I expect many people complained this holiday season that there was very little to entice in the television schedules. Sherlock and Doctor Who’s specials were written about by Kenneth Longden in a recent blog for CST Online. BARB...
Read MoreDefiance (2013-15) was an original commission science-fiction TV series which has aired on the SyFy channel in both the US and the UK. Set on Earth in the near-future after a war between humans and immigrant aliens who arrived...
Read MoreFirst it was a river. Then it was a bookstore. Then it sold power drills and pen refills. Now it’s a movie studio inviting one and all to submit scripts and videos? Amazon’s key insight has always been that distribution...
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The Christmas television schedules have, for many years, introduced a sense of the Carnavalesque...
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Although starting its operations as a commercial venture in November 2015, the new online BBC...
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Graduating from the Juilliard School as recently as 2009, Adam Driver is currently experiencing a...
Read MoreStock characters in entertainment television are well known to all of us: the wise old man, the nurturing mother, and the rebellious teenager evoke images in our mind, accompanied by a set of character traits and flaws. They are...
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FOX’s horror-comedy series Scream Queens is the latest addition to the canon of Ryan Murphy and...
Read MoreDoctor Who fans were perhaps expecting a slow 2015. As Steven Moffat said himself in a recent interview with The Radio Times, “This year is not a new Doctor year, it’s not an anniversary, or a new companion year … it’s dangerous...
Read MoreThis paper aims to explore, and expand upon, a theme I recently raised at The Media Across Borders conference, Roehampton University (June, 2015), in relation to global television formats and the transnational. In particular, it...
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In 1990, Charlotte Brunsdon wrote an article entitled ‘Problems with Quality’. It examined British...
Read MoreThis time last year I spent a fascinating day at the BBC with my colleague Paul Grainge interviewing members of staff responsible, in various ways, for BBC iPlayer. Whenever I interview TV practitioners the conceptual frameworks...
Read MoreI’ll always remember my initial reaction the first time I watched Absolutely Fabulous (BBC, 1992-2012). Edina Monsoon (played by co-creator Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy Stone (played by former model and co-star Joanna Lumley)...
Read MoreNetwork’s 12-disc collection ITV 60: Celebrating Sixty Years of ITV is a curious exercise. A compilation of 60 ITV programmes to mark the channel’s sixtieth anniversary, its selections derive from three separate sources. The...
Read MoreSo here’s a list of show titles for you: The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Prison Break, The A-Team, Hart to Hart, Gilmore Girls, Star Trek, Full House, and Magyver. Looking at it, you might think that this was a catalog of DVD box sets...
Read MoreAs I write, I’m on the road in Colombia from Barranquilla (see this impressive citizen journalist seeking to enter Shakira’s home there) to Cartagena de Indias, which Francis Drake briefly captured from the Spanish in 1586....
Read MoreWith recent debates and discussions surrounding the government’s Green Paper and the BBC’s Charter review (how the BBC should be funded; whether it distorts the market; if it should be self-regulated; and so on.) I have found it...
Read MoreProviding a certain sense of symmetry, my first blog of the academic year returns to the same theme I examined way back in July, when I looked at options for bringing ‘old’ TV into the digital age. Earlier this month saw the...
Read MoreBeginning with the young single mother Nancy in ‘The Empty Child’ (2005) Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who stories have often included strongly written female characters. His creation of female roles reached new levels of variety and...
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This article is the result of a recent, but brief conversation with Matt Hills on Facebook, where...
Read MoreI am long overdue a new television set. To my embarrassment, my television set is second hand, occasionally cuts out and sits atop an ugly prefabricated television stand that clashes with the surrounding 1950s-era furniture. I...
Read MoreAugust 11, 2015 is the day Pretty Little Liars (2010-) unmasked ‘A’, a day five years in the making: (Spoiler) ‘A’ is CeCe Drake (Vanessa Ray) on PLL. I write about this reveal not just from a personal investment in the show or...
Read More’ve spent what little time I’ve had recently on the ADAPT TV History project trawling through the BBC Internet blog on topics to do with innovation and social media (I say what little time I have, as for heads of department like...
Read MoreAs Halloween came and went, various images of costumes circulated on social media. One of my favourites showed a mini-Predator with the caption ‘Not every girl wants to be a princess.’ My first response was to laugh in...
Read MoreA few months ago the LA Times ran a piece entitled ‘Women at the CW work to keep sexual violence off their shows’. It detailed the discussions of the ‘Running the Show: The Women Executive Producers of the CW’ panel held at The...
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