scholarly journals Performing television history

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bignell
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Performance Study ◽  
Television History ◽  
Multiple Meaning ◽  
American Television ◽  
Television Medium

An expanded conception of performance study can disturb current theoretical and historical assumptions about television’s medial identity. The article considers how to write histories of the dominant forms and assumptions about performance in British and American television drama and analyses how acting is situated in relation to the multiple meaning-making components of television. A longitudinal, wide-ranging analysis is briefly sketched to show that the concept of performance, from acting to the display of television’s mediating capability, can extend to the analysis of how the television medium ‘performed’ its own identity to shape its distinctiveness in specific historical circumstances.

‘Disappointed romantics’: Troubled Heritage in the BBC's John le Carré Adaptations

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 727-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Oldham
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Working Through ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The One ◽  
Television Medium

This article analyses three serialised adaptations of John le Carré novels produced by the BBC: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), Smiley's People (1982) and A Perfect Spy (1987). It aims firstly to position them in the context of developments and trends during the period of the serials' production. It explores how, on the one hand, they were produced as variants on the classic serial model which aimed for a more contemporary focus and aesthetic in response to concurrent developments in British television drama, and on the other, how they have a complex and ambivalent relationship with the genre of television spy fiction. Secondly, this article builds upon this positioning of the serials to explore how the themes of le Carré’s novels are interpreted specifically for the television medium. Central to this is the issue of temporal displacement, as television's process of ‘working through’, often considered as characteristic of the medium's immediacy and ‘liveness’, is in this case delayed over many years by a cycle of continual adaptation. Here a particular narrative – the defection of Kim Philby in 1963 – resonates across three decades and is worked through in a variety of approaches, initially in the novels and subsequently reworked on television. It then examines how this manifests in the television adaptations in a contemporary heritage aesthetic which is complex and highly troubled.

The Forgotten Bond : The CBS production of Casino Royale (1954)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Television Drama ◽  
James Bond ◽  
American Television ◽  
Television Network ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Bond Character

In 1954, the US television network CBS broadcast a live studio dramatization of Casino Royale as an instalment of its drama anthology series Climax! Casino Royale was long thought to be “lost” and is still regarded as something of a curio item in the history of James Bond adaptations for the screen. This chapter offers a critical reassessment of the 1954 CBS production of Casino Royale by placing it in the institutional and aesthetic contexts of American television drama in the 1950s. In doing so, it argues that the Americanization of James Bond (played by American actor Barry Nelson) may be seen as part of a strategy of the cultural repositioning of the James Bond character for American consumption.

A ‘New Wave’ in British Television Drama

2005 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lez Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
American Television ◽  
The World ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Queer As Folk ◽  
The 1960S

In recent years, American television drama series have been celebrated as ‘quality television’ at the expense of their British counterparts, yet in the 1970s and 1980s British television was frequently proclaimed to be ‘the best television in the world’. This article will consider this critical turnaround and argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the last few years have seen the emergence of a ‘new wave’ in British television drama, comparable in its thematic and stylistic importance to the new wave that emerged in British cinema and television in the early 1960s. While the 1960s new wave was distinctive for its championing of a new working-class realism, the recent ‘new wave’ is more heterogeneous, encompassing drama series such as This Life, Cold Feet, The Cops, Queer as Folk, Clocking Off and Shameless. While the subject-matter of these dramas is varied, collectively they share an ambition to ‘reinvent’ British television drama for a new audience and a new cultural moment.

scholarly journals The Accented American: The New Voices of British Stardom on US Television

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Holliday
Keyword(s):  
Television Drama ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
American Television ◽  
Foreign Accents ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Small Screen

This article investigates the cycle of British performers in contemporary American television drama and what is at stake in their adoption of a US accent. British actors have been increasingly heralded for their ability to adopt credible foreign accents, marking a negotiation of ‘Britishness’ and assumed vocal ‘foreignness’. By examining several pilot episodes of contemporary US dramas, this article poses the hybrid voice of the ‘accented American’ as a privileged and self-reflexive form of sonic spectacle. This is a voice narratively ‘othered’ to reinforce the screen presence of the British actor-as-American, soliciting spectators’ attention to their extra-textual identities as non-natives, while paradoxically consecrating ‘Britishness’ through the individual actor's assured command of American language. The article concludes by scrutinising the post-9/11 captive narrative of successful US drama Homeland (Showtime, 2011–). Through its themes of dubious patriotic allegiance, Homeland inscribes the cultural discourses surrounding Damian Lewis's starring role and falsified Americanness. The series also operates as a valuable commentary upon the wider proliferation of British talent across American television, revealing the ways in which such small-screen dramas are helping to regenerate prior conceptions of British stardom.

scholarly journals Fag Men: Mad Men, Homosexuality and Televisual Style

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Digital Signal ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Television History ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
American Television ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Long Form ◽  
The Many ◽  
Analogue To Digital

Among the many retro-fittings achieved by Mad Men—Matthew Weinerʼs still unfurling television series set in the advertising world of the early 1960s—is the representation of the homosexual closet as a thing of the past. This essay approaches Mad Men’s account of the homophobic past in order to think about sexuality and televisual style. A landmark programme coterminous with American television transferring from analogue to digital signal, Mad Men allegorizes another moment in television history when the medium was defined not by convergence and time-shifting but by liveness, scheduling flow, mass-market demographics and synchronous viewing. Though it confines its gay content to minor characters and narrative arcs that phase in and out in relation to open-ended long-form needs, the programme’s representation of homophobia as a thing of the past provides a useful lens on the complex temporal co-ordinates of contemporary television.

Meaning-Making Practices, Copyrights, and Architecture in the Indonesian Archipelago

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-202
Author(s):  
Whitney A. Bauman
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Environmental Ethic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Multiple Meaning ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Copyright Laws

This article examines the connections between meaning-making practices and how those practices are codified into institutions and structures that shape individual identities. The theoretical and geographical locus of this article is Indonesia where one can be Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, or Confucian, but not outwardly an atheist. In practice, there are a lot of hybrid religious identities, and this is echoed in Indonesia’s economic and legal institutions, and even its architecture. In other words, what Tom Boellstorff identifies as an “archipelagic” understanding of the self in Indonesia is supported by multiple meaning-making practices and is reinforced through such technologies as copyright laws and architecture. Whereas the monotheistic traditions of the West, and even the Middle East, take place over large uninterrupted geographical spaces, the Muslim monotheism that spreads throughout the Indonesian archipelago takes on different forms depending on the context of the Island. With the rise of Indonesian nationalism, these various contexts are drawn together into a hybrid-monotheism. Such pastiche is reinforced in legal, economic, and architectural technologies. The pluralistic and hybrid beliefs and identities of the archipelago, can provide fertile grounds for articulating a planetary environmental ethic.

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