PBS premieres new period-piece Downton Abbey on Sunday, reminding us that Brit-lit mini-series, which construct variegated representations of mainly white, heterosexual, aristocratic, life, continue to be hugely popular.
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Perspectives
Brit-Lit Fantasies and Their Fans
Boardwalk Empire’s Aged Media Conundrum
Among the many threads entwined in this production are its virtually fetishistic engagement with and display of early 20th century material culture, including forms of media.
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Defining Television Studies
How to define television studies? What is television studies and what isn't?
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Antenna’s First Calendar Year
2010 was Antenna's first calendar year in existence. We offer some stats and thanks
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Unsolved Mysteries of 9/11
Signs of a deep and abiding popular skepticism toward the official conspiracy narrative of the 9/11 attacks continue rhizomically to proliferate through our media culture nearly a decade after the Mother of All Media Events.
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Why I Love Men of a Certain Age
Media audiences are getting older, the world is getting older, but there are few attempts to explore that in ways that capture both the drama and humor of aging. Here's one.
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Capitalizing on Multiculturalism: “Premium” Indian American Audiences and “American” advertisers
If we think of efforts by “American” entities to access “Indian American” spaces of culture, capital labor, and belonging as symptomatic of emergent modalities of the transnational, might we be able to see subtle shifts in the discourse of multiculturalism in the contemporary moment?
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Australian “Free” TV
Australia's digital channels pose a threat to the free-to-air channels, so how do the latter fight back?
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Sifting Through the Trash: Guided Spectatorship at the Maury Show
The most memorable part of being a Maury audience member was learning how the show achieves such a consistently united, cacophonous reaction from its audience: through coaching from the production crew.
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Late to the Party: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
As a games studies scholar, I risk my gamer credibility to admit that I have never played a single Zelda title.
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In Memoriam: The Late, Great Leslie Nielsen
Remembering the man Roger Ebert once called "the Olivier of spoofs."
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Late to the Party: It’s a Wonderful Life
For me, Jimmy Stewart and my hometown became one. As a teenager, I hated my hometown and small-town life in general. Why on earth would I watch the film on which my town based its image?
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Racist Rants as Rebranding Strategies
Juan Williams, Laura Schlessinger, Lou Dobbs, and Don Imus all used racially insensitive comments to renew flagging careers and reinvent themselves for a changed media environment. It's rebranding through racism.
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WikiLeaks “Bombshell”: The CBC is the Enemy
Considering the revelations which could emerge from WikiLeaks, news that U.S. Embassy Officials in Canada were vilifying CBC's fictional programming was...unexpected.
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