Perspectives

FOX's new animated sitcom Allen Gregory trades heavily in humiliation. Cynthia Chris examines the comedic resonance of this sort of situation in light of recent events.
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The licensing process for the HBO series highlights the challenge of balancing a level of control over the quality of products related to the series with efforts to both monetize and expand its audience.
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20th Century Fox is mounting an Oscar campaign for The Planet of the Apes' Andy Serkis. Tama Leaver examines the potential implications of this sort of virtual acting or 'synthespian' (synthetic thespian) performance for our understanding of what it means to act or perform.
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Norman Corwin's recent passing provides an ideal opportunity to consider the legacy of the man who has often been described as the poet laureate of American radio.
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The laugh track has persisted through decades of popular suspicion and disdain, but lately it has come to seem newly disreputable.
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Just in time for Halloween, ABC and NBC both rolled out new shows last week focusing on the basic premise that Fairy Tales are real and their protagonists, or their ancestors, are living somewhere in the United States.
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In a text so concerned with updating the Victorian source material to the contemporary period, there is very little else to the representation of Chineseness; it seems that Sherlock Holmes can use SMS messaging and GPS tracking, but Chinese culture is rendered remarkably narrow via such reductive stereotypes.
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Each year, the anticipated fall premiere television season is followed by an equally exciting period: fall cancellation season. The failures of The Playboy Club and Pan Am raise the question of why we turn to period TV, especially post-Mad Men.
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A look at Māori television media convergence and multiplatform expansion.
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In the second episode of Glee’s new season, “I Am Unicorn,” Kurt’s character loses the romantic lead in the school musical, West Side Story, to his more masculine boyfriend Blaine. The episode was both fascinating and confounding because instead of interrogating masculinist gender hierarchies, usually one of the show’s great strengths, the show affirmed...
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A first look at ABC's The Chew that considers the show's indistinct identity and uneasy relationship with an as yet undetermined imagined audience.
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The archive has a tremendous role to play in helping researchers reconstruct the past as seen on television, but it also helps us pinpoint precisely how history's televised narrative is already a construct—a carefully crafted and complex set of signs and symbols.
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Are Italian audiences different from American audiences because they are culturally and linguistically dissimilar or because local distribution choices affect their consumption of a given audiovisual product?
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Mediated drag images are often foregrounded, particularly as contemporary scholarship posits how reality television and music video challenge disseminated images of drag through parody and confrontational disregard for societal convention. Until recently, such representations were limited to television, film, and music video. But several drag artists have developed huge followings based on their online...
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Tomorrow Antenna will kick-off its second annual premiere week. But is Premiere Week what it used to be?
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