Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2017

In the HBO series True Detective (2014–present), the material world is no mere backdrop. It is not a neutral geography against which the theatre of human drama takes place, nor does it simply take the form of a psychological landscape, understood as an expression of the interior terrain of the show’s protagonists. This particular crime drama does not rely on the stabilizing dualism of exterior/interior, nor does it concern itself with an interaction between these apparently separate realms. Instead, True Detective deals with the consequences of living as part of a world in which such dualisms – and the humanist assumptions upon which they are based – are subject to mass extinction, a world in which a long-held belief in the separability of culture and nature, of free will and determinism, of the organic and the technological, is no longer tenable. Here, far from peripheral to practices of detection and investigation, the material world is an active agent inseparably entangled in such practices. In this article I contend that True Detective maps present trauma concerning a geohistorical period scientists have designated the Anthropocene, and, in doing so, radically exploits a crisis in the anthropocentric conventions of the genre.

This article describes the influences of Japanese popular culture on Philippine media through television shows and local advertising. As the generation raised on Japanese animation has grown up, their connection to Japanese culture is presently being manifested through their creative work. As a result, Japanese popular culture has become a part of Philippine nostalgia and is also being used as a powerful marketing tool towards young people. It continues to be prevalent in the Philippines despite having little to no support from the ‘Cool Japan’ project from MOFA. This article analyses a selection of media aired between 2006 and 2014 on Philippine television and YouTube, including television shows, advertisements and music videos, in relation to their visual content, sound and language. Following trends in media allows for a deeper consideration of how globalizing influences can affect local cultures and how these are assimilated, manipulated and eventually used for advertising and marketing.

This article explores the concept of television cycles, using the American sunshine noir cycle as an example. To conceptualize television cycles, this article draws heavily on Amanda Ann Klein’s work on American film cycles and puts the television cycle in relation to notions of genre, sub-genre and individual texts. In a second step, this article will analyse a specific example, the sunshine noir, a cycle present in American television in the 1980s and 1990s and most commonly associated with Miami Vice (1984–89). The sunshine noir is part of the crime genre and describes detective narratives that draw on film noir of the 1930s and 1940s and neo-noir films from the 1980s and 1990s and reconfigure elements of style and narrative to fit the narrative and industrial needs of television.

Ecocritic and philosopher Timothy Morton introduced the term ‘hyperobjects’ in a blog post in March 2010. Morton elaborates on the concept of the hyperobject in the final chapter of The Ecological Thought (2010), and the term supplies the title of his 2014 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. As Morton was articulating the idea of the hyperobject in the spring of 2010, the final season of the television show Lost (2004–10) was dramatizing the climactic instalments of its six-year narrative about a band of castaways stranded on a time-travelling, globe-trotting island, an uncanny object that exemplifies many of the characteristics Morton associates with hyperobjects. In its representation of the island as an inscrutable object punctuated by absence and mystery, in its examination of the dense interconnectedness of its sprawling human cast, and in its thematic emphasis on the epistemological limits that characterize our understanding of the natural world and even of ourselves, Lost not only presents its own version of Morton’s hyperobject but also suggests many of the same conclusions about the way our encounter with hyperobjects reconfigures our self-understanding and our relationship with the non-human world.

Many contemporary television programmes use television archive material in remembering the recent past. While research on memory cultures on television has developed over the past decade, there is very little research on the use of archive material in fiction. This article analyses how archive material functions as an affective element in the Finnish drama series Uutishuone (Newsroom) (2009). The article argues that television archive material in fiction is not just documentary evidence of the past, but can also work as an affective element. Uutishuone uses archive material as an affective element in three ways. First, scenes where characters witness legendary television moments appeal with a sense of experiencing history as it happens. Second, archive material functions as a melodramatic element that expresses the feelings of fictional characters. Third, in some scenes the affective charge of archive material derives from the sense that viewers know more about future developments than the fictional characters. The affective use of archive material enables Uutishuone to articulate ambivalent experiences of gender and socialism in the recent Finnish past.

The meaning and cultural standing of a television programme is not predetermined or set. Indeed, it changes over time from before the broadcast of the programme, to when it is shown, and after. Over this period, and beyond, different parties will struggle, negotiate and seek consensus over a programme’s status and reception. In this article I will develop a concept of media engagement in relation to such a process. To help delineate this concept I will focus on how broadcasters, critics and the public in the United Kingdom interacted over ITV’s second series of Broadchurch (2013–17). I will explore how the producers created a publicity image of the programme to position it in popular and critical debates. As I do this I will identify some of the main strategies being followed by media organizations and the related textual and discursive devices utilized in their publicity output to achieve these aims. I will then seek to identify and explore how critics and audiences responded to the broadcaster’s publicity image. However, as I argue, while, with the use of social media, the importance of the public might have increased in such debates, the broadcaster and critic still have a role in framing such discussions and, at least for the critic, in providing a final summation of the public mediated discussion once a programme has finished its run.

While reality television is not typically associated with acts of political advocacy or the endorsement of pro-social causes, on occasion the genre is capable of making such contributions, including participation in the cultural debate over LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) equality. The present article analyses ‘Tie the Knot’, an episode of the acclaimed fashion-design competition reality series Project Runway (2004-present) produced shortly before the United States Supreme Court’s 2013 rulings opening the door for marriage-equality legislation in the United States. I discuss the various ways the ‘Tie the Knot’ episode was noteworthy as a reality television text, a participant in the debate over same-sex marriage and an advocate for marriage equality. While ‘Tie the Knot’ broke new ground for the Runway series and the reality genre, at the same time the episode revealed limitations regarding how far its producers were willing to go in expressing their support for a controversial political cause and raised questions about the varying universalizing tendencies of mainstream media framings of same-sex marriage.

Lifestyle TV, Laurie Ouellette (2016) New York and London: Routledge, 194 pp., ISBN: 9781138784857, p/bk, £18.99

The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution, Jean K. Chalaby (2016) Cambridge: Polity Press, 232 pp., ISBN: 9781509502592, p/bk, £16.99 (pb); h/bk, £55.00

American TV Detective Dramas, Mareike Jenner (2015) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 198 pp., ISBN: 9781137425669, h/bk, £58.00; e-book, £45.99

Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner (eds) (2016) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 262 pp., ISBN: 78113755695, h/bk, £60.00; e-book £47.99

TV Peaks: Twin Peaks and the Modern Television Drama, Andreas Halsko v (2015) Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 300 pp., ISBN: 9788776749064, p/bk, £24.38