It’s a whole new world starting in November [2019]. — Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, speaking at the Royal Television Society Conference in Cambridge, England on 20 September 2019 (O’Connell 46)   Netflix’s dozen-year run as the unassailable superpower in the brave new world of streaming is being seriously challenged for the first time beginning in late 2019 and now into early 2020.

Recently, a very nice academic friend kindly asked me to talk to their television studies students about how to succeed with a career as a ‘television historian’. I explained that there hadn’t really been a ‘career’… it was just some stuff that happened when a hobby got out of control. So I didn’t go.  There was nothing to say. Hmmm… That blog seems to have run shorter than I’d planned.  Sorry for wasting your time.

One of the most fascinating techniques that I’ve acquired from my limited exploits in academia has been that of a “reading” of a single programme – arguments (not my strong point, as you know) and deductions made purely from the text under observation.

While the networks and streaming services continue to appeal to our cultural obsession with the past—from Watchmen and El Camino to the recent restart of Mad About You —I’m still thinking about that return to Deadwood from last spring, as a test case, perhaps, for all of this televisual nostalgia and its impact on us as viewers.

The HBO drama, Watchmen , is part of an ever-growing canon of comic books adapted for TV. Taking place 34 years after its print publication, the TV series refocuses the comic’s deconstruction of Cold War anxieties by exploring ongoing racial tensions in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The narrative centres on the rise of a white supremacist group, which has waged war on the Tulsa police.

The New Year should be a time for resolutions where we wipe the slate of history clean and attempt to be that little bit better than we were during the last twelve months. And looking at the other CSTonline contributions during December, I would hope that one of my resolutions for 2020 would be that I’d write something a bit more meaningful for CSTonline rather than spend another year setting new levels of wrongness.

William Proctor:     Lindelof has been quite insistent that he won’t return for a second season, but he is quite happy for the show to continue in his absence.

William Proctor: One of the first things that came to mind when watching HBO’s Watchmen is whether the series would be as equally impenetrable to audiences that have no experience of the comic.

William Proctor: For many comic fans, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is a sacred, seminal text, one that perhaps should never be adapted nor extended with sequels, prequels etc., or else the sanctity of the original would be defaced in some way—at least in the minds of purists (of which I am one, admittedly). […]

Until no later than September 2020, all EU countries will have to apply at the level of local legislation, the principles and norms of the new version of the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). Originally rolled out in 1989, and then named as “the television without frontiers directive”, the AVMSD is the key legal document defining the various pillars upon which the cross-border provision of audiovisual media services is built