“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.
CFP: The War Face on Screen, a one-day symposium, Thursday 6th July 2023, University of Leeds Deadline: Tuesday 2 May 2023 The central research question for this symposium is: how have images of the face been used on screen to document the phenomenon of war?
Keynote Speakers Concepción Cascajosa Virino (UC3M) Paul Julian Smith (CUNY) Streaming Wars: The New Hispanic TV Series is an international virtual workshop centered on the increasing significance and prominence of Spanish-language streaming content. Digital platforms are important agents in transmitting values and sociocultural changes, and TV series are one of their key vehicles.
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.
Dates: 9-10 November 2023 Place: University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Communication, Denmark.