Author: CSTonline

So what will be the future of the internet? Is it a glorious new frontier that can never become a border, an ever-expanding sphere of meaning that is generated permissively and received chaotically? Or is it an increasingly...

In the past year as researcher on the Warwick and De Montfort Universities AHRC project A History of Television for Women in Britain (1947-89) I’ve been thinking a lot about women and situation comedy, and watching a lot of...

By the time this blog is published, Utopia will have finished its six episode run on Channel 4. If Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge was launched with one kind of hype (see Stephen Harper’s blog), Utopia was surrounded by hype of...

Last week the BBC revealed that the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special would be shown in 3D, not only on television via the BBC HD channel, but also in cinemas. In a playful announcement, executive producer Steven Moffat said...

Dancing on the Edge, the five-part BBC2 series whose final episode will be broadcast on Monday, has all the hallmarks of a late-period Stephen Poliakoff artefact: sumptuous settings; deep focus shots revealing a wealth of period...

There are times when television rules our house.   There are certain shows we watch with an intense level of concentration and involvement that even prohibits exchanging opinions until the credits roll.  At other times,...

Sadly the 18th January 2013 marked the end of Fringe – the little – much loved — telefantasy show that managed to hold out for five seasons against the odds at Fox, a channel notorious for cancelling cult SF shows in their...

One of the strange things about the people in soaps is that they don’t appear to watch television. Recently in EastEnders we have had several sights of a character slumped on the sofa with a faint sound of a soundtrack on the...

Walton Goggins.  What a name.  Worthy of Dickens, everything about it just fits when you know his work: the Depression-era mountain-boy Sunday morning re-run buzz of the Christian name and the boggle-eyed hillbilly, gin n’ grog...

This Monday, at 6 am, a much-trumpeted ITV rebrand was revealed. The ITV logo has been re-designed and the 1 has been dropped to make their flagship channel ITV once more. The idents are now more expansive spatially and are...

There’s no picture of Jimmy Savile attached to this blog. Press and TV coverage has repeated images of him, seemingly to demonstrate what an unsavoury person he was (shell suit, cigar, endless gurning). Such images encourage the...

It’s the time of year for predictions. Five-page research reports into what consumers want, or what capital will give them, become available for $4500. Advertising semioticians set out their stalls at conventions. Academics...

Television readily and regularly produces moments of disgust, where revulsion and the fear of contamination rises up and takes one’s body over. One pushes away, or at, the techno-organic contagion as if its magical material...

Being asked to write a blog so close to Christmas my thoughts, perhaps inevitably, turned to Christmas telly, one of the primary pleasures that I associate with this time of year. My Christmas telly excitement always begins when...

I envy David Chase doing only thirteen episodes a season. I won’t insult him to suggest that’s a luxury because I know how hard he must work, but I think I would do very different episodes of Touched by an Angel if I had the...

In 2010, Michele Byers and David Lavery published the book On the Verge of Tears: Why Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature and the Real World Make us Cry (Cambridge University Press). The essays included...

   The title of a Heroes Episode (1.17). Image from Heroeswiki.com  Heroes (NBC, 2006-2010) has come and gone. The once promising NBC series, in its first season a world-wide cult phenomenon, flamed out, beginning in Season Two....

This is the fifth of five Telegenics examining the state of the American sitcom in the second decade of the 21st Century. The first was on Community; the second on How I Met Your Mother, the third on Big Bang Theory, and the...

  This is the third of five Telegenics that will examine the state of the American sitcom in the second decade of the 21st Century. Earlier entries were on Community and How I Met Your Mother. Subsequent Telegenics will...

This is the first of five Telegenics that will examine the state of the American sitcom in the second decade of the 21st Century. Subsequent entries will look at How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, 30 Rock, and Modern...

Image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press Stanley Fish. The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Press, 2010.   When I was working on Seinfeld,...

Image from Entertainment Weekly Online As an admitted one-time (TV)antipathist, my first conscious encounter with the now proliferating “Television is better than the movies” meme1 (hereafter TViBttM) was “TV Saves the World,” a...