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Transatlantic Television Drama
In 2014, the UK science-fiction television series Black Mirror was released on Netflix worldwide, quickly becoming a hit with US audiences. Like other beloved British imports, this series piqued Americans' interest with hints of dark comedy, clever plotlines, and six-episode seasons that left audiences frantic for more. In Transatlantic Television Drama, volume editors Michele Hilmes, Matt Hills, and Roberta Pearson team up with leading scholars in TV studies and transnational television to look at how serial dramas like Black Mirror captivate US audiences, and what this reveals about the ways Americans and Brits relate to each other on and off the screen. Focusing on production strategies, ...
Friends
This book offers a long overdue, extensive study of one of the most beloved television shows: Friends. Why has this sitcom become the seminal success that it is? And how does it continue to engage viewers around the world a quarter century after its first broadcast? Featuring original interviews with key creative personnel (including co-creator Marta Kauffman and executive producer Kevin S. Bright), the book provides answers by identifying a strategy of intimacy that informs Friends’ use of humour, performance, style and set design. The authors provide fascinating analyses of some of the most well-remembered scenes—the one where Ross can’t get his leather pants back on, and Ross and Ra...
Conversion Works
In this book, conversion means abandoning a world view and starting over. Using this definition of conversion, the book examines four works: Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. The main argument of this book is that all four works contain and induce conversion. That is, all four works feature an individual who abandons a world view and starts over, and all four works exhort their engager to do the same. This book also explores the works’ requirement of cognitive imitation, wherein a person replicates the mental activities of the individual who has a conversion in the work, and of private engagement, wherein a person reads or views the work while alone. The book concludes with an argument for the educational value of the four works that appropriates Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.
The Best Murders Are British
A staple of television since the early years of the BBC, British crime drama first crossed the Atlantic on public broadcasting stations and specialty cable channels, and later through streaming services. Often engaging with domestic anxieties about the government's power (or lack thereof), and with larger issues of social justice like gender equality, racism, and homophobia, it has constantly evolved to reflect social and cultural changes while adapting U.S. and Nordic noir influences in a way that retains its characteristically British elements. This collection examines the continuing appeal of British crime drama from The Sweeney through Sherlock, Marcella, and Happy Valley. Individual ess...
Mockumentary Comedy
This book is the first to take comedy seriously as an important aspect of the popular mockumentary form of film and television fiction. It examines the ways in which mockumentary films and television programmes make visible—through comedy—the performances that underpin straight documentaries and many of our public figures. Mockumentary Comedy focuses on the rock star and the politician, two figures that regularly feature as mockumentary subjects. These public figures are explored through detailed textual analyses of a range of film and television comedies, including A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, The Thick of It, Veep and the works of Christopher Guest and Alison Jackson. This book broadens the scope of existing mockumentary scholarship by taking comedy seriously in a sustained way for the first time. It ultimately argues that the comedic performances—by performers and of documentary conventions—are central to the form’s critical significance and popular appeal.
Transnational Television Drama
This history of British and American television drama since 1970 charts the increased transnationalisation of the two production systems. From The Forsyte Saga to Roots to Episodes , it highlights the close relationship that drives innovation and quality on both sides of the Atlantic.
An Introduction to Audio Description
An Introduction to Audio Description is the first comprehensive, user-friendly student guide to the theory and practice of audio description, or media narration, providing readers with the skills needed for the effective translation of images into words for the blind and partially-sighted. A wide range of examples – from film to multimedia events and touch tours in theatre, along with comments throughout from audio description users, serve to illustrate the following key themes: the history of audio description the audience the legal background how to write, prepare and deliver a script. Covering the key genres of audio description and supplemented with exercises and discussion points throughout, this is the essential textbook for all students and translators involved in the practice of audio description. Accompanying film clips are also available at: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138848177 and on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/translationstudies/.
Contesting British Chinese Culture
This is the first text to address British Chinese culture. It explores British Chinese cultural politics in terms of national and international debates on the Chinese diaspora, race, multiculture, identity and belonging, and transnational ‘Chineseness’. Collectively, the essays look at how notions of ‘British Chinese culture’ have been constructed and challenged in the visual arts, theatre and performance, and film, since the mid-1980s. They contest British Chinese invisibility, showing how practice is not only heterogeneous, but is forged through shifting historical and political contexts; continued racialization, the currency of Orientalist stereotypes and the possibility of their subversion; the policies of institutions and their funding strategies; and dynamic relationships with transnationalisms. The book brings a fresh perspective that makes both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of race and cultural production, whilst critically interrogating the very notion of British Chineseness.
Doctor Who: A British Alien?
This book argues that Doctor Who, the world’s longest-running science fiction series often considered to be about distant planets and monsters, is in reality just as much about Britain and Britishness. Danny Nicol explores how the show, through science fiction allegory and metaphor, constructs national identity in an era in which identities are precarious, ambivalent, transient and elusive. It argues that Doctor Who’s projection of Britishness is not merely descriptive but normative—putting forward a vision of what the British ought to be. The book interrogates the substance of Doctor Who’s Britishness in terms of individualism, entrepreneurship, public service, class, gender, race and sexuality. It analyses the show’s response to the pressures on British identity wrought by devolution and separatist currents in Scotland and Wales, globalisation, foreign policy adventures and the unrelenting rise of the transnational corporation.
Popular Culture and the Future of Politics
Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park argues that progressives should conceive the connections between media, policy, and culture beyond the limits of 'politics' and 'news.' With sustained analyses of groundbreaking contemporary examples of what has become known as 'convergence culture,' Ted Gournelos brings together a wide range of media without sacrificing depth. His examples, such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Onion, The Daily Show, Chappelle's Show, and The Boondocks, are chosen for their political scope and social impact and demonstrate the ways in which what we know as 'politics' is rapidly changing. The book's forays into established fields like feminist, race, and queer theory are combined with perspectives drawn from political economy and rhetoric to demonstrate the power of irony, humor, and cultural dissonance in modern approaches to dissonant cultural politics.
