Science fiction epic The Expanse created by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and based on the novels by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck has recently debuted its sixth and final season on Amazon Prime.

From the first TV station in Mainland China in the 1950s, Chinese TV’s history is one filled with political dynamics. It was initiated as a propaganda tool whilst gradually developing as a popular medium for public entertainment, education, and enlightenment.

One of the key talking points at this year’s RIPE conference – an event attended by industry and academia – was the issue of how public service broadcasters can continue to compete in a marketplace dominated by global players such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+. These are platforms with deep pockets (although a lot of that is debt), big-budget productions and subscriber bases that dwarf the PSBs’ own limited domestic reach.

“Who’d have thought there were so many different sorts of duck?” asked my wife. As the restrictions of lockdown eased during 2020, we’d opted to focus our precious hours of outdoor exercise by walking around the local nature reserve, a delightful area with a modest lake large enough for a good selection of wildfowl but too small to accommodate a barquentine.

Last year, Ian Greaves wrote an illuminating CST blog about the ‘turmoil’ COVID had created for the film journal Sight & Sound . As Greaves discusses, lockdown saw the return of extended reviews of new television in Sight & Sound with a separate television reviews section starting in Summer 2020.

Is it just me, or do you currently want to spend a lot of time sticking your head in the sand? I live in the UK, and if you live elsewhere, less Johnson-or-similar-run, you will probably not have quite that urge. But… it’s COP26, the world leaders came together, and you could feel them heating the atmosphere with their speeches. The sense of having only hot air delivered as policy is frustrating;

There’s an avalanche of anniversaries coming in 2022, a veritable tsunami of television history. The big one is the BBC’s centenary, starting with the publication of David Hendy’s The BBC: A Peoples’ History in January, and running through the year to climax in November. It’s a pity that BBC4 can no longer commission historically-informed documentaries to go with this event.

My last contribution to CST focused on the CBS True Crime programme, Murder by The Sea ( CBS , 2018- ). This was partly a result of my trawling through the variety of channels hosted by Freeview here in the UK. My intention, here, is partly to draw attention to Freeview, but also the many channels hosted by Freeview, and, to highlight channels that don’t always get scrutinised or discussed in terms of the changing landscape of

I struggle increasingly to explain to my students the basic difference between a television series and a television serial – which is a worry, because it’s a concept that underpins much of my historical teaching on narrative and genre.

Crime is one of the most prevalent and most-viewed genres on our TV screens and the best-circulating type of fiction content in Europe. Studying the attitudes of television viewers to crime shows, therefore, promises an insight into European tastes and preferences when it comes to the genre of crime, as well as finding out about attitudes towards media cultures from other countries.