Encyclopedia of TV Shows 1925-2007 (2024)

Television Series of the 1990s.pdf

From Spic to Spice: Latinas and Latinos on U.S. Television

Excerpts from CHAPTER ONE

Family? Everyone seems to have his or her own opinion as to what were the great sitcoms, often associating a particular show with a specific time of life that emotionally meant something to them. We hum the theme songs, repeat the funny phrases, and even copy of the behavior of the characters that have become our living room friends. Sitcoms are the most popular type of programming on the most influential medium in history and have had a major impact on how we think and what we think about. Television is a cultural reference point for most of us, a type of shorthand that makes it easy to carry on a conversation. Columnist Ellen Goodman wrote that to those born since the baby boom of the late '40s, " All history begins with television. " We compare ourselves to those on TV, we change how we dress and cut our hair and talk based on the latest television trend. Viewers pick up catch phrases and turn them into sidesplitting party parodies that in turn become part of our culture. " Not, " as Jerry Seinfeld would say, " that there's anything wrong with that! " Over time sitcoms acquire a kind of second life, where people who don't even watch a show perceive the program as being extremely influential. " Everyone watched Seinfeld " is a common misconception when in reality only around 20 percent of the population was tuned in on any given week. " Malcolm in the Middle is the hot new show, " people shouted in 2000, yet it finished its first season in 19 th place with less than 15 percent of America watching and soon lost almost half of those viewers. The media reported that Sex and the City was " a huge hit, " but the ratings showed that only seven million people watched out of a population of over 280 million people—that's less than three percent! The truth is few of the situation comedies in the history of television have had much long-term cultural impact. While Frasier was a darling of the critics, was almost always near the top of the Nielsen ratings in the mid-'90s, and holds the record for winning the most Emmy Awards, only about 18 percent of the people in America regularly watched the show at its peak and 25 years from now viewers may wonder why it's being rerun in the middle of the night on TV Land. How can a critically acclaimed series like Frasier end up having less cultural impact than a show like TGIF teen show Boy Meets World? The difference can be seen in examples from 1957: the highest-rated sitcom on TV at that time was the #2-ranked Danny Thomas Show (also known at Make Room for Daddy) while the Emmy winner that year for Best Comedy was Phil Silvers' You'll Never Get Rich (which it would win three years in a row). Neither of these shows are familiar to viewers below the age of 50 today

Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (Reading Contemporary Television

Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism: Bobby Lee, MADtv, and the De(con)structive Impulse of Korean American Comedy

The Velvet Light Trap, 2011

HBO: Brand Management and Subscriber Aggregation: 1972-2007

This is a copy of my PhD thesis, completed in 2011 at the University of Exeter. It represents a new history of Home Box Office, and particularly considers the importance of analysing the early history of the company for understanding its later success as a quality programming brand. As the thesis was researched and written between 2007 and 2011, its historical scope only goes up to 2007, with some mention of later series. It doesn't cover Game of Thrones or other recent HBO series, but I'm happy that certain trends identified in the thesis are still going strong. Feel free to contact me for questions about the thesis.

A Storytelling Machine: The Complexity and Revolution of Narrative Television (Between, 2016)

García, Alberto N. "A Storytelling Machine: The Complexity and Revolution of Narrative Television." Between [Online], 6.11 (2016): n. pag. Web. 24 Jun. 2016, 2016

This article analyses how TV fiction, in the last fifteen years, has become one of the most stimulating and successful vehicles to narrate complex and daring stories. The article is divided into two parts. In the first, armed with narratological and poetic elements, we will define the serial story, stripping away the husk of its principal forms and explain why it is now the best media for telling lengthy stories. In the second part we will pause to examine specifically variations on the traditional story: alternate universes, time jumps, coincidence between diegetic time in the story and real time and other mechanisms that have made television fiction the most daring way for telling stories.

Abracadabra: Key Agents of Mediation that Define, Create, and Maintain TV Fandom

MA thesis, 2012

This is a copy of my MA thesis, completed in 2012 at Georgia State University. From a media industries, fan studies, and emerging socio-cultural public relations perspective, this project pulls back the Hollywood curtain to explore two questions: 1) How do TV public relations practitioners and key tastemaker/gatekeeper media define, create, build, and maintain fandom?; and 2) How do they make meaning of fandom and their agency/role in fan creation from their position of industrial producers, cultural intermediaries, members of the audience, and as fans themselves? This project brings five influential, working public relations and media professionals into a conversation about two case studies from the 2010-2011 television season -- broadcast network CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 and basic cable network AMC’s The Walking Dead. Each of these shows speaks to fandom in particular ways and are representative of the industry’s current approaches in luring specific audiences to TV. This study shows that the relationship between entertainment publicists and media is dynamic, intertwined, complex, and historically hidden. INDEX WORDS: Public relations, Television, Media, Multimedia, Audience, Fandom, AMC, CBS

"'Be Moviedom's Guest in Your Own Easy Chair': Hollywood, Radio and the Movie Adaptation Series,"

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 33 (01), 24-54, 2013

Prior to the 1950s Hollywood films routinely disappeared from view on completion of their cinema release. From the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s, however, many films enjoyed a remarkable afterlife courtesy of audio adaptations on US radio. While Lux Radio Theatre, the premier and most high-profile example, has been much discussed in historical work on broadcasting and cinema, this essay reveals that the movie adaptation series was a much more extensive and significant radio genre – which includes such rarely discussed series as Academy Award, Hollywood Star Time, Old Gold Comedy Theatre, Theatre of Romance and Screen Director’s Playhouse. Drawing on a wide array of secondary materials and primary sources – including newspapers, fan magazines, and entertainment and advertising trade journals – the essay explores the significance of this prolific radio genre as a site of negotiation between the broadcasting and cinema industries as they vied for domination of mainstream entertainment. It examines the collaboration and competition between diverse interests groups within these industries – including broadcasting networks and advertising agencies, film production companies, exhibitors and movie stars – as they sought to capitalize on the emerging synergies between radio and cinema. As a programming concept the movie adaptation series provides fascinating insights into the developing liaisons between two predominant popular media of the pre-television era, emerging as perhaps the signature genre of network radio’s Hollywood era.

Alan Bisbort Media scandals Greenwood Press (2008)