ARIAS-BADIA, Blanca. Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, Peter Lang, 2020, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-78707-796-6 (print), ISBN 978-1-78707-798-0 (ePub)

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility fields have found an ongoing interest in corpus research both for descriptive purposes (Matamala, 2008; Baños, 2013; Reviers, 2017) and for teaching purposes (Rica Peromingo, 2019; Baños, 2021). In an interdisciplinary fashion, Blanca Arias-Badia’s book Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals specifically takes on the task of describing the principal linguistic features of crime fiction television scripts and their corresponding Spanish subtitles. Its interdisciplinary nature lies on the combination of Television Studies, Linguistics and Translation Studies (TS). Notably, the author explores the notion of norms and patterns through the lens of these three disciplines, all by situating the source text and the target text in the spoken word to written language continuum. The book follows a clear structure of nine chapters including a theoretical and methodological contextualisation of the (quantitative and qualitative) morphosyntactic and lexical analysis of the Corpus of Police Procedurals [...]

The negative effects of new screens on the cognitive functions of young children require new recommendations

Television studies have shown that some negative effects of screens could depend on exposure time, but more importantly on the characteristics of the child, the type of content viewed, and the context in which it is viewed. Studies on newer screens show that these factors are still valid but new ones now play a negative role: portable screens increase the duration of exposure and lowered the age at which exposure begins. More worryingly, new screen persuasive designs and dark patterns largely used incite more frequent use, attracting the attention of children and parents, resultantly interfering deeply in parent/child relationships. In this text we suggest that current academic recommendations have to be more broadly shared but also that new recommendations are needed: especially to advise parents not to let their screen interactions compete with real interactions with their child which are the core of learnings (especially language) and emotional regulations but also of their security.

On Living with Television

In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax. By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life.

Otro tipo de recompensa narrativa: el concepto de “prolongación temporal” como superación de la serialidad televisiva

Este artículo explora las características de la temporalidad en la televisión; en concreto, las capacidades estéticas propias que la pequeña pantalla tiene a su disposición en virtud de su temporalidad distintiva. Partiendo de una metodología que combina los estudios sobre serialidad que han proliferado tanto en los Television Studies como en la Filosofía de la Estética, este texto apunta, en primer lugar, cómo las nociones existentes de “serialidad” no ofrecen una descripción completamente adecuada del particular carácter temporal de la televisión y de sus capacidades estéticas. Por esta razón, se propone un nuevo concepto: la “prolongación temporal”. Esta abarca, a diferencia del concepto de serialidad, tanto la manera específica en la que el medio televisivo emplea la temporalidad, así como los efectos estéticos que este manejo genera en formatos y géneros tan diversos como interminables soap-operas, dramas seriales con arcos argumentales horizontales, procedimentales episódicos, comedias de situación, telediarios, emisiones deportivas, concursos semanales, telerrealidad e, incluso, documentales. Para respaldar nuestra argumentación, el artículo profundiza en tres casos de estudio que apuntalan la validez de nuestra teoría. En primer lugar, se abordan las series de ficción autoconclusivas, de las que se espiga el funcionamiento de la prolongación temporal en los gags recurrentes, en la estructura del monstruo de la semana y en la ruptura que suponen los “episodios especiales”. El segundo caso de estudio es la figura del presentador de televisión informativa, donde el concepto de familiaridad establece unas recompensas estéticas privativas gracias al paso del tiempo. El último caso que se examina es el de programas de telerrealidad, con Kitchen Nightmares como botón de muestra, donde las variaciones en las expectativas son esenciales para establecer una comparación fructífera con episodios anteriores.

Provocation: Why I want to talk television with global platform representatives

Interviews with industry workers and decision-makers are a critical method in television studies. Yet, one group of informants proves particularly hard to access – representatives from global media platforms. Why is it so hard to get interviews with global platform representatives, and what does the lack of access do to our research and scholarly debate?

Re-Visiting Tom O’Regan’s Australian Television Culture: Why Media Ownership, Regulation and Policy Still Matter

Almost 30 years after its publication, Tom O’Regan’s innovative and ambitious, multi-layered analysis of Australian television culture remains an important text for contemporary scholars of television studies, cultural and communications studies, and media industries. In this article, I re-visit the multiple lessons of value that we can take from Australian Television Culture and its distinctive analytical frameworks. Two of the book’s key areas of focus, media ownership structures, and media policy and regulation are explored further, including in work Tom and I would go on to do together.

Richang: An Affect-Inflected Ethnography of Chinese Livestreams

I tracked one Chinese livestreaming platform Douyu from its emergence as experimental subsidiary of a Video on Demand platform in 2013 to its status as an ordinary medium of mass entertainment in 2018. This affect-inflected ethnography is written based on participant observation of three channels on Douyu as I exhibit the microcontexts of each channel in chronicles of affective events, long pauses of silence, repetitive and incoherent dialogues, asymmetrical debates, and sporadic moments of emotional meltdown. This ethnographic writing is a contact zone, a provocation, and, by proxy, a dialogue between academic theories (especially from television studies), user practices, and my informants’ own attempts at theorising how and what livestream feels and means for them.

Fashioning The Crazy Ex Girlfriend: Costume Design As Mad Resistance In The Post Network Era

Until the relatively recent proliferation of feminist criticism, television studies and fashion studies have both been marginalized as frivolous and unimportant. Mental health research, now known within Disability Studies as Mad Studies, considers alternative methodologies rooted in anti-oppression against the representation of madness on television. These various fields, particularly research on madness, have been hidden discourses—whether feared (disability) or gendered feminine and therefore identified as non-consequential (fashion and television). Within these areas of research, intersectional perspectives have been neglected, which has allowed popular culture to perpetuate tired tropes and stereotypes in relation to the way mad individuals have been depicted, written, and importantly, costumed. I unpack these complexities through Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019) as a subversive example of costume design’s resistant possibilities. I analyze pivotal themes in the series by putting episode scenes, specific ‘looks,’ and an original interview with costume designer Melina Root into dialogue. Ultimately, as I argue, fashion on television, with its rising budgets and production quality, is complicit in the construction of on-screen female identities, particularly in regards to problematic ‘crazy woman’ tropes and othering representations of madness.