The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition

The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition
Author: Mary M. Dalton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438461321

This updated and expanded anthology offers an engaging overview of one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of television programming: the sitcom. Through an analysis of formulaic conventions, the contributors address critical identities such as race, gender, and sexuality, and overarching structures such as class and family. Organized by decade, chapters explore postwar domestic ideology and working-class masculinity in the 1950s, the competing messages of power and subordination in 1960s magicoms, liberated women and gender in 1970s workplace comedies and 1980s domestic comedies, liberal feminism in the 1990s, heteronormative narrative strategies in the 2000s, and unmasking myths of gender in the 2010s. From I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners to Roseanne, Cybill, and Will & Grace to Transparent and many others in between, The Sitcom Reader provides a comprehensive examination of this popular genre that will help readers think about the shows and themselves in new contexts. For access to an online resource created by Mary Dalton, which includes interviews with contributors and course lectures, visit: The Sitcom Reader: A Companion Website @ https://build.zsr.wfu.edu/sitcomreader

The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition

The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition
Author: Mary M. Dalton
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438461313

Updated version of an engaging overview of the television situation comedy. This updated and expanded anthology offers an engaging overview of one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of television programming: the sitcom. Through an analysis of formulaic conventions, the contributors address critical identities such as race, gender, and sexuality, and overarching structures such as class and family. Organized by decade, chapters explore postwar domestic ideology and working-class masculinity in the 1950s, the competing messages of power and subordination in 1960s magicoms, liberated women and gender in 1970s workplace comedies and 1980s domestic comedies, liberal feminism in the 1990s, heteronormative narrative strategies in the 2000s, and unmasking myths of gender in the 2010s. From I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners to Roseanne, Cybill, and Will & Grace to Transparent and many others in between, The Sitcom Reader provides a comprehensive examination of this popular genre that will help readers think about the shows and themselves in new contexts.

Screen Interiors

Screen Interiors
Author: Pat Kirkham
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-03-11
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1350150592

Covering everything from Hollywood films to Soviet cinema, London's queer spaces to spaceships, horror architecture and action scenes, Screen Interiors presents an array of innovative perspectives on film design. Essays address questions related to interiors and objects in film and television from the early 1900s up until the present day. Authors explore how interior film design can facilitate action and amplify tensions, how rooms are employed as structural devices and how designed spaces can contribute to the construction of identities. Case studies look at disjunctions between interior and exterior design and the inter-relationship of production design and narrative. With a lens on class, sexuality and identity across a range of films including Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913), The Servant (1963), Caravaggio (1986), and Passengers (2016), and illustrated with film stills throughout, Screen Interiors showcases an array of methodological approaches for the study of film and design history.

Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing

Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing
Author: Djoymi Baker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2023-07-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000900061

Focusing on Netflix’s child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix’s "Family Watch Together TV" tag. Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family-friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. The chapters in this book explore how this "Netflixication" of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector, which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing, leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations. This book will be of particular interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in the fields of television studies, screen genre studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor

The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor
Author: Katja Schulze
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3839462606

Vituperation, disparagement, and debasement seem to have become part of the mainstream discourse in contemporary US-American media culture. Zooming in on a distinct televisual comedy genre, Katja Schulze explores the formal principles, media-specific realizations, and the cultural work of disparagement in contemporary female-led situation comedies. Subsequently, larger patterns of (gender-based) invective strategies and conventions that define the dynamism of this comedic genre come into view. Her study outlines case studies of popular sitcoms, like Parks and Recreation, Mike & Molly, and the revival of hit-sitcom Roseanne, thereby unearthing how the shows are able to stage humor as mass-mediated deprecation - a signifying practice with its own poetics and politics.

Television Sitcom

Television Sitcom
Author: Brett Mills
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2005-11-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Despite its global reach, longstanding popularity, and immense profitability, sitcom has been repeatedly neglected in theoretical work on television and media. This book demonstrates that this lack needs to be sorely addressed, by dragging analysis of sitcom up to date, with a wealth of contemporary examples, a range of new approaches to the genre, and examination of the roles sitcom and comedy play within society. The book takes as its starting point the variety of ways in which sitcom has traditionally been explored. A chapter on genre examines the history and development of sitcom, and the institutional structures which produce it. There is also analysis of differences between sitcoms produced in a range of countries, and what happens when a programme gets sold abroad and remade. A chapter on representation explores the debates about the ways in which sitcom chooses who to make jokes about and why, and whether this matters. And a chapter on performance argues that this is a vital, and underexplored, aspect of sitcom's funniness, and interrogates the ways in which comic actors make their performance funny. With specific case studies on Will and Grace, The Office, and The Cosby Show, as well as analysis of a broad range of contemporary and historical examples throughout, this book will be of interest to students of sitcom and comedy, as well as those of television and popular culture.

Critiquing the Sitcom

Critiquing the Sitcom
Author: Joanne Morreale
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2002-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780815629832

This is the first anthology that examines the TV sitcom in terms of its treatment of gender, family, class, race, and ethnic issues. The selections range from early shows such as I Remember Mama (George Lipsitz’s “Why Remember Mama? The Changing Face of a Woman’s Narrative”) to the more recent Roseanne (Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s “Roseanne: Unruly Woman as a Domestic Goddess”). The volume also looks unflinchingly at major controversies; for example, the NAACP boycott of the stereotypical yet wildly popular Amos ‘n’ Andy and the queer reading of Laverne and Shirley. These diverse essays constitute a veritable history of postwar American mores. Some are classic, some forgotten, but all indicate the importance of considering text and subtext (social, historic, industrial) in the critical study of television. A final chapter by Joanne Morreale bids sitcoms adieu with the “cultural spectacle of Seinfeld’s last episode.”

The Sitcom Reader

The Sitcom Reader
Author: Mary M. Dalton
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2005-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780791465707

Offers a variety of perspectives on the sitcom genre and its influence on American culture.

TV in the USA [3 volumes]

TV in the USA [3 volumes]
Author: Vincent LoBrutto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1278
Release: 2018-01-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 144082973X

This three-volume set is a valuable resource for researching the history of American television. An encyclopedic range of information documents how television forever changed the face of media and continues to be a powerful influence on society. What are the reasons behind enduring popularity of television genres such as police crime dramas, soap operas, sitcoms, and "reality TV"? What impact has television had on the culture and morality of American life? Does television largely emulate and reflect real life and society, or vice versa? How does television's influence differ from that of other media such as newspapers and magazines, radio, movies, and the Internet? These are just a few of the questions explored in the three-volume encyclopedia TV in the USA: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas. This expansive set covers television from 1950 to the present day, addressing shows of all genres, well-known programs and short-lived series alike, broadcast on the traditional and cable networks. All three volumes lead off with a keynote essay regarding the technical and historical features of the decade(s) covered. Each entry on a specific show investigates the narrative, themes, and history of the program; provides comprehensive information about when the show started and ended, and why; and identifies the star players, directors, producers, and other key members of the crew of each television production. The set also features essays that explore how a particular program or type of show has influenced or reflected American society, and it includes numerous sidebars packed with interesting data, related information, and additional insights into the subject matter.