Episode 4 of the Icelandic drama Trapped (2015), currently showing on BBC 4, finished with a spectacular avalanche. The avalanche had been predicted by one of the characters who then triggered it in the hope of diverting it away from the town. But the event itself generated hardly any suspense about the fate of characters who might be caught in its path.

I passed my viva! Hurrah! Good, now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Channel 4 Comedy commission Catastrophe , which is currently airing its second series, less than a year after its first went out in January of 2015. And let’s also get something else out of the way: the total agreement I am in with the majority of TV critics about its being utterly brilliant. Good. That’s done too.

Long before the end of Christmas television viewing and schedules, broadcasters and production companies herald their new season of television viewing. It is part of that tradition where we say goodbye to the old year, and welcome in the new, and it is yet another example of how television has ingratiated itself into the rhythms of everyday life and the cultural rituals of a nation.

I expect many people complained this holiday season that there was very little to entice in the television schedules.

Graduating from the Juilliard School as recently as 2009, Adam Driver is currently experiencing a seminal phase of his career with his mass exposure to a worldwide audience via Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015). His breakthrough part has undoubtedly been Adam Sackler, ‘the sexually debased actor-carpenter-weirdo’ in Girls (HBO, 2012-present); a part for which he has

In 1990, Charlotte Brunsdon wrote an article entitled ‘Problems with Quality’. It examined British television’s claims to quality and investigated in particular how specific genres and aesthetics were claimed by a number of commentators, including politicians, critics and academics, and professionals as ‘quality’. It sparked a particular, British debate about what quality might mean at a time that by others was perceived as a period of

On July 18, 2015, Lena Dunham shared the following diagnosis for the title character from Daria (1997-2002), MTV’s cult animated series, with her two million Instagram followers: ‘I love Daria just as much as the next child of the 90s but I am also concerned not enough of us realized she was rude and almost definitely had clinical depression/could have benefitted from therapy and maybe some medication.

Confronted with the challenge of editing an article I had submitted a year ago, writing a paper for a conference for the week after next and starting work on my (now long overdue) book, it was with some horror that I realized I had put myself down to write a blog this week. What was I thinking?

October 2008 At the Quality American TV conference in Dublin back in 2004 Maire Messenger Davies highlighted a key problem in studying television: namely, the question of availability. She mentioned NBC’s critically acclaimed series I’ll Fly Away (1991-93), which lived on in memory but not in any tangible form like DVD or video.

THE DARK SIDE OF KELLEY David E.Kelley’s new primetime series on NBC, Harry’s Law, has just turned bleak. Fans of Ally McBealwere initially delighted by the idea of a sacked patents lawyer (‘Harriet Korn’/Kathy Bates) setting up a storefront law firm in an abandoned shoe shop.