Journal of Popular Television, The - Current Issue

This article examines how Internet Movie Database (IMDb) operates as a contemporary site of cultural legitimation by analysing its top 1000 highest-rated television episodes between 1975 and 2022. Rather than interpreting ratings as neutral reflections of quality, the study conceptualizes them as outcomes shaped by platform architecture, user participation and evaluative conventions. The findings reveal genre-based asymmetries in recognition, including drama’s dominance in representation alongside comedy’s stronger average performance, as well as the sustained visibility and consistency of animated series, particularly Japanese anime. The concentration of highly rated episodes in the streaming era further underscores the relationship between industrial transformation and audience-driven evaluation. Interpreted through cultural legitimation theory, the results demonstrate how participatory rating systems organize prestige, visibility and cultural hierarchy in digital media environments. The study contributes to debates on platform governance and digital cultural value by showing how audience metrics restructure definitions of television excellence.

Once Upon a Time (2011–18) uses the police procedural television series format to draw equivalency between this form and the Disney fairy tale. However, in its treatment of this material, it exemplifies how neither the justice of the small-town sheriff nor the medievalism-informed otherworld exists. Once Upon a Time enacts a fairy tale of justice and punishment coded through fairy-tale mores of good and evil, but as the show continues, the storylines extend and expand, and both narrative structures begin to break and thereby provoke questions about what justice looks like and who it is for in both the fairy tale and the police procedural.

Formula 1 has experienced a notable resurgence in the United States during the 2020s. This research examines the Netflix documentary series (docuseries) Formula 1: Drive to Survive and related US promotion as a key cause. Parasocial relationships and the documentary format itself have contributed to fan creation. The docuseries serves less as a re-enactment of a topic for historical perspective but rather as a public relations tool, garnering publicity for the sport but also creating fans. Sport promotion can use the documentary format for creating fans with little knowledge of a sport or its athletes. Research results indicated a strong positive correlation between viewership and better understanding of Formula 1 racing and its drivers, as well as becoming more interested in the sport and the lifestyle portrayed. Implications for promotions and marketing that increase use of the documentary as a dominant narrative tactic are discussed.

HBO’s The Last of Us (2023–present) stages a climate-linked dystopia in which institutional collapse renders distrust and violence as ordinary conditions of survival. This article introduces violent care to name a moral imaginary in which care emerges as emotionally and ethically legible through the willingness to do lethal harm on behalf of the few. Drawing on Fisher’s narrative paradigm, Bormann’s symbolic convergence theory and Berlant’s account of affective life, I analyse Season 1 as a rhetorical artefact, tracing how recurring fantasy themes consolidate into a rhetorical vision that makes suspicion of institutions and strangers feel prudent and morally compelling. Across key sequences (the outbreak prologue, Kansas City, the encounter with David, and the hospital finale), the series repeatedly rewards guarded intimacy and lethal protection, framing family as the only trustworthy ethical unit. The finale crystallizes the cruel optimism of this logic. Joel’s attachment to protectorhood sustains purpose and narrative closure while foreclosing more diverse imaginaries of solidarity, justice and responsibility for the many. The article argues that survivalist prestige television can function as a kind of affectively persuasive moral orientation, narrowing what forms of care and governance feel plausible under crisis.