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- Volume 9, Issue 3, 2021
Journal of Popular Television, The - Television and Nostalgia Now, Oct 2021
Television and Nostalgia Now, Oct 2021
- Editorial
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Introduction: Television and nostalgia now
By Caitlin ShawThis introduces the following dossier which, inspired by the roundtable panel ‘Streaming the past: Contemporary television, genre and nostalgia’ from the University of Hertfordshire’s 2021 genre/nostalgia conference, explores contemporary television’s relationship to nostalgia amid multi-platform shifts and the COVID-19 pandemic. While non-linear television has in some ways disrupted linear television’s ties to nostalgia, it has also seen a rise in aesthetically nostalgic programming. The introduction considers how this connects to broader cultural nostalgic trends, themselves fuelled by diversifying media technologies, and complicates meanings traditionally associated with period programming. It explores implications of recycling predominantly western and mediated pasts, and considers how the pandemic has highlighted intersections between linear television, non-linear platforms and differing forms of nostalgia. Finally, it introduces the dossier’s three short essays.
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- Special Section: ‘Television and Nostalgia Now’
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The homesick and the sick home
More LessThis short article explores the popular property renovation series DIY SOS: The Big Build (2010–present) to examine what it can tell us about the textual, affective and political modes of nostalgia on television. Inverting the homesick at the heart of nostalgia it considers, instead, the idea of the sick home by examining the ways in which the series represents and remedies lives affected by chronic illness and/or disability. The nostalgic promise of The Big Build is of a home to return to in the future and I argue that by placing the programme within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the series reveals a complex dynamic of loss and recuperation and a powerful nostalgic fantasy of community, care and (public service) television.
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Netflix, nostalgia and transnational television
More LessThis article offers an overview of the various kinds of nostalgia Netflix engages with. The focus here is self-produced originals and the way nostalgic elements are used to create different kinds of political outlooks within a transnational television environment. An underlying question is: in what ways can nostalgia be political within the transnational context of Netflix? The article explores this question while giving an overview of nostalgia’s use in different series, such as the culturally regressive politics of The Crown (2016–present), the progressive social justice project of Sex Education (2019–present) and the semiotic (if not political) project in series like Bridgerton (2020–present).
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Whose nostalgia? Differentiation in German television’s audience address
More LessNostalgia is often examined as an element of the text. In this contribution, I argue that texts offer a number of spectator positions that can be perceived as nostalgic if the viewer has accumulated certain life experiences that render them so. Examining Babylon Berlin, I argue that the programme offers a spectator position that can look at its Weimar of 1929 anxiously and nostalgically. This is a spectator position that assumes a viewer who is likely to be from the former West and who likely is younger than 55 years of age.
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- Articles
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An experiment in space and time: Remaking the missing Doctor Who episode ‘Mission to the Unknown’
More LessIn the 1960s, the majority of Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–present) episodes were wiped or lost. Students and staff at the University of Central Lancashire recently took on the challenge of remaking the missing Doctor Who episode ‘Mission to the Unknown’ (1965). The goal was to faithfully recreate the episode in a way that lays a claim to authenticity. This article examines the process and product and asks, with reference to television historiography, whether it achieves its goal of authenticity and what ‘authenticity’ might mean in this context. Ellis and others discuss the estrangement felt when viewing television from earlier decades. This article discusses the ‘feedback loop’ involved in knowing that the episode was made recently whilst assessing it as if it had been made in the past. The estrangement the viewer feels is therefore a sign that the episode is succeeding in its task of staying authentic to its era. But is it possible to completely abandon the knowledge of its contemporary production and lose oneself to the experience of viewing?
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The ‘troubled rebel girl’ and the ‘boy-next-door’: The apparent inversion of gender and love archetypes in 13 Reasons Why, Élite and Sex Education
Authors: Maddalena Fedele and Maria-Jose MasanetTeen series play a central role in the socialization process of young people, since they offer portrayals and models that young people can relate to, identify with or modify and break. Previous studies have shown that teen series continue to perpetuate a stereotyped gender representation and usually reproduce a heteronormative relationship model based on the myth of romantic love following the storyline of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. The present study consists of a close reading of three popular current Netflix teen series: 13 Reasons Why (2017–present), Élite (2018–present) and Sex Education (2019–present). The results show an inversion of the gender archetypes of Beauty and the Beast. The three female protagonists are ‘badasses with a good heart’, embodying the typical archetype of the ‘Beast’, while the three male protagonists are patient, caring, innocent and even virginal, embodying the archetype of the ‘Beauty’. However, unlike in the classic model, the boys fail in their attempts to save their beloved from themselves, and the girls end up suffering irreparable consequences. The tragic end of the female characters condemns them to the impossibility of a redemption that has traditionally been granted to males.
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Who is this who is coming? From neurosis to neurodegeneration in television adaptations of M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’
By Nicholas RayThis article discusses two BBC television adaptations of M. R. James’s classic ghost story ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904), the first directed by Jonathan Miller (1968) and the second by Andy de Emmony (2010). Arguing that de Emmony’s film takes Miller’s as a point of departure, it attempts to track the progressive ‘psychologization’ of James’s tale, a development that it explores with reference to Sarah Cardwell’s notion of ‘meta-textual’ lineage. The article outlines how Miller knowingly reimagines James’s story as a Freudian parable by drawing on the resources of classical psychoanalysis and its understanding of neurosis as the expression of a dynamic interior conflict, one in which something repressed menacingly returns. It goes on to read de Emmony’s film, which reorganizes the story around a case of dementia, as an effort to extend the tale into the psychic terrain of the ‘new wounded’, a term coined by philosopher Catherine Malabou to describe emergent psychopathologies unique to neurological injury or degeneration. Taking conceptual support from Malabou, the article demonstrates both the self-consciousness with which the later adaptation builds from its antecedent and its reinscription of the story within a frame of reference that specifically exceeds the psychoanalytic ontology presupposed by Miller. The films reimagine and contemporize the Jamesian haunting – with its climactic coming of a mysterious other – in ways that are utterly distinct but also cumulatively psychological. Looked at in apposition, the article suggests, they exemplify adaptation not simply as a revival or reconstitution of a past text but as an ongoing, intertextual and incremental labour of reinvention.
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A woman scientist in pursuit of truth: A rising trend of representation with Chernobyl
By Aslı TunçSky/HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl (2019) tells a human story behind the catastrophic disaster that had begun with an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine on 26 April 1986. Over the course of five one-hour episodes, Chernobyl dramatizes the incidents that paved the way to the massive explosion, such as the Cold War era, the dysfunctional Soviet bureaucracy and the power issues among the male political and scientific establishment. The highlight of the miniseries is female agency being the symbol of scientific approach, rational thought and common sense. This article analyses Chernobyl and the character of a Belarusian nuclear physicist named Ulyana Khomyuk (played by Emily Watson) by focusing on women’s representation on popular television in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. It also questions whether Chernobyl is one of the very few examples in popular culture of changing patterns of women’s representation in STEM.
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The logic of formatting: A case study on transnational television production
Authors: Jolien van Keulen, Tonny Krijnen and Joke BauwensThe transnationalization of television production has been examined by studies on formats and multinational media companies, which have often highlighted the resilience of the local in the global. This article investigates transnationalization on the micro level of television production, drawing on participant observations in a Dutch production company that is partly owned by an American conglomerate. It explores the deep entanglement of the local with the global in different facets of production – including legal, organizational and market aspects – as manifested in daily practices and decision-making in television production. Our analysis reveals an industrial logic of formatting that is not only induced by transnational ownership structures and business models but also deeply ingrained in production routines and programme conventions. Through this logic, transnationalization shapes media professionals’ daily work, the selection of programme ideas and the process of content development.
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- Book Reviews
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Lesbians on Television: New Queer Visibility and the Lesbian Normal, Kate McNicholas Smith (2020)
More LessReview of: Lesbians on Television: New Queer Visibility and the Lesbian Normal, Kate McNicholas Smith (2020)
Bristol: Intellect Books, 206 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78938-280-8, h/bk, £80
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Global TV Horror, Stacey Abbott and Lorna Jowett (eds) (2021)
By Nicola YoungReview of: Global TV Horror, Stacey Abbott and Lorna Jowett (eds) (2021)
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 272 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78683-694-6, p/bk, £45
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