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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2013
Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2013
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Did television empower women? The introduction of television and the changing status of women in the 1950s
Authors: Rowan Howard-Williams and Elihu KatzThis article examines the possibility that the introduction of television may have played a role in women’s empowerment. Focusing primarily on the historical context of the post-war United States, this article takes as its starting point the temporal coincidence of the very rapid uptake of television in the late 1940s and 1950s, followed in the 1960s by the women’s liberation movement and the increasing social status for women. It draws from a wide range of literature, focusing on three broad areas: the technological features of television, in particular its equalizing mode of address; the domestic and social context to which it was introduced; and the subversive and counter-hegemonic content that was available on early television.
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Josei drama and Japanese television’s ‘new woman’
More LessRecent advances in Japanese legislation purport to make the workplace more welcoming for career women. However, while women’s roles have progressed significantly since the implementation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), recent televisual representations of single working women in Japan demonstrate that the issue of women’s roles in the workplace remains highly contentious. The conflicting messages in these programmes may, in fact, have a regressive effect on the reception of women in the Japanese workplace.
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‘Best. Show. Eever.’: Who killed Veronica Mars?
More LessIn this article, I argue that Veronica Mars is a fruitful site for critical analysis as a result of its position between cult and mainstream fandom. As a result of network pressure, writer-creator Rob Thomas made significant changes to both the show’s structure and content; simultaneously, he positioned it as a cult-television haven for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had recently gone off the air. This deliber-ate positioning, coupled with Thomas’s openness about the process and the surprising willingness of cult fans to cooperate, makes it a unique case study in the business of popular television.
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A creature not quite of this World: Adaptations of Margaret Thatcher on 1980s British televisiona
More LessBecause the image conveyed by Margaret Thatcher was a construct and therefore artificial, what she looked and sounded like easily transferred from reality into heightened layers of parody and satire. But the way Thatcher appeared on a number of 1980s television texts is striking in terms of how her leadership and persona were read within gendered terms. Thatcher herself consistently downplayed the importance of gender or her own femininity. For her, politics functioned on the basis of convictions, principles and economic theories and far from thinking of herself in gendered terms, Thatcher sought to locate her leadership within gender-neutral realms. There is ultimately little to distinguish the actual Thatcher from the parodic Thatcher; this is inevitable for a leader whose image was so artificial. But where there is a major divergence between reality and the adaptation of reality is on the question of gender. Parodies of Thatcher on 1980s British television consistently returned Thatcher to gendered realms of conduct, showing her as nanny, ice maiden, warrior queen and often as a type conceptualized by film theorists as the ‘monstrous feminine’. This article explores parodies of Thatcher, showing ways in which, in contrast to Thatcher’s own insistence on gender neutrality, comedic and parodic works that were supposedly avant-garde or alternative in fact resorted to highly traditional gender types as the only way to make sense of Margaret Thatcher.
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Two men and a moustache: Masculinity, nostalgia and bromance in The Good Guys
More LessThe 2010 Fox series The Good Guys presents a replay of the buddy cop relationship that promotes male bonding while self-consciously acknowledging its homoerotic overtones. This article explores The Good Guys as a text that somewhat ambiguously promotes hybrid masculinities while reinscribing other racial and gender stereotypes. The Good Guys illustrates, and challenges, both previous and present concepts of masculine performance; at the same time, its affectionately cartoonish action-genre tropes suggest masculine wish fulfilment and nostalgia for the not-too-distant ‘good old days’ always just out of reach.
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Three characters in search of an archetype: Aspects of the trickster and the flâneur in the characterizations of Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House and Doctor Who
By Alec CharlesThis article examines the relationship between C.G. Jung’s notion of the trickster and the Baudelairean concept of the flâneur in the context of three iconic heroes of popular culture – and in doing so explores the similarities between those three figures – Sherlock Holmes (from Conan Doyle’s original to Benedict Cumberbatch’s contemporary interpretation of the role) and the heroes of the television series House M.D. and Doctor Who. It suggests that by applying these models to these three characters – these eccentric and brilliant and apparently emotionally stunted outcasts – we may discover in these figures greater depths than had at first met the eye.
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‘A live film’? Failing to notice television
By Brett MillsWhy does so much television go unnoticed? This article examines the coverage of the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games to show how some media forms – especially film and music – are a part of everyday debates about culture, whereas television is not. The Opening Ceremony was often about television, and was consumed by billions via television – yet reviews and commentaries about the event rarely mention television at all. This article shows that those involved in the Ceremony who have worked successfully in television – such as Danny Boyle and Rowan Atkinson – are similarly commonly understood via their work in other media. The article calls for those in Television Studies to be more vocal about the work the field does, in order to combat such erasing of television found in Danny Boyle’s description of the Opening Ceremony not as television, but as ‘live film’.
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The London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony: History answers back
Authors: Anita Biressi and Heather NunnThis article highlights the distinctive turn in public discourse towards historical resources, analogies and stories to help citizens make sense of the current era of austerity through a selective analysis of the media coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It argues that in straitened times British citizens are being asked to make do, to accept the rolling back of state provision and to modify their expectations of a civil society on the basis of historical myths as well as current realities. Having noted this, the article asks where on television are the counter-discourses that may also wish to lay a claim to a national history and to tell national stories and even to contest the dismantling of the welfare state? How might these spaces work to resist the prevalent criticism of public services, organized labour and popular protest and to defend the class (and other) politics and values with which these have been historically associated? In answer to these questions this article offers a brief consideration of the ways in which the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony deployed history and historical reference.
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The #NBCFail Olympics: Access, liveness and the public interest
By Myles McNuttThis article explores the deeper meanings within social media criticism of NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games, focusing on the divide between those social media users and what NBC perceives as their audience for primetime, tape-delayed broadcasts. While viewer frustration has been dismissed as a selfish desire for instant gratification in an era of conspicuous consumption, it also demonstrates the complicated relationship between NBC’s broadcasting strategies and liveness, which creates concerns over access. Similarly, although viewer frustration has been positioned in opposition to the economic imperative of commercial broadcasting, it seems necessary to engage with the notion of the public interest in the light of NBC’s broadcast history and the nationalized appeal of the Olympic Games. In their rush to characterize #NBCFail as evidence of Twitter’s mob mentality, analysts fail to ask what this backlash might mean for the Olympics’ place within the larger spectrum of broadcast programming in the post-network era, and for NBC’s responsibility to viewers when it comes to this global event (and broadcasting in general).
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Television, nation and the Olympic universe
By David RoweThere is a continuing tension in the modern Olympics between the universalist humanism inscribed within the Olympic Charter and the competitive nationalism that is foregrounded in its media coverage. Television, as the most important medium within the ‘media sports cultural complex’, is particularly dependent on generating and sustaining audiences through the active stimulation of nationalism which, not uncommonly, manifests as national chauvinism. The high cost of Olympic broadcast rights tends to encourage a pronounced focus on identification with nation in pursuit of audience maximization, with profound consequences for programming decisions concerning which Olympic sports are covered, when events are shown and how they are represented. The BBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games reveals that, even in the case of public service broadcasters who are not reliant on advertising income, the ‘national public’ mainly takes precedence over universalist Olympism. This article addresses the political economy of television in the Olympics in the context of public discussion about the coverage of London 2012 by the commercial Nine Network in Australia and the public BBC in the United Kingdom. It is accompanied by brief critical autoethnographic reflections of an Australia-based British expatriate watching the host broadcaster’s much-lauded ‘red button’ Olympics.
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Clare Balding: The televisual face of London 2012
By Faye WoodsThis piece discusses the performance of television presenter Claire Balding during her coverage of the Olympics and Paralympics of London 2012. It suggests that her success with viewers was connected with her persona as a television personality, which combined professional skill with intimacy and immediacy. It argues that Balding represented the face of contemporary public service broadcasting – one that bridges both the BBC and Channel 4’s brand identities – through her research and authority, combined with interaction with her through social media.
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A major boost for gender equality or more of the same? The television coverage of female athletes at the 2012 London Olympic Games
Authors: Edward M. Kian, Alina Bernstein and John S. McGuireThe vast majority of sport media content is devoted to men’s sports regardless of the type of medium or host country of media outlet. Along with professional tennis, the Summer Olympics is the only major international sporting event where female athletes generally receive television coverage that is quantifiably comparable to that given to male Olympic athletes. However, scholarship showed that even Olympics sport broadcasts are chauvinistic, evident by the language used by journalists covering female athletes and media focusing on specific women’s sports that offer the most heterosexual sex appeal. However, the 2012 London Games were dubbed ‘the Year of the Woman’ by the media, because these marked the first Olympics for which every participating nation sent at least one female athlete, women comprised the majority of athletes from several countries’ delegations (including the United States), and were some of the most publicized stars of the London Olympics. Nevertheless, preliminary analyses cited in this article indicate that sport media, including television, still treated female athletes in London as ‘girls’ rather than women, gave them secondary status compared to male athletes, and mostly focused on women – and their body parts – deemed appealing to the, mostly male, journalists who covered the Games.
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