Journalism and the hybrid condition: Long-form television drama at the intersections of news and narrative

Journalism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Baym
Keyword(s):  
Public Affairs ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Broadcast Journalism ◽  
American Television ◽  
Long Form ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Political Realities

Particularly in the context of American television, hybridity has become the defining feature of contemporary broadcast journalism. Hybridity itself manifests on multiple levels – the textual, systemic, and discursive. Together, these three levels of hybridization challenge traditional conceptions of journalism while at the same time enabling the emergence of new forms of journalistic truth-telling. This essay explores three examples of ‘public affairs narratives’, long-form fictional dramas that sit, in different configurations, at the intersections of news and narrative. It concludes that in an age of complexifying distinctions between the factual and the fictive, hybrid public affairs narratives have the potential to play a valuable journalistic function, orienting audiences to critical, but often under-explored, socio-political realities.

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

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

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

Mainstream Trends and Masterpiece Traditions

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva N. Redvall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Long Form ◽  
The Uk

The chapter explores the successful meeting of “mainstream trends” and “masterpiece traditions” in the commissioning and production of Downton Abbey (2010–2015), and the way in which this “postheritage drama” marks a significant transatlantic encounter between different broadcasting cultures and storytelling traditions. Drawing on recent research on the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States in television drama, the analysis first details how this period drama became a collaboration between the commercial UK broadcaster ITV and the American PBS station WGBH and its Masterpiece series. The chapter then investigates how the long-form narrative with soap opera elements was designed to tap into the UK tradition of heritage drama, while drawing on the speed and storytelling style of US television series. The chapter closes with a discussion of Downton Abbey’s production story in relation to the series’ remarkable popularity in the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond.

Gospel on the Box: Can Television Drama be Missional?

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-451
Author(s):  
Colin Heber-Percy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
World War ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
The North ◽  
Young Carer

Abstract In 2011 I wrote the television drama The Preston Passion for the BBC. The aim was to retell the story of Christ’s Passion in a series of provoking and unexpected ways. Pilate becomes a town mayor during a mill workers’ strike in nineteenth century England; Mary becomes a mother awaiting news of her son during World War I; Jesus is a young carer in contemporary Preston, a city in the north of England. Drawing on the experience of writing the drama, I aim to show how drama and mission are related enterprises, having a complex and nuanced relationship with one another and with the prevailing culture. These putative relationships find expression in shared prophetic modalities: truth-telling, challenge, and love. The article explores how these modalities are expressed in television drama and mission. I conclude by suggesting that both drama and mission also share a goal: personal and cultural transformation through bearing witness to the truth understood in a particular way.

A ‘New Wave’ in British Television Drama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

scholarly journals Performing television history

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

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

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