Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2022

This article explores how young Qatari audiences perceive authenticity in Turkish television dramas. The concepts of authenticity and realism are used as analytical tools to examine empirical findings from twenty focus group discussions with students, in 2016 and 2017. The results reveal that young Qataris see Turkish serials as offering a more authentic representation of real life than local and regional television serials. Although Turkish drama serials do not provide a window into actual life within Turkish society, they are perceived as offering a realistic depiction of characters and storylines representing Turkey’s social life and culture. This article establishes that Turkish serials’ dubbing into a colloquial Syrian dialect has heightened audience experience of authenticity. The fact that Turkish dramas were created against the backdrop of a Muslim country with significant ethnic and cultural similarities further elevated the Arab audiences’ perception of authenticity.

Best known as co-writer of Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted (1995–98), Irish writer Arthur Mathews is among the most versatile in recent British and Irish television comedy. Mathews’s other British work includes sketch show Big Train (1998–2002), Toast of London (2013–15) and Toast of Tinseltown (2022–present), while his work for Irish television includes the sitcom Val Falvey TD (2009). Drawing on interviews with Mathews concerning his formation and development as a writer, this article situates his distinctive comic sensibility within Ireland’s changing social and cultural landscape from the 1960s to the 1980s and the east coast of Ireland’s unusual ‘mediascape’ as a confluence of Irish, British and American currents. Mathews’s career and work illustrate how comic sensibility, national and regional identities intersect in the ‘British Isles’ as a geo-cultural archipelago rather than a collection of distinctive national identities. The article examines how he relates his acutely surreal humour and love of generic and stylistic incongruity to his formative experiences of watching and absorbing British television from a vantage point both ‘outside’, in a different national jurisdiction, and culturally on its margins. Finally, it gauges the limits of Mathews’s work in offering forms of cultural and social critique through comedy.

This article explores middlebrow culture on early 1980s television and the narrative structures and visual politics employed. The focus lies on Remington Steele (1983–87) and Magnum, P.I. (1980–88) as two middlebrow TV series that emphasize the male lead and link in with shifts in the visual culture of the era. Both series function within frameworks of middlebrow TV and visually focus on their male heroes’ bodies. The article analyses the term middlebrow in 1980s television and develops this concept more by exploring narrative structure and what Horace Newcomb has termed the ‘cumulative narrative’. The article then moves on to discuss the visual framing of the male lead as directed by an assumed heterosexual female gaze. In the course of this, it examines the parameters of the televisual image and the conditions that frame objectification on television. Due to the focus on a heterosexual female gaze, middlebrow television becomes strongly linked with women’s culture. This allows for conclusions surrounding the construction of the middlebrow, masculinity and early 1980s television culture. Exploring this cultural politics, and thus revealing a cultural hierarchy, is deemed important here, as it allows for an analysis of the role of nostalgia, both in 1980s and more contemporary television cultures going forward.

This article analyses three contemporary TV and streaming series that reimagine the Cold War era of the 1980s in a nostalgic mode: the docudrama Chernobyl (2019), the science fiction series Stranger Things (2016–present) and the spy thriller The Americans (2013–18). It argues that these productions rely on nostalgia and retro aesthetics in the service of an anti-communist imaginary and what Mark Fisher has called ‘capitalist realism’: the perception that capitalism is the only viable system of economic and political organization and, more crucially, that a coherent alternative to it has become unimaginable in our current, allegedly post-ideological, historical moment. The series present us with a past in which the future was still open – when there were still alternatives to the paths now being taken, which are now foreclosed. As these series depict all ideologies as anachronisms, their nostalgic mode serves to continually reaffirm the capitalist belief system and to symbolically annihilate any socialist or communist alternatives, yet, at the same time, also reflects resistance to the contemporary neo-liberal order.

This article examines the construction of the uncanny place in reality paranormal television. Two introductory sequences from the British programme Most Haunted (2002–present) are analysed that investigate ‘ordinary homes’ to consider the way that place is framed. Using textual analysis, the content of these sequences, including visual, auditory and discursive signifiers, is considered to identify themes where the inversion of the ordinary and the de-stabilizing of homeliness emerged. The use of binary oppositions and representations of liminality are identified as frequent tropes in the production of reality paranormal television. It is argued that these elements frame places as potentially uncanny and invite the viewers to participate in the paranormal possibility of the home. The uncanny, it is concluded, forms an integral part of the narratives that construct reality paranormal programmes and their success at sustaining an engaged and exploratory audience.