Two weeks into my MA, I attended a conference.

Nineties comedy/crime drama Due South (multiple international production partners, 1994-1998;

As a current master student at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, I’ve come to realize that my previous bachelor’s studies in communication offered limited exposure to television studies.

As a first year MA student of media studies at Film University Babelsberg, I recently had the privilege of attending the ECREA Television Section Conference Redefining Televisuality: Programmes, Practices, Methods , October 25th to 27th in Potsdam, Germany. The conference invited researchers to critically engage and revisit the concept of Televisuality developed by John T. Caldwell.

The trope of aliens visiting Earth has been a science fiction staple since long before the Lumière Brothers first recorded and (re)played a train coming into a station. Aliens coming in peace and trying to hide in plain sight in contemporary (ish) society is slightly newer and can be used to great comedic effect.

A comedy-drama about vampires and a high drama/satire of corporate culture would, on the face of it, seem unlikely bedfellows.

A murder has, yet again, been committed in a small town in Maine.  The local sheriff is baffled.  Fortunately, however, the town’s most famous resident, retired English teacher turned mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury), is on the case!

Two very different brothers from Edinburgh (okay, Leith) are driving one night and accidentally hit a pedestrian.  What follows in the BBC Scotland series Guilt (2019-2023) is, unsurprisingly, more about the emotion than the legal definition of guilt as we see the crimes being committed and know that the brothers are guilty of it and the subsequent cover-up.

Sometimes, coincidence allows us to observe separate but related phenomena that, seen by themselves, would be nowhere near as meaningful as when compared to each other. Such a wonderful coincidence happened recently in the relatively quick succession of two major television events: the Coronation of King Charles on the 6th and Eurovision, 7 days later, on the 13th May 2023.

What happens when one of history’s most feared villains meets a comparative innocent looking to enter the same line of work?  In many cases, this scenario is used in media to illustrate the corruption and making of monsters.