The UK now allows product placement in television programming, and their regulations on those placements perpetuate a false dichotomy regarding the logics and goals of product integration.
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TV
Egregious Product Placement? New Regulations in the UK
Watching the World’s Amazing Races
What I find frustrating about the show is not simply that it ends up Othering the world, but that it could be so much better. It’s like a B student who writes occasionally brilliant sentences, yet who isn’t trying hard enough.
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Gleetalians, or Glee’s Italian Promotional Paratexts – Part 2
In this second post, I now move on to consider locally produced promos, where an increased amount of creativity seems to be put forward and the intent is noticed of “domesticating” the show for the target culture.
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Gleetalians, or Glee’s Italian Promotional Paratexts – Part 1
In this post I propose to look at some of the promotional videos used for the Italian launch of Glee, which premiered on FOX Italia on December 25th, 2009. I will look at two examples in which the dubbed Italian version was superimposed on the English original.
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The State of Reality TV: Producing Reality on Joan & Melissa
WE's new series, produced by and starring Joan & Melissa Rivers draws attention to the artifice of reality TV, but in the fourth episode, the mask slips and reveals something that may be...possibly...perhaps..."real"...
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The State of Reality TV: The Pain of Watching The Bachelor
This season is painful to watch, but not in a fun, carnivalesque way. Rather, the pain seems to be much more serious and reveals the emotional trauma that we can experience when we blindly submit ourselves to normative ideas of patriarchy and the nuclear family.
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“You’ll always be young, you’ll always be beautiful”
Returning to the subject of failed adaptations--and those we might fear will fail--I suggest that we not only look at place but also time as a central category whose uniqueness impacts a show's success.
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Reflections on the Challenger Disaster 25 Years Later
25 years ago today, one of the most significant tragedy-induced media events of the twentieth century took place: the Challenger Disaster.
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The State of Reality TV: Kidding Around with Reality
Though not the most popular or influential entry in the genre, Kid Nation appropriately offers an elementary school primer both on the conventions of reality competitions and their negotiation of social structures taken for granted in the "real" world.
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Brit-Lit Fantasies and Their Fans
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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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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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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