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In the Swedish/Finnish/British/Norwegian television series Jordskott (2015–17) child victims’ mysterious disappearances signal that ‘something’s not right’ in Silverhöjd, a Swedish town. Three detectives uncover a conflict between the locals who depend on a local industry and preternatural human-like but non-human forest creatures familiar from Nordic tradition and fairylore. Both humans and semi/non-humans are ambivalent, but what sets the latter apart is their implication in caring for nature, protecting it, and punishing those who harm it. We analyse this series’ instantiation of a folkloristic popular green criminology, based in the idea that popular discourses’ representations of crimes and harms may offer serious interventions into issues of environmental, ecological, and species justice. Our ecocritical analysis suggests that tradition offers material for reflection, but also for sociocultural intervention, as it is circulated to address the dependencies and hierarchical configurations between humans and other life-forms, and the many consequences of ecological and individual harm. peerReviewed

This paper explores how the central female characters of the television series Killing Eve gain power by accessing and enacting forms of violent “otherness”. By rejecting traditional conceptions of...

Steve Canyon, developed in the late 1950s from the popular newspaper comic strip of the same name created by Milton Caniff, was the first attempt at generating a filmed dramatic series for American...

The TV series Our Boys (2019), which deals with traumatic historical events, provides the basis for a discussion of blind spots (scotoma) as a metaphor for collective denial. This social blindness ...

Black Mirror (2011–current), an anthology science-fiction television series, portrays how digital technologies reflect and shape our dreams and nightmares about the current media environment. The w...

The critically celebrated but academically controversial Canadian television series Slings & Arrows presents a poignant exploration of the interrelations between art and life. By depicting a dialec...

After the tremendous response to actor Alyssa Milano’s 2017 #MeToo tweet, U.S. television series began incorporating explicit #MeToo episodes. As feminist scholars amply demonstrate, television has...

This article explores the circulation and reception of Indian media (including films and more recently television series) in the majority Muslim city of Tamale, Northern Ghana. This includes the ar...

American Movie Classics’ (AMC) popular television series The Walking Dead (2010–present) transports viewers into an apocalyptic zombie dystopia where the lines between safety and precarity, being g...

This article begins with an analysis of the six-episode British television series Hit & Miss (2012) before moving back in time to a discussion of the films The Crying Game (1992) and Breakfast on P...

Matyjaszek’s article discusses a set of reactions by Polish emigre cultural and political activists in the United States to the screening of the NBC television series Holocaust: The Story of the Fa...

This article examines representations of high school athletes on sports teen drama television series by focusing on One Tree Hill, Friday Night Lights, and All American. Recognizing that these show...

This essay spans a long and somewhat unconventional arc – from Goethe’s 1795–6 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Years to Lena Dunham’s recent television series Girls. On the one hand, it focuses on...

The remarkable number of books, theatrical productions, films, and television series about people who are Mormon (mostly families or missionaries) suggests that the media is enamored with Mormons. ...

Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, is among the most complex cities in Africa, as it is defined as much by its creativity as by inertia and physical and symbolic barriers. This article examines the articulation of these dynamics through the prism of popular culture. While most research has focused on the reception of the global media by an African audience, the author analyses the hold that television series made in Douala have on the general public in the city. The article advances the hypothesis that the consumption of Cameroonian series involves a kind of “mirror” that allows the inhabitants of Douala to understand their collective existence and to open up new spaces for social collaboration. The “affective” power of images rooted in the local socio-cultural context plays a key role in these dynamics, because viewers develop a sense of community by sharing reactions and emotions. Douala, la capitale économique du Cameroun, figure parmi les villes les plus complexes d’Afrique, car elle se définit aussi bien par sa créativité que par l’inertie et des barrières physiques et symboliques. Cet article examine l’articulation de ces dynamiques à travers le prisme de la culture populaire. Alors que la plupart des études s’est concentrée sur la réception des médias globaux de la part du public africain, j’analyse l’emprise que les séries télévisées réalisées à Douala ont sur le public de la ville. J’avance l’hypothèse que la consommation de séries camerounaises implique une sorte de “miroir” qui permet aux habitants de Douala de comprendre leur existence collective et d’ouvrir de nouveaux espaces de collaboration sociale. Le pouvoir “affectif” des images ancrées dans le contexte socio-culturel local joue un rôle clé dans ces dynamiques, car les spectateurs développent un sentiment de communauté en partageant des réactions et des émotions.

In TV fiction, over the past years, it has been possible to detect the recuperation of specific themes linked to a particular sociopolitical context: the Cold War. The Russians and the Soviet era a...

Bowling Headliners, a television series broadcast from 1948 to 1950, played a significant role in earning the game’s acceptance as a spectator sport in the United States. Premiering in the pivotal ...

For many decades, cultural representations of the military and military service in Israel, particularly in films and television series, tended to focus on male Sabra (Israeli-born) soldiers and the...

This article combines ethnography and textual analysis to consider the reasons for the immense popularity of the 2012 Chinese television series “The Legend of Zhen Huan” (LZH). I argue that LZH, a ...

Patrick Magee was Samuel Beckett’s close collaborator and friend who, through his monologues on BBC radio in the early 1960s, shaped the parameters of a generic Beckettian character, one that can still be detected in the production, reception and understanding of Beckett’s work today. Yet it has not been sufficiently understood that Magee’s performances emerge from a wide and shifting field of biographical, aesthetic, professional and economic forces, given his centrality not only to Beckett’s reception, but to many other areas of performance, from classic West End theatre to horror film, counter-cultural provocation to iconic Sixties television series. Magee’s distinctive realization of Beckett’s anonymous, isolated, seemingly ancient voices took place in the context of his sustained experiment with the nature and function of character across several media, and in this essay I think through the nature and consequences of this mobility. To do so I focus on his career from 1958 to 1964, that is to say, from the small part he played in the first airing of Beckett’s play All that Fall on the BBC Third Programme, to the Royal Shakespeare Company summer season at the Aldwych in London, which featured Magee as leading man in all four plays staged, including Beckett’s Endgame and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade.

This article explores Disney’s production and circulation of specific and ambiguous Latinidad by focusing on the Disney Channel television series Stuck in the Middle (2016–2018). Bringing together ...

This article analyses a selection of creative projects engaging with Romanian migrant labourers, in relation to the controversy in the UK and in Romania prompted by the Channel 4 television series ...

Treating bodies as explicitly rhetorical, this article analyzes two queer Christian characters from the television series Queer as Folk (Showtime, 2000–2005), arguing that these guest characters re...

Frasier, a television series (1993–2004), evolved from the film noir tradition, but as a comedy rather than as tragedy. This also represents the tendency of television to mute the existential crisi...

The idea of teaching and learning about public administration through pop culture has exploded in recent years. Borry (2018) details how to incorporate the popular television series Parks and Recre...

Whoever heard of Eryholme, a small community on the boundary of North Yorkshire and Durham? Probably not many, outside of the immediate area had, until, in the enormously popular television series,...

Connecting the Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore by Stanley Corkin provides a careful analysis of the popular HBO television series The Wire, which aired between 2002 and 2008. Situat...

This article discusses the professional career of the Spanish screenwriter and director Mar Coll (Barcelona, 1981–), with special focus on what is her only television series so far, Matar al Padre ...

This article discusses a pedagogical project that asked undergraduate students in an education course to view and respond to the television series Parenthood’s representation of autism and to a det...

The inclusion of a gay 13-year-old main character (Cyrus Goodman) on the Disney television series Andi Mack prompted social conservatives to call for the show’s cancellation due to the alleged nega...

Turkish television series gained their presence in the global entertainment market being dubbed as Turkey’s soft power asset. However, in more recent years, together with increasing governm...

Phillies Jackpot Bowling, a television series broadcast on NBC in 1959 and 1960, played a historic role in transforming the image of bowling and precipitating an era of unprecedented popularity for...

This paper performs a case study of the hit television series, Transparent, and considers the public pedagogy (Burdick & Sandlin, 2013) the show produces. In order to do this, it conducts a...

The ABC/Marvel Television fantasy series Jessica Jones, aired in 2015 and 2018, is the first television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe both to be made specifically for an adult audience an...

Three cases, one supplemented with easily obtainable video demonstration (from a segment on the Discovery Channel’s Human Body: Pushing the Limits television series) validating the significance of clinical hypnosis techniques, which integrate easily into dental patient treatment, are reviewed.

This article uses the prime-time drama Peyton Place (ABC, 1964–67) to examine the challenges of racial integration in the serial narrative. Peyton Place broke ground as a prime-time serial, but dec...

This article explores the creation, production, and reception of the unique, popular, and publicly-funded mid-1970s children's television series Vegetable Soup, arguing that it constitutes a specific and intriguing chapter in the history of efforts in the United States to change "the environment for racism."

This essay advances the postcolonial analysis of the television series Stargate: SG-1 (1997–2007) by investigating its engagement with colonial tropes. We show that the series fails in its attempts...

This article is a study of fans of the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) in the context of the revival series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), when the series returned with a four-episode special on Netflix after being off the air for nine years. The series revolves around a single mother and her daughter, and this article shows how fans use representations of familial relationships, generations and transitional life stages in their own life course as long-term fans. The article combines theory on long-running serial narratives, media generations and cultural gerontology with fan studies theory, and analyses email interviews with 27 long-time fans of Gilmore Girls aged between 21 and 67 years. This article argues that being a long-term fan with an intense relationship to a media text (e.g. constantly re-watching old episodes) disrupts fans’ experience of generational belonging through: (1) what is experienced as nostalgic or a lack of nostalgia; (2) shifting character identifications across the life course and cross-generational identification; and (3) constantly ascribing new meaning to the media text as fans experience transitional stages in their own lives. This article is a study of fans of the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) in the context of the revival series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), when the series returned with a four-episode special on Netflix after being off the air for nine years. The series revolves around a single mother and her daughter, and this article shows how fans use representations of familial relationships, generations and transitional life stages in their own life course as long-term fans. The article combines theory on long-running serial narratives, media generations and cultural gerontology with fan studies theory, and analyses email interviews with 27 long-time fans of Gilmore Girls aged between 21 and 67 years. This article argues that being a long-term fan with an intense relationship to a media text (e.g. constantly re-watching old episodes) disrupts fans’ experience of generational belonging through: (1) what is experienced as nostalgic or a lack of nostalgia; (2) shifting character identifications across the life course and cross-generational identification; and (3) constantly ascribing new meaning to the media text as fans experience transitional stages in their own lives.

Taking its inspiration from a line in Chinese that appears in an episode of the popular US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this essay reflects on the broader phenomenon of minor or minoritized discourses and, specifically, insofar as it relates to modern Chinese literature. The focus, however, is not on discursive formations positioned at the margins of what might be regarded as mainstream Chinese literature (such as ethnic minority literature, Sinophone literature, and so forth), but rather on works by authors who may be viewed as paradigmatically canonical.

Best known for being a prankster in the 1970s television series, Mash, Alan Alda has found a new way to make us laugh: at ourselves. Prompted by a personal and costly miscommunication, Alda sets ou...

The Introduction to this book opens with an engaging discussion of a key scene from the highly popular US television series Glee (Fox 2009–2015). In the scene, one of the main characters, Artie, si...

The late 1990s were a key turning point in the history of anime. Its global reach was fully achieved in North America with the Pokemon television series, card game, and video games. Hayao Miyazaki’...

Although a considerable amount of research has been carried out in the field of global media studies on the ways in which US television and audiovisual products in general travel to different countries, little attention continues to be paid to the cultural and linguistic adaptation that such cross-cultural transfer inevitably requires and to the modifications to which these products become subject in the process. This paper focuses on the adaptation into Italian of a number of recent US television series containing controversial language and potentially disturbing themes, such as references to death, disability, sexuality/homosexuality and drugs. By analysing dubbed, subtitled, and fansubbed versions of such series, this study shows how the dubbed versions of the series tended to be toned down as far as taboo language and subjects are concerned, as opposed to the fansubbed versions and to some extent the official subtitles. In some of the more extreme cases the series seem to have undergone a ‘genetic modification’ of sorts, with Italian viewers watching sometimes radically different shows with respect to their US counterparts.

In the realm of 1970s sci-fi futurist themes, few concepts reverberated across the landscape of American popular culture with greater reach than the promise of human bionics. Beginning with a trilo...

The seeds that would eventually lead to the birth of the extraordinary project of ‘The Gatekeepers’ began to germinate when Israeli film director Dror Moreh watched the 2003 American Oscar-winning ...

This article interrogates the geopolitical content of the internationally popular television series Bron/Broen (‘The Bridge’) and its two subsequent adaptations. In my analysis of The Bridge as a g...

The paper uses empirical data from an ethnographic study of the production of a dramatic television series to explore the calculative practice of the production team. In its focus on three distinct...