There is nothing necessarily new about a character's surprising return, but the particular attention to the absent mother taps into a current and contentious discourse of motherhood: attachment parenting.
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TV
Mom Enough?: The Return of the Absentee Mother as Threat
Stranded on the TV Battleground: Hulu’s Invisible Original
Despite generic familiarity and a solid first season, Hulu's Battleground has struggled to draw the attention of critics and viewers alike as the site's first original fictional series.
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Jewpacabra
Last week’s South Park episode, “Jewpacabra,” is just the latest in the program’s intermittent efforts to use their medium to introduce otherwise silenced elements of society and culture into the public sphere. Though packaged in exactly the sort of silliness and Jew jokiness that the title implies, the episode actually features one...
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To XFinity and Beyond… The Missing Smart Living Room TV Interface
I demand a moratorium on breathless distribution announcements from cable companies until they upgrade the user interface. We all know the technology exists.
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Accessing the Cinematic Cloud
Recent comparisons to the early experience of using an ATM seem to offer quite a bit of potential for describing how we will be buying and watching movies and television shows in the near future.
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The Google+ Assignment
This piece begins a series reflecting on the trials and tribulations of digital pedagogy.
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Abbeyites Get Down with Downton Abbey
Downton Abbey has proved to be a hit for PBS and its cultural significance is evident in the various ways its fans engage with the show and with the past it mediates for us.
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Specter of Legitimation: The Fading of NBC’s Thursday Legacy
While the actual “Must See TV” branding is all but gone, there remains a specter of legitimation surrounding the evening…at least in the eyes of NBC schedulers.
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Promoting an Uncertain Future: Showrunners (on Hiatus) on Twitter IV
With NBC's Community and ABC's Cougar Town on hiatus, their respective showrunners' Twitter accounts become key outlets for implicitly or explicitly encouraging fan involvement and/or activism.
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End of Men on US Television?
Trend pieces positing a "mancession" on network television schedules this fall overestimated the phenomenon.
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Spirituality, Excess, and the Pleasures of Survivor: South Pacific
Religion is a prominent concern on this season of Survivor. In an early episode, returning cast member Coach told Upolu tribe mate Brandon that it will be a struggle to play the game as moral Christian men. How well did these men do with this task? In the last episode, after saying he’s playing...
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In Memoriam: Hal Kanter, the Creator of Julia
The TV series lasted three years and only in its first season did it crack the Nielsen ratings’ top tier. It has never had much of a presence in the syndication market, doesn’t show up on TV Land, and has never been in VHS or DVD release. Julia, the NBC series created by Hal...
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Of Motorcycles and Melodrama
Sons of Anarchy has often been described as Hamlet on Harleys for good reason. But my readings of late have me thinking that the show actually offers some really different inflections on Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance.
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Notes on the Laugh Track
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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Life Is Not A Fairy Tale
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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