I am not sure if I have ever bore witness to such a flurry of fan activity and creativity within such a short period of time. Given that the trailer debuted just over two weeks ago (although I am writing this after merely seven days), it astonishes me how quickly ‘24-7 always on’ digital fandom reacted and began posting comments, videos, parodies and artwork to continue constructing the Star Wars: The Force Awakens (or Episode VII) text twelve months before its December 2015 release.

I am currently working on a book-length study of the latest phase in Star Wars history. Tentatively titled, A New Hope?: Digital Fandom and the Star Wars Renaissance, I have been tracking how paratexts—whether producer- or viewer-generated—discursively surround the Star Wars text and how this interplay between audience and industry generates meaning and value creation. I began the first part of this project in 2012 when I conducted an audience research project to gauge fan reactions to the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney.

During the research process, I discovered that for many fans the Force Awakens text had already begun despite the fact that, at the time, there were no plans for the Star Wars Saga to continue in film (“officially,” at least). As Henry Jenkins pointed out in the seminal Convergence Culture, fans were “determined to remake it on their own terms.” More than this, however, fans were determined to “continue” the saga as well as “remake” it. Now that the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney has opened up the ostensibly “closed” text for further adventures, how will fans continue to play with the Star Wars brand within participatory culture?

Within hours of the trailer’s release, fan vids and art began to surface in cyberspace. Live reactions were filmed and uploaded to YouTube: some of these were intensely emotional, while others were fan parodies of fan reactions (usually of those who visibly wept), and others were negative or indifferent (like the Amazing Atheist who maintained that caution was the best approach citing the Prequel Trilogy as evidence of how things could go horribly wrong). ZachFB Studios uploaded a home-made version of the trailer as homage created entirely with LEGO, and numerous others followed suit.

There were many criticisms of the new lightsaber with its cross-guard judged by many to be ‘unrealistic’ and lacking sufficient rationale—in his own breakdown on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert pointed out one fan who tweeted “hilt on lightsaber stupid and impractical childhood ruined everything ruined!!!1!”

Fan art – once again, within hours — was uploaded via Instagram and Tumblr with links provided on Twitter and Facebook.

As Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have previously argued about fans of Lost, “spoilers” are often actively sought out as an integral feature of the fan experience. Lucasfilm carefully control the release of snippets of information to orchestrate a viral campaign that seeks to stimulate awareness of the brand to create a fever pitch as lead-up to the actual release of the film. Whether or not photographs of the Millennium Falcon or other concept images were “leaked” by Lucasfilm or via other methods—such as Latino Review reporting that set photographs were stolen by a Rebel Alliance of fans who used “affordable home drone technology” to swoop over locations and provide the world with snapshots of X-Wings and so forth—is difficult to determine. After all, this could be part of the plan to drip-feed the audience with tantalising teasers to turn us into Star Wars junkies all over again. Conversely, as Matt Hills suggests in a study of Sherlock spoilers, part of the attraction for forensic fandom is to assuage ontological anxieties about the fan-object, especially when the “idealized object is potentially threatened” by seeking out spoilers to mediate and monitor whether that which is being created matches up with a platonic textual authenticity. For many fans, the idealized object is, indeed, “threatened” (read: prequels) and this—to quote Hills—”working through of possible threats” is negotiated by paratextual exegesis and excursions into spoiler territory.

In the week following the trailer’s release, the mysterious figure know only by the nom de guerre “Spoilerman” leaked alleged, crucial plot details about The Force Awakens (which I could not help but read—I blame research, as despite being someone who usually avoids spoilers of any kind, I found that I could not help myself!). Once more, whether or not this clandestine “Spoilerman” is anything but a Lucasfilm/Abrams plant is difficult to ascertain; however, within the so-called spoiler itself, we are told that “fake” paratexts will be leaked periodically to misdirect and confound the sniffer dog-fans so that no one can be entirely sure what is real and what is not, suggesting there may be something rotten within Spoilerman’s “spoiler” itself.

As a researcher, the rich and creative fandom discursively surrounding a text that does-not-quite-exist yet—although Gray would no doubt argue that this is all part of the text—provides a mélange of data. Methodologically, however, worms are crawling everywhere. This is what I am thinking through at the moment as I seek to conduct an audience research project that is rather ambitious by looking at what Paul Booth has described as “transgenic media.” Instead of focusing on one platform, I want to bring in examples from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and so on, while also speaking directly to fans leading up to, and including, the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

This much is certain: Episode VII is in full swing, and we’ve only seen 88 seconds of footage.

Further, Marvel are constructing a sequential tapestry unrivaled in cinematic history by drawing from the comic book concept of continuity and building a grand universe of interconnectivity and hyperdiegetic expansion. DC, on the other hand, have announced that their film and TV properties will probably be separate universes which indicates a lack of vision and something which irks this author greatly. I do not want to craft dubious assertions about the audience here, but my own research has shown that fans love hyperdiegetic continuity, something which DC fail to recognize again and again going back to the 1960s/70s and leading into the Crisis on Infinite Earths maxi-series which was created to (supposedly) streamline DC’s erratic and errant continuity. DC has periodically performed continuity cleansing operations in 1994 (Zero Hour: Crisis in Time), 2005 (Infinite Crisis/52) and 2011 (Flashpoint/The New 52) whereas Marvel’s continuity goes back to those early Timely Comics featuring the first iteration of Captain America, Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch. Simply put, DC repeatedly pushes the reboot/reset button while Marvel has never resorted to such drastic tactics that often risks the ire of the fan culture by casting decades of comic material into the dustbin of history. Once again, DC are on the back-foot, defending rather than attacking.

Marvel’s latest film, Guardians of the Galaxy, is certainly another example of the studios’ risk taking, but this should not be surprising. As Marvel’s flagship characters, Spider-Man, X-Men and the ‘first family,’ The Fantastic Four, are unavailable due to a copyright deal that surely has Stan Lee weeping into his Hulk pajamas, Marvel Studios took a step into the unknown by using (then) B-lister, Iron Man, to launch their Cinematic Universe. Of course, we all know that casting Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark was a momentous decision and set the ground for what was to come. But even Iron Man had considerably more gravitas than Guardians of the Galaxy, a relatively unknown gang of motley mercenaries which includes Star Lord, Gamora, Drax the Destroyer, a talking tree creature named Groot, and Rocket Raccoon. In comic book lore, the Guardians is the second iteration of a team that first made its debut in 1969, but in current continuity, the revised roster has a relatively recent pedigree, first appearing in 2008. In 2012, as part of Marvel’s response to DC’s regenerative initiative, “The New 52,” Brian Michael Bendis began a new series featuring Rocket et al which has helped propel the intergalactic ensemble into the fan conscience.

Still, a massive risk when one considers the fan-ghetto that is the contemporary comic book industry. Guardians does not come with a pre-built recognition like Iron Man, Hulk, or The Avengers. Many commentators agreed that Marvel Studios could be hoisted by its own petard by breaking free of the comfortable confines of branded characters and experimenting with lesser known fare. An early scene in the film operates as an arch-commentary on the unknown quality of these characters when Peter Quill fails to spark any recognition from one of Thanos’ henchmen. “I’m Starlord!” he says proudly, to which his pursuer responds emphatically: “WHO?” with a quizzical lack of comprehension.

Any anxiety has surely been put to rest now as Guardians broke box-office records which demonstrates that the Marvel brand has become a trusted commodity rather than this-or-that superhero. But is the film any good?

Well, first and foremost, it has a raccoon who wields awesome weapons and has a penchant for wry doses of humor. That alone has me on-board. What is striking about this film, for this reviewer at least, is that it does not take itself seriously at all and fully embraces the absurd to deliver a fun-filled, comedy-laden adventure that DC’s audio-visual properties sorely lack. Even Man of Steel managed to take the most optimistic of superheroes and turn him into a dour, miserable facsimile imbued in the grim and gritty ambiance of The Dark Knight (I know, I promise I will stop with the DC/Marvel comparisons, but the former has colored me irritated). Conversely, Guardians is a romp: it is zany, silly and crafted with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink irony that had the audience spluttering popcorn and joining in a collaborative chorus of laughter that was joyful to partake in. There weren’t many laughs in Nolan’s Batman films or Man of Steel (there I go again!). Not that I am against the grim and gritty: Nolan’s films were astounding, a three-act epic that deserves the accolades.

Guardians acts as a kind of pilot for the team’s further adventures (which we are informed during the final credits “will return”) and the story presents an origin narrative for how the team first meet and begin to form an alliance. It is not until the film’s final act that the Guardians come together into a cohesive unit. This is, for all intents and purposes, “Guardians of the Galaxy: Year One.”

Did I mention the raccoon? With guns?

And before you get your knickers all twisted up in a poststructuralist knot, it is necessary to construct definitions before we can even begin to analyse, examine and debate how cultural processes operate. The idea that concepts can be interpreted any which way possible is to misinterpret poststructuralism that suggests that language.

Let’s get down to brass tacks here. The term “reboot” – as in rebooting your computer – is only forty-three years old, its birthday being 1971. Relatively speaking, that’s a squealing, squawking baby! If words could grow legs and arms, reboot couldn’t even clench a fist, let alone walk or run.

Etymologically, a reboot-as-narrative-analogy is even younger, a foetus, a seedling even (1989 is its birthday according to the Oxford English Dictionary). Many have commented that the reboot narrative concept comes from the comic book medium. Indeed it does. But this is where the problems begin, you see? This is where the genre process and rebooting get all entangled and entwined in a Gordian knot of conceptual hodge-podge. Comic books have been rebooting for decades, since “minute zero,” as Michael Chabon calls the publication of Action Comics #1 which introduced the world to Superman in 1938.

Not true.

To be sure, comic books have always sufficiently engaged in periodic revisions, regenerations and reformations. As Geoff Klock has argued, one of the principle reasons why long-running vast narratives, such as DC and Marvel, have managed to expand and enhance their brand “life” is by delicately dancing the dialectic between standardisation and differentiation to great effect as an elemental part of their survival code, a kind of Darwinism, a natural (textual) selection.

This is how all texts operate and not a description of the reboot process. “Mere repetition would not satisfy an audience,” claims Steve Neale. I concur, Steve. For Derek Johnson, “product differentiation is the key to profit.” Well said, Derek. Or, as Stringer Bell would no doubt say: “word” (which is cool-talk for “definitely,” or so I am led to believe).

What, then, is a reboot, I hear you ask?

In 1986, DC Comics sought to purge their labyrinthine story-program of continuity errors and a narrative history that deterred potential “newbies” from jumping on-board. Sales had been declining rapidly for over a decade and Marvel “ruled the roost.” A twelve-part mini-series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, was the answer to their problems. Annihilate the DC Universe and start over from scratch. In short, reboot the system. Wipe away a publication history and begin again with a new story-program.

To be sure – and I do not mince my words here – engaging with the DC comic book hyperdiegesis at that time could not have been helped by three PhDs in Quantum Physics, a Macarthur Grant and a five-year long sabbatical from life, the universe and nutritional necessity! Douglas Wolf describes fans who can successfully navigate the chaotic contours of the DC and Marvel hyperdiegetic continuities as “super-readers.” I think this does them a disservice. Comic book readers of the 1980s who consumed and understood the continuity are nothing less than geniuses, gurus, veritable professors of alternate realities and monstrous geographies. I say award them MBEs, each and every one of them. Stick ‘em in a laboratory and watch them create the time machine. Hell, throw in a Delorean, let’s see life really imitate art….

The notion that comic books have been rebooting since its inception is misleading and fallacious. One technique which DC and Marvel have adopted over the years is that of the “ret-con,” an abbreviation of “retroactive continuity.” A ret-con retroactively changes continuity by altering the details of an event in the past to make sense of a current storyline. Sometimes this technique can be extreme, such as the Spider-Man arc, One More Day, which ret-conned Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s marriage out of continuity – and created a fan backlash in the process for good reason: it was just too darn silly!

It is not only comics that engage in ret-conning. If anyone remembers Dallas, and the infamous season where Bobby Ewing is killed and is miraculously resurrected the following year. How did he return? It was all a dream! This ret-con wiped away an entire season’s worth of episodes in one fell swoop. Of course, it was all downhill from there and Dallas had “jumped the shark.”

A ret-con is not a reboot. A reboot wipes away a publication history or, in film or television, a screen history and begins again with a new syntagmatic layer.

Of course, rebooting can never truly wipe the slate clean. The slate is a palimpsest and contains all the traces and ghosts of previous incarnations. However, we can see (hypothetically) intertextuality and dialogism spiralling along a horizontal axis – the paradigmatic – and the story itself unfolding sequentially along a vertical axis which is the syntagm. Intertextuality may “destroy the linearity of the text,” as Laurent Jenny argues, but linearity is still preserved. I prefer to understand narrative as a dialectic between linearity and non-linearity, chaos and order, paradigm and syntagm. Intertextuality vandalise the text while at the same time readability is guaranteed. As Mark J.P Wolf states, “without causality, narrative is lost.”

Next time, I shall illustrate how the reboot terminology has been marshalled by academics and journalists in ill-conceived ways, one which has birthed a buzz word – fuzz-word even – that has set in motion a range of non-sequiturs.

[I]t was necessary to do what we call in comic book terms “a reboot”… Say you’ve had 187 issues of The Incredible Hulk and you decide you’re going to introduce a new Issue 1. You pretend like those first 187 issues never happened, and you start the story from the beginning and the slate is wiped clean, and no one blinks…So we did the cinematic equivalent of a reboot, and by doing that, setting it at the beginning, you’re instantly distancing yourself from anything that’s come before. (Goyer, quoted in Greenberg, 2005: 13 – 14)

Upon closer examination of Nolan’s statement, however, we can see that he expressly states that a reboot is “new terminology” in the “movie business.” To some extent, then, Nolan is correct. The principle of rebooting did not exist as a film concept prior to Batman Begins which influenced other producers to follow the conceptual conceit. It was burrowed deep within the cultural ghetto of the comic book medium.

What is a reboot, then? This is the overarching question of this series of articles and one which I have been wrestling with for six years or so (yes, I possess nothing you could unequivocally describe as “a life”).

A reboot is an economic and narrative strategy that ignores or disavows a pre-established series of texts to inaugurate a new narrative sequence, a beginning again. Despite what journalists, academics, and other commentators would have you believe, a reboot is not a prequel, a sequel, or a remake. A reboot can also be a remake or an adaptation – all reboots remake or adapt, to a greater or lesser extent; but not all remakes or adaptations are reboots. Prequels, sequels, and other derivations are all part of an “already-existing narrative sequence” (Wolf, 2012). Simply put, if new episodes in the story architecture are installed onto an “ongoing, aggregate content system” (Johnson, 2013), then this is not rebooting. Conversely, then, a reboot is a syntagmatic disconnect (with the proviso that reboots always enter into dialogic relations with other texts along the paradigmatic axis).

Over the past six years or so, I have been researching the reboot phenomenon in comic books and film; firstly, for my undergraduate final dissertation – which was also my first peer-reviewed publication – and then extended into a PhD thesis which I am putting the finishing touches to as we speak. My first encounter with the reboot terminology came in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins as the word came to be increasingly used in popular film and TV magazines in the UK, such as Empire and Total Film, to describe an array of contradictory texts, many of which did not qualify as reboots at all. Indeed, the study of reboots has been made all the more frustrating by a kind of semantic fashion which I have tracked and mapped by consulting journalistic paratexts over the course of the past fifteen years to examine precisely when the terminology came to be in vogue. Following the success of Batman Begins and, more notably, The Dark Knight, the reboot terminology semantically exploded as a buzz-word, a fuzz-word even. This may sound like hyperbole, but let me assure you, I have many more examples populating my hard-drive than can be fit within the confines of a single book.

I also signed up for Google Alerts, an online service that sends weekly reports to my e-mail account detailing when the term reboot had been used, where and in what context. Since The Dark Knight was released in 2008, I have witnessed the emergence terminological “virus” as the term was first picked up by film journalists, TV critics, console game reviewers, industry personnel, and (the horror! the horror!) academics – and, then, on into the cultural vernacular of the everyday: Obama is rebooting the Presidency; Alex Ferguson is rebooting Manchester United; Reboot your wardrobe, your sex life, your business, your brain, your diet… and so on and so forth ad nauseam.

If I may be so bold and candid, one of the principle reasons why I set out to deconstruct the principle of rebooting was because I was irritated. That may not be the most praise-worthy or legitimate rationale for embarking on a research project that (let’s be honest here!) eats into a significant chunk of your life, if not consuming it in one hearty calorific meal.

Why was I irritated? Well, these journalists (and eventually scholars, too) were using the terminology incorrectly and incoherently. So I decided to look under the hood of the car, and investigate the engine, the cultural and linguistic mechanics, to see what was going on. The premise of this series of articles is to explain what I discovered “under the hood.”

True Detective

It’s HBO.

True Detective has rapidly entered the pantheon of television drama shared by luminaries such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and so on. Indeed, the adventures of Marty and Ruste Cohle have kept this commentator on the edge of his seat for eight weeks now. But what I am interested here is the audience of forensic textual foragers that, like the true detectives themselves, followed the scattered bread crumbs that led towards, not the yellow brick road, but the yellow king and the city of Carcosa.

The tail-end of episode 1 had Charlie Lang mention a king, but it is in episode two when the motif is concretised as Rust reads aloud from Dora Lang’s diary: “I closed my eyes and saw the king in yellow moving through the forest. The king’s children are marked, they all become his angels.”

The camera zooms in on the diary and we see fragmented quotations that turn out to be lifted from a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers first published in 1895 titled The King in Yellow. Michael Hughes wrote an interesting and illuminating article for i09 in February which details the connections between True Detective and The King in Yellow. I do not wish to tread the same ground here.

Rather, what interests me is how references to The King in Yellow spawned an online man-hunt for the killer of Dora Lang by participants reading the Chambers collection as a code-breaking device to solve the crime within the show. Indeed, the creativity and dedication of the viewing populace never ceases to astound me no matter how many times I witness it. I am guessing that a great deal more people just watched the show’s mysteries unfold in their living rooms rather than deputising themselves and microscopically examining a 19^th Century text for clues; but for some viewers, True Detective’s enigmatic coding frequencies invited them into the text to play in the sand-box of textuality and allusion. The sudden surge in popularity of the book turned an obscure ‘weird fiction’ text into a bestseller on Amazon almost overnight based solely on references within True Detective. Anna Russell, writing for Speakeasy, states that the book ‘shot up 71% in 24-hours to reach number 7 on Amazon’s bestseller list.’

Of course, the concept of participatory engagement is nothing radically new and has been discussed at length by Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, among other scholars. But laying intertextual ‘Easter eggs’ within a HBO show that invites audience members to partake in the hunt for a serial killer? That strikes me as quite a departure.

Or, at least, it did. For I am making the assumption that the creators of True Detective knew instinctively that this is what would happen; that by threading oblique references within the text, the interactive viewer would not be able to help themselves exclaiming, ‘the game’s afoot,’ as they grasp deerstalker hat and magnifying glass to join the hunt for the yellow king.

On the other hand, perhaps the show’s creators understand the twenty-first century viewer, or at least a portion of it, and the penchant for extra-curricular investigations. The ABC show, Lost, crafted a sprawling online metropolis for dedicated fans to join a quest to solve the island’s mysteries while also laying intertextually furnished motifs in an array of locations that explicitly referenced The Wizard of Oz, for example, and other cultural artefacts.

Clearly, True Detective does not function on the same-level as Lost’s postmodern campaign. But then Lost is not a HBO show. True Detective is.

I wonder if anyone out there mapped audience reactions and theories as the show aired. Of course, in this era of digital communication and web 2.0, the internet is rife with websites and forums that do not simply vanish overnight and this is certainly an area for further study.

I, for one, intend on re-watching True Detective through the prism of Chamber’s collection. The game is afoot, indeed.

For female-led franchises, the results were rather telling. The Hunger Games, of course. Twilight (which led to a debate about it being female-led and the conclusion was that it is a unisex franchise that may be directed towards a female demographic). Some mentioned Tomb Raider as a duopoly of films which tied into an incredibly successful gaming franchise with Lara Croft being heralded as a character who broke through the hypermasculine frontier and continues to influence gaming culture almost two decades after her first appearance on the Sony Playstation. (No one mentioned the criticism levelled at the Lara Croft character as masculine wish-fulfilment or her being nothing more than an Indiana Jones analogue.) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels were also mentioned. Indeed, Lisbeth Salander is another interesting case study as she also functions as a political force in the novels as she collaborates with Mikhail Blomqvist to take down a serial killer who targets women. The Swedish title of the first book is The Men Who Hate Women which, for my money, would have made for a better title (and deliciously political). Re-reading the books or watching the Swedish film series with this title in mind changed my interpretative experience somewhat and I came to view Lisbeth as a cipher for female empowerment and emancipation. (You may or may not agree).

My students also mentioned the Alien film franchise, of course. Perhaps it all began with Ripley, in film at least?
Lt. Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver in four Alien films, is perhaps the first female lead in a science fiction film franchise (I am certain someone will marshal evidence to the contrary which I would be interested in learning about). And while the character has been disregarded by many critics and commentators in the past for being a man trapped in a woman’s body – ‘butch’ rather than feminine – I believe that Ripley challenged gendered roles in considerable ways. In the second film, Aliens, she is both action hero and Mother, much in the same way as Katniss Everdeen. Ripley has no problem wielding military equipment and weapons while also providing maternal care for Newt, the child character in Aliens. Like Katniss, Ripley also operates along a hegemonic faultline that challenges gender normativity and stereotypical dichotomies. Lt. Ellen Ripley was an incredibly progressive move at the time when the science fiction landscape was reeling from the impact of Star Wars which led to masculine-dominated narratives such as television’s Battlestar Galactica, the resurgence of Star Trek and even James Bond got in on the act in Moonraker. Like Katniss, Ripley also challenges the patriarchal capitalist order described in the films as ‘The Company,’ and even gives her life to prevent the military body from possessing the Alien gestating inside of her (Alien3). Ripley is nothing if not a morass of contradictions and complexities.

In Jennifer K Stuller’s excellent book, Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, the author points out that Ripley was’ limited by socially accepted gender stererotypes that kept her from being radically progressive.’1 I think, however, that the character is highly political and subversive. Simply having a female lead the charge and end up as the driving force behind the Alien Queen’s destruction is a political statement in and of itself.
The Terminator films also gave us Sarah Connor who mutates from damsel-in-distress into action heroine, but she exists primarily to protect her son, John Connor, who is destined to become the leader of the resistance in the future – she is an ass-kicking mother, but she is primarily in the role of mother all the same. One cannot exclude John Connor’s destiny as another male saviour (with the same initials as Jesus Christ thrown in for good measure). Along the way, however, she kicks some dust in the face of stereotype. Sarah Connor may be limited – certainly more so than Ripley and Everdeen – but she does ask significant questions along the way.

Much has been written about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: The Warrior Princess, and Scully of The X-Files. Perhaps television has succeeded in ways that film has not? At present, Daenerys Targayen in Game of Thrones can be read from a feminist perspective as she continues her march to Westeros, freeing slaves along the way and laying down the gauntlet at the feet of many male-rulers in order to reclaim the throne from the Patriarch-King. Only time will tell if she succeeds in supplanting the ubiquitous masculine figure-head. But Game of Thrones is hardly a female-led franchise and there are many pernicious representations within the text that illustrate women as ‘whores,’ scantily clad and in the service of men. This is another faultline, of course, as HBO seek to have it both ways. The programme is both reactionary and progressive depending upon your viewpoint.

The Canadian sci-fi drama, Continuum, has a female protagonist in the lead, but, at the moment, she fights for a future where corporations have taken over the role of government and much of the moral ambiguities come from the so-called terrorists who seek to challenge the status quo. One can only hope that Kiera Cameron recognises her part as protector of the 99% and changes tact.

Vicky Ball explores the female-ensemble drama in British Television in a series of articles and a forthcoming book, Heroine Television (2014)2. Texts such as Prime Suspect, Band of Gold and many others privilege female protagonists that, at times, are radical and progressive. Consider Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison (played by Dame Helen Mirren) who works as a detective in the masculine-dominated workforce and the political ramifications that result from the clash of genders. (The less said about the U.S remake, the better).
(To be continued…).

1 Stuller, Jennifer K. (2010) Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology. New York: I.B Taurus.

2 See, Ball, Vicky (2012) ‘The ‘Feminization’ of British Television and the Re-traditionalization of Gender’, Feminist Media Studies Vol. 12, No. 2. March.; Ball, Vicky (2013)  ‘Forgotten Sisters: The Female Ensemble Drama’ in Moseley, R., Wheatley, H and Wood, H. (eds.) ‘Television for Women’, Screen Dossier (Vol. 54, No. 2. Summer 2013).