Television & New Media RSS feed -- OnlineFirst Articles

From The Simpsons to "The Simpsons of the South Pacific": New Zealand's First Primetime Animation, bro'Town

Lustyik, K., Smith, P. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:32:04 PST

New Zealand’s first primetime animated program, bro’Town, ran successfully for five seasons between 2004 and 2009. Described by its creators as a "modern-day non-PC satire," bro’Town focuses on five New Zealand teenagers of Samoan and Maori ethnicities growing up in Auckland. While the program was promoted as "The Simpsons of the South Pacific," its audience, critics, and politicians have celebrated it as a twenty-first-century New Zealand creative success story. This article explores the historical, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped bro’Town in the context of the debates on media globalization using the framework of hybridity as "the cultural logic of globalization" as well as the framework of global television formats. The authors suggest that bro’Town represents a complex case of television program adaptation and provides a unique case study to examine the multilayered nature of contemporary hybrid cultural forms moving beyond the simplistic local–global dyad.

From Discourse to Discord: Quality and Dramedy at the End of the Classic Network System

Sewell, P. W. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:23:23 PDT

This article examines the struggle for cultural authority that occurred in critical and industrial discourse surrounding the so-called "dramedies" that premiered on network television in 1987, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (NBC, 1987–88, Lifetime, 1989–91), Frank’s Place (CBS, 1987–88), The Slap Maxwell Story (ABC, 1987–88), and Hooperman (ABC, 1987–89). It situates that dispute in the broader trends of the changing practices and understandings of "quality television" and the erosion of network power. The article builds on the existing scholarship on early eighties quality with a consideration of later challenges to this critical-industrial construct and specific attention to the imperatives and tactics that shaped various parties’ attempts to achieve discursive dominance. A close examination of the attempted linkage of dramedy to established markers of quality demonstrates both the contingency of the seemingly stable discourse of quality television and its reflexive resistance to change.

Lost and Mastermind Narration

Clarke, M. J. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:31:36 PDT

ABC’s Lost is indicative of a recent trend in television programming that exploits seriality, information multiplicity and real virtuality. While these aesthetic innovations have arguably facilitated the franchising of this and other programs, it has also created several textual problems around the issues of canon, authority and narration. In this article, I illustrate how Lost uses the strategies of what I call mastermind narration to rearticulate this imperiled textual authority. The strategies of this tendency include the use of repeated subject matter, particularly confidence tricks, and the patterning of textual form, particularly through shifting the narrational valence of series flashbacks.

Morality, Complexity, Experts, and Systems of Authority in House, M. D., or "My Big Brain Is My Superpower"

DuBose, M. S. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:17:06 PDT

At first, House, M. D. appears to be a medical procedural show, as it follows a physician and his team around as they diagnose mysteriously ill patients. However, rather than following procedure, House shows the protagonist Dr. Gregory House avoiding work and subverting the hospital’s policies, procedures, and authority. Dr. House’s success comes from his wit, intellect, and problem-solving abilities, all of which allow him to work outside of both standard medical practices and the hierarchy of his hospital. This article argues that House, rather than being the procedural it appears to be, is in actuality a superhero program. Dr. House’s intelligence is his superpower (much as is the case with comic superheroes), and it allows him to ignore traditional authority in favor of his own method. Consequently, House calls into question the very status and existence of both authority figures and mechanisms of control in the postmodern landscape.

The BBC's Role in the Changing Production Ecology of Preschool Television in Britain

Steemers, J. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:17:06 PDT

CBeebies, the BBC’s brand for young children, has become a successful public service undertaking, lauded by parents and policy makers alike. Nevertheless, it operates in a complex and highly competitive "ecology," where recent funding crises in commercial television have left CBeebies as the main commissioner of U.K.–originated content. Having outlined the broader industry context of CBeebies, this article examines changes in its organization, target audience, scheduling and commissioning practices, and relationship with the BBC’s commercial subsidiary, BBC Worldwide, to explain how wider commercial, cultural, and technological forces have impacted the Corporation’s strategies for preschool content. It suggests that growing pressures to locate funding for "fewer, bigger, better" programs may have an adverse impact on the range of content and sources of supply.

Negotiating Distances: The Cultural Economy of Television Programs

Ashuri, T. — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:51:10 PDT

This article considers the moral and ethical implications of television representation in a global age. It focuses on the role of the television industry in challenging and changing the distance between the remote and proximate, the foreign and familiar. The emphasis is on the institutional processes that enable as well as circumscribe these sorts of presentations. At the core are economic collaborations for the making of television documentaries made by television practitioners of different nations and cultures. In this space of social and political communication, the collaborating parties who are geographically, materially, and culturally distant from each other negotiate these distances as well as the distances between the subjects being presented (the alien viewed) and their audience (the distant viewers). The method applied is "participant observation." The focal point of this approach is an annual event—the Israeli Forum of CoProductions—at which producers from different countries hammer out collaborations. Findings show that the interlocutors are designing the distance between the strange and familiar, the distant and near—challenging and changing it while simultaneously preserving and perpetuating it.

Smut Goes Corporate: TMZ and the Conglomerate, Convergent Face of Celebrity Gossip

Petersen, A. H. — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:51:10 PDT

An examination and analysis of TMZ’s tremendous success, both as a website and syndicated television show, with particular eye to the style, content, and collection of gossip that distinguishes TMZ from its competition, whether entertainment Tonight or Perezhilton.com. The paper also traces TMZ’s positioning within the conglomerate universe, looking to the intricate ways in which Time Warner bankrolls a product with a primary objective of tearing down the veneer of media products, including those under the Time Warner umbrella. Ultimately, TMZ’s cross-platform strategy and success emerges as a harbinger of the ways in which celebrity gossip will be sponsored, disseminated, and consumed in years to come.

The Office: Articulations of National Identity in Television Format Adaptation

Beeden, A., de Bruin, J. — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:48:43 PDT

This article analyses the first series of both the original British and American remake of the sitcom The Office. We discuss how television format adaptations work through articulations of national identity, and suggest that the success of an adaptation may be linked to its ability to reflect and interpret its new context. Despite the global success of the sitcom genre there are clear differences in the situations, characters and humor used by British and American sitcoms which must be addressed by an adaptation. The way in which The Office has adapted to the institutional context, culture and humor of the United States, after its success as a British sitcom, illustrates that national identity is a vital part of the global television format trade. While it may appear that the growth of format adaptations reflects the increasingly globalized contemporary world, in fact, format adaptations encourage articulations of national identity and cultural belonging.