Television Landscape Research Articles

The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader

While there is a significant critical literature on science fiction in cinema, on the small screen it has been less well served by academia. Accounts of television science fiction – with a few notable exceptions1 – have tended to be the preserve of fans and enthusiasts, whose work is characterized by passion if not necessarily by scholarly rigour. Given the scarcity of work in this field, any new study is to be welcomed; but the most impressive feature of The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader is not merely that it plugs a gap but that it does so in an informed, enlightening and, for the most part, highly engaging manner. Editor J.P. Telotte has a good track record with two previous monographs on science fiction cinema,2 and his contributors represent a broad range of multidisciplinary specialisms, including literature, cultural studies, feminist theory, and film and media studies. Thirteen of the sixteen contributors hold posts at North American universities and this is reflected in the contents of the volume, focused largely on US television. This is understandable enough – US series such as Star Trek (1966–69), The X Files (1993–2002), Battlestar Galactica (2004–09) and Lost (2004– ) have become part of an international television landscape through export and global syndication – though it would have been useful to include more non-US examples for comparison. The exceptions are chapters on Japanese anime television by Dennis Redmond, and the history of British science fiction television by Mark Bould, which both offer broad-brush surveys. This is a minor criticism, however, and at least British science fiction television has been served by its own anthology.3

Cambodia's broadcast TV: promotion of consumerist desires

Broadcast television in Cambodia has historically been left out of scholarship, be it that of economics, politics, or mass communication. That, however, does not mean the study of Cambodia's broadcast TV has only academic significance. Indeed, the entire mass communication industry has experienced a sea of change since the introduction of the UN-backed democracy project in 1991, followed by the call for a “free market” economy and its accompanied globalized and liberal discourses. That wholesale political and economic shift has led, and continues to lead, to the transformation of not only the macro aspects of the state, such as the imposed structural adjustments as the pre-condition for international funding, but also the micro, private aspects of the society's members, those ranging from religious practices, gender relations, social and familial values, and the like. While that shift in the early 1990s is now a thing of the past, its social consequences are now more apparent than ever with such issues as gap of inequality and conflicts in social relations and values being strongly felt. Cambodia's television is indeed at the forefront of representing and acting in these social changes, which demands of academics, development workers, and policy makers interested in the country that they attentively examine the country's broadcast TV. Thus, this paper takes the chance to primarily draw a landscape of Cambodia's broadcast television as it is at present, while at the same time juxtaposing the industry against its current societal context. In doing that, I first put into perspective a brief historical development of broadcast television in relation to the country's political and economic shift. I then proceed to introduce an overall picture of Cambodia's broadcast TV, describing its current state of ownership, technological and regulatory framework, market, and programming. Eventually, I turn to provide a critical argument about the industry as a promoter of the surging consumerist desire—“freedom of choice”—for the last several years. Towards the end of the paper, I move toward a speculation over the future of Cambodia's broadcast TV by taking into account current institutional aspects of the country's politics and economy, as well as discursive aspects of technology, free market, and regulations.

Sexual Socialization Messages in Mainstream Entertainment Mass Media: A Review and Synthesis

Results of recent research on the effects of the mainstream entertainment mass media on youth sexuality indicate that studies that do not take care to link particular types of media content to conceptually related outcomes are likely to yield results inconsistent with theoretical expectations. The purpose of this article is to facilitate content sensitive research by providing a review of the literature that researchers can use as a reference point when considering which questions to pose in their efforts to assess the effects of sexual entertainment media content on young people. Key results of content analyses of sexual portrayals in programs popular with adolescents across the entire television landscape, in prime-time programming popular with adolescents, soap operas, music videos, talk shows, feature length films, and magazines targeting adolescent and young adult females and males are presented, differences and similarities across genres are highlighted, and implications for future research are considered.

The Portrayal of Sexual Intercourse on Television: How, Who, and With What Consequence?

This study examines televised portrayals of sexual intercourse. Programs (N = 152) representing the overall television landscape are assessed for the presentation of intercourse acts, the characters who engage in them, and their consequences. Results indicate that 16% of characters involved in sexual intercourse acts on television are teenagers or young adults. Female participants are more attractive and more likely to be victims of sexual crimes than male characters. Consequences of sexual intercourse portrayed are mostly emotional in nature and tend to be more positive than negative in valence. Positive consequences tend to be transient whereas negative consequences are presented as more enduring and emotionally impactful. Though HBO includes the greatest number of shows with sexual intercourse acts, few differences across channels are observed in the presentation of sexual intercourse, indicating a fairly uniform portrayal. Findings are discussed in light of theory, past content analyses, and implications for viewer effects.

Television performance in Indonesia: steering between civil society, state and market

This article looks at the television landscape in Indonesia that has undergone a major transformation in recent decades. As one of the ‘Asian Tigers,’ Indonesia introduced commercial television in two waves between 1989 and 2002 as a complement to the traditional state broadcaster, TVRI. During the Reformasi movement, commercial TV stations contributed to the emerging civil society in the period 1998–2000 by supporting the movement for democratic reform that led to the resignation of President Suharto. An assessment of the current Indonesian television scene shows that most commercial TV stations, after a short coalition with civil society, went ‘back to business’ again in the context of a relatively young but highly competitive Indonesian market.

The analog switch-off in a cable dominated television landscape. Implications for the transition to digital television in Flanders

Abstract Flanders will complete the migration from analog to digital terrestrial television by the end of 2008. Despite the cable dominated television landscape, the Flemish government is aiming at a smooth transition from analog to digital terrestrial television. Therefore, a multi-methodical study (quantitative survey and qualitative focus group interviews) has been set up by order of the Flemish government to understand the specific features and needs of analog antenna viewers and their expectations for the analog switch-off. The study shows that there are three distinctive types of analog antenna viewers. The results demonstrate that the antenna viewers are rather badly informed about the upcoming analog switch-off, which may lead to a negative attitude and may impede a smooth transition. Finally, antenna viewers seem to be rather conservative viewers: they wish to keep on watching the same television programs from the same channels. Moreover, digital terrestrial television is their preferred alternative.

Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment

This dossier of articles on the uses of reenactment in documentary-based film, video, and performance art of the past quarter-century originated in panels that I organized and participated in at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Visible Evidence conferences in 2007 and 2008. The impetus for those panels was a critical hunch that reenactment was making a comeback, a feeling that throughout the landscape of contemporary moving-image culture-in mainstream film and television, at festivals of documentary and avant-garde cinema, and in galleries and museums-one was seeing the return of techniques of historical restaging that had once been quite common in documentary and social realist film. The eureka moment for me came when I found myself, in the space of a week or so, listening to presentations at my university by two quite different American filmmakers, George Stoney and Liza Johnson. Both had been invited to discuss projects that had taken them to impoverished areas of the American South, where two quite different (but not unrelated) kinds of oppression and neglect had made daily life a struggle. The resulting films had been crafted with local residents, whom the filmmakers had asked to play themselves in small quotidian dramas. A half-century apart, Stoney and Johnson had created American versions of what Cesare Zavattini, one of the pioneering theorists and practitioners of Italian neorealism, called pedinamento, which Ivone Margulies translates in an important essay on cinematic reenactment as the shadowing of everyday facts at close range.1 Margulies uses the documentary work of Zavattini and his fellow neorealists as the model for a social pedagogy of reenactment in cinema, in which ordinary people are given the task of interpret[ing] their human roles in society, so as to give themselves and others a second chance, when psychological or social circumstances have initially prevented them from acting as they would have liked.2 We tend to think that documentary filmmaking became aware of itself (or, in the critical jargon, self-reflexive) quite recently: at some point, say, after Stoney made his classic works of documentary reenactment for the Georgia State Department of Health, including Palmour Street: A Study of Family Life (US, 1949), his first film as a director, and All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story (US, 1953), the film I had heard him speak about at NYU. Made in a semi-narrative style that had been conventional for decades, the innovation of Palmour Street and All My Babies was to put black people in speaking roles in which they could act out the challenges for impoverished communities of maintaining good health (mental health, in Palmour Street; natal and maternal health in All My Babies), as well as some of the methods of addressing them and the racial discrimination that was the unspoken subject of both films, and of Stoney's interracial production methods.3 It has been convenient to distinguish the era of Stoney's earliest films from a later period of filmmaking and viewing-arriving some time in the 1980s or 1990s-by the term postmodernity, which has been taken to mean, when applied to realist and documentary cinema, the end of credulity in methods of narrative construction and historical explanation. But it was clear to me that the film I heard Johnson discussing, South of Ten (US, 2006), an experimental documentary made with residents of the devastated Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was no less a work of pedinamento than Stoney's. Both films could be said to serve the exemplary or redemptive function that characterized, according to Margulies, the neorealist sense of reenactment. And in both films, acting serves as the critical, if not contradictory, foundation of a documentary effect, wherein the nonprofessional actors' theatricality calls into question the authenticity of [their] gestures.4 My interest in convening public conversations on reenactment was spurred, in part, by the coincidence of these two film presentations, and the deja vu experience of seeing methods of performance and storytelling in documentary film of the 1950s apparently revived for a film of the recent past. …

Sofa-TV: The New Digital Landscape

Television is attracting an enormous amount of attention from both researchers and managers, due to the profound changes that are taking place thanks to the diffusion of digital technology. The study of the digital landscape of television, including the players competing in its arena and their strategies, is well worth the effort. This paper, based on 32 case studies and the census of the Sofa-TV (Sat TV, DTT, and IPTV) offerings, aims at describing the current state of channel offerings, individualizing the principal players, and identifying their strategies, thus allowing us to give a few predictions as to the possible future changes in the industry. The analysis will have a general applicability, as the considerations made are not particularly country-specific, although performed within the Italian context, one of the most advanced in the development of digital television platforms.

Power Feminism, Mediated: Girl Power and the Commercial Politics of Change

In 1993, Naomi Wolf presented a divisive polemic on In Fire with Fire, (1) a New York Times notable book and national bestseller, Wolf called for a new approach to address shortcomings she perceived in the feminist movement. She cited a chief concern: that was out of touch with the average woman's needs and mindset. Wolf claimed that most women did not identify with feminism, stating that the feminist movement relied too heavily upon scare tactics in seeking support. As a result, she argued, failed to inspire women. Where did women find inspiration, then? In some cases, Wolf said, they relied on the media. She claimed that women more often found role models they identified with in the mainstream media than in feminist discourse, for women are fed up with the reminders of their own oppression. We are moved far more effectively by appeals to our strength, resourcefulness, and sense of responsibility (2)--appeals that she noted were increasingly common in the mass media of the 1990s. As evidence for her claim, Wolf wrote that during the Gulf War, women were inspired by imagery of female soldiers. She argued, If the woman behind you at the checkout counter at Wal-Mart can crush a foreign enemy, and probably disable an unarmed domestic assailant, what can you not do?'' (3) Wolf listed Roseanne Arnold, Queen Latifah, and Janet Reno (4) as iconic role models for mainstream women, praising media texts such as Thelma and Louise, Gone With the Wind, 9 to 5, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Cheers (5) for offering appealing new representations. Wolf claimed that the strong women in these media texts were derivative of archetypal strong women--the Greek goddess Diana, the Queen of Sheba, and Nike, Winged Victory--that were reawakening in the female psyche.'' (6) Wolf made a case that in the popular imagination, the idea of women's strength and was successfully supplanting a popular conception of women as victims. Wolf praised modern iconic strong women and ancient archetypes as exemplars of feminism. She conceived of as a positive form of feminist thought and engagement that begins with the assumption that women have enormous power, (7) both financially and politically. Wolf argued that women can use this to effect sweeping change in society--working within the system, using the master's tools, rather than outside of it as radicals. (8) Thus, Wolf revealed her opposition to Marxist and neo-Marxist feminist perspectives. In the wake of Fire with Fire's commercial success, the strong woman ascended in U.S. popular culture, reflecting changing cultural ideas about women, strength, and power. Representations of heroic women in such television shows as Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Charmed (1998-2006), and Alias (2001-2006) (9) helped rectify the media's symbolic annihilation of women, (10) in discourse with Wolf's contributions to These characters took ownership of the enormous power that Wolf ascribed to all women, wielding it compellingly and garnering loyal audiences. Whether Wolf's assessment of the feminist movement was right or wrong (and I gravitate towards the latter, in part because her stance on victimhood is reductionistic and problematic), she had correctly assessed the powerful woman's appeal and resonance. For several years, archetypically strong women like Xena were the pulse of the television landscape, and their narratives implicitly reinforced feminist ideals, cycling them repeatedly through the media environment. However, the fantasy/science-fiction orientation of these shows meant that these television programs usually depicted feminist ideals through their characters' behaviors, generally eschewing clear engagement with feminist issues. This individualistic emphasis reflected a key characteristic of the feminism that Bonnie Dow has analyzed: specifically, prime-time television's longstanding tendency to focus on feminist identity, rather than feminist politics. …

Public television policies in Europe: The cases of France and Greece

The aim of this article is to examine the way technological developments and the internationalisation of the television industry affects public television (PTV) broadcasters in Europe. The work focuses on the policies pursued by PTV broadcasters in selected European countries in response to the challenges that confront them in the era of digital convergence. The changes in the European television landscape force public channels to rethink their position towards new digital technologies, organisational structures and programming policy and scheduling. To illustrate the difficulties but also the opportunities that arise during this period of change, the article analyses specific activities and strategies undertaken by public channels in the main areas examined (reorganisation, programming and technology) in one large (France) and one small European country (Greece).

Diversity and diaspora

Since the late 1990s, Europe's satellite television landscape has been transformed, with European populations of non-European heritage increasingly watching television channels in their own languages. After surveying recent academic work on diasporic communication, multiculturalism and representation, this article examines examples of Euro-Arab interaction over Arabic-language satellite channels in the period 2003—6, exploring the evolving dynamic between symbolic and territorial power.

Intellectual Scaffolding: On Peter Dahlgren's Theorization of Television and the Public Sphere

In this working paper, the author's goal is to revisit Habermasian public sphere theory by first discussing its strengths and weaknesses in the context of today’s (western European) television landscape. The author then moved on to exploring one reconceptualization of television as a public sphere, that of the Swedish scholar Peter Dahlgren (1995 & 2005). Finally, the author elaborated and further developed those key aspects of Dahlgren’s model that was consider particularly relevant for rethinking the public sphere of today.

'Your Window-on-the-World'

Interactive television (iTV) has enjoyed increasing penetration within the UK's emerging digital television market. As with many new media technologies, its initial marketing positioned iTV as a spectacular new form of television. This has since given way to representations and applications that rely increasingly on a positioning of iTV as `everyday'. Drawing on the work of Tom Gunning, William Boddy and Lyn Spigel, I suggest that the discursive formation of iTV is not simply one of the now familiar stories of a new technology's movement `from the spectacular and astonishing to the convenient and unremarkable' (Gunning, 2004). Rather, this movement is one that is facilitated by the prominence of `window-on-the-world' discourses that not only relate television's digitalization to the initial inception of television into everyday life, but are also illustrative of the particular institutional backdrop of the UK's television landscape and, in turn, suggestive of particular gendered assumptions and positionings.

Jednota, či rozmanitost? Kulturní cíle evropské audiovizuální politiky a jejich aplikace v prostředí české televizní scény

Tato stať zkoumá kulturní předpoklady a cíle evropské audiovizuální politiky, reprezentované především Směrnicí č. 89/552/EHS o Televizi bez hranic, a praktické výsledky této politiky v prostředí české televizní krajiny. V první části autor stručně rekapituluje přítomnost a charakter kulturních cílů ve vývoji evropské vysílací legislativy. Následně se zaměřuje na prezentaci a kritické zhodnocení dosavadních výsledků politiky programových kvót, obsažené v článcích 4 a 5 uvedené Směrnice, napříč státy EU. Druhá část statě je věnována empirické případové studii implementace Směrnice o Televizi bez hranic do české mediální legislativy, přičemž si všímá zejména otázky, do jaké míry české televizní stanice naplňují kvóty na evropskou a nezávislou produkci. V závěrečné části je krátce diskutován aktuální proces přípravy nové Směrnice o audiovizuálních mediálních službách, opět s důrazem na její kulturně-politické aspekty a vztah k existujícím koncepcím evropské kultury a identity.

THE PUBLIC SERVICE VALUE OF INTERACTIVE TELEVISION

‘Red button’ interactivity has become an important feature of the UK's digital television landscape, with the BBC launching over 150 such applications in 2004 alone. Simultaneously, interactive television has become an important site of fulfilling public service remits and providing public value by the BBC. This paper examines the place and purpose of the BBC's interactive television services in the newly developing public service landscape. The paper focuses on the dialectic between the rhetoric of choice that has accompanied digitalisation and the public service remits of universalism, civic value and education to interrogate two prominent cases of the BBC's use of interactive television: news programming and the coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympics. In so doing, I propose that such interactive applications promote choice as a public service value that is both problematic for how public service obligations are fulfilled and how television studies conceives and understands the television text. As a result I suggest that by paying attention to the specificities of television's form, we can usefully draw on new media scholarship to understand the interactive, non‐linear television text as ‘fragmented’. In turn, analysing these interactive applications as a form of textuality we can usefully term ‘fragment’, I argue that whilst choice is not an inherently problematic public service value, its privileging in news programming undermines existing notions of the genre's public service fulfilment.

Goodbye, CRT

With many developed countries going fully digital in the near future, the entire television landscape is expected to change dramatically in the next few years. Plasma and LCDs as well as several new technologies including the surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) are vying to replace the 100-year old CRT. After examining the advantages and disadvantages each of these new options, the paper predicts that LCD televisions will dominate by 2010

Beyond Binaries and Condemnation: Opening New Theoretical Spaces in Jewish Television Studies

The objective of this article is to critique the current literature on Jews and Jewishness in North American television. It is our contention that this work is problematic in a number of ways. First, it insists on a strict binary between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ television images, and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ audience responses to these images. Second, it assumes that a unified, ‘acceptable’ Jewish identity pre‐exists the production of these images, and that this identity merely needs to be incorporated into the television landscape to make its images ‘better’. Third, it assumes a direct and unproblematic relationship between what the viewers see on television and how they understand the world. In the second half of this essay we introduce scholarship in other areas of television and media studies, as well as in the emerging field of Jewish cultural studies, to point to the need to theorise a much more complex relationship between identity and spectatorship than is realised in much of the current literature on Jewishness and television. We argue that our relationship, as viewers, to television is inherently complex, contradictory, ambivalent, and shifting, and thus cannot be pinned down by rigid and hierarchical binary structures. Further, we argue that Jewishness cannot be reified as a single, visible, knowable identity, and that the ambivalent pleasures of viewers viewing Jewishness on television, including our own, must be accounted for rather than dismissed.

Heading South to Make It Big: The American Success of Canada's You Can't Do That on Television

For scholars and policy-makers anxious about questions of national identity, the standard narrative describing the flow of television programming across the U.S.-Canadian border is of an invasion from the south. After all, as Michael Koch explains, Canada shares a border of over 5000 kilometres with the United States, and 90 percent of Canada's population lives within 100 kilometres of that border. As a consequence of this proximity, the prodigious cultural industries of the United States have long been perceived as a threat to the cultural identity of Canada. (1) In other words, this anxiety is motivated by both geographic proximity and relative industrial strength. The American television industry has long enjoyed certain advantages over its counterpart, not least of which is its access to a larger domestic audience. One result of this access has been that producers of programs for the commercial television market in the United States have historically had more money to work with than producers of programs for broadcasters, whether state-funded or commercial, with better funding leading to higher production values. Another result has been that American producers have historically had an easier time recouping their costs on domestic sales alone, which has in turn enabled them to sell their programs in Canada for less than what it would cost companies to produce something equivalent. (2) Given this situation, and given the linguistic and cultural similarities between the U.S. and English-speaking Canada, it would seem that anxiety about the role played by American programs in the television landscape is not entirely without grounds. (3) This is not, however, the whole story. To focus exclusively on the flow of programming from the U.S. to Canada is to miss an important aspect of cultural trade between the two countries. In the essay Canadian Television Exports: Into the Mainstream, Paul Attallah traces the history of programs that have been successfully exported to the U.S. and elsewhere, starting with the Broadcast Corporation's (CBC) science-based show The Nature of Things, which began production in 1956. (4) He divides this history into two periods defined by the government's approach to the subsidization of television production, the turning point coming in the early 1980s when Telefilm Canada, the organization charged with stimulating film production, began to shift away from its historical focus on film to include television as well. Attallah goes on to point out two areas where television producers have been particularly successful in gaining access to the U.S. market. The first has been in the provision of programming for children, where the lower costs of production coincided with the resources of producers. The second has been in the provision of programming to U.S. cable networks, which developed an insatiable appetite for programming content in the 1980s, a decade marked by rapid growth in the U.S. cable industry. (5) With this in mind, I examine in this paper the 1980s children's television show You Can't Do That On Television (YCDTOTV), a low-budget sketch comedy known for its gross-out humor that was produced by the independent broadcaster CJOH in Ottawa and became a hit on the U.S. cable network Nickelodeon. According to Attallah, the show, which premiered on CJOH in February 1979 and began airing on Nickelodeon in 1982, was one of the most successful independent exports to originate during the era before Telefilm Canada began to shift its funding focus to include television. (6) As such, it serves as a useful case study for comparing the dynamics shaping the U.S. and television industries during the 1980s: despite its hit status on Nickelodeon, where new episodes ran until 1990, YCDTOTV remained more or less unknown in Canada, even in Ottawa, until late in the decade. …

Multi-Platform Event Television: Reconceptualizing our Relationship with Television

The proliferation and success of popular factual formats, the process of digitalization, and the emergence of interactive technologies have transformed the global television landscape. Content is now being produced, delivered, and consumed in new ways. Capitalizing on these changes are a set of complex multi-platform media events that deliver a range of content across various platforms, utilizing television, the Internet, mobile phones, and digital and interactive screen services. This paper will explore the ways in which these examples have changed the way we think about television, live broadcasting, the relationship between various technologies and platforms, and, most importantly, about the way we conceptualize audiences.

Public Service Broadcasting in the New Media Age: The BBC's Experience

As the main public service broadcaster in the United Kingdom the BBC has, and continues to be, a central feature of the television and radio landscape. The principles that underpin the remit and activities of the BBC remain the core of its activities and the article outlines the continued relevance of these fundamental features of the BBC's remit in the context of the development of new technologies such as digital television and the Internet. This article argues that these principles remain as relevant today as they did in the formative years of the BBC, and they are likely to become even more important in the coming years as a reference point for the British public.