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sort of part in it, fortunately. To put it simply, film’s classical format of ninety minutes in a dark room is deeply threatened. This very dimension does not hold anymore, and two-hour or three-hour formats are becoming frequent. As a linear narrative has become boring, surprises and plot twists are needed – excesses that grow tiring instead of sparking more interest. A talented filmmaker, Pascal Bonitzer, 2 observed that audio-visual creativity – screenplays, direction, narrative dynamics – is found more today in British and American TV series than in film
Substance and style have been attended to separately in different strands of television studies, from those who have sought to establish the discipline as serious and worthy of study, to the work of television aesthetics, which has taken stylistic achievement as a primary focus. This collection interrogates and overturns the typical relationships between the terms, instead setting them alongside one another and renegotiating their relationship through new perspectives and with reference to a range of television programming. Contributors draw attention to the ways substance and style inform one another, placing value on their integration and highlighting the potential for new meanings to form through their combination. In this way, the binary is used to re-evaluate television that has been deemed a failure, or to highlight the achievements of programming or creative personnel who are less celebrated. Chapters present style as a matter of substance, in terms of it being both part of the material constitution of television and an aspect of television that rewards detailed attention. Substance is developed through a range of interpretations which invite discussion of television’s essential qualities and capabilities as well as its meaningfulness, in conjunction with its stylistic achievements. Programmes studied comprise The Americans, Call the Midwife, Les Revenants, The Good Wife, Friends, The Simpsons, John From Cincinnati, Police Squad! and The Time Tunnel. Substance and style are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which include series and serial dramas, sitcoms, science fiction, animation, horror, thrillers and period dramas.
ways in which recently successful and popular Westerns on television and film continue to imagine gun violence as justifiable. For although the genre’s production numbers seem ever in decline, Western films and television shows continue to be written, produced and, it must be said, received with enthusiasm. In this final chapter, then, I employ readings of a television series, Justified (2010—), and Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained (2012,) to consider the genre’s continued salience, relevance, and resonance with, and within, other discursive regimes. As I
, for science fiction is replete with scenarios set in the future extrapolating from contemporary knowledge and experience – not only in the realm of science and technology but also in respect of societal structures. 2 Through the creation of alternative worlds, 3 in which humans (and non-humans) interact, establish institutions and govern, science fiction takes on a political dimension. The upshot is that a fair number of television series and movies address matters of a legal nature, thereby confirming that the legal maxim ubi societas, ibi ius (‘wherever there
refashioning through Gothic fictions shows no sign of diminishing. The most effective way of illustrating the perennial power Gothic bodies possess to fashion themselves anew, replaying the preoccupation with surface and depth, is through a final example. The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer unites a number of the themes discussed in the previous chapter. Suturing the kind of American high
independent texts and their textual elements. Rather than simply converting a pre-existing text to a different form or medium, a new genre, or for another audience, the adjacent adaptation interweaves the two texts – an ostensibly original television series with an existing, fundamentally recognisable secondary text – a true palimpsest in which both the primary narrative of the television serial and the secondary adaptation become one. However, to be successful as both narrative and pleasurable aesthetic experience, adjacent adaptations rely on the audience ‘knowing’ both
teen drama The Vampire Diaries . The television series is itself a ‘doubling’ in that it is an adaptation of a series of novels by L. J. Smith, creating a situation wherein the same central characters inhabit the parallel townships of the novels’ Fells Church and television’s Mystic Falls, and consequently have histories which are, at times, contradictory. 2 The television version also explicitly
In an Expression of the figure’s mutability, Nina Auerbach writes that ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’. 1 The twenty-first-century vampire is a substantially different creature from the grotesque monsters who lurk in the shadows of narratives from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. The HBO television series True Blood (prod
Indigenous cultures, with their unfamiliar beliefs and practices, and their relationships to an earlier period of land settlement, are frequently appropriated by gothic fictions. In contrast, forms of the gothic created by Indigenous cultures are few. Within a consideration of this global issue, this chapter will explore the New Zealand television series Mataku , an
Martin wrote his first scripts for an ITV company with the first of six episodes for Redcap, an ABC Television series about the military police starring John Thaw, on which his brother, Ian Kennedy Martin, was working as the story editor. Troy wrote three episodes for the first series and another three for the second series in 1966. In between he adapted The Successor (Anglia, 13 September 1965), a play about the election of a pope, for Anglia Television, for whom he also wrote The New Men (Anglia, 8 November 1966), an adaptation of a novel by C. P. Snow, about the