Television Series Research Articles

Translation of Humor and Culture: Examples from The Big Bang Theory

Translation of humor and cultural references are the main challenges that linguists focused on audiovisual translation must overcome. The objective is to translate the source material into something that the audience will understand. Not all comical situations and expressions or cultural allusions are translatable literally or have an equivalent in the target language. To maintain the same level of impact and comic relief, these professionals make important decisions that range from omission to a complete transformation of each joke and reference. This paper contains an analysis of the translations into Spanish of four heavily charged instances of comedy and cultural references of the television series The Big Bang Theory.

Observation or Insight? Unraveling the Impact of Characters' Image on Interpersonal Communication in Contemporary Chinese TV Series

A salient determinant of effective interpersonal communication resides in the cultivation of a positive personal image. The intricate interplay between self-image, individual behaviors, and communication abilities highlights the far-reaching influence of personal perception on social interactions. In the contemporary landscape of Chinese television series, exemplified by the production ‘Nothing but Thirty’, a deliberate effort is made to depict characters that embody the evolving roles of women in modern society. Drawing from relevant literature, this study conducts a comprehensive analysis of characters’ image in ‘Nothing but Thirty’, examining content such as appearance, language, non-verbal cues (body language), and varied scene settings. Adopting a rigorous qualitative case study methodology and leveraging content analysis grounded in the coordinated management of meaning theory and social exchange theory, the research aims to dissect the nuanced dynamics of interpersonal communication as portrayed in the series. The findings illuminate that the dynamic characterizations in contemporary Chinese TV series function as reflective mirrors, capturing the intricate layers of modern interpersonal communication and societal intricacies. This narrative analysis extends beyond the purview of conventional storytelling, offering a scholarly exploration of the intricate fabric of human interaction.

Ascendancy of Mass Media in Achieving Gender Equality

For centuries, marginalisation has affected the niches and nooks of the world on a different level. Identities like caste, creed, religion, language, race and gender have been practiced with a hierarchy and hegemony. Women are one of the largest marginalized communities along with LGBTQIA+. OTT platform plays a crucial role in displaying voices from the margins in order to showcase socio-cultural inequality and inhumanity. The present paper deals with the Indian patriarchal mindset that refuses to accept women as a major contributor and creator of society. Accepting all weak gender identities as a part of the main stream is almost like mission impossible. Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbow colour society’ is a far reaching-goal in India. Thanks to social media of the 21st century for transmitting these minority voices to the public’s attention and awareness. The media of the 21st century has aided a lot in conditioning society’s mindset into accepting an egalitarian society. The present paper deals with marginalized married Indian women’s voices from a film called The Great Indian Kitchen on OTT and a television series based on Manju Kapoor’s novel Married Woman and Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Namesake. The house wives have been portrayed as searching for identities and are rebellious against the stereotypical roles. The issues of identities of the women protagonists have been powerfully depicted through these channels. The research is based upon qualitative and quantitative data analysis with statistical evidence wherever necessary. The paper is divided into four parts, namely the role of media in the 21st century, issues of identities as a theoretical background, application of the identity issues of Ashima , protagonist of book , Namesake Nimisha, the protagonist, in the film The Great Indian Kitchen and in the tele-series The Married Woman and last but not the least conclusions. This is a study and critique to highlight how the media aids in re-conceptualization of societal norms and traditions for the queer and female community to gain their self-esteem and dignity with special reference to GEM (Gender Empowerment Measure).

How backstory and direct address reformulate the Shakespearean character on television: The case of the missing psychological motivation for House of Cards’ Frank Underwood

This article delves into narrative elements of direct address and backstory in television, focusing on House of Cards (2012–19), Shakespeare’s Richard III and Game of Thrones (2011–19). Comparing dramaturgical approaches in stage plays and TV series, the study highlights House of Cards’ unique incorporation of a pragmatic use of the direct address to create ‘world-view’ for character exploration. The analysis extends to Game of Thrones, emphasizing Tyrion Lannister’s self-descriptive addresses revealing a psychological struggle rooted in rejection and backstory. The article proposes a methodological framework linking first lines or direct addresses to character backstories, emphasizing the role of self-descriptive asides in character creation. It introduces the concept of a ‘psychological motivational arc’ within character arcs, exploring how direct addresses contribute to nonlinear character development. Concluding with an in-depth examination of House of Cards’ Frank Underwood, it scrutinizes Willimon’s ‘show, don’t tell’ approach, questioning its potential limitations on character depth and challenging traditional screenwriting advice. The analysis unravels the interplay between direct address, backstory, and character development in television series, offering insights into evolving narrative techniques and their implications for contemporary screenwriting.

Walkman time machine

ABSTRACT In the recent boom of 1980s-set television period dramas, the Walkman appears again and again as a symbol of the decade. This article argues that the Walkman (or personal stereo) is not just a one-way ticket into the past but can unsettle the temporality of the television serials in which it appears. It functions as a time machine – figuratively and occasionally even literally – by creating allegorical connections between past and present. Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014–2017), The Americans (FX, 2013–2018), and Deutschland 83 (Sundance TV, 2015–2020) recreate for viewers the initial experience of the Walkman as a wondrously new piece of personal, mobile technology. Oblique comparisons to the smartphone sidestep didacticism, instead creating a defamiliarized perspective on current technology that has otherwise become a source of both boredom and anxiety. The Walkman further provides a structural metaphor for the ‘complex’ temporality of shows like Halt and Catch Fire: the back-and-forth spooling/unspooling mechanism of cassette tape access suggests that backward and forward movement in time are inherently intertwined. The Walkman’s recurring appearances in these serial television narratives allow the shows to ponder how we arrived at our technological present and what might have gone differently.

Doc Martin and Comedy, with an Hegelian Twist

Buffalo Pictures’ long-running television series Doc Martin (ITV, 2004–22) has recently concluded, eighteen years since production began. Filmed every second year – excepting COVID interruption – in idyllic Cornwall, the show begins with exceptional but irascible London vascular surgeon, Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes), moving into the fictional fishing village of Portwenn as local GP. This show, with its 79 episodes, weaves together situation comedy, medical mystery, drama and idiosyncratic romance. In this article I want to explore layers of comedy in this long-running ‘dramedy’ by heuristically deploying the comedy theory taught by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. By reference to the ‘three forms of comic action’ found in Hegel’s lectures – the comedies of ‘coincidence’, ‘reduction’ and ‘negation’, to adopt Mark Roche’s terminology – I aim to show how this television serial uses humour to raise questions about what is existentially meaningful within human experience; test the usefulness of Hegel’s ideas on comedy for analysis of contemporary forms of media such as television and film; and contribute to literature on the nature of comedy in television serials, particularly those that utilise situation comedy.

The Powers: Consult the Fates: A Conversation with Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline, and Jessica Mensch

The Powers is an artistic and scholarly performance collective between Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline, and Jessica Mensch. Together they produce music, television series, video work, incantations, and performance pieces that disrupt white-patriarchal myths of the witch. As part of the Witch Institute, hosted at Queen’s University in August 2021, The Powers shared their anti-colonial and feminist oracle deck with participants remotely via Zoom. Throughout the performance, participants were invited to choose a card from The Powers’ “Consult the Fates” Oracle deck, to have their fates foretold. Inspired by famous critical race scholar bell hooks, each card cleverly asked participants to rethink, dismantle, and destroy the “white-supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-hetero-patriarchy.” Audience members familiar with The Powers oeuvre will undoubtedly have recognized several of the hand-drawn characters such as the Squid, Hairball, Blob, and Skelly, who have appeared in previous performances as part of The Powers’ multiverse.

Building Suspense: A Critical Examination of Foreshadowing Devices in TV Series Opening Credits

This paper explores the intricate use of foreshadowing devices within the opening credits of television series, unraveling the artful integration of visual, musical, and textual elements. Through detailed case studies of iconic shows such as Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, we dissect the deliberate choices made by creators to engage audiences from the very beginning. The analysis uncovers the narrative nuances embedded in symbols, musical scores, and textual clues, highlighting their role in setting the stage for complex and immersive storylines. Ethical considerations, methodological challenges, and the limitations of the study are also addressed. By contributing insights to television studies and narrative theory, this paper emphasizes the significance of opening credits as a canvas for storytelling in the evolving landscape of contemporary television.

Patients torn to pieces.

Dissecting bodies is a common practice in many cultures. But in "big data medicine", the art of dissecting the human body has become an obsession. Indeed, modern biotechnology allows us to see and measure the molecular components of every single cell. But how can we put this immense number of bits and pieces back together again and see the patient as a whole? The first turning point is that proposed by René Descartes, who, inspired by dreams and visions, conceived the idea of unifying all scientific disciplines through the pervasive application of mathematics. Descartes formulates four basic rules, the second (top-down method) and third (bottom-up method) of which become crucial in modern data analysis. An instructive case study considered here is that of pulmonary tuberculosis, where the Cartesian approach of decomposing problems into smaller and smaller "pieces" - from organism to organ and from cellular lesion to the microscopic level - has led to the cure of the disease through antibiotics. This success story inspired Paul Ehrlich who, with the concept of the "magic bullet", defined modern pharmacology. However, this paradigm is being challenged today by multifactorial diseases and big data medicine, where the enormous availability of clinical and molecular data must be integrated to arrive at a therapeutic decision. The Cartesian approach shows its limitations today, as witnessed by the similar difficulty in fields other than medicine, illustrated here by the case of choosing to produce a successful television series based on user profiling. The take-home message is that the amount of data collected does not automatically guarantee success but that, instead of being data-driven, a collective "human" overview and assessment is inevitable. That is, close collaboration between clinicians and data analysts, integrating expertise, is needed to address challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases through imagination and not mere extrapolation.

Suggestive answers strategy in human-chatbot interaction: a route to engaged critical decision making.

In this study, we proposed a novel chatbot interaction strategy based on the suggestive ending of answers. This strategy is inspired by the cliffhanger ending narrative technique, which ends a story without specifying conclusions to spark readers' curiosity as to what will happen next and is often used in television series. Common chatbots provide relevant and comprehensive answers to users' questions. In contrast, chatbots with our proposed strategy end their answers with hints potentially interest-triggering users. The suggestive ending strategy aims to stimulate users' inquisition for critical decision-making, relating to a psychological phenomenon where humans are often urged to finish the uncompleted tasks they have initiated. We demonstrated the implication of our strategy by conducting an online user study involving 300 participants, where they used chatbots to perform three decision-making tasks. We adopted a between-subjects factorial experimental design and compared between the following UIs: (1) plain chatbot-it provides a generated answer when participants issue a question; (2) expositive chatbot-it provides a generated answer for a question, adding short summaries of a positive and negative person's opinion for the answer; (3) suggestive chatbot-it provides a generated answer for a question, which ends with a suggestion of a positive and negative person for the answer. We found that users of the suggestive chatbot were inclined to ask more questions to the bot, engage in prolonged decision-making and information-seeking actions, and formulate their opinions from various perspectives. These findings vary with the users' experience with plain and expositive chatbots.

Imagination, Identification, Intensification: Rhetorical Strategies for Climate Fiction on Television

ABSTRACT Television climate fiction is an emerging, promising genre for environmental communication. Because audience uptake of this genre’s early texts will likely influence future texts’ production, it is important to attend to early texts’ persuasive successes and shortcomings. Thus, I rhetorically analyze Extrapolations (2023), a climate-fiction television series intended to provoke climate action from its audience. This analysis reveals three rhetorical strategies as critical to the genre’s persuasiveness: imagination, which helps audiences envision and evaluate information being presented to them; identification, which fosters feelings of connection and responsibility from audiences; and intensification, which moves audiences to act by imbuing emotion into the delivery of information. I show how these strategies can serve as a conceptual framework for developing and assessing climate fiction in popular media, and I suggest ways in which these strategies can more effectively motivate climate action.

Organisational Expertise in Hollywood: How the Government, Social Movements, and Think Tanks Consult TV and Film Makers

Existing studies show that when Hollywood professionals develop and produce films and television series, they consult experts in social and political issues. These experts may be private individuals or representatives of various governmental, social movement, or research organisations. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, I focus on organisational experts and explore how they provide their expertise to Hollywood. I argue that these organisations form a peculiar social space surrounding Hollywood, which I refer to as ‘the relational space of organisational expertise provision’, which demonstrates some field effects like similar practices and habitus, but does not show overt competition. I argue that the provision of organisational expertise in Hollywood is undertaken by organisational boundary spanners who operate within this relational space through the enactment of expertise networks, the construction of connecting interfaces, and the trading of expertise as short-lived, or proxy, capital. These findings contribute to the Bourdieusian field analysis and sociology of expertise by elucidating how social spaces interact, how social agents gain power through the inter-field exchange of expertise, and what happens in the field of power.

Nemone Lethbridge’s play Baby Blues on BBC television: maternal mental illness narratives, stigma and support in 1970s Britain

ABSTRACT In December 1973, the BBC aired Nemone Lethbridge’s auto-fictional play Baby Blues as one of their influential ‘Play for Today’ (PfT) series (1970–1984). This article explores the impact of Lethbridge’s controversial television play, which drew attention to taboo topics, such as infertility, caesarean section childbirth, infanticide, suicide, and, separately, motherhood ageism and dismissive medical professionals. It will illustrate how Lethbridge’s play Baby Blues was part of a broader change in discussing maternal mental illness and creating support for women experiencing postnatal depression and psychosis, instigated by the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). The article situates Baby Blues within the wider history of the PfT series, with its focus on socio-political issues, and highlights the challenges Lethbridge faced in bringing the play to production. It analyses the mixed responses to the play, many of which were critical, and how this led to Lethbridge’s launching of a grass-roots self-help group, Depressives Anonymous (DA), in 1974, which was—and still is—a long-lasting legacy of Baby Blues. The article builds on the history of maternal mental illness as explored in women’s narratives and its association with stigma, support and feminism, alongside the British Broadcasting Corporation’s television series PfT, in 1970s Britain.

Television Series as a Didactic Tool in the Initial Training of Secondary School Teachers

Within the context of Pre-Service Secondary Teacher Education, skills development (PSTE) requires, among other things, the cultivation of critical thinking among future teachers, who must also acquire conflict prevention and resolution skills. To this end, the students of a master’s degree in Secondary School Teacher Training at a Spanish University were asked to analyse, in small groups, the conflicts featured in a television series. The research objective was to learn more about trainee teachers’ opinions regarding this methodology. The results indicate that they had favourable opinions about this method and were highly satisfied with the learning process and with the teamwork. Significant differences according to sex and age were observed. This suggests that forming more heterogeneous work groups in the future would be a good idea. The results also suggest that critical thinking was a good predictor of student satisfaction with the methodology. It would, therefore, be a good idea to develop critical thinking in more depth during PSTE.

Fold in the Cheese? An Approach to Teaching Qualitative Data Analysis to Students

There are many elements of qualitative data analysis that may appear intangible to novice researchers. In this article, I present an approach to a data analysis workshop with students, where I do my best to avoid the instruction to “fold in the cheese,” as per the television series Schitt’s Creek. Students attend 90-minute workshops where they use an assortment of buttons to practice different strategies of qualitative analysis. The tactile mechanism of sorting objects has proven invaluable in workshops, as it helps students to physically organize their thoughts and takes pressure off to find the “right” answer. The nature of the items could also be adapted to meet students’ accessibility needs. The workshop has improved the quality of student writing in methods chapters and built students’ confidence as they approach their own data analysis processes, especially for master’s students and research assistants, where a full-length course may not be feasible.

Television series as propaganda: the populist discourse in Aghazadeh

ABSTRACT This article explores the strategic use of the popular television series Aghazadeh as a tool for disseminating regime propaganda and shaping public opinion in Iran. The regime’s proactive approach in controlling and creating cultural productions is examined, highlighting its investment in countering foreign and diaspora narratives by creating commercially appealing entertainment that reinforces regime values. Aghazadeh employs populist discourse to mobilize public support, framing threats to the nation and its women as national rather than ideological challenges. The series portrays corrupt political elites as major contributors to social inequality and emphasizes the complexity of combatting corruption. It also subverts negative stereotypes associated with the Revolutionary Guards, presenting them as protectors of the nation. Ultimately, Aghazadeh (alongside its making-of documentary) serves to reinforce the existing power structure and manipulate public sentiment through cultural production.

“Taking Comedy Seriously”: Humour in Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

Royalty and Its Representation in Popular Culture

Royalty and Its Representation in Popular Culture

The Royal Treatment

The Royal Treatment

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”