Critical Studies in Television 2021 Slow Conference Programme

Home , Derry Girls, Quality television

CRITICAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME Version update 14/07/21 STUDIES IN TELEVISION SLOW CONFERENCE

19 July-6 August 2021

Time Zones Overview

Contents Time Zones Overview...... 0

Welcome ...... 2

How to use Teams and etiquette ...... 3

Programme Critical Studies in Television 2021 Slow Conference Overview ...... 6

Programme Details...... 8

Monday, 19 July 2021...... 8

Keynote: Kristen Warner, University of Alabama ...... 8

Wednesday, 21 July 2021 ...... 9

10-11.30am: Television Studies and Criticism in the Age of Multiplatform Television .. 9

4-5.30pm: Transnational Television Industries and their Strategies ...... 11

Thursday, 22 July 2021 ...... 14

Panel: Game of Thrones – Understanding Audience Responses to a Challenging TV Series ...... 14

Friday, 23 July 2021 ...... 16

9.30-11am Challenges to Teaching and Research in Television ...... 16

Monday, 26 July 2021...... 19

1-2.30pm Gender and/on Television...... 19

3-4.30pm The Internet and/as Television ...... 21

Tuesday, 27 July 2021 ...... 25

Roundtable: Cultures of Television Studies ...... 25

Wednesday, 28 July 2021 ...... 26

3-4.30pm Re-Writing Early Histories of Television...... 26

Monday, 2 August 2021 ...... 29

9.15-11am Researching Television’s Histories ...... 29

4pm-5.30pm Television and the Question of Quality ...... 31 Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Wednesday, 4 August ...... 35

10.30-12noon Questions of Genre ...... 35

1.30-2.30m Nationally Specific Developments ...... 37

3-4.30pm Representations of the Politically Marginalised ...... 39

Friday, 6 August 2021...... 42

PhD Candidate Roundtable ...... 42

2-3.30pm Convergence: The Challenge to the Industry ...... 42

Television Studies: Where to? ...... 46

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Welcome The teams of the Television Studies Research Group at Edge Hill University and the Critical Studies in Television editorial team welcome you to the 2021 Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference.

Please feel free to tweet! Hashtag is #CSTConference2021. And if you want to be nice, include @CSTonlinetv and #TVStudiesResearchGroup, @EHU_ISR and @EdgeHill_Media.

This year’s conference follows a theme of examining the discipline itself. As we find ourselves at several crossroads of change, brought about by digitalisation, social movements, the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock. Our contributors have responded to a call for paper that invites them to reflect on our discipline. This conference will thus be a space where we can come together to set the agenda for television research and education. We will hear papers from all disciplines that engage with television and want to contribute to Television Studies as a field. Delegates are presenting papers that offer analyses of the field(s) or methods and ask questions about what research Television Studies should conduct and how we want to teach the subject.

The conference will take place via Teams (for more information see below), but all presentations will also be uploaded to YouTube to the following playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBrk-wPNLaVn8h21oryiYpbimT8tMdBBp

If you have a Google account, you should be able to comment and ask questions there – and we hope to continue the conversation there.

Please bear with us – this is the first time we are running this conference like this, and there will inevitably be a learning curve… which will make the next slow conference all the better.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

How to use Teams and etiquette To join any of our sessions, please click the links below which are available both in the overview (click the linked-up title of the session) and in the section which includes the abstracts. When you enter, you will notice that you are muted and that your camera should be off. Please leave it like this until you want to ask a question in the Q&A. You can ask questions via the chat, or by raising your hand. To raise your hand, click the image of the emoji with the hand. One of the options is hand raising:

If you are presenting, obviously you will need to unmute yourself and ideally also switch on your camera. You will be given permission to screenshare which you can do by clicking this icon:

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

When you’ve clicked that button, you should see an option to share either the screen or a window. If you click ‘window’, you will be given an option as to what to share: in that case pick your relevant presentation:

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

You should then be able to see your presentation – click on ‘present’ as always and that will give delegates the ability to see your full screen presentation.

In order to finish presenting, click the window with the x at the bottom: This will end the screen sharing.

For further information about Teams, see here: Downloadable guides (microsoft.com)

If you are on a MAC, a chrome book or some other form of device or/and things don’t work, please don’t worry: it’s probably easiest if you send the slides beforehand to Elke ([email protected]) and you give her instructions on when to move forward onto the next slides when you present.

As always, any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Programme Critical Studies in Television 2021 Slow Conference Overview

Day Morning Early Afternoon Late Afternoon Monday, 19 July 4-5.15pm Opening: Jo Crotty, Head of the Institute for Social Responsibility Keynote: Kristen Warner

Wednesday, 21 July 10-11.30am 4-5.30pm Television Studies and Narratives of Criticism in the Age of Television Multiplatform Yu Xiang Television Emily Walker, Brett Robert Watts Mills and Justine Mann John Ellis Klára Feikusová Thursday, 22 July 1-2.30pm Panel: Game of Thrones – Understanding Audience Responses to a Challenging TV Series Feona Attwood Clarissa Smith Friday, 23 July 9.15-11am Challenges to Teaching and Research in Television James Walters Mike Wayne Paul Grainge Monday, 26 July 1-2.30pm 3-4.30pm Gender and/on The Internet and/as Television Television Ana Tominc David Levente Palatinus

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Sonia Sa JP Kelly Cat Mahoney Mareike Jenner

Tuesday, 27 July 2pm Roundtable: Cultures of Television Studies Luca Barra Ruchi Kerr Jaggi Gary Edgerton Alexia Smit Wednesday, 28 July 3-4.30pm Re-Writing Early Histories of Television Andy Lawrence Carl Sweeney Caryn Murphy

Monday, 2 August 9.15-11am 4pm-5.30pm Researching Television and the Television’s Histories Question of Quality Charlotte Stevens Tom May Derek Johnston Tom Hemingway Ipsita Sahu Melissa Beattie Michael J. Clark Wednesday, 4 August 10.30-12noon 1.30-2.30m 3-4.30pm Questions of Genre Nationally Specific Representation of the Emily Walker Developments Politically Lothar Mikos Deborah Castro and Marginalised Concepcion Cascajosa Susanne Eichner Rosane Svartman and Ricardo Ramirez Felipe Muanis Julie Taddeo and Katherine Byrne Friday, 6 August 12 noon-1pm 2-3.30pm 4-5.30pm PhD Roundtable: Convergence: the Closing Roundtable: Methodological and Challenge to the Where to? Disciplinary Challenges Industry Christine Geraghty, Brett Carl Sweeney, Richard Vilde Schanke Sundet Mills and Gabriel Dhillon, Klára Feikusová Gary Edgerton Moreno-Esparza and Misha Iakovlev Bärbel Goebel-Stolz

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Programme Details

Monday, 19 July 2021 4pm: opening address: Jo Crotty, Director of the Institute of Social Responsibility, Edge Hill University 4.15pm – 5.15pm Keynote: Kristen Warner, University of Alabama Chair: Elke Weissmann, Edge Hill University To join, click here: Teams Meeting Kristen Warner Keynote Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at The University of Alabama. She is the author The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Kristen’s research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of racial representation and its place within the film and television industries as it concerns issues of labor and employment. Her work can be found in academic journals, a host of anthologies and online platforms like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Film Quarterly.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Wednesday, 21 July 2021 10-11.30am: Television Studies and Criticism in the Age of Multiplatform Television To join this session, please click here. Chair: Brett Mills, Robert Watts, Independent Scholar: ‘The Big Picture’: Considering the Impact of Binge- Watching on Popular TV Criticism In late 2019, the launches of both Apple TV+ and Disney+ marked a new phase in the so- called “streaming wars” — an environment in which any new service offering original drama must now decide whether to distribute serial content episodically as a ‘weekly pulse’, or follow Netflix in encouraging viewers to ‘binge and burn ’through whole seasons on-demand (Jarvey 2019). The two approaches cultivate different kinds of relationships between platforms, texts and their audiences. Scholarship in this area has already elucidated how foregrounding the contrast with scheduled, linear TV has been effective a form of industrial positioning (Jenner 2018); and explored the uses and gratifications of binge-watching for individual viewers (Glebatis Perks 2015). This paper considers another aspect of how the binge-distribution model reshapes conceptions of television: its impact on the form and content of popular television criticism. It focuses particularly on the role of the (Anglophone) TV critic in mediating and positioning markedly ‘national ’TV content for transnational consumption, and identifies some potential impacts of a shift in the critical vocabulary in terms of TV drama’s articulation of national and local culture.

Popular TV criticism has often resembled a ‘discourse in search of an object ’(Poole 1984); a variable, multimodal form that frequently reconfigures in response to technological, industrial, and cultural shifts (Lotz 2008). This paper suggests that Netflix and others ’ promotion of binge-watching encourages a wider shift towards singular series reviews that take the season, rather than the episode, as their object. These “big picture” reviews draw more on the evaluative aesthetics of film criticism — as a mode that considers works as unified wholes and self-contained aesthetic objects — than on traditions of “in-progress” TV criticism organised around the fragmented and socially-situated moments of (national) episodic broadcasting. Drawing on a study of transatlantic reviews of various British TV dramas — broadcast weekly in the UK, but reframed as bingeable objects on US streaming platforms — I first consider how constructions of “bingeability” intersect with the existing

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme legitimation discourses of “cinematic” or “ event” television. Then, this notion of the “big picture” as a critical frame is used to demonstrate how, in framing the series as a singular aesthetic object akin to the cinematic experience, critics tend to frame the more exotic or foreign aspects of a national television address in broader terms, stripping away their social meanings whilst endowing them with appeals more akin to the touristic spectacle.

John Ellis, Royal Holloway: The Streaming Disruptors are Undermining TV Studies as well as Broadcast TV Streaming services like Netflix are undermining the basis of our discipline. The affordances of home video, DVD and other technologies made possible the building of audio-visual libraries for teaching and research. They also enabled adventurous approaches to audience research. These technologies allowed scholars and teachers to own the objects of their researches. Commercial streaming services are rolling back these gains. They are not libraries; they frequently and arbitrarily withdraw films and programmes. Their processes of tailoring content to individual tastes hide as much as they reveal. So it is increasingly impossible to accumulate a library or to even to plan teaching based on what they offer. Unlike European broadcasters, whose audience research is often public, their huge databases of viewer choice and behaviour remain obstinately secret. Yet they use this data to guide their commissioning, from the basic elements of production up to the intimate details of editing pace and lines of dialogue. The information that they possess (but do not share) dwarfs the capacities of academic audience research and renders it virtually irrelevant. Enterprises like Netflix are classic 'tech disruptors' and one of their key acts of disruption has been to take back control of texts and information from users whilst seeming to do the opposite. You own a DVD but you only have temporary access to a streamed text. Streaming technology itself does not require this kind of implementation: the vast and perpetual library of TV recordings offered to UK academia by the BoB service offers a radically different model which will be briefly explored. But how are media studies to respond to this challenge to its very existence? I hope to stimulate a debate on this vital issue.

Klára Feikusová, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic: Curricular Traps: Television Studies in the Czech Republic

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Television Studies have been a part of academia in Western countries for decades now. However, they came to the countries of Eastern Europe much later. This paper will present problems that Television Studies face in the Czech Republic. While there always has been some, albeit scarce, academic writing about television in the Czech Republic, Television Studies as a theoretical major separate from the Film Studies have only been established in 2015 (Palacký University Olomouc). At other universities, Television Studies are usually part of Film Studies department, if they are present at all. Since Television Studies are quite new in Czech academia, they have to face a lot of difficulties that might be resolved in Western countries, but not there. There is still a need for legitimization of them as a major and of television as an artistic medium. Television Studies in Czech are also influenced by cultural hierarchies (e.g. analytical works about television only deal with quality TV), Americanisation and cinephilia. There are also more practical obstacles lie language (lack of literature or subtitles in Czech), distribution or small number of television scholars in the country.

This paper serves as a case study of Television Studies in the Czech Republic. My research is presented from position of someone who studies and teaches the Television Studies. My presentation will focus on problems Czech television scholars have to deal with and the question of how to teach Television Studies as a new academic field in the country.

4-5.30pm: Transnational Television Industries and their Strategies Yu Xiang: Cultural Homogenisation or Narrative Transparency? A Case Study of the Dating Show in East Africa: Hello, Mr. Right? To join, please click here. Chair: Matthew Pateman Although television as a traditional media seems fading out from people’s daily routine of acquiring information, it remains a rare asset in many of the underdeveloped areas in third world countries. The statistics show that in 2016, there were 19.47 million TV subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa which is about 1.9% of its overall population, and the number is expected to rise to 75 million by 2021 (Statista, 2020). One of the major contributors to the increase of the number is believed to be the Chinese media company StarTimes. The private Chinese company entered the African market in the year 2002 and established subsidiaries in more than 30 countries with nearly 26 million subscribers by 2011. Besides international content such as sports events and news, it also delivers Chinese movies, dramas, and reality shows.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

The dating show Hello, Mr. Right produced by StarTimes and aired in Kenya and Zambia is one of its most popular media products in African markets. The show is adapted from the Chinese dating show If You are the One which was originally imported from Australia. The localization of the show format in China and Africa reflects the changing map of the global media flows and pushes people to rethink the oblivious critique on cultural homogenization in the 1970s. With the growing media industries in the global South, the north-to-south one- dimensional cultural domination is ruptured with regional disjuncture. Basing on the case of Hello, Mr. Right, this research aims to continue the unsettled discussion on the alternativeness of hegemonic decoding following the theoretical frameworks of the cultural imperialism paradigm (with a focus on sub-imperialist structures in the global South) and narrative transparency theories. The two research questions are 1. Does the dating show format (especially the Chinese version) have a specific modern imagination of romantic relationships? 2. Is this imagery perpetuated in Hello Mr. Right or is it dissolved by the local culture? The proposed method is discourse analysis, and the objective is to find out whether the increasing presence of Chinese media content poses a particular imagination about modernity, as indicated in the scripted romantic relationship in the dating show, and how such imagination is perceived and internalized indigenously.

Emily Walker, Brett Mills and Justine Mann: Final Draft and the Challenges of Born-Digital Television Scripts

Final Draft is the standard scriptwriting computer software in the media industries, used – according to its own publicity – “by 95% of film and television productions” (finaldraft.com). Lauded for its ease of use, the program includes features such as beat boards and alternate dialogue enabling its users to quickly and efficiently work on scripts. Furthermore, it enables collaborative working, facilitating co-writers working in distant physical spaces. But Final Draft’s features also function as problems for archiving television production, and for the methodologies hitherto commonplace for the study of writing, authorship, and creative labour. For example, updates of the software have rendered accessing material produced on earlier versions complex, laborious and expensive, problematising access and archiving. Furthermore, the program does not keep an archive of all earlier versions of a script, making understanding the existence or chronology of edits difficult to trace. A further problem arises from the position television continues to have within cultural hierarchies, in which its ‘low’

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme status compared to other cultural forms results in many television writers assuming no-one will have any interest in their work, and thus they are prone to not engage in self-archiving in a manner standard for, say, novelists. This paper will explore these problems – and offer solutions – drawing on material from the comedy strand of the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at the University of East Anglia, UK (see https://portal.uea.ac.uk/library/archives/bacw). In particular, it will draw on material from the Charlie Higson archive housed at BACW to outline ongoing attempts to respond to these challenges. Higson’s archive contains both analogue and digital material from his decades of working as a writer, performer and producer on television programmes such as The Fast Show (BBC2/Fosters Funnies: 1994-2000, 2011, 2014), Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased (BBC1: 2000-1) and Swiss Toni (BBC3: 2003-4). Given this archive constitutes a wide range of analogue and digital material, it functions as a useful case study for the variety of tools used by those who undertake creative work and, by extension, the challenges analysis of television history and creative labour face. In doing so the paper will acknowledge the particularities of television as an institution and, specifically, comedy as a genre, illustrating how these contexts impact upon issues related to archiving and the analysis of creative work.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Thursday, 22 July 2021 1-2.30pm Panel: Game of Thrones – Understanding Audience Responses to a Challenging TV Series Chair: Andrea Wright To join this panel, please join here. The end in 2019 of the eighth and final Season of Game of Thrones marked the close of much more than a TV series. The story-world, and its grim events, had become the focus of a vast array of speculations, debates and controversies. Winning praise for its early seasons, substantial controversies over the fate of particular characters, and a nearly 2 million petition protesting against its closing Season, it has nonetheless been part of a wider repositioning of ‘fantasy’ as a mode of thinking and story-telling. In 2016-7, a project mounted by an international team of researchers set out to capture audience responses to the series ‘in flight’, seeking to capture not simply meanings and pleasures, but also the kinds of ways different people took up the ‘fantasy’ series into their wider thinking. The project managed to gather more than 10,000 responses to its complex online questionnaire (delivering more than 3 million words of ‘talk’ about the series), adopting the same general methodological (qualiquantitative) approach that worked very successfully with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies (among other projects). A book of the core findings of the project is currently nearing completion, to be published later this year. Meanwhile, this Panel proposes to examine three different aspects of the project’s findings, within the frame of considering the overall cultural significance of the series.

Feona Attwood: ‘Game of Thrones – simultaneously empowering and hostile to women …’ One of the most interesting aspects of Game of Thrones from the point of view of gender and sexual politics is the way in which the series was emphatically claimed as a world of both exploitation and empowerment, though with a growing consensus that the final season failed its female characters and its audience. Drawing on our participants' responses to the depiction of women in Game of Thrones I will examine how these might be situated in relation to more public and visible feminist analyses of the series in the context of a political environment which is characterised by hostility to women and sexual minorities and by a resurgence of activism around gender and sexuality. In this context, what do audience responses have to tell

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme us about how we might understand the representation of gender and how useful are existing frameworks of understanding?

Clarissa Smith: ‘“Winter is Coming”: a televisual allegory for current dangers’ Game of Thrones has generated a number of go-to phrases, but ‘Winter is Coming’ is perhaps the most widely repeated and, during a number of popular protests, has been quite extensively used as a metaphor for other things. Encapsulating the dark themes of impending doom for Westeros and its inhabitants, oncoming winter drives the narrative of the TV series and is significant for its seeming confirmation of at least one researcher's claim that the ‘effects’ of the show lie in its affirmation ‘that the world is cruel and unjust. Followers of the story are kept waiting for justice, which never arrives.’ (Gierzynski 2018) Our questionnaire asked what viewers understood by the phrase ‘Winter is Coming’, to explore what kind of associations between individual narrative themes and ‘our’ world might be illuminated. In this paper I will outline the ways some viewers point to ‘Winter is Coming’ and its narrative power as analogies to current 'real world' crises such as climate change and Trumpian politics.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Friday, 23 July 2021 9.30-11am Challenges to Teaching and Research in Television To join this session, click here. Chair: Elke Weissmann James Walters: Have you seen this? Teaching and Research the Television Moment The dramatic expansion of available television content in the twenty-first century has brought with it a series of opportunities and challenges for teaching and research. In the classroom, for example, there is greater potential to build up a framework of interrelated texts that students can access with relative ease through online learning resources, institutional or personal subscriptions (and perhaps through other, less official, means). At the same time, however, the likelihood of a student cohort possessing equivalent knowledge of even one television title, which may span many episodes and seasons, can be limited as a climate of abundance conversely places constraints upon shared viewing experiences. Writing about television can similarly involve negotiating the scale of single or multiple television texts and maintaining an accessible context for useful discussion. Will an account based on season one of a programme remain relevant for seasons eight, nine or ten, for example? Will a full appreciation of an article-length argument depend upon many hours of committed viewing on the part of the reader? Against the basic truth that students and academics cannot watch every example of television that may come up in our teaching or research, the reliance on moments as tangible focal points has endured as a practical necessity. Moving beyond this pragmatic need, there is an opportunity to reflect on the critical status we afford television moments. If the moment is taken to encapsulate the aesthetic and thematic interests of an entire television text spanning hours of screen time, for example, the weight of burden placed on a small section can be considerable. Equally, if a moment is taken in isolation and evaluated only in terms of its internal compositional features, there is the potential for an appreciation of the size and shape of television texts to be subdued or suppressed. Questions of congruence and incongruence, generality and specificity, therefore underpin the ways in which we think about television moments. This paper stays with some of these interests by focussing on a moment from Shrill (Hulu, 2019-). Coming at the end of the second episode of the second season, this short sequence encapsulates some of the choices available in discussions of moments. It resonates across multiple layers: striking in its aesthetic immediacy, its evocation of the show’s wider themes,

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme and its illustration of the relationships that exist between moments and their medium. Those seconds on screen can take us in different directions, on paths that cross and converge. Knowing which routes we are following, and our reasons for choosing them, is therefore crucial to understanding the critical engagements that we hope to foster in our teaching and research.

Mike Wayne: Teaching Television Industry Research Practices: Methodological and Pedagogical Challenges Given the difficulties associated with accessing decision-makers, producers, and creative talent, scholarship exploring the television industry often relies on a variety of sources including annual reports, press releases, court proceedings, archival records, third-party industry reports, magazine features, policy documents, and newspaper articles. Like these wide-ranging materials themselves, this approach is variously described as media historiography, media industry studies, or trade press analysis. For scholars, our ability to publish meaningful research in this vein is largely dependent on our ability to use our experience with and knowledge of these sources to critically unpack their contents. As Amanda Lotz (2018) notes, however, helping our students “develop the ‘chops’” to effectively read and use such materials is a separate challenge (163). As such, this paper explores the methodological and pedagogical issues the author encountered when designing a MA-level workshop with the goal of teaching students how to conduct television industry research using publicly available secondary data. Using Netflix as an example, this paper will describe techniques and resources designed to guide students through a four-step research process that begins with a conceptual approach to identify an object of analysis (industrial discourse or industrial practice). In step two, students locate “official” sources (including press releases and earning call transcripts), find materials related to industry events (such as roundtables and Q&A sessions), and identify meaningful trade press coverage. Step three offers practical techniques to transform such material into coherent data sets with a variety of digital tools. In step four, students analyze their data and generate findings regarding a specific television industry discourse or practice. Although all four steps will be outlined, the bulk of this paper will be a detailed discussion of steps two and three: finding and working with relevant secondary data. Ultimately, this work is an exercise in pulling back the veil on television industry studies research practices in order to help students develop critical and methodological skills associated with producing publishable scholarship. 17

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Paul Grainge: The Life of Metaphor in TV and Media Industry Research According to James Geary (2012), the primary purpose of metaphor is ‘to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't been named or so abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained’. If, as he suggests, ‘metaphor is a lens that clarifies and distorts,’ this paper examines metaphor as a specific object of study in TV and media industry research. From environmental images of flow and streaming to cultural images of disruption and divides, TV and media industry studies routinely deploys metaphor as a conceptual device. Sometimes scholars draw on terms produced by the ‘discursive engine’ of industrial cultures such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and other times they develop metaphors to catalyse new ways of theorising (‘spreadable media’, ‘signal traffic’ etc). While the politics of metaphor has been examined in relation to specific abstractions like ‘platform’ (Gillespie 2017) and ‘cloud’ (Holt and Vonderau 2015), and scholars are alert to the challenge of finding adequate vocabularies to describe change and continuity in the media ‘ecology’ (Lobato 2019), this paper reflects on the methodological import of metaphor as a thinking device within the field of TV and media industry studies. Gareth Morgan’s (1997) influential work on metaphor in organizational theory suggests that the most important aspect of any metaphor rests in its power of engagement in relation to the situation in which a metaphor is generated or used - in what it allows people to see, understand and do, and not in any abstract characteristics of the metaphor itself. While Morgan examines metaphors as living, practical frames for engaging and shaping the ontological dimensions of organizational life, this paper considers the generative function of metaphor in TV and media industry critical contexts. Reflecting on the types and hierarchies of metaphor that have been mobilised in TV and media industry research, this paper ‘reads for the metaphor’ in recent critical attempts to construct the field of media industry studies. By way of focus, the paper goes back to the invited ‘think pieces’ of the inaugural issues of Media Industries Journal (2014) and examines this collection of perspectives as a site for the production of metaphor.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Monday, 26 July 2021 1-2.30pm Gender and/on Television To join this session, please click here. Chair: Christine Geraghty Ana Tominc: Gender Representation on Early Television Food Programmes in Six European Countries: A cross-country comparison This study will present a preliminary attempt at a cross-country comparative analysis of European food programme in the 1950s and the 1960s, focusing on representation of gender in six European contexts. Although food programming was one of the TV genres that features on almost all European televisions from early on, although in different formats, genres and quantities, research into early food television in Europe – and also elsewhere – is surprisingly scarce, especially given current interest in food media (e.g. Moseley 2008, Bonner 2009, Collins 2009, Tominc 2015, Wei and Martin 2015, Eriksson 2016, Roger 2016, Geddes 2017). The Food and Cooking on early Television, en edited collection of studies covering eight European countries (currently in preparation by the author, Routledge, possibly 2021) will fill some of this gap. Focusing on the first examples of food programming on television from Portugal to Czechoslovakia, it aims to demonstrate how through various genres – travelog, cooking instruction and advertising, satirical show – the mundaneness of food content was used in various countries to unite the nation, to modernise and to entertain it, to name but a few. In this, state televisions reflect creativity that is underpinned by cultural assumptions of European societies and state ideologies, although there is also an underlying similarity in some of its features (e.g. around attempts to create national identification, e.g. Portugal, Italy). Based on the findings gathered in this collection, this talk offers some comparative observations – however limited – focusing on gender representation in food shows in six very different contexts: Portugal, The Netherlands, UK, Italy, Yugoslavia, and East Germany. It offers shared traits, such as an image of a male authoritative presenter or cook whose role is to demonstrate to the nation not only what to cook, but also what to think about food. In this, however, we find difference as some presenters strive for a turn towards a modern, new, improved self, stripped of tradition and old thinking, while in some especially Western countries, there is also yearning for the old times and traditions. Women tend to be still traditional cooks and mothers, although in some cases, this is also rapidly changing, especially thorough the 1960s.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Through these observations, I argue in favour of television studies that go beyond divisions established after the World War II; rather, as Mihelj and Huxtable (2018) have argued, television – and specifically the associated media cultures – should be studied as sub-types of modern television “designed to promote an alternative vision of progress and belonging” (ibid., p.9). Furthermore, from the perspective of food studies, a cross-country comparative approach to television (ibid.) as attempted here can more usefully demonstrate how early food television in Europe reflected and (possibly) transformed the lives of Europeans as a whole as they shared in the decades following the War a similar sense of optimism for the future and, at the same time, yearning for the past.

Sonia Sa: Portuguese Television News and Gender: Hobbling white and eradicating black women Feminist movements in Portugal have reached new dimensions and diverse representations, both in the public domain - essentially in politics and leadership positions - as well as in the balance between private and public life. However, when the analysis is the television prime time commentary of news in Portugal, the result is the epithet of gender inequality and factual discrimination against black women. In the content analysis we conducted over three consecutive years, we concluded that women's participation in these information programs is about 10% and black women is zero. From these results we analyze the ineffective application of Getting the Balance Right (International Federation of Journalists, 2009) on Portuguese informative television, in a clear and constant trample on gender equity and ethical and racial diversity in the media.

Cat Mahoney: ‘History is a beautiful thing’: Feminising the recent past in Derry Girls and Glow This paper will consider two Female Ensemble Dramas (FED) that represent the recent past from an explicitly feminine perspective; Derry Girls (Channel 4 2018 - present) and G.L.O.W. (Netflix 2017 - present). Both series are what Alison Landsberg refers to as 'historically conscious dramas' (2015: 62) in that they do not seek to recreate "real" people or events from the past, but rather the 'lived contours' of a particular historical moment (62). This paper will explore the ways in which both series 'make palpable the social norms and expectations' (Landsberg 2015: 86) of being a women or girl in 1980s America and 1990s Northern Ireland. It will consider the series' use of popular music, clothing and props from 20

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme the two periods to generate a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for audiences for whom the two periods are likely within living memory, whilst also offering a critique of those periods. Both series utilise comedy, narrative and dialogue to expose the periods' problematic and prejudicial racial, religious and gendered politics and this paper will demonstrate the ways in which the FED format facilitates and bolsters this critique. Both series explicitly de-centre masculine perspectives. In Derry Girls, the one male member of the central group of characters is not only othered by his gender, but also by his nationality as the only Englishman in Derry. In G.L.O.W. narrative impetus is derived from a group of women attempting to subvert the expectations of the sporting and entertainment industries by establishing an all female wrestling programme. This de-centering is key to both series’ exploration of historical female subjectivity and critique of the remembered past. This paper will finally consider both series use of television as a historical anchor point through the incorporation of original broadcasts and news coverage form their diegetic periods. In both series the television set is the primary source of news and information and, by depicting real footage of well known historical events such as the Challenger Shuttle disaster and Omagh bombing, is also a source of historical verisimilitude for audiences. This paper will suggest the potential of television as a conduit for history and particularly for histories that offer alternative perspectives and critiques on traditionally masculine pasts

3-4.30pm The Internet and/as Television To join this session, please click here. Chair: Cathrin Bengesser David Levente Palatinus: Streaming Trends and Platform Wars: Shifting Trends and the Case of The Expanse Over the past years, cultural and political discourses on television as well as on television scholarship, have become dominated by the rhetoric of ‘crisis’: one of the most emblematic tropes, in public perception as well as in scholarship, ‘crisis’ has been frequently deployed to describe the protracted struggle between broadcast and streaming media platforms and formats. Many have seen the proliferation of digital content distribution as that which brings about the decline, or at least the radical repositioning of broadcast television (Lury 2011; Edgerton 2010; Mikos 2016), while other have taken a more celebratory approach to the broadening of digital perspectives: some have argued this shift towards streaming services

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme produced new exciting consumption practices that complement traditional forms of viewing (Barnes 2019, Shuster, 2018); others have argued digital platforms potentially open new horizons to an even more pronounced transnationalization of television (Green, 2019) via a wider distribution of local productions (Szcepanik and Vonderau, 2013; Szcepanik, 2018) as well as international cooperations, or the circulation of cultural legacies (Haegedoorn, 2015, 2019). Some critics pointed to the apparent boom in television content being available (and consumed) by audiences, constituting ‘peak television’. On the other hand, surveys and empirical data (see Nielsen, 2020) seem to confirm that broadcast television, as format and as cultural form, is still significant, with specific types of audiences still tuning in on their preferred types of programs, opting for specific types of content distributed via linear television. Clearly, these fluctuating trends provide exciting sources for research into audience behavior, production and distribution models, and a broader cultural conceptualization of what television stands for in an increasingly mediated and digital environment. What seems to be relatively underexplored, however, are questions of content, quality, and participation, and the ways specific forms of television drama shape our understanding of these aspects in the streaming era. Through a case study of Amazon Prime’s The Expanse (Syfy, 2015-2018, Amazon Prime 2019-), this paper is to direct attention to the impact the growing proportion of streaming platforms have on audiences participatory behaviors – as amply demonstrated by the massive and expanding social media fandom of the program. First, the paper will comment on the correlation between specific formats and genres, aimed at niche audiences, being capable of garnering significant fandom and attaining an iconic cultural status, and streaming platforms’ potential to offer a more streamlined viewing experience (the illusion of more control through more personalized content). Secondly, it will ask whether streaming platforms’ own original productions constitute an ‘aesthetic shift’ commensurate to what used to be termed ‘quality’ television (Akass and McCabe, 2007). To that end, I will briefly address cultural perceptions of quality, complexity, affect and participation in relation to trending genres. Particularly, I’m interested in casting light on the ways specific television distribution and production (and, consequently, consumption) models become conducive to specific (niche) genres, which The Expanse is a quintessential example of.

JP Kelly: ‘What’s on in the box?’: Methods for archiving and analysing video-on demand catalogues 22

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

When using a video-on-demand [VOD] service such as Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, we are typically confronted with hundreds of different recommendations at once. This plethora of content can feel somewhat overwhelming, resulting in what John Ellis (2000) rather presciently described many years ago as “choice fatigue”. However, the default interfaces of such services offer just a small glimpse into the much more extensive catalogues of content that sit behind them. The desktop version of the iPlayer, for example, includes approximately 120 different recommendations, but beneath this is a catalogue of approximately 7,000-8,000 titles. The interface plays a crucial role in making sense of VOD catalogues – sometimes promoting and sometimes hiding content – and in this way they operate as “site[s] of new economies and forms of power” (Ash, 2016:4). Given their cultural significance, interfaces have been subject to a number of studies in recent years (e.g. Chamberlain 2011; Kelly 2011; Johnson 2017, 2019). However, far less attention has been paid to the catalogues upon which these interfaces operate. To a large extent, this is due to the methodological challenges involved in the analysis of catalogues. Despite these difficulties, VOD catalogues play a crucial role in the contemporary media experience and it is therefore imperative that we develop new methodologies that will allow us to examine them more effectively. As Ramon Lobato maintains, “as television studies moves further into the Internet age, it must develop a robust understanding of how catalogs work if it wishes to understand wider dynamics of access, choice, and diversity in digital distribution.” (2018:2) There have been several attempts to put VOD platforms more clearly on the research agendas of media studies scholars (Lobato 2017, Johnson 2019) yet the methodological barriers still remain. In the case of VOD catalogues, the primary obstacle is limited access to catalogue data. This paper addresses this particular methodological challenge by developing and demonstrating one way to gather and archive longitudinal catalogue data for the BBC iPlayer. Using a dataset compiled over a period of approximately 12 months, I employ exploratory data analysis [EDA] (Tukey 1977) to consider what kinds of patterns we can detect within a VOD catalogue. This includes a consideration of the volume of titles belonging to certain channels and genres as well as their availability. In doing so, I use to EDA to consider what we can learn about the “dynamics of access, choice and diversity” (Lobato 2018:2), specifically in the context of public service broadcasting. Finally, this paper will supplement the iPlayer catalogue dataset with an iPlayer interface dataset, enabling a consideration of the relationship between the two – a relationship which has received little if any critical attention thus far. Given that VOD interfaces and catalogues are interdependent (one cannot function without the other), this paper ultimately argues that 23

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme not only do we need to develop more innovative methodologies to help us archive and study these platforms, but that we should not necessarily conceptualise and analyse interfaces and catalogues as distinct entities.

Mareike Jenner: Controlling Television Binge-watching has emerged as dominant mode of viewing in streaming culture: embraced by industry its use of interfaces that privilege the practice (Jenner 2018, Johnson 2019) and audiences Perks 2015, Steiner and Xu 2018). In light of this, it is important to look back to see how the practice fits into a broader continuum of television’s ancillary technologies and associated viewing practices, such as channel-surfing and its relationship with the remote control. This paper frames binge-watching as continuation of previous viewing practices to evade the television schedule. In other words, television’s ancillary technologies that allow audiences to control television. Importantly, this control is not power, but control over a viewer’s immediate environment. This kind of individual control is framed by a neoliberal ideology in which ‘self-improvement’ is sold as a way to package cultural capital (see, for example, Feher 2009). In particular, the paper explores channel-surfing and its relationship with the technology of the remote control and how it relates to binge-watching and its relationship with the Netflix interface. Bellamy and Walker (1996) discuss the remote control as technology that gives audiences autonomy and control over television. Similarly, the Netflix interface forces viewers to take control over their own, personalized schedule in what Lisa Perks calls ‘entrance flow’ (Perks 2015). Both discourses link in and (in the case of Netflix’ use of binge-watching) even capitalise on notions of ‘good’ TV as cultural capital, a strategy of self-improvement. Thus, this paper deals with the intersection of viewing practices, technologies and cultural capital as mode of ‘self-improvement’ within neoliberal cultures.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Tuesday, 27 July 2021 2pm Roundtable: Cultures of Television Studies To join this session, please click here. Chair: David Levente Palatinus Ruchi Kher Jaggi (Symbiosis International University, Pune, India), Alexia Smit (University of Cape Town), Gary Edgerton (Butler University, USA), and Luca Barra (University of Bologna, Italy) Chair: David Levente Palatinus (Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic)

This roundtable session will bring together a number of scholars from various geographic and cultural backgrounds to talk about disciplinary differences in different countries and how the contexts of the countries - including politics but also university systems more generally - impact on the ways television studies developed. The panel’s aim is to highlight and extend the ongoing discourses on and around a number of interrelated issues that dominate television studies in contemporary times, and to open possible avenues for future conceptualizations of the ways industry, audiences, policy makers and scholarship can interact productively. To that end, the session will attempt to address issues ranging from the space and place of television studies in relation to media and screen cultures, the social sciences and the humanities, to the institutional hierarchies and disciplinary structures that determine classificatory schemas and practices of legitimation. The panel seeks to map out mixed ecologies and the co-existence of production models, and television mobilities where cultural legacy, content and format travel through geographic and temporal contexts. It will also aims to tap into discussions about ways to de-westernize television studies by paying attention to transnationalization in production cultures, by re-thinking the micro- and macro-management of production and distribution, as well as the landscapes of production in post-pandemic times.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Wednesday, 28 July 2021 3-4.30pm Re-Writing Early Histories of Television To join this session, please click here. Chair: Brett Mills Andy Lawrence: Transnational and National Broadcasting in the North Atlantic: A historical case study Television launched in Iceland on 1 March 1955. Historically, the development of Icelandic television deviates from the model adopted by most Western European nations due to transmissions from the English-language service provided by the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) predating and subsequently competing against domestic public service broadcaster RÚV. Iceland was one of the last European nations to launch a national television service. The national broadcaster RÚV commenced transmissions on 30 September 1966. Iceland is unique among the Nordic nation-states due to a transnational television service operating as a monopoly prior to the setting up of a national public service broadcaster. Unique among the Nordic nation-states due to the island having no land border, it consequently was not able to receive content via signal overspill from a neighbouring territory. Since its inception, the development of the Icelandic television industry and institutions have been influenced by tensions with transnational organisations, protectionist domestic cultural policies, and economic imperatives. In other respects, it has conformed to the model of public ownership and public service broadcasting as the dominant paradigm until market liberalization in the 1980s facilitated the establishment of commercial networks, changes to delivery systems due to satellite transmissions, and latterly digital modes of distribution which have enabled viewers to access global content. This paper will analyse the development of a small-nation television culture in relation to theories of the transnational. The paper is a historical case study that will analyse the influence of transnational organisations on Icelandic broadcast media. The case study will focus on the period 1955 to 1977 and shall demonstrate that Icelandic media policy and the establishment of domestic national broadcaster RÚV were influenced by AFRTS. Within the specified timeframe this chapter will highlight key historical, technological, and political developments that have influenced Icelandic television’s growth and development. In this overview, I will analyse programming structure, parliamentary debates, and national

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme arguments concerning the medium’s role as nation-builder and opposing force to transnational influences.

Carl Sweeney: ‘I’m Married to the Cape’: Adam West, Batman and signature roles on the small screen Historically, television stardom has not received the same level of attention as cinema stardom, in keeping with the paradigms of John Ellis (1992) and John Langer (1997), which posit that the small screen creates personalities rather than stars. However, Deborah Jermyn (2006) challenges prior theories through analysis of Sarah Jessica Parker’s public image, identifying the need for new models through which to examine television’s relationship to contemporary stardom. Because old hierarchies have shifted, Jermyn asks whether it is “time to revisit the notion that stardom ‘proper’ […] must emerge from a succession of separate roles?" (2006: 83). Though this is pertinent to Parker, it is arguably more germane to those who came earlier. Pre- 1980s American television stars were more likely to be principally defined by their connection to a flagship part, because this period was characterised by scarcity of viewing options (Ellis, 2002), the emergence of repeats as a quintessential televisual form (Kompare, 2005) and a strong cultural tradition of American programmes being exported to nations such as Britain (Rixon, 2006). In conjunction, these factors helped cement the association between prime-time TV stars and popular characters. By theorising star status for someone linked overwhelmingly with a single role, a distinct form of televisual fame comes into focus. To argue this, this paper proposes a new category of stardom, described by the term ‘signature role TV star’, evaluating Adam West as an archetypal example. West is best known for his leading role on Batman (ABC: 1966-1968), where he portrayed crime-fighting millionaire Bruce Wayne, who kept Gotham City safe under the guise of his superhero alter-ego. West’s stylised performances became a key factor in the programme’s twin address to viewers, who may have interpreted the series as a straightforward superhero drama or a camp satire. At its peak, Batman was a mainstream phenomenon across the world, yet ultimately the series was cancelled after a mere three seasons. Thereafter, the actor was unable to parlay his success into a lasting career as a mainstream leading man. However, West’s connection to Batman continued to manifest, as he occasionally reprised his former role, whilst also taking other parts that evoked his superhero success. Meanwhile, he regularly played himself in a parodic fashion, as exemplified by his popular role in Family Guy (Fox: 1999-2003; 2005-present). In his latter-day career, West demonstrated that the 27

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme strong link with a single role can acquire new inflections over time. Therefore, he embodies not just the ambivalences of being associated with a signature TV role, but also the advantages.

Caryn Murphy: Inside the US Classic Network This paper uses the archived records of executives, producers, and writers who were working in the U.S. television industry during the time period now referred to as the “classic network” era to examine how creative personnel understood the industrial system that enabled and constrained their work. This period of television history, the 1960s and 1970s, remains under- studied, even though extensive and accessible records of individuals who were active in the industry provide a significant window into its mechanics. Michele Hilmes, Jason Mittell and J. Fred MacDonald have characterized the classic network era as a time when the networks utilized oligopolistic control to minimize the financial risk associated with programming and wrest maximum profits from sponsors and advertisers. It is primarily characterized by close competition among three national broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC), each seeking to profit by reaching the largest possible share of the audience. Todd Gitlin’s influential study, Inside Prime Time, offers a sociological perspective on the era, analyzing extensive interviews with network executives about their expertise in the industry. The archived papers of creative personnel offer an additional avenue from which to approach an understanding of the possibilities and challenges that characterized production and distribution at this time. The archived papers of producers including David Susskind, Reginald Rose, Herbert Brodkin, and Norman Felton offer evidence of the kinds of negotiations that creative personnel undertook with network executives as they carefully crafted dramatic programming intended to be palatable to the largest possible audiences. I use the records of these producers to analyze how the classic network system was understood by those who worked within it, and in particular, how personnel associated with television drama sought to generate audience interest. I examine the innovative strategies related to audience testing, program marketing, and narrative experimentation that producers undertook as they attempted to appeal to a mass audience, arguing that their methods help to explicate the workings of the network system. Records related to the production of classic network dramas help to demonstrate how producers balanced the desire for socially impactful programming with the system’s reliance on nationwide appeal.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Monday, 2 August 2021 9.15-11am Researching Television’s Histories To join this session, please click here. Chair: Perelandra Beedles Charlotte Stevens: ‘Researching Starsky and Hutch is exquisite torture’: Letters about Television in 1980s Media Fanzines This paper reflects on work with archived media fans’ letterzines of the 1970s and 1980s. Growing out of the science fiction APA fanzine scene, letterzines contain primarily letters of comment (LOCs) between female fans, and as such capture conversations about the objects of their fandom. However, the broader media fandom community had interests beyond science fiction: zines from this period also encompass fandoms of cop shows such as Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) and Simon & Simon (CBS, 1981-1989). Letterzines focused on television texts contain a range of information of interest to historians of television: LOCs contain interpretations of character and narrative and discussions of fan conventions and meet-ups, which give a window on how women related to contemporary television. Vitally, amongst the discussion of the texts themselves the LOCs have descriptions of how fans watched television at a time when VCRs started to saturate the domestic market. Therefore, I am reflecting on using zines as a method of historical inquiry, as a way to recover discussions that occurred in a defined period of women’s television history. These primary source documents potentially have a capacity to nuance assumptions about what women watched, their views on the programmes, and the contexts in which they watched. The spectatorship practices cover activity that sounds a lot like binge-watching (e.g. drinking champagne while marathoning cop shows), but occurred at least 20 years before the DVD box set has made this mode of viewing mainstream.

Derek Johnston: Reading Past Reception: A Case Study of the BBC Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) This paper draws on the letters and messages and newspaper clipping held by the BBC Written Archives Centre in relation to the 1954 adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a case study for considering how we understand the historical reception of programming. This production is particularly useful in this regard because it achieved a certain notoriety in relation to its reception, with questions being raised in Parliament about the duties of broadcasters apparently as a result of its broadcast, and claims that the repeat performance

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme only went ahead when the word spread that it had been enjoyed by the royal family. The paper will examine some of these stories and the truth behind them, as well as the way that a number of responses associated the production with 'horror comics' and what that suggests about the associations being made and the significance of this term in its context. These examinations will serve to support consideration of the challenges of interpreting past audience reception, and thinking about how we narrate the history of television and its audiences.

Ipsita Sahu: Women in Early Indian Television and the Feminist Movement in the 1970s This paper is part of a larger doctoral project on early Indian television. Titled “Arrival of Television in India: A Media Archaeological Study”, my project seeks to explore the changing audio-visual context of 1970s India, linked to the entry of television. I offer a techno-material archaeological approach using black and white television as the entry point for an inter-medial history of cinema, radio and television. Television is situated here as an techno-political infrastructure, a material and cultural object, and domestic form shaped by the historical context of the Cold War, the National Emergency in India (1975-77), and the rise of the feminist movement in the early 1970s. Based on the conference themes of television histories, audience, identities, my paper will look at the entangled history of television’s expansion and the third wave women’s movement in India. In this paper, I will explore the consolidation of Indian television by mapping the careers of notable women presenters and producers of the 1970s-80s, such as Salma Sultan, a news anchor, Tabassum Govil, a film-based talk show presenter, Madhumalati, an afternoon show host, Kamalini Dutt, producer of dance programmes. Each of these women employees transitioned into television from previous careers in radio, film, theatre and dance and were closely involved in molding television’s form during its early stage. The paper will explore their television persona and engagement with the medium as particularly epochal. Some of the female presenters became icons in the 1970s and 1980s and imparted new respectability to women in the entertainment industry. Apart from star anchors, the conspicuous presence of women behind the scenes, also becomes significant in relation to the vibrant public debate about the status of working woman in India due to the rise of women activism and feminist movement in the early 1970s. Against this background, television formed a complex site: on the one hand, educational talk shows on television regularly provided a platform for feminist scholars, and on the other, the television set as dowry gift was being extensively used as a gimmick in print advertisements. Drawing upon interviews, television columns in magazines 30

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme and newspapers, and a host of advertisement material, this paper will use the stardom and experiences of early television women presenters as an entry point to navigate broader questions of how the parallel developments- arrival of the new media of television, and the rise of the feminist movement in India- opened a complex techno-social field for constructing and contesting gender relations in India.

4pm-5.30pm Television and the Question of Quality To join this session, please click here. Chair: Janet McCabe Tom May: Time and the Body in Play for Today through a Study of Average Shot Lengths and Bodily Framings This presentation builds on the aesthetic analysis approaches of Barry Salt (1983), David Bordwell (in Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson 1988 & in Bordwell 2006) and Jeremy G. Butler (2010) to produce a statistical examination of Play for Today’s historical trajectory. Conducting detailed shotlogging of a representative sample of 10 per-cent of the PFT corpus and the strand’s seven title sequences, this paper aims to investigate whether the use of the material modes of production of film and video made a difference to PFT’s cutting speeds. This will draw on a dataset of Average Shot Lengths (ASL) based on manual shotlogging within VLC player, which is to be further analysed via R programming – using a digital humanities approach.

I may also consider the positioning of actors’ bodies in relation to designed sets and ‘real’ location spaces within PFT’s framings in the same sample. Thus, it will be ascertained whether there is an individualistic foregrounding of close-ups and extreme close-ups or a more rooted, environmental observational gaze of characters seen in medium or long shot within sets or locations.

Tom Hemingway: ‘Soprano, Draper, Underwood… Horseman’: The Post-Broadcast Adult Animated Comedy This paper is concerned with the adult animated comedy programme on post-broadcast television. Whilst this sub-genre isn’t exclusive to post-broadcast platforms, it is notably prominent on Netflix which gestures towards the company’s programming strategy and desire for the sub-genre to be seen as a distinctive part of their brand image. In turn, the

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme programmes thus call to be analysed to assess the ways in which they might consciously conform to the company’s ‘house style’. There is an obvious continuum between the humour found in popular broadcast adult animated comedies such as Family Guy (Fox, 1998 - ) and South Park (Comedy Central, 1997 - ) and the adult animated comedies available for streaming on platforms like Netflix. However, rather than attempting to appeal solely to the juvenile in adults, I will propose that a post-broadcast adult animated show like BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014 - ) appears to cater to an adult, mature sensibility through its careful handling of character development, multiple plot threads, and exploration of depression and addiction. This can be equated with the way ‘quality television’ appealed to viewers in the 90s and 00s in series like The Sopranos (HBO, 1999 - 2007) and Mad Men (AMC, 2007 - 2015). I will examine the ways in which BoJack Horseman more closely follows the narrative tradition of the prestige network drama as opposed to the inconsequential narratives of many broadcast adult animations which often reset at the start of each episode.

Melissa Beattie: Good Taste: Travel Food Series as Quality Television Academically, the concept of Quality TV is almost exclusively associated with dramas. McCabe and Akass (2018) go even further by arguing that HBO has become the legitimising arbiter of quality TV. I would argue, however, that ‘quality’ can be easily applied to other genres as well; this broadly follows Hills (2014) who argues that ‘discursive blocks’ should be broken, in his case utilising discourses commonly associated with makeover television in an analysis of Doctor Who and Sherlock. Here, I analyse the travel food series hosted and produced by Anthony Bourdain in the context of quality TV, including industrial/paratextual and textual elements as discussed in quality TV scholarship (Weissmann 2012, Logan 2016, Schlütz 2016, inter multa alia). While there is always some variance between scripted dramas and documentaries, this paper argues that the majority of elements attributed to quality TV dramas are also present in the Bourdain corpus. I further argue that limiting studies of quality TV to scripted dramas is, itself, based around concepts of cultural capital, with lifestyle TV such as food and travel series being considered too ‘low’ to be analysed in this way. These discursive blocks should also be broken in order to more fully understand the contemporary TV landscape.

Michael J. Clark: I want to talk about The Simpsons, but do not know how

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

From the perspective of analytic philosophy, which excavates the conceptual assumptions embedded in our critical vocabulary, this paper interrogates the notion of ‘the work’ as it is presently understood in television studies. More precisely, it asks questions of a methodology, central to television aesthetics, that leads out from a representative moment to illuminate a programme’s broader aesthetic achievements. While the close analysis of moments is taken here as an important development in our discipline—granting long-overdue attention to the artistic possibilities of the medium—I argue that this approach will remain limited until we understand and articulate in clearer terms ‘the work’ being discussed in our studies. Too often, I contend, it is tacitly assumed that this ‘work’ ought to be a programme, construed as a whole, which is approached as if it were a film with self-contained integrity and clearly defined temporal boundaries. While this assumption is sometimes unproblematic, it is troubled by, and diminishes, long-running, perhaps indeterminate programmes that mutate in form and content as their production expands across time. First, I explicate this problem by recounting difficulties I have encountered applying this method to The Simpsons, now in its thirty-first season. I argue that the first eight seasons of The Simpsons constitute a staggering achievement that deserves critical attention, and continue to elucidate why attempts to grant this attention are frustrated by the programme changing, in almost all aspects and invariably for the worse, while negotiating the demands of network-enforced longevity. Because of this change, the programme, taken as an entire thirty-one-season work, exists today as a thoroughly disunified thing, encompassing so much difference that it would be misleading to posit a moment, or several moments, as representative of the whole programme’s features and qualities, which are erratic rather than stable. And yet, though inconsistent within the whole, I do not take the earlier seasons’ achievements to be invalidated by the programme’s broader trajectory—they remain significant and I still wish to discuss them. To potentially resolve this problem, I turn to Ted Nannicelli’s invaluable discussion of the ontology of television artworks, which he clarifies are understood as being subdivided into the interrelated but individuated works of the episode, the season, and the programme. Building on this, I tease out and challenge Nannicelli’s belief that, though appreciation of television artworks involves attention to all three kinds of work, the ultimate object of appreciation is the programme. I argue that, if we accept that episodes and seasons can be understood as individuated works, there is no necessary reason why the programme in its entirety should be privileged in this way. I propose that in instances like The Simpsons, a programme may not always be a coherent or desirable object of appreciation. In these 33

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme instances, I conclude, a close analysis of a moment that enables a discussion of individual episodes or seasons is not lesser than one that enables a discussion of a whole programme, and still fulfils television aesthetics’ remit of understanding our engagement with television artworks.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Wednesday, 4 August 10.30-12noon Questions of Genre To join this session, please click here. Chair: Stephen Lacey Emily Walker: More than a Vicar: Defining ‘religious sitcoms’ on British television Religious sitcoms have an enduring popularity on British television, from the early All Gas and Gaiters (BBC1, 1966-1971) to The Vicar of Dibley (BBC1 1994-2007), the latter of which received over 14 million viewers at its height in 1999 [BBC Staff, 2000]. In fact, because in this period the Anglican church had only 1 million regular churchgoers, Dibley was arguably bringing Christianity to a wider audience that the church [BRIN]. Despite this popularity, there has been very little study of religious sitcoms as texts or as a separate sub-genre within sitcom. As a term, ‘religious sitcoms’ has been widely used in the media [for example, see Landreth, 2014] and is usually applied to a sitcom with a vicar or priest as the main character, such as Father Ted (C4, 1995-1998) or Rev (BBC2, 2010-2014). Yet, religious sitcoms have much more to offer as a sub-genre. As neither entirely a workplace nor a family sitcom [Creeber, 2008: 79], the religious sitcom often straddles both the public and the private, complicated by the need to be always accessible in the clerical position. Thus, a religious sitcom frequently features scenes in the workplace (such as the church or council chambers) as well as the home, and often parishioners will visit either regardless of time of day. Connected to this, the vicar in the religious sitcom is expected to uphold their ethical standards (in other words, ‘practice what they preach’) at all times, even when alone in their homes. The vicar or priest can receive pressure from church authorities or parishioners when these are deviant or unmet. In addition, the vicar or priest still tries to maintain a personal identity, for example gender or sexual when the figure of the priest is paradoxically fetishized and asexual [Ornella, 2016]. Drawing on television sitcom and genre theory [Creeber 2008; Mills 2005; Mittell 2004; Morreale 2003] and the textual analysis research from my thesis, this paper will discuss some of the recurring, genre-defining themes that appear in religious sitcoms, including: the use of prayer as a monologue; pressure from church authorities and or financial issues; the conflict between professional and personal ethical positions; the development of ‘clerical’ gender and sexual identities; and the constant expectations for vicars to be available and ‘perform’ for parishioners. The paper will also discuss the importance of the British context of these sitcoms, especially the use of countryside and city settings and the changing landscape of both sitcom

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme and religious identity during this period [Hunt, 2013]. These themes will be explored using four contemporary British religious sitcoms: All in Good Faith (ITV1, 1985-1988), The Vicar of Dibley, Father Ted, and Rev.

Lothar Mikos: Babylon Berlin as Blueprint for Berlin Noir Berlin has become an important location and space for national and international contemporary drama series, as well as an important mediated historical space. Meanwhile Berlin is a production hot spot in Germany that attract national and international productions. Berlin as a production site and location goes hand in hand with an aesthetic style and a mediated image of the city (Eichner & Mikos 2017). Berlin based production company X-Filme has produced three seasons of the internationally acclaimed television drama series “Babylon Berlin” (GER 2017-, ARD/Sky), based on the bestselling novels by Volker Kutscher and built around the character of Gereon Rath, who investigates in an exciting world metropolis with drugs, sexual emancipation, arts, and murder at a time in which the Nazi Regime appears at the horizon (Mikos/Zopfs 2019). The so called “Roaring Twenties” are a central aspect of the narration. The series coined the genre German Noir or Berlin Noir (Bondebjerg 2018), because it was staged with an international noir appeal that goes back to the international success of Scandinavian crime drama (Gamula & Mikos 2014, Hansen & Waade 2017), and follows partly the genre conventions of film noir (Bould 2005; Naremore 2008; Spicer 2007). In several ways ”Babylon Berlin” is a signature TV drama series in Germany: it was the most expensive TV drama series in Germany to date; it was sold to more than 90 territories thanks to the distributor Beta Film; and for the first time a public service broadcaster, ARD, cooperated with a commercial broadcaster, Sky, to co-produce a TV drama series. Based on interviews with members of the production team and responsible persons from the involved broadcasters, and a textual analysis of the series the paper will show how the aesthetic tradition of film noir and Nordic Noir are transformed into a Berlin Noir that inspired several other national and international television drama series which were produced in the city. Babylon Berlin could become the blueprint of Berlin Noir as the series combined the noir aesthetic with the mediated image of the city.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

1.30-2.30m Nationally Specific Developments To join this session, please click here. Chair: Elke Weissmann Deborah Castro and Concepcion Cascajosa: Global video-on-demand services and local original production. Spain as a case study. North American video-on-demand services have made their global expansion a priority in recent years. Despite the contribution made by what has been called “Netflix Studies” (Lobato, 2019 Lotz, 2020; Iordache, 2021) and projects focused on HBO (Imre, 2018), Hulu (Sanson & Steirer, 2019) and Amazon Prime Video (Tiwary, 2020), little is known about the different localizing strategies that these companies create and implement to settle in non- Anglosaxon countries. To advance research in this field, in this presentation we will establish a cross-service comparison of the localizing strategy of six global VOD services that, on the one hand, are marketed as separate OTT services and, on the other, have announced their intention to produce original content. Those services are Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Starz, Disney, and Apple TV+. The comparison will be done at the following levels: (1) the operators through which these services are available, (2) the strategy to create and develop their fiction teams and (3) the type of productions and content strategies (e.g., production companies they are working with, type of original content, exclusive deals with local broadcasters). To do so, we rely on the analysis of secondary data and we focus our attention on Spain, a country that has caught the attention of the global audiovisual industry (European Audiovisual Observatory, 2020, p. 50). The importance of exploring Spain is threefold. First, the country has a highly developed and strong television industry. Secondly, Spain acts as a bridge between Europe and Latin America, a region where Spanish productions have been traditionally well-received. Thirdly, and connected to the above, the country has become a popular production hub for transnational operators, where producing high-end programs is cheaper than in other countries. Results show that Netflix, Amazon, HBO and Starz are very active in establishing partnerships with telecommunications companies (also at the regional level as is the case of Netflix) whilst intra-collaboration is still limited (i.e., Starz and Amazon). Unsurprisingly, most of the companies have developed a local fiction team with veterans in the sector, and rapidly invested in original fiction series. With the exception of HBO, most of these global services have partnered with local production companies with strong track records (e.g.,

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Bambú). As per the genre of these series, they have invested in genres that traditionally travel well, such as crime dramas, biopics and literary adaptations.

Rosane Svartman and Felipe Muanis: Mass Audiences and Telenovelas in Brazilian Television Brazil has a unique audiovisual ecosystem. Even though the country has a multi-platform population that watches content through cable networks since 1990, through VOD platforms - Netflix since 2011, and that leads Latin American social media consumption, more than 25 million Brazilians tune in during primetime every day to watch telenovelas in corporate television. This research investigates the importance of telenovela and in what ways this content survives in an interconnected media landscape. As a result of its generalist style, Globo TV, a public concession commercially exploited by a private group, creates what Dominique Wolton (1996) defined as a social link between Brazil’s many realities, creating a great complex of relationships, always in transformation. 41 telenovelas were broadcast on Brazilian open television in 2019. Of the 84,7 million people who watched the genre, 64,7 million viewers (approximately 80% of the viewing public) watched TV Globo telenovelas. Telenovelas are over one hundred episodes long, have a strong melodrama influence, and are written according to the reaction of the audience while the content is exhibited. Through authors Martín Barbero, Silvia Oroz, and others, the importance of melodrama as a Latin American matrix will be approached. This is a hybrid work, which mixes empirical experience and market sources with theoretical sources. Rosane Svartman, one of the authors, is also a head writer of telenovelas and an International Emmy nominee. We have chosen to exploit both identities because we believe that exposing processes in which author participated would also contribute to the research at hand. In Brazil watching television and watching telenovelas are synonyms, therefore the future of both is intertwined. Telenovelas may indicate strategies for the survival of corporate television in Brazil in an interconnected media landscape. This research also aims to explore in what ways the telenovela may tap into new possibilities to continue to exist.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

3-4.30pm Representations of the Politically Marginalised To join this session, please click here. Chair: Brett Mills Susanne Eichner: The Different Articulations of Forced Migration in TV Drama Series Migration movements, forced migration or the so-called African-European “refugee crisis” have been addressed within film and television studies from different angels. For example, migration and film (e.g. Loshitzky 2010; Hagener 2018), documentary (e.g. Kuo 2010; Lebow 2012), and television news (e.g. Moores & Metykova 2010; Jacobs et al. 2016). While there is an increasing interest in fictional television forms, a close analysis of the roles of television in articulating forced migration is still missing. This paper addresses the issue by analysing and comparing the European mini-series Lampedusa (Italy, RAI, 2016), with the Australian series Stateless (Australia, ABC, 2020-). Both series negotiate the topic of forced migration as a dominant topic of the narration (rather than as side/background aspect or as a metaphor). As serialised narratives that create a shared understanding among (trans)national communities, television series in general have the potential to build relatable worlds and serve as forum for negotiation of identity, political culture, ideology and the very meaning of community. Beyond their function as popular entertainment, television series thus engage in geopolitical interventions and contributing to our understanding of world. They do so, however, differently. As a text and production analysis will show how the two series are articulating their agenda. It will also take into account their respective production environment including particular missions and aims of public broadcasting in the respective geo-linguistic region, and the respective market logics. Examining how television fiction engages (differently) with and articulates forced migration in different global regions and within different logics of production will allow a deeper understanding of the role of television in the construction of the cultural narratives of forced migration.

Ricardo Ramirez: Seeing Yourself/Being Seen: Chilean cays and lesbians and the televisiual visibility of homosexuality The visibility of gays and lesbians on Chilean television has increased steadily over the last decades. Although this is an under-researched area of study in the country, a few papers have analysed how national TV frames homosexuality. None, however, have paid attention to the ways in which these representations have been interpreted and “used” by viewers who self- identify as gays or lesbians. This study aims to fill this gap, offering an analysis of the ways 39

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme in which a sample of 30 Chilean gays and lesbians relates to the televisual visibility of homosexuality. Through a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews that were conducted in Santiago, Chile in 2019, it is argued that the intense feelings that gay/lesbian images produce in the participants are not only associated to the perceived invisibilisation of homosexuality on television but are also imbued with an abiding awareness of the fact that these representations are being consumed by others. In that sense, it can be argued that gay/lesbian viewers watch and interpret television from their own perspectives, but continuously adopting a straight viewpoint that allows them to anticipate the ways in which these images are being received by mainstream society. This is crucially significant for them, as they claim that even though there are multiple institutions (re)producing discourses about homosexuality within Chilean society, TV has a central social influence over diversely identified individuals whose understanding of what homosexuality “is” is strongly influenced by what television shows. In a different manner, participants explain that their own understanding of their sexual identifications is not defined but only influenced by television, via its proposal of figures through which their own feelings and social positions can be understood. The impact of the televisual images of homosexuality over their own lives, however, extends beyond this, as they explain that mainstream viewers use the televisually produced ideas about homosexuality for “understanding” and “reading” them as gays/lesbians. This relationship, however, is seen as mostly detrimental or favourable depending on the specific characteristics through which TV makes homosexuality visible. In that sense, TV can be either a regressive instrument or an agent for social change. About this, participants recognise the co-existence of images that further marginalise gays and lesbians, and others that have contributed in moving public opinion towards “acceptance”. Whatever the case, a sense of dissatisfaction remains. From their own perspectives, most of the images are still “far from perfect”; even many of those that, when seen from a straight viewpoint, are evaluated as socially favourable. In that sense, they seem to have a positive relation with visibility, but not with the terms through which that visibility has been achieved in Chile.

Julie Ann Taddeo and Katherine Byrne: Fifty Years On: The Rape Narrative in Period TV Since the marital rape scene in the BBC’s 1967 adaptation of The Forsyte Saga sparked a national outcry, rape has become a staple of the small screen British period drama, whether it’s an adaptation of a source text like The Forsyte Saga or Poldark or an original series like Downton Abbey or Peaky Blinders. This talk surveys rape narratives in some of the most 40

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme popular costume dramas on our screens today and how viewers process such scenes in multiple ways. While rape permeates western popular culture, the period drama provides both a historical and contemporary context for analysis as well as a space in which a largely female audience can use the past to come to terms with a universal experience. But, as this talk hopes to demonstrate, viewer reception, which is never passive, is itself fractured, by age, production teams’ agendas and fans’ own biases, among other factors, thus impacting how rape and “consent,” as presented in these dramas, are processed. While the emphasis is on female rape narratives, the male rape scenes in Outlander will also be addressed to explore how male trauma is prioritized (by writers and viewers) in ways that female rapes are not. Lastly, we will discuss how #MeToo has reshaped (in some cases) how rape is presented on our small screens since 2017.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

Friday, 6 August 2021 12-1pm PhD Roundtable PhD Candidate Roundtable To join this session, please click here. Chair: Hannah Andrews

Richard Dhillon (Warwick), Klára Feikusová (Palacký), Kat Pearson (Warwick), Carl Sweeney (Wolverhampton), Misha Yakovlev (Warwick)

This roundtable considers various issues relating to television studies from the perspective of current postgraduate researchers working in the field. In particular, the conversation will focus on three key themes. The first is around the cultural status of television, and how popular discourses have shaped the participants’ attitudes towards the medium. The second concerns hierarchies of value and quality within television studies, including issues of canon, media specificity, and interdisciplinarity. Finally, the third theme relates to the potential of television research, and the television archive, as a tool for outreach work. Throughout the panel, the contributors will examine how their own approaches have been shaped by the matters at hand. In short, this roundtable discussion engages with the direction of television studies through the prism of the participants’ experience as researchers.

2-3.30pm Convergence: The Challenge to the Industry To join this session, click here. Chair: Hannah Andrews Vilde Schanke Sundet: Young Streamers and Key Industry Lessons Streaming is changing the media industries, forcing executives and decision-makers to rethink strategies and actions. While the music industry has been leading the path for some time, the television industry is following suit, and even the film and book industries are tapping into streaming services. In all sectors, new global players such as Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon have gained key positions, challenging incumbent industry players and their business models and practices. For national players, a central dilemma has been to harness the opportunities of streaming—and alleviating the unfortunate consequences—while also making sense of the developments taking place. A key concern has been how to attract young audiences and gain knowledge of their media habits.

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

This paper presents the critical lessons that industry executives and decision-makers have learned from the young streaming audience. Three research questions guide the paper: How do industry executives perceive young people and their streaming habits? Are young people still seen as leading the path or is “everyone” a streamer today? And, how are these industry perceptions of a young streaming audience translated into production strategies and practices? The paper combines perspectives from a critical media industry approach (Havens et al. 2009), with lessons from media management (Albarran et al. (eds.) 2006) and platform studies (Evans and Donders 2018, Dijk et al. 2018). While the first approach provides a general framework for examining industry players, media management provides a focus on industry notions, strategies and business models. At the same time, platform studies contextualize these within a broader framework of changing power dynamics. The paper applies a mixed-method approach consisting of document analysis of industry reports and nearly 40 interviews with CEO/top-level industry executives. The informants represent the most significant television, film, music, and book organizations in Norway, including streaming providers, major record labels, production companies, broadcasters, book publishers and interest organizations. All interviews were conducted between November 2019 to February 2020 and follow the same structured interview guide designed to allow for comparison across institutions and industries. Although the Norwegian market is small and somewhat peripheral, it is also technologically mature. It has served as a strategic test market for many new streaming services as well as social media providers. Hence, trends in this market may serve as a forecast for trends also in other markets. The paper addresses, first, how leaders across sectors address the common “youth challenge”, and second, how leaders, especially in the television industry, respond to this challenge in terms of strategies and practices. A key finding is the common set of challenges industry players attach to a streaming youth audience, describing youths as a distinct audience group separating their media use, habits and consumption from older audience categories. This notion of the “youth challenge”, has implications for strategies and practices, in which the television industry increasingly are looking for new ways of producing and publishing television content.

Gary Edgerton: Silicon Valley + Hollywood = Convergence 2.0 Silicon Valley-based Netflix’s dozen-year run as the unassailable superpower in the brave new world of streaming is being seriously challenged for the first time beginning in late 2019 43

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme and now into 2020. This corporation now shares the top-tier of the streaming sector with five other major over-the-top (OTT) media-service providers (i.e., Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, and Peacock). Moreover, there currently exists 265 other mini-major and niche online video service companies trying to make a go of it in the United States alone. This tsunami of streaming activity is resulting in a once-in-a-lifetime shift in the entertainment landscape. The degree of convergence now brought about by streaming is having the unintended consequence of rendering the traditional ways of classifying television, video, and film platforms obsolete in the 2020s. The same TV programming and film narratives travel seamlessly across broadcast, cable-and-satellite, and OTT windows reaching a wide assortment of different viewing cohorts. Likewise, creative content moves fluidly between multiplexes and IMAX theaters, home and mobile digital devices of all shapes and sizes. The 2020s augur an era of radical convergence. In addition, new streaming providers are now sprouting up all over the world to challenge Netflix from Spain to Singapore, Britain to India, Germany to Japan and China. Where Netflix was the hunter; it’s now the hunted. The new reality is that it has to compete with a handful of other major streamers who as of today are behind (but catching up) in terms of usability and performance of their online delivery systems and algorithmic know-how. Nevertheless, they are way ahead in respect to the scope and quality of their archival holdings and current creative output offering potential subscribers branded content they recognize and want to watch. A Darwinian fallacy exists whereby industry professionals and media scholars alike reflexively frame marketplace competition in the entertainment industry as a survival of the fittest. In point of fact, the interrelated histories and developments of film and television never played out in such a simplistic and one-dimensional way. A kind of convergence 2.0 is presently occurring between New Tech and Old Hollywood where the traditional firewall between them is rapidly dissolving as each side becomes more like the other. Peak TV has morphed into Plus TV where the future of Hollywood is inextricably linked with streaming as a technological, industrial, aesthetic, cultural, and consumptive practice. One can quibble about dates and specific starting points, but it is increasingly evident that the history of television entered the TVIV stage sometime around 2013 when Netflix made its first baby steps beyond being just a distributor of television programs and films to being a content generator. This presentation delineates and suggests that we now need to both rethink the way in which we classify distribution platforms as well as reconceptualize screen 44

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme narratives more in line with the radical convergence of TVIV where the traditional boundaries between television and film no longer apply.

Bärbel Goebel-Stolz: Televisual ‘Heimat’ – Transcoded Identity A single anecdote sums up my personal academic origin story: A small mountain village, at the dawn of commercial television in Germany, had two hotels. Each of the hotels linked to only one of the two new commercial television stations, RTL or SAT1, and the villagers on either end of the village linked up to the signal of the hotel closest to them. So even long before ultra-niche television providers fragmented the market and limited the number of culturally / nationally “relevant” programming that would dominate the next day(s)’s watercooler talk, some communities lacked the ability to organize their discussion of culture around common texts. I to this day have never seen a full episode of McGuiver. while one of my best friends has never seen an episode of The Knight Rider. But this problematic is, as hinted at here, not solely a historic one. We once again, after satellites and cable had permeated family live quite thoroughly in many countries, have reached a state of fragmentation that not only defines our ability to understand pop cultural references, but that defines us. Or more specifically, it is our cultural engagement that we shape our sense of belonging and identity upon, even when that identity is shaped by our denying that connection to the medium of television. In other words our sense of belonging, our nostalgic centres, our cultural identity, I argue, is shaped by what I term the Televisual Heimat. This is especially relevant a concept for conceptualizing affect and media for those who were children of the late 1970s and through to the end of the 20th century. Where we feel “right” and where we feel “home” may be a far cry from where we were brought up in real life (IRL). For me, it defines my unability to conceptualize that mountain village, or even Germany, as *home or ‘Heimat. Experiencing history *through (new) media* is a familiar concept for many of us, as is thinking thourgh how media shapes views on history and the past, but we have failed to ask how that shapes us as individuals. Rather than asking what experiences we bring to our media reading, the question would be how do these media write us. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Karen Barad have, from a digital humanities standpoint, addressed how entangled with media we are through production and research of the same, entangled with the history we research and seek to mediate. I argue that this entanglement begins at a less observed, less participatory stage and am leaning on one specific part of Lev Manovich 5pts on New Media, partly to also emphasize that ‘new’ is relative. Manovich states that New Media are 45

Critical Studies in Television Slow Conference 2021 Conference Programme

TRANSCODED, a joint effort of computation and culture. Our engaging with media, the computation and processing and reading of the culture it produces and reflects, is therefore transcoding our identity, and generates our unheimlich sense of belonging to that which we may only know from our screens.

4-5.30pm Closing Roundtable: Television Studies: Where to? To join this session, click here. Christine Geraghty, Brett Mills and Gabriel Moreno-Esparza