Film, Media, and Popular Culture / Television

How mid-century television anthologies reflected and shaped US values and identities.

A study of the largely hidden world of primary media market research and the different methods used to understand how the viewer is pictured in the industry.

In the postwar era, the police procedural series Dragnet informed Americans on the workings of the criminal justice system and instructed them in their responsibilities as citizens.

An examination of the critical influence of working actors and actors’ labor unions on industrial structures and practices in Hollywood, including film, television, and streaming.

As the saying goes, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time,” but in the face of tragedies on a national scale, comedy becomes the medium through which audiences untangle accepted understandings of what it means to be American.

From Twin Peaks (including the 2017 return) to Girls, a veteran critic and scholar draws on decades of industry expertise and exclusive interviews with renowned creators to examine the rise of art television.

Revisiting early debates about TV content and censorship from industry and government perspectives, this book recounts the development of the Television Code, the TV counterpart to the Hays Motion Picture Production Code.

Taking a bottom-up approach through interviews with numerous industry workers, this book deepens our understanding of the intricate processes behind the creation of the LGBT representations that appear on television.

The first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire, this book explicates the complex narrative arc of the entire series and its sweeping vision of institutional failure in the postindustrial United States.

Surveying a wide range of international productions, this collection of essays by established and emerging scholars investigates the important cultural work performed by repetition, or multiplicities, in film and television.