Television careers offer many potential benefits: opportunities for creative expression, a sense of making a difference in the world, flexibility and autonomy – but often at a price. That price includes long hours, unpaid/under-paid work, lack of investment in professional development and training, lack of mechanisms for worker voice – more fundamentally, perhaps, it includes endemic insecurity… Source ..read more

While improvised or unscripted television has been a feature of media industries for decades, most such series are either comedy or reality television. Suspects (Channel 5, 2014-2016), on the other hand, was an unscripted crime drama featuring improvised dialogue. For those unfamiliar with the series, Suspects follows a group of officers from an unspecified London CID. These include DS Jack Weston… Source ..read more

The mid-1990s were an unusual time to grow up in the US (at least I thought so). The success of The X-Files (Fox 1993-2003; 2016-2018) had led to an explicit spinoff (Millennium, Fox 1996-1999) as well as a glut of similar conspiracy and alien-related series. While many of these have been covered academically, at least in passing, the thirteen-episode series The Visitor (Fox, 1997) was… Source ..read more

So, this morning, the day has already got off to a good start with the unprompted arrival of what I like to think of as a ‘Nice one!’ e-mail. They don’t have to be long. They don’t have to be complicated. And – indeed – they were a thing taught to me in the technology field before we even had e-mails. I have no idea what I liked to think of them as back then. This one was from a… Source ..read more

This blog first appeared on the Women’s Film and Television History Network – UK/Ireland website on 22 March 2024. This week, the nominations for the British Academy Television Awards will be announced. There will be nominations for a range of TV craft roles, including directors, cinematographers, sound recordists and editors, as well as production design, hair and make-up, and costume… Source ..read more

The Book Reviews Section for the journal Critical Studies in Television is interested in adding to our list of possible book reviewers. We are particularly interested in recruiting PhD students who would like to get the experience of writing for a Journal. Guidance will be given about shaping a review, reviews will get sympathetic editorial advice and deadlines can be adjusted to suit personal… Source ..read more

‘It’s been…’ For those of a certain age and/or certain geographic range, that partial lyric was almost certainly read in the voice of Steven Page, the former co-front man of Canadian band Barenaked Ladies (from now BNL). Though Page has since become both a solo artist and part of the Trans-Canadian Highwaymen supergroup and the iconic initial lyric is now sung as a duet between BNL’s multi… Source ..read more

This month the University of Stirling published the largest ever study of autistic people’s research priorities (Cage, E et al, 2024) finding that they wanted research to focus on mental health and support rather than ‘cure’. In other words, autistic people want their lives to be valued and supported as they are, not to have the sides shaved off their square pegs so that they will fit into a round… Source ..read more

2024 has started with a bang for TV. Shows like The Traitors (BBC1) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV) have had around 10 million people tuning in to each episode, reminding us of the social relevance and transformative power of the medium. As television scholar, Amy Holdsworth, notes, TV acts as a ‘point of collective identification’ (2011:145), not just between the viewer and what they see on… Source ..read more

When writing my dissertation, these many years ago, I would often have some sort of disaster film on in the background. This is not so much because I enjoy listening to actors screaming violations of the laws of basic physics, geology and other STEM fields at the top of their lungs (though I do)[1] but because I tend to think of the genre as dark, absurdist comedy. Regardless of whether or not… Source ..read more