CRITICAL STUDIES IN TELEVISION SLOW CONFERENCE - CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
CRITICAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Version update 14/07/21
STUDIES IN
TELEVISION
SLOW
CONFERENCE
19 July-6 August 2021
Time Zones Overview
Contents
Time Zones Overview................................................................................................................ 0
Welcome .................................................................................................................................... 2
How to use Teams and etiquette ................................................................................................ 3
Programme Critical Studies in Television 2021 Slow Conference Overview ........................... 6
Programme Details..................................................................................................................... 8
Monday, 19 July 2021............................................................................................................ 8
Keynote: Kristen Warner, University of Alabama ............................................................ 8
Wednesday, 21 July 2021 ...................................................................................................... 9
10-11.30am: Television Studies and Criticism in the Age of Multiplatform Television .. 9
4-5.30pm: Transnational Television Industries and their Strategies ............................... 11
Thursday, 22 July 2021 ........................................................................................................ 14
Panel: Game of Thrones – Understanding Audience Responses to a Challenging TV
Series ................................................................................................................................ 14
Friday, 23 July 2021 ............................................................................................................ 16
9.30-11am Challenges to Teaching and Research in Television ..................................... 16
Monday, 26 July 2021.......................................................................................................... 19
1-2.30pm Gender and/on Television................................................................................ 19
3-4.30pm The Internet and/as Television ........................................................................ 21
Tuesday, 27 July 2021 ......................................................................................................... 25
Roundtable: Cultures of Television Studies .................................................................... 25
Wednesday, 28 July 2021 .................................................................................................... 26
3-4.30pm Re-Writing Early Histories of Television........................................................ 26
Monday, 2 August 2021 ....................................................................................................... 29
9.15-11am Researching Television’s Histories ............................................................... 29
4pm-5.30pm Television and the Question of Quality ...................................................... 31
Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Wednesday, 4 August .......................................................................................................... 35
10.30-12noon Questions of Genre ................................................................................... 35
1.30-2.30m Nationally Specific Developments ............................................................... 37
3-4.30pm Representations of the Politically Marginalised .............................................. 39
Friday, 6 August 2021.......................................................................................................... 42
PhD Candidate Roundtable .............................................................................................. 42
2-3.30pm Convergence: The Challenge to the Industry .................................................. 42
Television Studies: Where to? ......................................................................................... 46
1
Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Welcome
The teams of the Television Studies Research Group at Edge Hill University and the Critical
Studies in Television editorial team welcome you to the 2021 Critical Studies in Television
Slow Conference.
Please feel free to tweet! Hashtag is #CSTConference2021. And if you want to be nice,
include @CSTonlinetv and #TVStudiesResearchGroup, @EHU_ISR and @EdgeHill_Media.
This year’s conference follows a theme of examining the discipline itself. As we find
ourselves at several crossroads of change, brought about by digitalisation, social movements,
the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock. Our contributors have
responded to a call for paper that invites them to reflect on our discipline. This conference
will thus be a space where we can come together to set the agenda for television research and
education. We will hear papers from all disciplines that engage with television and want to
contribute to Television Studies as a field. Delegates are presenting papers that offer analyses
of the field(s) or methods and ask questions about what research Television Studies should
conduct and how we want to teach the subject.
The conference will take place via Teams (for more information see below), but all
presentations will also be uploaded to YouTube to the following playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBrk-wPNLaVn8h21oryiYpbimT8tMdBBp
If you have a Google account, you should be able to comment and ask questions there – and
we hope to continue the conversation there.
Please bear with us – this is the first time we are running this conference like this, and there
will inevitably be a learning curve… which will make the next slow conference all the better.
2Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
How to use Teams and etiquette
To join any of our sessions, please click the links below which are available both in the
overview (click the linked-up title of the session) and in the section which includes the
abstracts.
When you enter, you will notice that you are muted and that your camera should be off.
Please leave it like this until you want to ask a question in the Q&A.
You can ask questions via the chat, or by raising your hand. To raise your hand, click the
image of the emoji with the hand. One of the options is hand raising:
If you are presenting, obviously you will need to unmute yourself and ideally also switch on
your camera. You will be given permission to screenshare which you can do by clicking this
icon:
3Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
When you’ve clicked that button, you should see an option to share either the screen or a
window. If you click ‘window’, you will be given an option as to what to share: in that case
pick your relevant presentation:
4Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
You should then be able to see your presentation – click on ‘present’ as always and that will
give delegates the ability to see your full screen presentation.
In order to finish presenting, click the window with the x at the bottom: This will end the
screen sharing.
For further information about Teams, see here: Downloadable guides (microsoft.com)
If you are on a MAC, a chrome book or some other form of device or/and things don’t work,
please don’t worry: it’s probably easiest if you send the slides beforehand to Elke
(weissmae@edgehill.ac.uk) and you give her instructions on when to move forward onto the
next slides when you present.
As always, any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
5Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Programme Critical Studies in Television 2021 Slow Conference
Overview
Day Morning Early Afternoon Late Afternoon
Monday, 19 July 4-5.15pm
Opening: Jo Crotty,
Head of the Institute for
Social Responsibility
Keynote: Kristen
Warner
Wednesday, 21 July 10-11.30am 4-5.30pm
Television Studies and Narratives of
Criticism in the Age of Television
Multiplatform Yu Xiang
Television Emily Walker, Brett
Robert Watts Mills and Justine Mann
John Ellis
Klára Feikusová
Thursday, 22 July 1-2.30pm
Panel: Game of
Thrones –
Understanding
Audience Responses to
a Challenging TV
Series
Feona Attwood
Clarissa Smith
Friday, 23 July 9.15-11am
Challenges to Teaching
and Research in
Television
James Walters
Mike Wayne
Paul Grainge
Monday, 26 July 1-2.30pm 3-4.30pm
Gender and/on The Internet and/as
Television Television
Ana Tominc David Levente Palatinus
6Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Sonia Sa JP Kelly
Cat Mahoney Mareike Jenner
Tuesday, 27 July 2pm
Roundtable: Cultures
of Television Studies
Luca Barra
Ruchi Kerr Jaggi
Gary Edgerton
Alexia Smit
Wednesday, 28 July 3-4.30pm
Re-Writing Early
Histories of Television
Andy Lawrence
Carl Sweeney
Caryn Murphy
Monday, 2 August 9.15-11am 4pm-5.30pm
Researching Television and the
Television’s Histories Question of Quality
Charlotte Stevens Tom May
Derek Johnston Tom Hemingway
Ipsita Sahu Melissa Beattie
Michael J. Clark
Wednesday, 4 August 10.30-12noon 1.30-2.30m 3-4.30pm
Questions of Genre Nationally Specific Representation of the
Emily Walker Developments Politically
Lothar Mikos Deborah Castro and Marginalised
Concepcion Cascajosa Susanne Eichner
Rosane Svartman and Ricardo Ramirez
Felipe Muanis Julie Taddeo and
Katherine Byrne
Friday, 6 August 12 noon-1pm 2-3.30pm 4-5.30pm
PhD Roundtable: Convergence: the Closing Roundtable:
Methodological and Challenge to the Where to?
Disciplinary Challenges Industry Christine Geraghty, Brett
Carl Sweeney, Richard Vilde Schanke Sundet Mills and Gabriel
Dhillon, Klára Feikusová Gary Edgerton Moreno-Esparza
and Misha Iakovlev Bärbel Goebel-Stolz
7Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Programme Details
Monday, 19 July 2021
4pm: opening address: Jo Crotty, Director of the Institute of Social Responsibility, Edge
Hill University
4.15pm – 5.15pm
Keynote: Kristen Warner, University of Alabama
Chair: Elke Weissmann, Edge Hill University
To join, click here: Teams Meeting Kristen Warner Keynote
Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative
Media at The University of Alabama. She is the author The Cultural Politics of Colorblind
TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Kristen’s research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of
racial representation and its place within the film and television industries as it concerns
issues of labor and employment. Her work can be found in academic journals, a host of
anthologies and online platforms like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Film Quarterly.
8Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Wednesday, 21 July 2021
10-11.30am: Television Studies and Criticism in the Age of Multiplatform
Television
To join this session, please click here.
Chair: Brett Mills,
Robert Watts, Independent Scholar: ‘The Big Picture’: Considering the Impact of Binge-
Watching on Popular TV Criticism
In late 2019, the launches of both Apple TV+ and Disney+ marked a new phase in the so-
called “streaming wars” — an environment in which any new service offering original drama
must now decide whether to distribute serial content episodically as a ‘weekly pulse’, or
follow Netflix in encouraging viewers to ‘binge and burn ’through whole seasons on-demand
(Jarvey 2019). The two approaches cultivate different kinds of relationships between
platforms, texts and their audiences. Scholarship in this area has already elucidated how
foregrounding the contrast with scheduled, linear TV has been effective a form of industrial
positioning (Jenner 2018); and explored the uses and gratifications of binge-watching for
individual viewers (Glebatis Perks 2015). This paper considers another aspect of how the
binge-distribution model reshapes conceptions of television: its impact on the form and
content of popular television criticism. It focuses particularly on the role of the (Anglophone)
TV critic in mediating and positioning markedly ‘national ’TV content for transnational
consumption, and identifies some potential impacts of a shift in the critical vocabulary in
terms of TV drama’s articulation of national and local culture.
Popular TV criticism has often resembled a ‘discourse in search of an object ’(Poole 1984); a
variable, multimodal form that frequently reconfigures in response to technological,
industrial, and cultural shifts (Lotz 2008). This paper suggests that Netflix and others ’
promotion of binge-watching encourages a wider shift towards singular series reviews that
take the season, rather than the episode, as their object. These “big picture” reviews draw
more on the evaluative aesthetics of film criticism — as a mode that considers works as
unified wholes and self-contained aesthetic objects — than on traditions of “in-progress” TV
criticism organised around the fragmented and socially-situated moments of (national)
episodic broadcasting. Drawing on a study of transatlantic reviews of various British TV
dramas — broadcast weekly in the UK, but reframed as bingeable objects on US streaming
platforms — I first consider how constructions of “bingeability” intersect with the existing
9Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
legitimation discourses of “cinematic” or “event” television. Then, this notion of the “big
picture” as a critical frame is used to demonstrate how, in framing the series as a singular
aesthetic object akin to the cinematic experience, critics tend to frame the more exotic or
foreign aspects of a national television address in broader terms, stripping away their social
meanings whilst endowing them with appeals more akin to the touristic spectacle.
John Ellis, Royal Holloway: The Streaming Disruptors are Undermining TV Studies as well
as Broadcast TV
Streaming services like Netflix are undermining the basis of our discipline. The affordances
of home video, DVD and other technologies made possible the building of audio-visual
libraries for teaching and research. They also enabled adventurous approaches to audience
research. These technologies allowed scholars and teachers to own the objects of their
researches.
Commercial streaming services are rolling back these gains. They are not libraries; they
frequently and arbitrarily withdraw films and programmes. Their processes of tailoring
content to individual tastes hide as much as they reveal. So it is increasingly impossible to
accumulate a library or to even to plan teaching based on what they offer.
Unlike European broadcasters, whose audience research is often public, their huge databases
of viewer choice and behaviour remain obstinately secret. Yet they use this data to guide their
commissioning, from the basic elements of production up to the intimate details of editing
pace and lines of dialogue. The information that they possess (but do not share) dwarfs the
capacities of academic audience research and renders it virtually irrelevant.
Enterprises like Netflix are classic 'tech disruptors' and one of their key acts of disruption has
been to take back control of texts and information from users whilst seeming to do the
opposite. You own a DVD but you only have temporary access to a streamed text.
Streaming technology itself does not require this kind of implementation: the vast and
perpetual library of TV recordings offered to UK academia by the BoB service offers a
radically different model which will be briefly explored.
But how are media studies to respond to this challenge to its very existence? I hope to
stimulate a debate on this vital issue.
Klára Feikusová, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic: Curricular Traps:
Television Studies in the Czech Republic
10Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Television Studies have been a part of academia in Western countries for decades now.
However, they came to the countries of Eastern Europe much later. This paper will present
problems that Television Studies face in the Czech Republic. While there always has been
some, albeit scarce, academic writing about television in the Czech Republic, Television
Studies as a theoretical major separate from the Film Studies have only been established in
2015 (Palacký University Olomouc). At other universities, Television Studies are usually part
of Film Studies department, if they are present at all. Since Television Studies are quite new in
Czech academia, they have to face a lot of difficulties that might be resolved in Western
countries, but not there. There is still a need for legitimization of them as a major and of
television as an artistic medium. Television Studies in Czech are also influenced by cultural
hierarchies (e.g. analytical works about television only deal with quality TV), Americanisation
and cinephilia. There are also more practical obstacles lie language (lack of literature or
subtitles in Czech), distribution or small number of television scholars in the country.
This paper serves as a case study of Television Studies in the Czech Republic. My research is
presented from position of someone who studies and teaches the Television Studies. My
presentation will focus on problems Czech television scholars have to deal with and the
question of how to teach Television Studies as a new academic field in the country.
4-5.30pm: Transnational Television Industries and their Strategies
Yu Xiang: Cultural Homogenisation or Narrative Transparency? A Case Study of the Dating
Show in East Africa: Hello, Mr. Right?
To join, please click here.
Chair: Matthew Pateman
Although television as a traditional media seems fading out from people’s daily routine of
acquiring information, it remains a rare asset in many of the underdeveloped areas in third
world countries. The statistics show that in 2016, there were 19.47 million TV subscribers in
Sub-Saharan Africa which is about 1.9% of its overall population, and the number is expected
to rise to 75 million by 2021 (Statista, 2020). One of the major contributors to the increase of
the number is believed to be the Chinese media company StarTimes. The private Chinese
company entered the African market in the year 2002 and established subsidiaries in more
than 30 countries with nearly 26 million subscribers by 2011. Besides international content
such as sports events and news, it also delivers Chinese movies, dramas, and reality shows.
11Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
The dating show Hello, Mr. Right produced by StarTimes and aired in Kenya and Zambia is
one of its most popular media products in African markets. The show is adapted from the
Chinese dating show If You are the One which was originally imported from Australia. The
localization of the show format in China and Africa reflects the changing map of the global
media flows and pushes people to rethink the oblivious critique on cultural homogenization
in the 1970s. With the growing media industries in the global South, the north-to-south one-
dimensional cultural domination is ruptured with regional disjuncture. Basing on the case of
Hello, Mr. Right, this research aims to continue the unsettled discussion on the
alternativeness of hegemonic decoding following the theoretical frameworks of the cultural
imperialism paradigm (with a focus on sub-imperialist structures in the global South) and
narrative transparency theories. The two research questions are 1. Does the dating show
format (especially the Chinese version) have a specific modern imagination of romantic
relationships? 2. Is this imagery perpetuated in Hello Mr. Right or is it dissolved by the local
culture? The proposed method is discourse analysis, and the objective is to find out whether
the increasing presence of Chinese media content poses a particular imagination about
modernity, as indicated in the scripted romantic relationship in the dating show, and how
such imagination is perceived and internalized indigenously.
Emily Walker, Brett Mills and Justine Mann: Final Draft and the Challenges of Born-Digital
Television Scripts
Final Draft is the standard scriptwriting computer software in the media industries, used –
according to its own publicity – “by 95% of film and television productions” (finaldraft.com).
Lauded for its ease of use, the program includes features such as beat boards and alternate
dialogue enabling its users to quickly and efficiently work on scripts. Furthermore, it enables
collaborative working, facilitating co-writers working in distant physical spaces. But Final
Draft’s features also function as problems for archiving television production, and for the
methodologies hitherto commonplace for the study of writing, authorship, and creative
labour.
For example, updates of the software have rendered accessing material produced on earlier
versions complex, laborious and expensive, problematising access and archiving.
Furthermore, the program does not keep an archive of all earlier versions of a script, making
understanding the existence or chronology of edits difficult to trace. A further problem arises
from the position television continues to have within cultural hierarchies, in which its ‘low’
12Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
status compared to other cultural forms results in many television writers assuming no-one
will have any interest in their work, and thus they are prone to not engage in self-archiving in
a manner standard for, say, novelists.
This paper will explore these problems – and offer solutions – drawing on material from the
comedy strand of the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at the University of
East Anglia, UK (see https://portal.uea.ac.uk/library/archives/bacw). In particular, it will
draw on material from the Charlie Higson archive housed at BACW to outline ongoing
attempts to respond to these challenges. Higson’s archive contains both analogue and digital
material from his decades of working as a writer, performer and producer on television
programmes such as The Fast Show (BBC2/Fosters Funnies: 1994-2000, 2011, 2014),
Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased (BBC1: 2000-1) and Swiss Toni (BBC3: 2003-4). Given this
archive constitutes a wide range of analogue and digital material, it functions as a useful case
study for the variety of tools used by those who undertake creative work and, by extension,
the challenges analysis of television history and creative labour face. In doing so the paper
will acknowledge the particularities of television as an institution and, specifically, comedy
as a genre, illustrating how these contexts impact upon issues related to archiving and the analysis
of creative work.
13Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Thursday, 22 July 2021
1-2.30pm
Panel: Game of Thrones – Understanding Audience Responses to a Challenging TV
Series
Chair: Andrea Wright
To join this panel, please join here.
The end in 2019 of the eighth and final Season of Game of Thrones marked the close of much
more than a TV series. The story-world, and its grim events, had become the focus of a vast
array of speculations, debates and controversies. Winning praise for its early seasons,
substantial controversies over the fate of particular characters, and a nearly 2 million petition
protesting against its closing Season, it has nonetheless been part of a wider repositioning of
‘fantasy’ as a mode of thinking and story-telling. In 2016-7, a project mounted by an
international team of researchers set out to capture audience responses to the series ‘in flight’,
seeking to capture not simply meanings and pleasures, but also the kinds of ways different
people took up the ‘fantasy’ series into their wider thinking. The project managed to gather
more than 10,000 responses to its complex online questionnaire (delivering more than 3
million words of ‘talk’ about the series), adopting the same general methodological
(qualiquantitative) approach that worked very successfully with The Lord of the Rings and
The Hobbit film trilogies (among other projects). A book of the core findings of the project is
currently nearing completion, to be published later this year. Meanwhile, this Panel proposes
to examine three different aspects of the project’s findings, within the frame of considering
the overall cultural significance of the series.
Feona Attwood: ‘Game of Thrones – simultaneously empowering and hostile to women …’
One of the most interesting aspects of Game of Thrones from the point of view of gender and
sexual politics is the way in which the series was emphatically claimed as a world of both
exploitation and empowerment, though with a growing consensus that the final season failed
its female characters and its audience. Drawing on our participants' responses to the depiction
of women in Game of Thrones I will examine how these might be situated in relation to more
public and visible feminist analyses of the series in the context of a political environment
which is characterised by hostility to women and sexual minorities and by a resurgence of
activism around gender and sexuality. In this context, what do audience responses have to tell
14Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
us about how we might understand the representation of gender and how useful are existing
frameworks of understanding?
Clarissa Smith: ‘“Winter is Coming”: a televisual allegory for current dangers’
Game of Thrones has generated a number of go-to phrases, but ‘Winter is Coming’ is perhaps
the most widely repeated and, during a number of popular protests, has been quite extensively
used as a metaphor for other things. Encapsulating the dark themes of impending doom for
Westeros and its inhabitants, oncoming winter drives the narrative of the TV series and
is significant for its seeming confirmation of at least one researcher's claim that the ‘effects’
of the show lie in its affirmation ‘that the world is cruel and unjust. Followers of the story are
kept waiting for justice, which never arrives.’ (Gierzynski 2018) Our questionnaire asked
what viewers understood by the phrase ‘Winter is Coming’, to explore what kind of
associations between individual narrative themes and ‘our’ world might be illuminated. In
this paper I will outline the ways some viewers point to ‘Winter is Coming’ and its narrative
power as analogies to current 'real world' crises such as climate change and Trumpian
politics.
15Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Friday, 23 July 2021
9.30-11am Challenges to Teaching and Research in Television
To join this session, click here.
Chair: Elke Weissmann
James Walters: Have you seen this? Teaching and Research the Television Moment
The dramatic expansion of available television content in the twenty-first century has brought
with it a series of opportunities and challenges for teaching and research. In the classroom,
for example, there is greater potential to build up a framework of interrelated texts that
students can access with relative ease through online learning resources, institutional or
personal subscriptions (and perhaps through other, less official, means). At the same time,
however, the likelihood of a student cohort possessing equivalent knowledge of even one
television title, which may span many episodes and seasons, can be limited as a climate of
abundance conversely places constraints upon shared viewing experiences. Writing about
television can similarly involve negotiating the scale of single or multiple television texts and
maintaining an accessible context for useful discussion. Will an account based on season one
of a programme remain relevant for seasons eight, nine or ten, for example? Will a full
appreciation of an article-length argument depend upon many hours of committed viewing on
the part of the reader?
Against the basic truth that students and academics cannot watch every example of television
that may come up in our teaching or research, the reliance on moments as tangible focal
points has endured as a practical necessity. Moving beyond this pragmatic need, there is an
opportunity to reflect on the critical status we afford television moments. If the moment is
taken to encapsulate the aesthetic and thematic interests of an entire television text spanning
hours of screen time, for example, the weight of burden placed on a small section can be
considerable. Equally, if a moment is taken in isolation and evaluated only in terms of its
internal compositional features, there is the potential for an appreciation of the size and shape
of television texts to be subdued or suppressed. Questions of congruence and incongruence,
generality and specificity, therefore underpin the ways in which we think about television
moments.
This paper stays with some of these interests by focussing on a moment from Shrill (Hulu,
2019-). Coming at the end of the second episode of the second season, this short sequence
encapsulates some of the choices available in discussions of moments. It resonates across
multiple layers: striking in its aesthetic immediacy, its evocation of the show’s wider themes,
16Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
and its illustration of the relationships that exist between moments and their medium. Those
seconds on screen can take us in different directions, on paths that cross and converge.
Knowing which routes we are following, and our reasons for choosing them, is therefore
crucial to understanding the critical engagements that we hope to foster in our teaching and
research.
Mike Wayne: Teaching Television Industry Research Practices: Methodological and
Pedagogical Challenges
Given the difficulties associated with accessing decision-makers, producers, and creative
talent, scholarship exploring the television industry often relies on a variety of sources
including annual reports, press releases, court proceedings, archival records, third-party
industry reports, magazine features, policy documents, and newspaper articles. Like these
wide-ranging materials themselves, this approach is variously described as media
historiography, media industry studies, or trade press analysis. For scholars, our ability to
publish meaningful research in this vein is largely dependent on our ability to use our
experience with and knowledge of these sources to critically unpack their contents. As
Amanda Lotz (2018) notes, however, helping our students “develop the ‘chops’” to
effectively read and use such materials is a separate challenge (163). As such, this paper
explores the methodological and pedagogical issues the author encountered when designing a
MA-level workshop with the goal of teaching students how to conduct television industry
research using publicly available secondary data.
Using Netflix as an example, this paper will describe techniques and resources designed to
guide students through a four-step research process that begins with a conceptual approach to
identify an object of analysis (industrial discourse or industrial practice). In step two, students
locate “official” sources (including press releases and earning call transcripts), find materials
related to industry events (such as roundtables and Q&A sessions), and identify meaningful
trade press coverage. Step three offers practical techniques to transform such material into
coherent data sets with a variety of digital tools. In step four, students analyze their data and
generate findings regarding a specific television industry discourse or practice. Although all
four steps will be outlined, the bulk of this paper will be a detailed discussion of steps two
and three: finding and working with relevant secondary data. Ultimately, this work is an
exercise in pulling back the veil on television industry studies research practices in order to
help students develop critical and methodological skills associated with producing
publishable scholarship.
17Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Paul Grainge: The Life of Metaphor in TV and Media Industry Research
According to James Geary (2012), the primary purpose of metaphor is ‘to carry over existing
names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't been named or so
abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained’. If, as he suggests, ‘metaphor is a lens that
clarifies and distorts,’ this paper examines metaphor as a specific object of study in TV and
media industry research. From environmental images of flow and streaming to cultural
images of disruption and divides, TV and media industry studies routinely deploys metaphor
as a conceptual device. Sometimes scholars draw on terms produced by the ‘discursive
engine’ of industrial cultures such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and other times they
develop metaphors to catalyse new ways of theorising (‘spreadable media’, ‘signal traffic’
etc). While the politics of metaphor has been examined in relation to specific abstractions like
‘platform’ (Gillespie 2017) and ‘cloud’ (Holt and Vonderau 2015), and scholars are alert to
the challenge of finding adequate vocabularies to describe change and continuity in the media
‘ecology’ (Lobato 2019), this paper reflects on the methodological import of metaphor as a
thinking device within the field of TV and media industry studies.
Gareth Morgan’s (1997) influential work on metaphor in organizational theory suggests that
the most important aspect of any metaphor rests in its power of engagement in relation to the
situation in which a metaphor is generated or used - in what it allows people to see,
understand and do, and not in any abstract characteristics of the metaphor itself. While
Morgan examines metaphors as living, practical frames for engaging and shaping the
ontological dimensions of organizational life, this paper considers the generative function of
metaphor in TV and media industry critical contexts. Reflecting on the types and hierarchies
of metaphor that have been mobilised in TV and media industry research, this paper ‘reads
for the metaphor’ in recent critical attempts to construct the field of media industry studies.
By way of focus, the paper goes back to the invited ‘think pieces’ of the inaugural issues of
Media Industries Journal (2014) and examines this collection of perspectives as a site for the
production of metaphor.
18Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Monday, 26 July 2021
1-2.30pm Gender and/on Television
To join this session, please click here.
Chair: Christine Geraghty
Ana Tominc: Gender Representation on Early Television Food Programmes in Six European
Countries: A cross-country comparison
This study will present a preliminary attempt at a cross-country comparative analysis of
European food programme in the 1950s and the 1960s, focusing on representation of gender
in six European contexts. Although food programming was one of the TV genres that features
on almost all European televisions from early on, although in different formats, genres and
quantities, research into early food television in Europe – and also elsewhere – is surprisingly
scarce, especially given current interest in food media (e.g. Moseley 2008, Bonner 2009,
Collins 2009, Tominc 2015, Wei and Martin 2015, Eriksson 2016, Roger 2016, Geddes
2017). The Food and Cooking on early Television, en edited collection of studies covering
eight European countries (currently in preparation by the author, Routledge, possibly 2021)
will fill some of this gap. Focusing on the first examples of food programming on television
from Portugal to Czechoslovakia, it aims to demonstrate how through various genres –
travelog, cooking instruction and advertising, satirical show – the mundaneness of food
content was used in various countries to unite the nation, to modernise and to entertain it, to
name but a few. In this, state televisions reflect creativity that is underpinned by cultural
assumptions of European societies and state ideologies, although there is also an underlying
similarity in some of its features (e.g. around attempts to create national identification, e.g.
Portugal, Italy).
Based on the findings gathered in this collection, this talk offers some comparative
observations – however limited – focusing on gender representation in food shows in six very
different contexts: Portugal, The Netherlands, UK, Italy, Yugoslavia, and East Germany. It
offers shared traits, such as an image of a male authoritative presenter or cook whose role is
to demonstrate to the nation not only what to cook, but also what to think about food. In this,
however, we find difference as some presenters strive for a turn towards a modern, new,
improved self, stripped of tradition and old thinking, while in some especially Western
countries, there is also yearning for the old times and traditions. Women tend to be still
traditional cooks and mothers, although in some cases, this is also rapidly changing,
especially thorough the 1960s.
19Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Through these observations, I argue in favour of television studies that go beyond divisions
established after the World War II; rather, as Mihelj and Huxtable (2018) have argued,
television – and specifically the associated media cultures – should be studied as sub-types of
modern television “designed to promote an alternative vision of progress and belonging”
(ibid., p.9).
Furthermore, from the perspective of food studies, a cross-country comparative approach to
television (ibid.) as attempted here can more usefully demonstrate how early food television
in Europe reflected and (possibly) transformed the lives of Europeans as a whole as they
shared in the decades following the War a similar sense of optimism for the future and, at the
same time, yearning for the past.
Sonia Sa: Portuguese Television News and Gender: Hobbling white and eradicating black
women
Feminist movements in Portugal have reached new dimensions and diverse representations,
both in the public domain - essentially in politics and leadership positions - as well as in the
balance between private and public life. However, when the analysis is the television prime
time commentary of news in Portugal, the result is the epithet of gender inequality and factual
discrimination against black women. In the content analysis we conducted over three
consecutive years, we concluded that women's participation in these information programs is
about 10% and black women is zero. From these results we analyze the ineffective
application of Getting the Balance Right (International Federation of Journalists, 2009) on
Portuguese informative television, in a clear and constant trample on gender equity and
ethical and racial diversity in the media.
Cat Mahoney: ‘History is a beautiful thing’: Feminising the recent past in Derry Girls and
Glow
This paper will consider two Female Ensemble Dramas (FED) that represent the recent past
from an explicitly feminine perspective; Derry Girls (Channel 4 2018 - present) and
G.L.O.W. (Netflix 2017 - present). Both series are what Alison Landsberg refers to as
'historically conscious dramas' (2015: 62) in that they do not seek to recreate "real" people or
events from the past, but rather the 'lived contours' of a particular historical moment (62).
This paper will explore the ways in which both series 'make palpable the social norms and
expectations' (Landsberg 2015: 86) of being a women or girl in 1980s America and 1990s
Northern Ireland. It will consider the series' use of popular music, clothing and props from
20Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
the two periods to generate a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for audiences for whom the
two periods are likely within living memory, whilst also offering a critique of those periods.
Both series utilise comedy, narrative and dialogue to expose the periods' problematic and
prejudicial racial, religious and gendered politics and this paper will demonstrate the ways in
which the FED format facilitates and bolsters this critique. Both series explicitly de-centre
masculine perspectives. In Derry Girls, the one male member of the central group of
characters is not only othered by his gender, but also by his nationality as the only
Englishman in Derry. In G.L.O.W. narrative impetus is derived from a group of women
attempting to subvert the expectations of the sporting and entertainment industries by
establishing an all female wrestling programme. This de-centering is key to both series’
exploration of historical female subjectivity and critique of the remembered past.
This paper will finally consider both series use of television as a historical anchor point
through the incorporation of original broadcasts and news coverage form their diegetic
periods. In both series the television set is the primary source of news and information and,
by depicting real footage of well known historical events such as the Challenger Shuttle
disaster and Omagh bombing, is also a source of historical verisimilitude for audiences. This
paper will suggest the potential of television as a conduit for history and particularly for
histories that offer alternative perspectives and critiques on traditionally masculine pasts
3-4.30pm The Internet and/as Television
To join this session, please click here.
Chair: Cathrin Bengesser
David Levente Palatinus: Streaming Trends and Platform Wars: Shifting Trends and the
Case of The Expanse
Over the past years, cultural and political discourses on television as well as on television
scholarship, have become dominated by the rhetoric of ‘crisis’: one of the most emblematic
tropes, in public perception as well as in scholarship, ‘crisis’ has been frequently deployed to
describe the protracted struggle between broadcast and streaming media platforms and
formats. Many have seen the proliferation of digital content distribution as that which brings
about the decline, or at least the radical repositioning of broadcast television (Lury 2011;
Edgerton 2010; Mikos 2016), while other have taken a more celebratory approach to the
broadening of digital perspectives: some have argued this shift towards streaming services
21Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
produced new exciting consumption practices that complement traditional forms of viewing
(Barnes 2019, Shuster, 2018); others have argued digital platforms potentially open new
horizons to an even more pronounced transnationalization of television (Green, 2019) via a
wider distribution of local productions (Szcepanik and Vonderau, 2013; Szcepanik, 2018) as
well as international cooperations, or the circulation of cultural legacies (Haegedoorn, 2015,
2019). Some critics pointed to the apparent boom in television content being available (and
consumed) by audiences, constituting ‘peak television’.
On the other hand, surveys and empirical data (see Nielsen, 2020) seem to confirm that
broadcast television, as format and as cultural form, is still significant, with specific types of
audiences still tuning in on their preferred types of programs, opting for specific types of
content distributed via linear television.
Clearly, these fluctuating trends provide exciting sources for research into audience behavior,
production and distribution models, and a broader cultural conceptualization of what
television stands for in an increasingly mediated and digital environment. What seems to be
relatively underexplored, however, are questions of content, quality, and participation, and
the ways specific forms of television drama shape our understanding of these aspects in the
streaming era.
Through a case study of Amazon Prime’s The Expanse (Syfy, 2015-2018, Amazon Prime
2019-), this paper is to direct attention to the impact the growing proportion of streaming
platforms have on audiences participatory behaviors – as amply demonstrated by the massive
and expanding social media fandom of the program. First, the paper will comment on the
correlation between specific formats and genres, aimed at niche audiences, being capable of
garnering significant fandom and attaining an iconic cultural status, and streaming platforms’
potential to offer a more streamlined viewing experience (the illusion of more control through
more personalized content). Secondly, it will ask whether streaming platforms’ own original
productions constitute an ‘aesthetic shift’ commensurate to what used to be termed ‘quality’
television (Akass and McCabe, 2007). To that end, I will briefly address cultural perceptions
of quality, complexity, affect and participation in relation to trending genres. Particularly, I’m
interested in casting light on the ways specific television distribution and production (and,
consequently, consumption) models become conducive to specific (niche) genres, which The
Expanse is a quintessential example of.
JP Kelly: ‘What’s on in the box?’: Methods for archiving and analysing video-on demand
catalogues
22Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
When using a video-on-demand [VOD] service such as Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, we are
typically confronted with hundreds of different recommendations at once. This plethora of
content can feel somewhat overwhelming, resulting in what John Ellis (2000) rather presciently
described many years ago as “choice fatigue”. However, the default interfaces of such services
offer just a small glimpse into the much more extensive catalogues of content that sit behind
them. The desktop version of the iPlayer, for example, includes approximately 120 different
recommendations, but beneath this is a catalogue of approximately 7,000-8,000 titles.
The interface plays a crucial role in making sense of VOD catalogues – sometimes promoting
and sometimes hiding content – and in this way they operate as “site[s] of new economies and
forms of power” (Ash, 2016:4). Given their cultural significance, interfaces have been subject
to a number of studies in recent years (e.g. Chamberlain 2011; Kelly 2011; Johnson 2017,
2019). However, far less attention has been paid to the catalogues upon which these interfaces
operate. To a large extent, this is due to the methodological challenges involved in the analysis
of catalogues. Despite these difficulties, VOD catalogues play a crucial role in the
contemporary media experience and it is therefore imperative that we develop new
methodologies that will allow us to examine them more effectively. As Ramon Lobato
maintains, “as television studies moves further into the Internet age, it must develop a robust
understanding of how catalogs work if it wishes to understand wider dynamics of access,
choice, and diversity in digital distribution.” (2018:2)
There have been several attempts to put VOD platforms more clearly on the research agendas
of media studies scholars (Lobato 2017, Johnson 2019) yet the methodological barriers still
remain. In the case of VOD catalogues, the primary obstacle is limited access to catalogue data.
This paper addresses this particular methodological challenge by developing and
demonstrating one way to gather and archive longitudinal catalogue data for the BBC iPlayer.
Using a dataset compiled over a period of approximately 12 months, I employ exploratory data
analysis [EDA] (Tukey 1977) to consider what kinds of patterns we can detect within a VOD
catalogue. This includes a consideration of the volume of titles belonging to certain channels
and genres as well as their availability. In doing so, I use to EDA to consider what we can learn
about the “dynamics of access, choice and diversity” (Lobato 2018:2), specifically in the
context of public service broadcasting.
Finally, this paper will supplement the iPlayer catalogue dataset with an iPlayer interface
dataset, enabling a consideration of the relationship between the two – a relationship which
has received little if any critical attention thus far. Given that VOD interfaces and catalogues
are interdependent (one cannot function without the other), this paper ultimately argues that
23Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
not only do we need to develop more innovative methodologies to help us archive and study
these platforms, but that we should not necessarily conceptualise and analyse interfaces and
catalogues as distinct entities.
Mareike Jenner: Controlling Television
Binge-watching has emerged as dominant mode of viewing in streaming culture: embraced
by industry its use of interfaces that privilege the practice (Jenner 2018, Johnson 2019) and
audiences Perks 2015, Steiner and Xu 2018). In light of this, it is important to look back to
see how the practice fits into a broader continuum of television’s ancillary technologies and
associated viewing practices, such as channel-surfing and its relationship with the remote
control.
This paper frames binge-watching as continuation of previous viewing practices to evade the
television schedule. In other words, television’s ancillary technologies that allow audiences to
control television. Importantly, this control is not power, but control over a viewer’s
immediate environment. This kind of individual control is framed by a neoliberal ideology in
which ‘self-improvement’ is sold as a way to package cultural capital (see, for example,
Feher 2009). In particular, the paper explores channel-surfing and its relationship with the
technology of the remote control and how it relates to binge-watching and its relationship
with the Netflix interface. Bellamy and Walker (1996) discuss the remote control as
technology that gives audiences autonomy and control over television. Similarly, the Netflix
interface forces viewers to take control over their own, personalized schedule in what Lisa
Perks calls ‘entrance flow’ (Perks 2015). Both discourses link in and (in the case of Netflix’
use of binge-watching) even capitalise on notions of ‘good’ TV as cultural capital, a strategy
of self-improvement.
Thus, this paper deals with the intersection of viewing practices, technologies and cultural
capital as mode of ‘self-improvement’ within neoliberal cultures.
24Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Tuesday, 27 July 2021
2pm
Roundtable: Cultures of Television Studies
To join this session, please click here.
Chair: David Levente Palatinus
Ruchi Kher Jaggi (Symbiosis International University, Pune, India), Alexia Smit (University
of Cape Town), Gary Edgerton (Butler University, USA), and Luca Barra (University of
Bologna, Italy)
Chair: David Levente Palatinus (Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic)
This roundtable session will bring together a number of scholars from various geographic and
cultural backgrounds to talk about disciplinary differences in different countries and how the
contexts of the countries - including politics but also university systems more generally -
impact on the ways television studies developed. The panel’s aim is to highlight and
extend the ongoing discourses on and around a number of interrelated issues that dominate
television studies in contemporary times, and to open possible avenues for future
conceptualizations of the ways industry, audiences, policy makers and scholarship can
interact productively.
To that end, the session will attempt to address issues ranging from the space and place of
television studies in relation to media and screen cultures, the social sciences and the
humanities, to the institutional hierarchies and disciplinary structures that determine
classificatory schemas and practices of legitimation. The panel seeks to map out mixed
ecologies and the co-existence of production models, and television mobilities where cultural
legacy, content and format travel through geographic and temporal contexts. It will also aims
to tap into discussions about ways to de-westernize television studies by paying attention to
transnationalization in production cultures, by re-thinking the micro- and macro-management
of production and distribution, as well as the landscapes of production in post-pandemic
times.
25Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
Wednesday, 28 July 2021
3-4.30pm Re-Writing Early Histories of Television
To join this session, please click here.
Chair: Brett Mills
Andy Lawrence: Transnational and National Broadcasting in the North Atlantic: A historical
case study
Television launched in Iceland on 1 March 1955. Historically, the development of Icelandic
television deviates from the model adopted by most Western European nations due to
transmissions from the English-language service provided by the American Forces Radio and
Television Service (AFRTS) predating and subsequently competing against domestic public
service broadcaster RÚV.
Iceland was one of the last European nations to launch a national television service. The
national broadcaster RÚV commenced transmissions on 30 September 1966. Iceland is
unique among the Nordic nation-states due to a transnational television service operating as a
monopoly prior to the setting up of a national public service broadcaster. Unique among the
Nordic nation-states due to the island having no land border, it consequently was not able to
receive content via signal overspill from a neighbouring territory.
Since its inception, the development of the Icelandic television industry and institutions have
been influenced by tensions with transnational organisations, protectionist domestic cultural
policies, and economic imperatives. In other respects, it has conformed to the model of
public ownership and public service broadcasting as the dominant paradigm until market
liberalization in the 1980s facilitated the establishment of commercial networks, changes to
delivery systems due to satellite transmissions, and latterly digital modes of distribution
which have enabled viewers to access global content.
This paper will analyse the development of a small-nation television culture in relation to
theories of the transnational. The paper is a historical case study that will analyse the
influence of transnational organisations on Icelandic broadcast media. The case study will
focus on the period 1955 to 1977 and shall demonstrate that Icelandic media policy and the
establishment of domestic national broadcaster RÚV were influenced by AFRTS. Within the
specified timeframe this chapter will highlight key historical, technological, and political
developments that have influenced Icelandic television’s growth and development. In this
overview, I will analyse programming structure, parliamentary debates, and national
26Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme
arguments concerning the medium’s role as nation-builder and opposing force to
transnational influences.
Carl Sweeney: ‘I’m Married to the Cape’: Adam West, Batman and signature roles on the
small screen
Historically, television stardom has not received the same level of attention as cinema stardom,
in keeping with the paradigms of John Ellis (1992) and John Langer (1997), which posit that
the small screen creates personalities rather than stars. However, Deborah Jermyn (2006)
challenges prior theories through analysis of Sarah Jessica Parker’s public image, identifying
the need for new models through which to examine television’s relationship to contemporary
stardom. Because old hierarchies have shifted, Jermyn asks whether it is “time to revisit the
notion that stardom ‘proper’ […] must emerge from a succession of separate roles?" (2006:
83).
Though this is pertinent to Parker, it is arguably more germane to those who came earlier. Pre-
1980s American television stars were more likely to be principally defined by their connection
to a flagship part, because this period was characterised by scarcity of viewing options (Ellis,
2002), the emergence of repeats as a quintessential televisual form (Kompare, 2005) and a
strong cultural tradition of American programmes being exported to nations such as Britain
(Rixon, 2006). In conjunction, these factors helped cement the association between prime-time
TV stars and popular characters. By theorising star status for someone linked overwhelmingly
with a single role, a distinct form of televisual fame comes into focus. To argue this, this paper
proposes a new category of stardom, described by the term ‘signature role TV star’, evaluating
Adam West as an archetypal example.
West is best known for his leading role on Batman (ABC: 1966-1968), where he portrayed
crime-fighting millionaire Bruce Wayne, who kept Gotham City safe under the guise of his
superhero alter-ego. West’s stylised performances became a key factor in the programme’s
twin address to viewers, who may have interpreted the series as a straightforward superhero
drama or a camp satire. At its peak, Batman was a mainstream phenomenon across the world,
yet ultimately the series was cancelled after a mere three seasons. Thereafter, the actor was
unable to parlay his success into a lasting career as a mainstream leading man. However,
West’s connection to Batman continued to manifest, as he occasionally reprised his former
role, whilst also taking other parts that evoked his superhero success. Meanwhile, he
regularly played himself in a parodic fashion, as exemplified by his popular role in Family
Guy (Fox: 1999-2003; 2005-present). In his latter-day career, West demonstrated that the
27You can also read
