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Reality TV restores a crucial, and often absent, element to the critical debate about reality television: the voices of people who watch reality programmes.From Animal Hospital to Big Brother, Annette Hill argues that much can be learned from listening to audience discussion about this popular ...

Reality TV restores a crucial, and often absent, element to the critical debate about reality television: the voices of people who watch reality programmes.From Animal Hospital to Big Brother, Annette Hill argues that much can be learned from listening to audience discussion about this popular and rapidly changing television genre. Viewers' responses to reality TV can provide invaluable information to enhance our understanding of both the reality genre and contemporary television audiences.Drawing on quantitative and qualitative audience research to understand how viewers categorise the reality genre, and how they judge the performance of ordinary people and the representation of authenticity within different types of reality programmes.* Do audiences think reality TV is real?* Can people learn from watching reality TV?* How critical are viewers of reality TV? Reality TV argues that audiences are engaged in a critical examination of the development of popular factual television. The book examines how audiences can learn from watching reality programmes, and how viewers think and talk about the ethics of reality TV.

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files display many of the central ...

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files display many of the central characteristics that critics and theorists have associated with postmodernism, including fragmentation of narratives and characters, multiplicity in style and genre, and the collapse of traditional categorical boundaries of all kinds. While these inventive series also challenge many of the conventions of television programming itself, they do not, however, pose a subversive threat to the capitalist order. The book argues that instead, the very characteristics that identify these series as postmodern are also central characteristics of capitalism, especially in the late consumerist phase.

Creating Television brings television and its creators to life, presenting fascinating in-depth interviews with the creators of American TV. Having interviewed more than 100 television professionals over the course of his 15 years of research, Professor Robert Kubey presents the 40 conversations ...

Creating Television brings television and its creators to life, presenting fascinating in-depth interviews with the creators of American TV. Having interviewed more than 100 television professionals over the course of his 15 years of research, Professor Robert Kubey presents the 40 conversations that provide the most illuminating insights about the industry and the people working in it. These interviews bring television's creators to life, revealing their backgrounds, work, and thoughts about the audience and the television programs they create. Each interview tells a compelling tale of an individual's struggles and successes within a complex collaborative and highly commercial medium, offering readers rare insights on the human component in television's development. Featured in this volume are actors, agents, writers, directors, producers, and executives, representing television's earliest days through to the present day. Spanning shows from I Love Lucy and The Tonight Show through to Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos, these creators share the stories of how they gained entry to the industry and built their careers, offering readers a rare opportunity to meet, up close, the people involved in creating many of the most famous and successful programs in the medium's history, and linking the creators' personal histories to the television programs they create. With its unique insights on the people responsible for making television, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in television history, sociology of culture, human creativity, television production, media studies, and mass media ethics. It will also be a popular reader for undergraduate and graduate students in courses addressing television, mass culture, media and society, American Studies, creativity, television history, and media ethics.

Archie Bunker's America discerns what was "in the air" as television networks tried to accommodate cultural and political swings in America from the Vietnam era through the late 1970s. Josh Ozersky's spirited examination of the ways America changed television during a period of intense social ...

Archie Bunker's America discerns what was "in the air" as television networks tried to accommodate cultural and political swings in America from the Vietnam era through the late 1970s. Josh Ozersky's spirited examination of the ways America changed television during a period of intense social upheaval, recuperation, and fragmentation uncovers a bold and beguiling facet of American cultural history. From the conflict-based comedy of All in the Family and such post-1960s frolics as Three's Company to tendentiously apolitical programs like Happy Days, Ozersky describes the range and power of television to echoed larger schemes of American life.

Around 1968, advertisers who were anxious to break into the lucrative baby-boomer demographic convinced television networks to begin to abandon prime-time programming that catered to universal audiences. With the market splintering, networks ventured into more issue-based and controversial territories. While early network attempts at more "relevant" programming failed, Ozersky examines how CBS struck gold with the political comedy All in the Family in 1971 and how other successful, conflict-based comedies turned away from typical show business conventions. As the 1970s wore on, the innovations of the previous years began to lose their public appeal. After Vietnam and Watergate, Ozersky argues, Americans were exhausted from the political turbulence of the preceding decade and were ready for a televisual "return to normalcy."

Straightforward, engaging, and liberally illustrated, Archie Bunker's America is peppered with the stories of outsider cops and failed variety shows, of a young Bill Murray and an old Ed Sullivan, of Mary Tyler Moore, Fonzie,and the Skipper, too. Drawing on interviews with television insiders, trade publications, and the programs themselves, Ozersky chronicles the ongoing attempts of prime-time television to program for a fragmented audience --