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In television scholarship, sound and image have been attended to in different ways, but image has historically dominated. The chapters gathered here attend to both: they weigh the impact and significance of specific choices of sound and image, explore their interactions, and assess their roles in establishing meaning and style. The contributors address a wide range of technical and stylistic elements relating to the television image. They consider production design choices, the spatial organisation of the television frame and how camera movements position and reposition parts of the visible world. They explore mise-en-scène, landscapes and backgrounds, settings and scenery, and costumes and props. They attend to details of actors’ performances, as well as lighting design and patterns of colour and scale. As regards sound, each chapter distinguishes different components on a soundtrack, delineating diegetic from non-diegetic sound, and evaluating the roles of elements such as music, dialogue, voice-over, bodily sounds, performed and non-performed sounds. Attending to sound design, contributors address motifs, repetition and rhythm in both music and non-musical sound. Consideration is also given to the significance of quietness, the absence of sounds, and silence. Programmes studied comprise The Twilight Zone, Inspector Morse, Children of the Stones, Dancing on the Edge, Road, Twin Peaks: The Return, Bodyguard, The Walking Dead and Mad Men. Sound and image are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which includes series, serial and one-off dramas, children’s programmes, science fiction, thrillers and detective shows.
style have been attended to in different strands of television studies. Contributors were encouraged to engage directly with previous approaches but not feel hemmed in by them, with several offering metacritical reflections on prior understandings of the terms. The result is that while all chapters agree that substance and style are not easily divisible and the evaluation of television benefits from attention to both, there is still an eclectic range of perspectives, with differing emphases and responses to our key terms. The aim of the volume, and the ‘Moments in
journalistic reviews and other sources assist in this process. By addressing each stage in the making of television drama, from production and broadcast through to reception by the first and subsequent audiences, and the critical evaluation of television plays by professional reviewers and academics, the book is able to evaluate the significance of, for example, public service commitments and audience research, since for the BBC a concern for positive audience response was played off against the broadcasting institution’s sense of responsibility to disseminate the work of a
impressiveness; large-scale, sweeping narratives that draw on history or myth; momentous action; and the foregrounding of heroic deeds. Television epics in the classic vein are therefore obliged to meet expectations that are cinematic in nature, or risk being judged for falling short. (It is not of course uncommon for the ‘cinematic’ to be employed as a criterion in the evaluation of TV, and for this to complicate television's capacity to establish itself as an autonomous art – see Jaramillo 2013 for a useful discussion.) Perhaps this is one of the reasons there are