Author: CSTonline

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...

Making and Remaking Television Classics, 20 March 2009, University of Warwick Rachel Moseley writes: Most people have a sense of what might count, for them, as ‘classic television’. From long-running serial drama like Coronation...

In this short reflection on the study of television fictions, I endorse and qualify the recognition by several commentators in recent years that the boundaries between cinema and television have become blurred and require a...

THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS Someone once asked me “What’s the difference between apocalyptic fiction and dystopia?” I had to think about it for a bit, but then I came up with, “The world goes to hell...

On the 8th and 9th of November I had the pleasure of attending the British Promax conference with my colleague Paul Grainge as part of our AHRC-funded project on the promotional screen industries.  Promax is the industry body...

The BBC is currently engulfed in a crisis that has already led to the resignation of the new Director-General George Entwistle after just 7 weeks in the job. Like several previous BBC crises, this one centres around journalistic...

For the past two years I’ve been the research fellow on the ‘History of Television for Women in Britain 1947-89’ project.  My principal role has been exploring and documenting what we, as a project team, have identified as...

Yet again, the US Presidential election was a televisual one. Yet again, we were told it was not. No matter how many people follow the election cycle on TV, no matter how much time and money the campaigns spend on it, there...

As part of a project on multiplatform public service content, I’ve been examining the changing meanings of the term ‘multiplatform’ at the BBC. In one of my last interviews (at least for a while) at the BBC on the topic last...

Even in our near-miraculous coverage of the Olympics, I would say that we’ve taken – joyously – our capacity to present and distribute existing forms of content to their natural limits rather than innovate to discover genuinely...

I am swimming, swimming in a sea of liquid camera movements, dissolves, reflections, blue pools, deep oceans, lavish spectacles, messy births, intimate bodily exchanges, bad romances, trashy sex, bright lights, swirling colours,...

October is one of my favourite months of the year. In the build up to Halloween, it seems that the world around me is finally catching up with my enthusiasm for all things gothic, gruesome and macabre.  Black and orange become...

As a practicing textual analyst and historian of British television drama between the sixties and the eighties, I have a methodology that is so distinct in my field as to possibly be unique. I gain my knowledge of British...