Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black (OITNB) (2013 –) has gained a reputation for unabashedly screening female faces and body-types that centric media often overlooks. From its opening sequence, OITNB spotlights a vast array of...
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In our ‘post-television’ age when the appearance of television drama and film, both shot on...
Read MoreAt some point during the first episode of Judd Apatow’s new Netflix series Love – co-written and co-produced with Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin – the show lost me: or rather, to be more precise, it irritatedme, because in fact, it...
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Is VHS essential to the study of television? This is a debate I’m currently engaged in with the...
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In the current febrile atmosphere of the debate about whether the UK should be “in” or “out” of...
Read More@james_a_bennett Television production is often thought of as taking place either in the studio, on location or in the edit suite. Todd Gitlen’s book Inside Primetime and Nick Couldry’s work has encouraged us to think about this...
Read MoreWhen it comes to television, I have always been a ‘glancer’ rather than a ‘gazer’. Born somewhere between Generation X and Generation Y, I grew up with what is now commonly referred to as ‘traditional’ television. As a child,...
Read MoreReleased in its entirety on Netflix on December 18th, 2015, the 10-episode long crime documentary, Making a Murderer – directed by Columbia University film graduates Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos – quickly became the ‘must...
Read MoreIt might still seem strange, after all these years, to say that Horace and Pete is television, since it is not available, at the moment, from any network, cable provider or software application. To see it one has to pay for each...
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Channel 4’s recent foray into foreign-language television drama, Deutschland 83, highlights a...
Read MoreI feel I should start this blog with an admission: I am a lifelong X-Files fan. I first watched it at the age of 12, and over 20 years later I’m as obsessed with Mulder and Scully as I was then. The news last year that the...
Read MoreThe theory/practice ‘divide’ has long bedeviled media studies. But this divide cannot be sustained in the face of new concerns in the field. Studies of gaming and computing emphasize issues that studies of audiovisual media have...
Read MoreA decade ago, Bernie Sanders and I arrived on the same plane from New York to a public event in the mid-west. We were allocated shared transport from the airport, so I spent maybe forty minutes with him. The event we were headed...
Read MoreFor many, Lisa Kudrow will forever be associated with Friends (NBC, 1994-2004), the epitome of conservative network television. And yet, with both The Comeback (HBO, 2005; 2014) and Web Therapy (L Studio; Showtime: 2008—), the...
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My eyes lit up when I saw her – I’d dreamt of seeing her in the flesh since I first laid eyes...
Read MoreCast your minds back, if you will, to the year 2010, when the BBC was poised to launch a brand new detective on our screens. Dark and tousle-haired, his deductive powers would prove a constant source of amazement to his more...
Read MoreAt the moment I’m editing a book on Music in Comedy Television. As part of the project I decided to go back to iconic pieces of comedy television I remember having had a musical impact, starting with 80s sitcoms (judge me, go...
Read MoreChristmas is long gone and some of its televisual pleasures have been explored in the CST blogs by Kenneth Longden (https:///bbc-christmas and https:///sherlock-abominable) and Lorna Jowett (https:///not-so-cosy). But one...
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It was in the November of 1989 when the first private television station in Greece...
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The BBC is under threat like never before. That seems to be the consensus about the two events of...
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I passed my viva! Hurrah! Good, now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Channel 4 Comedy...
Read MoreJust before Christmas I was suffering from ‘Flue, we had just lost our third pet in a year and I was not at my best in a number of other ways. I arose from my sick bed mildly feverish by then and sought comfort in Television...
Read MoreLiz Giuffre’s earlier blog ‘From Ramsay Street, With Love’ starts with an apology and ends with an assurance that Australians know that long-running soap Neighbours is ‘a bit embarrassing and a bit backward’. As a...
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Sometimes, things coincide to throw a particular interesting light on an issue that needs raising....
Read MoreLong before the end of Christmas television viewing and schedules, broadcasters and production companies herald their new season of television viewing. It is part of that tradition where we say goodbye to the old year, and...
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