Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television
Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television

Author: Trisha Dunleavy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1317402790

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This book examines the creative strategies, narrative characteristics, industrial practices and stylistic tendencies of complex serial drama. Exemplified by shows like HBO’s The Sopranos, AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Showtime’s Dexter, and Netflix’s Stranger Things, complex serials are distinguished by their conceptual originality, narrative complexity, transgressive lead characters and serial allure. As a drama form that continues to expand and diversify in today’s television, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale provide further examples. Dunleavy investigates the strategies that underpin the innovations, influence and success of complex serial drama, giving students and scholars a nuanced understanding of this contemporary TV form.

Composing TV Drama
Composing TV Drama

Author: Marco Ianniello

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-08-19

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1666941042

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In this book, Marco Ianniello investigates the complex art of television drama screenwriting, arguing that the screenplay itself, rather than the final product, is at the heart of the current success of the genre. Bridging a crucial gap between theory and practice through textual analyses of various case studies, Ianniello expands on television story structure theory and screenwriting practice by foregrounding story construction and character development in the serial drama. The development of these key frameworks – structure and character – will enable both screenwriting scholars and practitioners to better identify, assess, critique, and craft the complexities of the television drama screenplay.

Complex TV
Complex TV

Author: Jason Mittell

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-04-10

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0814769608

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A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

Immortal Films
Immortal Films

Author: Barbara Klinger

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-11-15

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0520968956

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Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance.

Jimmy McGovern
Jimmy McGovern

Author: Steve Blandford

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-05-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1526111381

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This, the first book length study of one of Britain's leading television writers, Jimmy McGovern, links his work to key changes in British television over the last thirty years. McGovern's versatility has meant that his work ranges from soap opera to crime series, studio based single drama to art house features for theatrical release. The book therefore acts partly as a survey of the way that drama for the small screen has mutated and changed over a key period in its history. Steve Blandford's percipient and readable book extensively examines some of McGovern's most influential work, including Brookside, Cracker, The Lakes, Hillsborough and The Street.

Cop Shows
Cop Shows

Author: Roger Sabin

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-03-07

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1476616434

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From cops who are paragons of virtue, to cops who are as bad as the bad guys...from surly loners, to upbeat partners...from detectives who pursue painstaking investigation, to loose cannons who just want to kick down the door, the heroes and anti-heroes of TV police dramas are part of who we are. They enter our living rooms and tell us tall tales about the social contract that exists between the citizen and the police. Love them or loathe them--according to the ratings, we love them--they serve a function. They've entertained, informed and sometimes infuriated audiences for more than 60 years. This book examines Dragnet, Highway Patrol, Naked City, The Untouchables, The F.B.I., Columbo, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, Starsky & Hutch, Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Miami Vice, Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, CSI, The Shield, The Wire, and Justified. It's time to take another look at the "perps," the "vics" and the boys and girls in blue, and ask how their representation intersects with questions of class, gender, sexuality, and "race." What is their socio-cultural agenda? What is their relation to genre and televisuality? And why is it that when a TV cop gives a witness his card and says, "call me," that witness always ends up on a slab?

Acting in British Television
Acting in British Television

Author: Tom Cantrell

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-09-16

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1137470224

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This fascinating text offers the first in-depth exploration of acting processes in British television. Focused around 16 new interviews with celebrated British actors, including Rebecca Front, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Ken Stott, Penelope Wilton and John Hannah, this rich resource delves behind the scenes of a range of British television programmes in order to find out how actors build their characters for television, how they work on set and location, and how they create their critically acclaimed portrayals. The book looks at actors' work across four diverse but popular genres: soap opera; police and medical drama; comedy; and period drama. Its insightful discussion of hit programmes and its critical and contextual post-interview analysis, makes the text an essential read for students across television and film studies, theatre, performance and acting, and cultural and media studies, as well as academics and anyone interested in acting and British television.

An Introduction to Television Studies
An Introduction to Television Studies

Author: Jonathan Bignell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0415598176

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'An Introduction to Television Studies' is a comprehensive introduction to the field. It provides resources for thinking about key aspects and introduces institutional, textual, cultural, economic, production and audience-centred ways of looking at television.

Epic Television Miniseries
Epic Television Miniseries

Author: John De Vito

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2010-03-08

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0786457333

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To paraphrase silent movie queen Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's classic 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, "The epic miniseries are big! It's television that got small!" This is especially true when one compares such iconic epic miniseries as Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), Roots (1977), Holocaust (1978), Shogun (1980), The Winds of War (1983), War and Remembrance (1988-89) and Angels in America (2003) to today's ordinary television programming. This work traces the historical trajectory of the epic miniseries and delves into the character archetypes and themes that recur in the genre, giving close critical attention to more than 40 miniseries. A filmography is included.

Engaging the Past
Engaging the Past

Author: Alison Landsberg

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-06-02

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0231539460

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Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, among other popular texts, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers. Contemporary media can encourage complex interactions with the past that have far-reaching consequences for history and politics. Viewers experience these representations personally, cognitively, and bodily, but, as this book reveals, not just by identifying with the characters portrayed. Some of the works considered in this volume include the films Hotel Rwanda (2004), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Milk (2008); the television dramas Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome; the reality shows Frontier House, Colonial House, and Texas Ranch House; and The Secret Annex Online, accessed through the Anne Frank House website, and the Kristallnacht exhibit, accessed through the Unites States Holocaust Museum website. These mass cultural texts cultivate what Alison Landsberg calls an "affective engagement" with the past, tying the viewer to an event or person and fostering a sense of intimacy that does more than transport the viewer back in time. Affect, she suggests, can also work to disorient the viewer, forcibly pushing him or her out of the narrative and back into his or her own body. By analyzing these specific popular history formats, Landsberg shows the unique way they provoke historical thinking and produce historical knowledge, prompting a reconsideration of what constitutes history and an understanding of how history works in the contemporary mediated public sphere.