Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2025

The highly popular television series Yellowstone (2018–24) is to many a ‘modern revisionist Western’. Detractors call it a ‘red-state show’, with its right-wing, conservative themes, centred around kinship, land ownership, loyalty and what it takes to preserve a way of life against the forces of economic progress. On the surface the series revels in its ‘neo-Western’ generic conventions, but there is a deeper set of themes articulated through the tropes of the horror genre: body mutilation, blood and gore, the evil of the land, demon spawn, the association of women with blood and victimhood, as well as Oedipal fear. This clash of genres creates a strange juxtaposition and challenge to the dominant tone. This article discusses the many instances of horror ‘intruding’ on Yellowstone’s predominantly western genre, and in each case asks why these connections are being made so overtly.

Set in Chicago, the Emmy award-winning series The Bear (2022–present) overlays its diegetic world over the city’s architecture, charting its urban geography across a fictional map of sites and culinary spots, imbued with personal histories and narrative significance. As the series intersects the city’s real locations with its fiction, it creates a network of places and non-places that affect individual characters’ narratives and embody their memories. The juxtaposition between meaningful urban spaces and transitional locations in The Bear’s diegesis illustrates Marc Augè’s commentary on supermodernity’s enforcement of needless progress and productivity, and the subsequent fragmentation of the human experience that results from such exertion. The following article employs Augè’s place/non-place binary and his interpretation of supermodernity’s effect on the metropolitan experience in an analysis of the city’s significance to The Bear’s commentary on accelerated gentrification and the individual perception of such frantic and expedited progress. Organized in three parts, this article’s analysis investigates the ways the series intertwines Chicago’s architecture and local culture with the characters’ own lives in order to deliver its critique on supermodernity’s impossible expectations, the city’s place as a formal tool of narrative development and its role in structuring the series’ culinary achievements.

Today, there are more than 100 distinct ethnic groups living in the Russian Federation. Officially, the Soviet Union was against racial inequality and pursued racial equity, at times genuinely and at other times cynically. Scholarship has addressed the function of race and racialization in the Russian empire and Soviet Union, though more work is to be done in the contemporary context. In this article, I analyse racialization at the intersection of gender and sexuality in the Russian children’s TV series Masha and the Bear (2009–present). Herein, I reveal narrative themes, topic associations, and visual cues that join to globally communicate messages from a Russian perspective of proper romantic coupling, parentage, and gender and sexual expression. Finally, I invite further studies into how racialized gender and sexuality in Russian media affects ethnically minoritized people in the contemporary Russian Federation.

Despite the success of the show Yellowstone (2018–24) and its spin-offs, creator Taylor Sheridan is a controversial figure in the industry due to his unconventional approach to TV series production. By rarely employing writers’ rooms and taking on the daily activities of showrunning on multiple series simultaneously, he has bypassed traditional chains of command with regard to drama production. In an interview that came out weeks into the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, Sheridan asserted his status as the sole voice on his productions and refused to play by any industry rules that affect his authority. As he tells his stories in his own way, Sheridan provides a key case study of the role of the branded showrunner in today’s contentious television landscape.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced the way people do social interaction. One of the more recent forms that has become a phenomenon is watching online content together via Netflix Party, a subscription video-on-demand platform. Utilizing the uses and gratifications theory as the conceptual framework, the main objective of this research was to determine the factors that influence the virtual group-watching of Netflix Party. The 391 respondents who took part in the survey willingly responded to twenty statements broken down into five categories. SEM, or structural equation modelling, is implemented in the goodness-of-fit model. The outcomes of SEM brought to light that the factors of entertainment, engagement, social influence and binge-watching had a significant impact on group-watching in New Zealand through the Netflix Party feature on various digital channels during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, an informational factor was not shown to have an important aspect of the group-watching activities.