Author: CSTonline

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...

In Tim Pratt’s short story “Impossible Dreams,” a cinephile named Pete discovers a mysterious video store from an alternative universe that appears in our reality only for briefer and briefer periods each evening near closing...

When we are on stage, we are in the here and now. —Konstantine Stanislavski In a pivotal scene of Fringe’s “Over There,” Part 1 (2.21), Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) meets his now-graying mother for the first time since he was a...

One of the aims of the ‘Spaces of Television’ project is to explore the relationship between sites of production and the content and form of (British) television drama. We have already seen, in the papers at our two...

At the moment I’m rather glad that I’m not teaching one of my favourite courses, ‘Contemporary Issues in Television Studies’. This was the kind of course in which you try and persuade students that learning about legislation,...

I think when Alex [Gansa] and I first conceived the series, it seemed obvious that we couldn’t take the show with Brody as a character beyond the first season.  But then we realized how rich that mine was and how much more there...

If there is something ultimately distinctive about television it has to be in its strange handling of time and in our apprehension of this fact. I don’t mean merely its ability to transmit live images, or its collusion with the...

I’ve been catching a number of butterflies on my television in the last year or so, but they bear little resemblance to the ones that I see from time to time in my backyard. Sitting through an episode from Season Three...

March 2009. On July 5 2008, the National Film Theatre in London played host to a remarkable event. It was a talk given by one of the central figures in the history of British television drama, David Rose. Over the course of the...