well-established, cognition-based intervention for people with mild to moderate dementia. However, it can be difficult for older people with dementia, particularly those living alone, to access Cognitive Stimulation Therapy groups in the community. Television offers familiar technology with potential to transmit material similar to that used in Cognitive Stimulation Therapy groups. Consequently, an interactive pilot television episode of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy was devised that adheres to the key principles and session themes of group Cognitive Stimulation Therapy. Consideration was given to the suitability of resources, on-screen visual cues, time given for the person with dementia viewing to process, consider and answer questions, possible interactions with the audience, and the grading of activities. The aim of the pilot episode was to be accessible in the home of the person with dementia, by themselves or with a caregiver, with the potential for enjoyment and cognitive stimulation similar to that seen in group Cognitive Stimulation Therapy.

When Do Public Health Epilogues Correct the Influence of Alcohol Story Lines on Youth? The Interplay of Narrative Transportation and Persuasion Knowledge

Youth drinking is a major public health problem. Entertainment content that positively depicts alcohol consumption is often implicated as a factor shaping youths’ attitudes and beliefs about drinking alcohol. This research examines whether and under which conditions corrective epilogues can counteract the influence of a television episode featuring positive consequences of drinking. Building on recent research that demonstrates how consumers’ persuasion knowledge can increase acceptance of a message, this study finds that persuasion knowledge enhances receptivity to epilogues but only among viewers who are highly transported into the story. The research points to a promising approach to remedy the potentially harmful influence of a story line depicting undesirable behaviors on a vulnerable population.

Expanding Television’s Cultural Forum in the Digital Era: Prime Time Television, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter

Twitter updates and expands television’s cultural forum model by letting viewers speak to current events such as the Black Live Matter (BLM) movement. This article analyzes 1,985 tweets in response to three television episodes (Law & Order: SVU, The Good Wife, and Scandal) that dramatized BLM, and identifies five common themes in how viewers address these representations: thematic appropriateness, timing, producers’ qualifications, institutional critiques, and the purpose of entertainment television. This study concludes that Twitter facilitates a meta-commentary, which expands traditional discussions of entertainment programming, and that these programs transcend “mere” entertainment to become critiques of larger social movements.

A Cluster of Essays on Serial Narrative: Introduction

A Cluster of Essays on Serial Narrative:Introduction Sean O'Sullivan (bio) serials, by their nature, produce sprawl—in terms of both storytelling length and cultural fecundity. How can we study the sometimes inexhaustible elements of narratives told in parts, across many platforms, eras, and constituencies? The following contributions to that inquiry address the challenge from four different angles: —Serials as cross-medial form. My article, "Six Elements of Serial Narrative," posits six terms and concepts that allow us to analyze serials at perhaps their most basic definitional level—namely, the narrative relationship between one installment and another. These six are: iteration, multiplicity, momentum, world-building, personnel, and design. Beyond identifying these elements, my argument aims to provide methods for considering them within specific serial stories and across serial manifestations, to suggest that—however different the native idioms of comics, television, written fiction, podcasts, and cinema—we can place their serial properties into shared conversation. —Serials as units of meaning. Kathryn VanArendonk contrasts my universalist approach with a counterclaim about the particularity of one serial manifestation, specifically the television episode. "Theorizing the Television Episode" positions the episode as a rule-bound entity shaped by the specific affordances and history of television as a medium, distinct from the wider activities of serialized storytelling. She argues that the special properties of the episode allow for wide ranges of narrative experimentation, while simultaneously providing a reproducible weekly container that operates both independently of and in league with the continuing show around it. [End Page 47] —Serials as interactive technology. The art of part publication has always been intertwined with the material conditions of its issuance—whether those conditions were the shilling price and multiple illustrations that accompanied Dickens's forays into the serial, or our current moment of digital immediacy. In "As We Speak: Concurrent Narration and Participation in the Serial Narratives '@ I_Bombadi' and Skam," Tore Rye Andersen and Sara Tanderup examine two recent serial genres—the Twitter story and the webserial—in light of their distinctive qualities of construction and their distinctive qualities of reception. In so doing, they bring these twenty-first-century objects into contact with the recurrent topic of audiences' ongoing engagements with stories of "planned unruliness." —Serials as creative and interpretive practices. The productive tension between planning and improvisation has shaped serials in all eras, and that complicated navigation needs to be re-learned by every artist working with the syntax of installments. Critics and consumers have likewise always struggled to make sense in real time of narratives that are initially available to us gradually and in pieces. "Contemporary Seriality: A Roundtable" offers a dialogue among two makers of stories—Lev Grossman and Julie Snyder— and a film reviewer—A. O. Scott—about a broad range of serial issues, from the dangerous allure of suspense to the comforts of nesting within broad storyworlds to the tricky, permeable boundaries shared by the fictional, the journalistic, and the corporate. The collective aim of this quartet is to provide a synecdochic representation of how serials operate, and of how we can try to discuss them. I am deeply grateful to all the contributors, as we aim to advance our collective investigations of this field of collective storytelling. [End Page 48] Sean O'Sullivan Sean O'Sullivan is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Mike Leigh, a volume in the University of Illinois Press series on Contemporary Film Directors, and of articles and book chapters on such topics as: The Sopranos and episodic storytelling; modernist structure in Mad Men; and Deadwood and Charles Dickens. Copyright © 2019 The Ohio State University

Truth and Travesti(e)s in Rubem Fonseca’s and HBO’s “Dia dos Namorados”

This article examines the representation of a transgender sex worker and the heterosexual men who encounter her in two versions of the same story, Brazilian author Rubem Fonseca’s groundbreaking 1975 short story “Dia dos Namorados” and an episode of the HBO television series Mandrake, inspired by Fonseca’s fiction and released in 2005. Considerable changes in dominant social attitudes in the intervening years led the makers of the television episode and Fonseca himself to position themselves as supportive of travestis and homosexuals. The adaptation shows the sex worker as more deserving of compassion than in the original text, while the main character, Mandrake, is in turn more understanding, as is fitting for a gentleman of 21st century Rio. However, both versions depict the travesti as fundamentally dishonest, a characterization that enforces harmful stereotypes; and both ignore the rampant violence that real-life Brazilian travestis have faced throughout the decades. My analysis serves to illustrate that gentler treatment and superficial professions of opposition to discrimination are not the same as a true reevaluation of the humanity of marginalized subjects.

Theorizing the Television Episode

Theorizing the Television Episode

Spoilers Affect the Enjoyment of Television Episodes but Not Short Stories.

While spoilers are culturally regarded as something that detracts enjoyment from a narrative, research has presented a complicated picture. When Leavitt and Christenfeld presented participants plot-crucial information to individuals before reading a short story, the story was subsequently enjoyed as much as, or more than, unspoiled stories. Other research shows that these findings may be driven by an interaction of individual differences, such as need for cognition, rather than a broad spoiling effect. In Experiment 1, we tested if reported enjoyment of a narrative decreased even when participants were alerted to the presence of a plot spoiler, to extend previous findings for short stories while adding a condition informing participants beforehand that their short stories was being spoiled. Experiment 2 extended this methodology to full-length episodes of television. Our results were different from previously reported positive effects of spoilers and show that spoilers, under certain circumstances, have a negative effect on enjoyment for television but not short stories.

Don't Make Me Laugh!: Morality, Ethics, and the Laugh Track

ABSTRACT Since the 1950s, the laugh track (or “canned laughter”) has been a standard feature of American situation comedies. The laugh track has attracted considerable attention from the social and psychological sciences, as well as ire from viewers. Primarily, criticisms of the laugh track see its use as a problem of morality, either because it coerces viewers into laughing or makes them more receptive to ideological messages from the media. These concerns are exaggerated. Use of the laugh track, however, does seem deceptive, evidenced by the television industry's continued secrecy about its use. A better approach would be to move from morality-based arguments about who is to blame for the widespread use of the laugh track to an ethics-based perspective that regards providing viewers with information about the use of a laugh track in particular television episodes as a question of media ethics.

When Do Public Health Epilogues Correct the Influence of Alcohol Storylines on Youth? The Interplay of Narrative Transportation and Persuasion Knowledge

Abstract Youth drinking continues to present a major public health problem. Entertainment content that positively depicts alcohol consumption is often implicated as a factor in shaping youths' attitudes and beliefs about drinking alcohol. This research examines whether and under which conditions epilogues can counteract the influence of a television episode featuring positive consequences of drinking. Building on recent research that demonstrates how consumers' persuasion knowledge can increase acceptance of a message, this study finds that persuasion knowledge enhances receptivity to epilogues but only amongst viewers who are highly transported in the story. The research points to a promising approach to remedy the potentially harmful influence of a storyline depicting undesirable behaviors on a vulnerable population.

Air-object: on air media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017)

In Terror from the Air, Peter Sloterdijk argues that from the beginning of the twentieth century warfare operates according to an ‘atmoterrorist model’ whereby air becomes an attackable zone that compromises everyday lifeworlds. The ‘breather’ in this situation is ‘an unwilling accomplice in his own annihilation’ as twentieth-century military assaults on atmosphere make explicit the ‘living organism’s immersion in a breathable milieu’ (Terror, 22–23). This atmoterrorist ‘explication’ (making explicit) of our vulnerability to an air-envelope is supplemented by mass media ‘vectors’ that everywhere produce anxiety about our weaponised atmosphere. For Sloterdijk, mass-mediated anxieties and hallucinations accompany the awareness of an imperceptible atmosphere that threatens us with homelessness and the potential prohibition of life itself. Closely reading ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017), this essay argues that Mark Frost’s and David Lynch’s visually, aurally and atmospherically potent television episode not only serves as a backstory to the long-running mystery of Laura Palmer, who is discovered raped and murdered in the original Twin Peaks (1990), but also foregrounds the role of air and breath normally backgrounded in the series. In tension with this surrealistic drama of explication is the primal vocality (calls, gasps, screams) of female characters who bear the traces of the toxic atmosphere they abide.

Alcohol Storylines in Television Episodes: The Preventive Effect of Countering Epilogues

This experimental study assessed whether alcohol television storylines impact youth drinking attitudes and intentions and whether corrective epilogues can potentially moderate this impact. Television episodes were professionally produced to depict heavy drinking leading to either positive or negative consequences. The pro- and anti-alcohol episodes were shown alone or with an epilogue where a main character discussed the deleterious effects of excessive drinking. Attitudes toward drinkers and drinking intentions were measured subsequently, along with reactions to the episode and demographic data, among participants aged 14–17 using an online study. Exposure to the pro-alcohol episode was related to more positive attitudes toward drinkers. Including an epilogue after a pro-alcohol episode was related to more negative viewers’ attitudes toward drinkers and lower drinking intentions compared to a pro-alcohol episode with no epilogue. By contrast, including an epilogue after an anti-alcohol episode was unrelated to attitudes toward drinkers or drinking intentions. Viewing a single television episode with a pro-alcohol message may lead to more positive attitudes toward drinkers. The finding that a brief epilogue may reduce the impact of the pro-alcohol storyline suggests easily implemented preventive strategies to counter the adverse impact of substance use portrayals in entertainment programming.

Dementia Health Promotion for Chinese Americans.

IntroductionThis study aims to describe the results of a dementia awareness campaign in the Chinese American community. MethodsThe campaign consisted of a health fair, four dementia seminars, radio shows, television episodes, and a YouTube series. Descriptive statistics and qualitative data were obtained from various health communication channels. ResultsThere were 156 and 313 participants in the health fair and dementia seminars, respectively. The participants in each component of the campaign also provided qualitative data on barriers and effective ways to disseminate awareness of dementia and brain health. ConclusionA dementia awareness campaign may be an effective way to reduce health disparities and dementia in the Chinese American community.

Switched at Birth: A Game Changer for All Audiences

Switched at Birth: A Game Changer for All Audiences

I <i>Am</i> Big, It’s the <i>Pictures</i> That Got Small

Franz Waxman composed over 150 film scores, the most famous of which is Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950). The film plot bears a striking resemblance to Rod Serling’s teleplay for The Twilight Zone, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (1959). Waxman, composer of the film, was approached to compose a score for a television episode that was what many term a shortened version of Wilder’s film for the small screen, but with supernatural elements. This article serves to remedy the dearth of literature on this topic and to form an examination of the ways that Waxman conceived of music to accompany films with similar themes but on different screens. Through this comparison of the two scores, a clearer picture of Waxman’s approaches to composing music for moving images will be presented.

Hedonic Contamination of Entertainment

ABSTRACT These three studies found support for a process termed hedonic contamination, whereby exposure to advertisements before a movie or television show activates persuasion knowledge, directs attention to the product placements, and reduces consumption enjoyment. Study 1 showed that exposure to in-theater commercials led to more negative attitudes toward product placements in the feature movie and reduced overall enjoyment of the movie. Study 2 implemented an eye-tracking experiment showing that advertising exposure increased eye fixations on product placements in a subsequent television episode. Study 3 identified the activation of persuasion knowledge as the underlying process driving hedonic contamination. The collective results suggest new research directions for understanding the interplay between advertising exposures and how consumers respond to subsequent entertainment content and marketing messages.