When Canadian period crime drama Murdoch Mysteries (CityTV 2008-2012;

The US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966-7) is about television. It’s about the capabilities of the medium, its technologies and the experience of watching it. The series has a grandiose, excessive visual style, characterised by scale and spectacle, and it served to advertise colour television as colour sets became more affordable in the 1960s.

The BBC’s sitcom/comedy drama, Detectorists , centred around two middle-aged metal detectorists and their hobby, is not noticeably ground-breaking, cutting-edge, politically savvy, conspicuous in its social realism, culturally diverse, sexually promiscuous, obscene, coarse, or expletive-laden in its language, nor vitriolic and in-your-face with political rancour. It is gentle, good-humoured, almost somnambulist in its

“It’s impossible to watch HBO’s Chernobyl without thinking of Donald Trump,” tweeted the author Stephen King in May 2019, simultaneously offering a backhanded compliment to a television miniseries that was fast becoming a critical sensation and a withering takedown of Trump’s presidential capacities.

‘Say what you like about South London, but it pays all our wages’ Edwyn Cooper (ep.1)   Some years ago, I immersed myself in British tales of armed robbery – blags – while researching a study of the four-part BBC series Law and Order (1978) which is based on events surrounding a wages grab in South London.

While generally marketed as the further adventures of a popular character, spin-offs generally have the industrial function of creating more saleable content for a given studio and/or network.

Last week I told of my near-encounter with Patrick ‘Jean-Luc Picard’ Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation – not at Farpoint,[1] but in an Italian restaurant in Shad Thames back in 2011. This anecdote then acted as a springboard for an account of my on/off relationship with new Trek in the 1990s and early noughties, which – by the time I returned to these shores from Italy in 2008 – had seemingly withered on the vine.

Written on 12 April, 2023 This…is going to be a very different sort of blog. I’m writing this from a small hotel on a side street in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.  You’ve probably never heard of this city (unless you’ve bothered to look at my author bio;

If you have never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation , you might be better off skipping this one. Way back in 2011, I was happily in the middle of my PhD studies.

In a recent CST blog, I discussed some of the negative issues surrounding the use of a fictitious country in the context of a series which also features both actual countries and attempts of sociocultural and/or sociopolitical critique.  For this blog [1], I would like to provide a counterpoint with an example of how the use of a fictitious country can be done in a way that is more nuanced, if not necessarily more positive.