Television Studies

LOST exemplifies a contemporary American prime-time series that exhibits both serial and episodic traits and, thanks to technological developments, has proliferated across many different platforms allowing for a deepening of its hyperdiegetic world. This paper will examine how Lost’s non-linear narrative structure, using flashbacks and flash forwards, serves to provide a linear development of story and character while also creating an implicit promise of narrative resolution and final closure. However, as I will argue using a close study of Lost’s fifth season finale, recent developments have extended and problematised the non-linear framework that has structured the show’s development from the beginning. Instead of the promise of a story that can, despite a complex non-linear narrative, be reconstituted in linear terms, the increasing complexity of Lost’s narrative has opened up the possibility of a radical act of de-narration that threatens to erase an entire five seasons’ worth of story.

Die Verflechtungsstrukturen deutscher TVSender und Produktionsgesellschaften sind hoch komplex und sehr intransparent gestaltet. Der Versuch, diese schlüssig zu durchdringen, ist für den Fernsehzuschauer angesichts
von verfügbaren Informationen und Veröffentlichungen
der Sender nur mit Mühe möglich. Um dessen Situation möglichst konkret nachzubilden, wurde die Methode reiner Exploration
gewählt. Die diesem Beitrag zugrundeliegende Studie versucht, allen Hindernissen zum Trotz, auf diesem Wege für die – gemessen an den Wirtschaftsdaten – fünf größten deutschen
TV-Sender eine erste Verflechtungsmatrix aufzuzeigen. Sie versteht sich am Ende als Aufforderung zur Erhöhung der Transparenz, die sich insbesondere an die öffentlich-rechtlichen
Leistungsträger richtet.

La Guerra Civil española es una cuestión sin agotar. Entre sus consecuencias se encuentra el impacto que ésta tuvo en la memoria de varias generaciones. Sin embargo, el estudio de la memoria social y de sus representaciones sobre la guerra y la dictadura franquista no ha recibido la atención necesaria por parte de la historiografía, la sociología, los estudios culturales y los de comunicación. No obstante, ochenta años después de la contienda española, son múltiples y variopintas las producciones culturales producidas bajo el paraguas de la posmemoria o memoria de segunda y tercera generación.

Los ensayos reunidos en este volumen se aproximan, desde un prisma interdisciplinar, a un corpus amplio y heterogéneo de producciones contemporáneas sobre la memoria en la España actual: trabajos literarios, visuales y audiovisuales que incluyen desde novelas a series de televisión, pasando por cómics, textos dramatúrgicos, programas radiofónicos, documentales, cortometrajes de ficción y producciones transmedia. Todos ellos proponen una mirada al pasado de España desde la distancia generacional, pero también subrayan la recuperación de lo traumático o lo nostálgico para nuestro presente.

Posmemoria de la Guerra Civil y el Franquismo aporta nuevas perspectivas acerca de la memoria colectiva, contribuyendo a repensar los modos en que ésta se construye y recrea, destacando el papel esencial que los medios de comunicación y la producción cultural juegan en la conformación de la memoria del pasado entre las generaciones.

Con le espressioni “Cinema a domicilio”, “piccolo cinematografo privato”, “cinema in casa”, giornalisti, intellettuali e addetti ai lavori salutano l’avvento della programmazione televisiva italiana sperimentale, alla fine degli anni Trenta. Alla fine degli anni Quaranta, quando la RAI riprende quegli studi e quegli esperimenti che, nel giro di pochi anni, porteranno al varo del servizio regolare di trasmissione, il dibattito si rianima; ma la ricerca dello specifico televisivo si accompagna questa volta alla crescente preoccupazione per l’avvenire del cinema stesso quale mezzo di intrattenimento di massa. Attraverso lo spoglio sistematico delle riviste corporative dell’AGIS, il mio intervento intende esaminare il posizionamento degli esercenti cinematografici italiani nel conflitto cinema-televisione e il loro contributo alla messa a punto delle principali strategie di contenimento della concorrenza.

With the labels “home cinema”, “small private cinema”, “home theater”, journalists, intellectuals and professionals welcome the advent of experimental television in Italy, during the late thirties. At the end of the forties, when RAI resumes those studies and experiments that, within a few years, will lead to the launch of the regular television service, the debate is revived, but the search for the specificity of the medium is accompanied by a growing concern for the future of cinema itself as mass entertainment. Through the study of AGIS’ major corporate magazines, this essay will examine the positioning of the Italian film exhibitors in the conflict cinema-television, and their contribution to the development of the main strategies of containment of the competition.

Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet.

Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals.

Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
https://iupress.org/9780253057174/contemporary-korean-shamanism/

The seeds of a culture of elite drug use that were sown in the first season of Rome blossom to full prominence in the show’s second series as male and female characters within the city and without are shown conspicuously consuming narcotics. What emerges from the haze of opium and hemp smoke is a swirl of inference as a decidedly modern habit is thrust into ancient hands, along with all of its connotations. Perhaps inspired as much by Shakespeare as by orientalist stereotypes, the prevalence of the vice is striking: the reimagined Cleopatra is often addled with opium and her paramour Antony succumbs to the vice all too quickly, while in Rome itself the parvenue Jocasta corrupts the well-to-do Octavia with her imported hemp whose potency is enough to attract the dabbling of Atia, whose later casual dismissal of the habit implies that it was neither scandalous nor out of the ordinary. Commonplace, seductive, and always aphrodisiac, drug use in the show nevertheless brings with it the dangers and associations of the modern habit. Notions of degeneracy, addiction, sexual impropriety and juvenile delinquency come with the vice and speak to the character of the users, while the foreign origins of the substances themselves bear political associations that play into dichotomy of Roman versus non-Roman in the series. And all of this emerges from what is essentially an historical embellishment of a drug culture that never was present. This chapter seeks to delve into what lies behind this retrojection of a modern vice onto the ancient elite by considering the ramifications of drug use within the world of the series, and the implied judgement of the characters involved. All the while drug use in Rome will be situated in relation to both historical context, and the increasing frequency with which this modern decadence is grafted onto the ancients in contemporary depictions of the Classical world.

Developments in contemporary Latina/os media are the result not only of an exponential­ ly growing Latina/o population in the United States but also of the synergy between trans­ formations in the global political economy and the emergence of new media platforms for production, distribution, and consumption. To reflect upon the emergence of the industry is to consider the politics of the labeling of the Latina/o community and the eventual con­ figuration of a market audience. It also requires a confrontation with the cultural history of representations and stereotypes of Latina/os, particularly in radio, TV, film, and the in­ternet, and the transnational aesthetics and dynamics of media produced by and/or for Latina/os in the United States. If the notion of media revolves around a technological means of communication, it also encompasses the practices and institutions from within which the Latina/o communities are imagined, produced, and consumed. At the start of the 21st century, the idea of Latina/os in media revolved around a handful of Latina/o stars in Hollywood who often performed stereotypical representations, a racialized and marginal Spanish-language radio industry, and two Spanish television networks, Univi­sion and Telemundo. A more complex constellation of representations has evolved in both mainstream and Spanish-language media, among them new platforms for production and resistance, including social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat), radio podcasts and streaming services (e.g., Hulu and Netflix), and a more active and engaged audience that consumes media in Spanish, English, and even Spanglish.

The aim of this collection is to develop, and promote discussion of, qualitative and quantitative methods, in addi-tion to more traditional ones, for studying television series. Indeed, a methodological hybridity characterizes media stud-ies, which seeks to expand the investigatory frameworks of the phenomena of interest, situating them within the entire media system (including production, distribution and con-sumption) and their social, cultural and political contexts. In this perspective, adopting qualitative and quantitative mod-eling approaches can create an interesting perspective and enhance the development of future research fields. For ex-ample, in the study of individual programs, or particular sites of production, consumption, and reception, or of audience response, modeling approaches might help to identify textual and contextual features that correlate with the persistence of particular programs over time; the ability of particular shows to adjust their form or market appeal in response to changing contextual conditions; and the ways in which different pro-duction, distribution, or exhibition contexts influence textual form and/or audience response.

As Olivia Pope hangs up on the President’s Chief of Staff, and starts strutting away, audiences have seen a character unlike any Black female character. For Olivia embodies a new kind of Black woman, one who commands respect wherever she goes, and one not held back by labels like Mammy, Matriarch or Black Lady. She is a woman on a mission to fix the lives of Washington’s elite, as well as the negative images of Black women (BW) that have graced the screens since slavery. She defies stereotypes and shows audiences how unique, flawed and normal BW really are. This chapter will examine the ways in which the negative stereotypes of BW discussed in the previous chapter, as well as dominant Eurocentric beauty standards, have started to be dispelled by popular television shows: Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM). However, while these shows have started to dispel negative stereotypes, they only do so to an extent. Maxine Craig’s Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? about the experiences of BW will be used parallel to television roles to help demonstrate the changes in portrayal and representation. This chapter will also use Laura Mulvey’s Gaze Theory as a framework to look at the ways in which the female protagonists are viewed by the audience.

Si è cercato, attraverso l’analisi delle interviste contenute all’interno della Notte della Repubblica, non solo di analizzare le risposte alle domande che un Paese intero ha posto ai terroristi attraverso la voce di Zavoli, ma anche di rintracciare una contro-narrazione, di tener conto dell’eterogeneità delle voci degli intervistati. Fornire nuove proposte interpretative e modificare la struttura narrativa accettata dall’opinione pubblica su questo periodo è possibile solo attraverso una rilettura che preveda lo spostamento del focus verso le storie individuali. Questa scelta permette di isolare una piccola parte dell’intreccio degli eventi, sottrarli alla cristallizzazione e ricondurli alla difficoltà del reale.

There is a new panorama of audiovisual content construction that has been opened with the expansion of the TV format formats industry in the world. The emergence and popularization of television can be considered one of the most relevant phenomena in the 20th century in social communication, in the context of Brazilian television productions, the present study aimed to create a methodology for creating new formats of television programs, Based on the analysis of the creative processes used by TV channels, broadcasters and producers, with reference to a new market for the export of audiovisual ideas. This research is justified by the fact that Brazil still has a gap to be filled, since it is not configured as an exporter of television formats. The guiding hypothesis of this research was whether the lack of systematization of the creative process for TV program formats inhibits the development of new ideas for entertainment programs. The hypotheses were also analyzed that the vertical model of the TV stations discourages the development of new projects of formats of programs in Brazil; And that most TV stations do not have creative teams because they do not know how to stimulate or evaluate the creations of new programs. The method used to develop this study was qualitative, using the techniques of exploratory research, bibliography, documentary analysis and cartography, including maps and diagrams. The theoretical framework is based on studies of communication, genres and formats, on theories of genetic criticism, creativity, creative processes, innovation, design thinking and business modeling, as well as the interpretation of data from the Brazilian television scenario. The development of the research finds scientific and methodological support in the line of research Creation Processes in the Media and in the Research Group CCM - Communication and Creation in the Media, aligned with approach of the studies of the professor Lucia Leão.

Negli ultimi anni gli spettatori televisivi si sono abituati alla presenza sempre più imponente di serie tv. Ma non solo. Queste serie televisive vedono sempre più al centro delle vicende narrate protagonisti un po’ particolari, con caratteristiche che potrebbero sembrare a prima vista abbastanza anomale. Infatti si tratta spesso di protagonisti “negativi”, deboli o cattivi, in sostanza si tratta di antieroi. Il testo affronta quindi l’analisi di questi personaggi anomali che manifestano caratteristiche contrarie a quelle normalmente attribuite all’eroe, ma che nonostante tutto attraggono gli spettatori televisivi che ad essi si affezionano. Ma perché siamo attratti dai protagonisti “negativi” delle serie tv? Cos’è un antieroe? E come tale figura si integra alla forma della narrazione televisiva attraverso la serialità?

The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.
Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and independence. Digital media supercharge these dilemmas, as industries merge and media converge, as audiences become co-creators of content online.
The media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. This book is a critical primer on how media workers manage to survive, and is essential reading for anyone considering a career in the media, or who wishes to understand how the media are made.

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developed in Europe during the past decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment as well as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. In the article, it is argued that there has been an approximation between the textual features and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual live television, and a model is presented that is supposed to account for these narrative patterns.

With dragons, dogs, wolves, ravens, and so many more, animal symbolism is endlessly significant in Game of Thrones. Discover their meanings in heraldry, in Celtic myth, and other clever correspondences. What do red, green, black, and grey symbolize, in heraldry and fiction? Why does Daenerys wear so much blue? What about golden roses? As George R.R. Martin’s characters chomp on bloody beef, blood oranges, red wine, beets, and pomegranates, they foreshadow the inevitable bloodbaths. Thus the intricately crafted world of books and show has endless depth, revealed in this spoiler-free talk for fans of every flavor. (This is a free powerpoint of a presentation I've done--this is also a book, written by me, with this title).

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developedin Europe the last decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment aswell as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. Inthe article is argued that there have been an approximation between the textualfeatures and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual livetelevision, and a model is presented, that is suppose to account for these narrativepatterns.

Film, video games, television ads, corporate presentations-whatever medium you're working in, a visual story is the most compelling way to provide your audience with information and, more important, with an emotional experience. Exploring Visual Storytelling analyzes the essential techniques of creating compelling visual stories. Based on the pioneering work of Minneapolis-based Visual Culture, this innovative book-DVD package examines and explains the fundamentals of the medium by covering the seven key concepts behind every visual story: context, character, conflict, plot, 2D space, 3D space, and time. Each topic is thoroughly explained in print and then applied in the companion DVD, fully demonstrating how these core concepts work together to create a cohesive, compelling story.

Culture has been traditionally seen as the by-product of a particular society in a clearly defined territory (Yengoyan 1986). However, the elusive concept of culture, seen as both a merging and dichotomising force, has been called into question due to the increasing entanglement of contemporary societies (Welsch 1999). Indeed, territories can no longer be seen as containing cultures, since people move with their meanings, and meanings find ways of travelling and flourishing even when people stay in their territories (Hannerz 1996). The increasing development of communications systems (Hepp 2009) and economic interdependencies and dependencies plays an important role in challenging the traditional view of culture. Thus, the concept of transculturality can better characterise contemporary cultures and their ability to move beyond material and immaterial borders.
One of the ways through which cultural-specific phenomena cross borders and find a new life in a different environment is represented by forms of hybridisation (Bhatia 2004), seen as vehicles which can help popularise given genres. The hybridisation of broadcast news, for instance, has produced forms of docu-fictions, which can be placed in the blurred generic area of story-telling and news reporting, mixing together facts and fictions (Baym 2009). However, as vessels, these narrative hybrid forms bring together with them cultural-specific elements, which are difficult to re-enact in a new context. This is the case, for instance, of the TV series Gomorrah, which is based on the Italian novel Gomorra written in 2006 by the Neapolitan author Roberto Saviano.
As Saviano has repeatedly underlined (Caliendo 2012), most of the news stories linked to the Neapolitan Mafia, known as Camorra, stay local and remain largely unknown to most Italians. Further, as Cavaliere (2010) states, international books and movies generally focus on the Sicilian Mafia, while little has been written about the Camorra. Saviano’s exposé, first, and its popularised adaptations have shed light on the criminal activities of the Camorra and, while some elements of fiction are undeniably present in both the book and its adaptations, they succeeded in raising awareness on the problems linked to the Neapolitan context, something that journalism has failed to highlight from a national and an international point of view.
In order to achieve this, from a national point of view, the TV series, for instance, premiered in Italy with Italian subtitles, since the language of Gomorrah – The Series (from now on referred to as GTS) is a mix of both Italian and Neapolitan dialogues. While representing a third step in the translation of the original script, the UK subtitles of the TV series, on the other hand, have helped draw attention to the criminal activities plaguing Naples’ hinterland from an international point of view. However, since translation is central in the process of identity formation (Gentzler 2008), the aim of this contribution is to focus on the transcultural reception of the series. In particular, based on the concept of translation repercussion (Chesterman 2007), the proposed analysis will firstly focus on a particular aspect of the TV series, that is, how the producers of the series have created their target audience in the Italian and English versions of the DVD blurbs. Based on the work of Bednarek (2010, 2014), this preliminary analysis of the TV series will help us see how this specific type of advertising discourse construes its target audience. Since these texts “must take care to engage with what can be a diverse audience in an appropriate way” (Baker 2006: 50) by, for instance, “deciding what aspects [...] are foregrounded (or backgrounded) and what assumptions are made about the interests and lifestyles of the target audience” (Baker 2006: 50), the analysis of DVD blurbs can help us better understand what values are specifically constructed in discourse, thus, highlighting the type of universe that producers want to create when addressing their target audience. Additionally, since this type of persuasive discourse will eventually result in a financial exchange, language plays a fundamental role in the representation of the TV series as a whole and, thus, how it should be interpreted by its viewers.
The second part of our investigation will focus on how the main characters linguistically construct themselves in the context of the Italian and English subtitles of the TV series. We have decided to focus specifically on the subtitles of the TV series since, in the English adaptation, GTS was not dubbed and, thus, in order to make the comparison between the original and its re-adaptation more productive, we have decided to avoid taking under consideration also the original script of the TV series, since this would have insulated given differences that were not strictly linked to the translation process but due to the different media. The analysis was carried out thanks to corpus linguistic methodologies and these have allowed us to see how the “individual linguistic thumbprint” (Culpeper 2014: 166) of each character in the source text was construed in the target text. As we will see, given characteristics of specific characters seem to be stereotyped in the target text, while others seem to highlight given peculiarities in the target texts that were not particularly underlined in the source texts, thus, offering the audience new personas in the translation of the original text.

The article discusses the production of live television formats, as they have developed in Europe during the past decade. The analytical examples are taken from entertainment as well as factual television, and from public service as well as commercial contexts. In the article, it is argued that there has been an approximation between the textual features and generic and narrative structures of entertainment and factual live television, and a model is presented that is supposed to account for these narrative patterns.

Golda Meir's relationship with the gender issue and the feminist movement was complex and ambivalent. This was evident both on the level of public perception in Israel and around the world, and on that of her own identity as a female leader or as a feminist. In 1977, the now defunct Israel Broadcasting Authority’s Channel 1 aired the television program This is Your Life in which Meir was the main guest. While covering mainly Meir's political biography, the three-hour program touched sometimes on the gender issue. This article focuses on examining the latter topic. Through critical viewing and qualitative content analysis of the program, the study sought to examine whether and how the issue of gender stood out throughout Meir's public career. The broadcast was found to include forty-seven gender references. These were classified into six main thinking patterns, among them, Meir's consistent identification with the domestic sphere; her framing as a leader with “feminine” character traits such as humanity, motherhood, and warmth; questioning her leadership ability in relation to “masculine” issues, such as national security; and many references to her personal relationships. The theoretical novelty of the present article lies in the possibility that it proposes examining the biography of a political leader not only through archival documents and collections but also through the mass media. Its main empirical conclusion is that in contrast to past research, the gender issue seems to have been prominent and significant throughout Golda Meir's political life.

Television Studies is an established field within media studies, and with the dominance of reality television in particular, a research emphasis on this style is growing exponentially. Reality television and documentary film have important relevance for sociological studies because of their assumed but tenuous relationship to the real world as well as creative and strategic use of social representation. In this course, students will explore the world of reality television, documentary, and digital storytelling: the categories, sociological & consumption messages, audience interaction, and media coverage. In addition, students will learn important aspects of the history and theories of screen culture, as well as how to analyze and interpret a wide variety of media texts using key film and TV studies concepts and vocabulary.

Reality TV has inspired ongoing scholarly analysis of how formerly passive audience members are turned into active participants or even empowered citizens, but the actual encounters between media producers and media participants have been little explored. This article presents a detailed, critical study of the new interfaces to public visibility, combining a historical perspective with the in-depth study of production practices. Beginning with the several participatory forms of reality TV already established in the earliest days of broadcasting, I trace how audience members have long been recruited according to either a celebrity model or a citizen model of participation. I then demonstrate how these models are combined in the production of Idols to support both its preparation and its presentation of participants, and how new media (online and mobile) are mobilized to both reinforce and capitalize upon this participation. Questioning the popular and scholarly hype surrounding the audience’s “power” in reality TV, I in fact conclude that the television industry is actually taking a firmer grip on people in order to reduce costs and risks while increasing revenues in a time of uncertain financial prospects.

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

Abstract:
The growth and widespread use of social media is altering the viewing experience for some television audiences quite considerably. Viewers are increasingly integrating social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook into their TV-watching experience to collectively discuss programmes and live TV events as they happen. In sum, viewers are watching television with their laptops or mobile devices at hand, seemingly in an effort to transform their experience into a social, or community event (Makice, 2009). This paper will examine this growing intersecting media landscape of television and social media, considering the consequences of increased audience involvement within this convergence. Analysing the Twitter-led engagement of viewers of Channel 4’s 2011 Street Riots: The Live Debate, this study illustrates how Twitter is being used by television audiences and networks surrounding the live broadcast of a programme. I show how the viewing audience uses Twitter to express their views on issues within the debate and also on the show itself, the importance of “liveness” (Auslander 2008) and the extended tweeting audience, and how information and knowledge is circulated, in form of “collective intelligence” (Lévy, 1997). I argue that we can see these processes resulting in a change in viewership for many individuals, subsequently influencing the ways in which audience and programmes engage with each other.

This article claims that the emergence of television in the 1950s must be interpreted as a conservative media revolution. It aims at revisiting some of the popular narratives about the emergence of television as a revolutionary moment in media history and questions the newness of television in the European mass media ensemble. Focusing on a set of privileged sites of negotiation where the tensions between the conservative and modernising agencies of the medium became most visible or explicit, the article emphasizes the ambiguous and contested nature of television as a new medium. Finally, the author pleas for an integral approach to media history that studies the intermedial relationships and interdependencies between television and other mass media.

Television aestheticians and cognitivists share an important endeavour.  Both groups are driven to explore the compelling emotional, cognitive and aesthetic appeals of contemporary television serials. In other words, whether we take up a broadly aesthetic perspective or cognitive approach towards TV, we are engaged in an ongoing act of appreciative engagement. We share a mutual fascination with the televisual works that captivate us, and an urge to address our sense of their potential significance or moment.
Our apparent commonalities, however, lead us not only in diverse directions, but often also into disagreements and mistrust. I write as someone committed to television aesthetics, who embraces the arrival of new perspectives, and recognises the usefulness of much cognitive work, but who nonetheless will admit to some uneasiness about the presumptions underlying cognitive science, and trepidation regarding its deployment within TV studies. This chapter is a preliminary foray into the two approaches side by side. But rather than comparing and contrasting, I aim to uncover something a little more nuanced and elusive: the distinctive sensibility of each perspective and the implicit values which inform it.
          The chapter proceeds by identifying some of the commonest notes of concord and discord between aesthetic and cognitive television scholars, uncovering differences of purpose, scope and values, in order to better appreciate the points of urgent distinction which separate the approaches, and to illuminate the hazards of speaking at cross purposes.
          So that I might grasp more positively the specific strengths and merits of each perspective, I briefly consider how a specific moment of television might seize the attention of its practitioners. I have chosen two moments drawn from recent US television series – The Closer (FOX, 2005-12) and Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004-12) – that I argue are most sensitively and persuasively appreciated via cognitive and aesthetic perspectives respectively.
My exploration of these two examples leads me, finally, to revisit this book’s core focus – the television serial – via a consideration of ‘moment’. The ‘sense of moment’ in this chapter’s title consciously denotes two meanings of the word. The first is more commonplace: a moment is a short time, an instant. The second refers to importance, weight, significance. What is the ‘moment’ of a particular fragment within a long-running serial? How do cognitive and aesthetic approaches weigh this moment? As we shall see, cognitivists and aestheticians take up subtly dissimilar stances in relation to seriality and moment(s), and in each approach, the two meanings of ‘moment’ are differently interconnected. Attending to these distinctions helps us uncover something of the sensibility of each perspective. And in keeping with the values and sensibility of a television aesthetician, I ultimately aver that it is television programmes themselves, or the unique particularities of selected moments within them, which will guide us – if we let them – to choose the most appropriate appreciative approach in each case.

The 20th anniversary edition of EL TIGRE (2021) – with a new Preface about the relationship between Televisa and President López Obrador and the legacy of Azcárraga Milmo – is available at the following sites:
IN THE USA (e-book): www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EJTIEFG;
IN MEXICO (paperback): www.amazon.com.mx/El-tigre-Azc%C3%A1rraga-imperio-Televisa/dp/6073199775; (e-book): www.amazon.com.mx/El-tigre-Azc%C3%A1rraga-imperio-Televisa-ebook/dp/B00EJTIEFG/ OR www.gandhi.com.mx/catalog/product/view/id/8222604/;
IN THE UK (e-book): www.amazon.co.uk/El-tigre-Azc%C3%A1rraga-imperio-Televisa-ebook/dp/B00EJTIEFG/.

EL TIGRE: Emilio Azcárraga y su imperio Televisa is a biography of the Mexican media mogul Emilio Azcárraga Milmo (1930-1997). Founder of the giant Grupo Televisa - the world's largest Spanish-language broadcaster - Azcárraga was Latin America's answer to Rupert Murdoch. He inherited a TV & radio company and turned it into a colossus, involved in publishing, pay-TV, film, popular music, soccer, and the fine arts. He socialized with presidents and helped shape Mexico’s politics. He became the richest man in Latin America. He consistently generated controversy, through his monopolistic approach to business, his fiery and paternalistic management style, his support of the "perfect dictatorship" of long-ruling party the PRI, his extravagant lifestyle, and his incorrigible womanizing.
In EL TIGRE, Andrew Paxman and Claudia Fernández explore the turbulent life of this charismatic but secretive magnate and trace the evolution of his company, from a radio station founded by his father in 1930 to the present day. They study the traditionally symbiotic relationship between Televisa and the PRI; they examine Azcárraga's influence upon lawmaking, the church, the arts, and Mexico's relationship with the USA; and they survey the story of the telenovela, the much-exported form of soap opera with which Azcárraga turned both Televisa and U.S. network Univision into multi-billion dollar businesses.
EL TIGRE is unique as an unauthorized biography of a Mexican businessman. It reveals both the secret world of Mexican big business and the little-known humanity of a man widely regarded as an arrogant autocrat. It encourages debate about political privilege, broadcast regulation, private sector feudalism, the democratization of Mexico, and racism, classism & sexism in the media.

Can popularized images of lesbians exist beyond their sexualized stereotypes? At different points Willow and Tara's relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer adheres to and transgresses constructed stereotypes. This paper seeks to explore how this relationship can provide viewers a transgressive experience while remaining within the bounds of normative representation on a corporate television network. Willow/Tara's visibility contributes to an archive of transgressive  lesbian representation.

How might television aesthetics characterise the 'medium' or 'art form' or television? From a perspective inspired by analytic philosophical aesthetics, this paper disputes the commonplace practice of referring to television as a ‘medium’. It proposes instead that television be regarded as an art composed of many media. Individual works employ various media available to television and also to other arts.
The paper evaluates the usefulness of these distinctions for our conceptual understanding of television, appraisal of television works, and appreciation of television in relation to other arts. Via its reconfiguration of ‘medium/media’, it challenges narrowly contemporary notions of the televisual, positing a more historicised model and situating television alongside other arts – amongst friends.