Television Without Pity

Television Without Pity
Author: Tara Ariano
Publisher: Quirk Books
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781594741173

From weekend-long "Real World" marathons to the People's Choice Awards, from favorite characters (Brenda Walsh, Seth Cohen) to the most unfunny recurring skits on "Saturday Night Live," this is a celebration of television unlike any other. 100 illustrations.

Without Pity

Without Pity
Author: Ann Rule
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2003-12-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0743480287

In an update to one of the most astonishing crimes of the Case Files volumes, Ann Rule profiles the criminals that kill without conscience and shatters their crimes without pity. In eight stunning Case Files volumes, from A Rose for Her Grave to the #1 blockbuster Last Dance, Last Chance, Ann Rule reigns as "America's best true-crime writer" (Kirkus Reviews). Now, she updates the most astonishing cases from that acclaimed series—and presents shocking, all-new true-crime accounts—in one riveting anthology. In every explosive chapter of Without Pity, Ann Rule deepens her unrelenting exploration of the evil that lies behind the perfect facades of heartless killers...and the deadly compulsions of greed and power that shatter their outward trappings of material success. They are the admired, trusted neighbor; the affable family man; the sexy, charismatic lover; the high-achieving professional. Perhaps most frightening of all is that they are heroes in their own minds. But when someone gets in the way of their deluded dreams, they are capable of deadly acts of violence with no remorse. Analyzing the true nature of the sociopathic mind in chilling detail, Ann Rule traces the murderous crimes of seemingly ordinary men—killers who drew their unsuspecting victims into their twisted worlds with devastating consequences.

Digital Participatory Culture and the TV Audience

Digital Participatory Culture and the TV Audience
Author: Sandra M. Falero
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2016-07-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113750000X

In this study, Falero explores how online communities of participatory audiences have helped to re-define authorship and audience in the digital age. Using over a decade of ethnographic research, Digital Participatory Culture and the TV Audience explores the rise and fall of a site that some heralded as ground zero for the democratization of television criticism. Television Without Pity was a web community devoted to criticizing television programs. Their mission was to hold television networks and writers accountable by critiquing their work and “not just passively sitting around watching.” When executive producer Aaron Sorkin entered Television Without Pity’s message boards on The West Wing in late 2001, he was surprised to find the discussion populated by critics rather than fans. His anger over the criticism he found there wound up becoming a storyline in a subsequent episode of The West Wing wherein web critics were described as “obese shut-ins who lounge around in muumuus and chain-smoke Parliaments.” This book examines the culture at Television Without Pity and will appeal to students and researchers interested in audiences, digital culture and television studies.

Screwball Television

Screwball Television
Author: David Scott Diffrient
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-04-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0815650698

Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls. Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated wordplay and compelling portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, this contemporary American TV program finally gets its due as a cultural production unlike any other, one that is beholden to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, steeped in intertextual references, and framed as a "kinder, gentler kind of cult television series" in this tightly focused yet wide-ranging collection. This volume makes a significant contribution to television studies, genre studies, and women’s studies. Screwball Television seeks to bring Gilmore Girls more fully into academic discourse not only as a topic worthy of critical scrutiny but also as an infinitely rewarding text capable of stimulating the imagination of students beyond the classroom.

Playing Real

Playing Real
Author: Lindsay Brandon Hunter
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-02-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810143070

Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief explores the integration and interaction of mimetic theatricality and representational media in twentieth- and twenty‐first-century performance. It brings together carefully chosen sites of performance—including live broadcasts of theatrical productions, reality television, and alternate-reality gaming—in which mediatization and mimesis compete and collude to represent the real to audiences. Lindsay Brandon Hunter reads such performances as forcing confrontation between notions of authenticity, sincerity, and spontaneity and their various others: the fake, the feigned, the staged, or the rehearsed. Each site examined in Playing Real purports to show audiences something real—real theater, real housewives, real alternative scenarios—which is simultaneously visible as overtly constructed, adulterated by artifice and artificiality. The integration of mediatization and theatricality in these performances, Hunter argues, exploits the proclivities of both to conjure the real even as they risk corrupting the perception of authenticity by imbricating it with artifice and overt manipulation. Although the performances analyzed obscure boundaries separating actual from virtual, genuine from artificial, and truth from fiction, Hunter rejects the notion that these productions imperil the “real.” She insists on uncertainty as a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief—including relationships to realness and authenticity among both audience and participants.

Queer Online

Queer Online
Author: David J. Phillips
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2007
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780820486260

Textbook

American Remakes of British Television

American Remakes of British Television
Author: Carlen Lavigne
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2011-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0739146742

Ever since Norman Lear remade the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part into All in the Family, American remakes of British television shows have become part of the American cultural fabric. Indeed, some of the programs currently said to exemplify American tastes and attitudes, from reality programs like American Idol and What Not to Wear to the mock-documentary approach of The Office, are adaptations of successful British shows. Carlen Lavigne and Heather Marcovitch's American Remakes of British Television: Transformations and Mistranslations is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that focuses on questions raised when a foreign show is adapted for the American market. What does it mean to remake a television program? What does the process of 'Americanization' entail? What might the success or failure of a remade series tell us about the differences between American and British producers and audiences? This volume examines British-to-American television remakes from 1971 to the present. The American remakes in this volume do not share a common genre, format, or even level of critical or popular acclaim. What these programs do have in common, however, is the sense that something in the original has been significantly changed in order to make the program appealing or accessible to American audiences. The contributors display a multitude of perspectives in their essays. British-to-American television remakes as a whole are explained in terms of the market forces and international trade that make these productions financially desirable. Sanford and Son is examined in terms of race and class issues. Essays on Life on Mars and Doctor Who stress television's role in shaping collective cultural memories. An essay on Queer as Folk explores the romance genre and also talks about differences in national sexual politics. An examination of The Office discusses how the American remake actually endorses the bureaucracy that the British original satirizes; alternatively, another approach breaks down The Office's bumbling boss figures in terms of contemporary psychological theory. An essay on What Not to Wear discusses how a reality show about everyday fashion conceals the construction of an ideal national subject; a second essay explains the show in terms of each country's discourses surrounding femininity. The success of American Idol is explained by analyzing the role of amateur music in American culture. The issue of translation itself is interrogated by examining specific episodes of Cracker, and also by asking why a successful series in the U.K., Blackpool, was a dismal failure as an American remake. This collection provides a rich and multifaceted overview of approaches to international television studies.

Television Entertainment

Television Entertainment
Author: Jonathan Gray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135253498

Television Entertainment offers a thematically based overview, balancing an interest in art, aesthetics and audiences with the power, politics and production of television, that includes examples from recent and current television, including Lost, reality television, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, political satire, Grey’s Anatomy, The West Wing, soaps, and 24.

2011 Social Media Directory

2011 Social Media Directory
Author: Jeffery A. Riley
Publisher: Pearson Education
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2010-08-15
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0132601117

Quick access to today's top Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn resources - on business, entertainment, politics, health, sports, and much more! A single, up-to-the-minute source for all the best new resources on today's top social networks More than 3,000 entries on parenting, shopping, fashion, sports, travel, religion, and many other topics A huge timesaver: helps users instantly uncover hidden "gems" they'd otherwise have to search for, stumble upon, or never find at all!