The Short Season and Short Asides

13Jun09

I’ve got a few random thoughts that have been piling up without sufficient mass to justify a full post. So here’s a compilation of stuff passing through my mind, Larry King style.
- I’ve not tried to do a full account or analysis of the network upfronts or planned 2009-10 season. But in reading about the [...]

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Tags: breaking bad, in treatment, pushing daisies, up

Mulling the future of public access TV

31Mar09

Since I moved to Vermont in 2002, I have been on the board of Middlebury Community Television, our local public access channel. Yesterday, the board sponsored a community media forum, where we invited members of our community to come together to discuss the role of a small public access channel in a small town today [...]

Filed under: Media Politics, Middlebury, TV Industry, Technology, Television, Vermont   |  4 Comments
Tags: public access

Jump-starting Dollhouse

25Mar09

I’ve finally caught up with Dollhouse, which had been lingering a bit long on my TiVo. As anyone paying attention to the extratextual buzz knows, last week’s episode, “Man on the Street,” was hyped to deliver the narrative payoff and higher stakes that many feel the series has lacked. I concur with the consensus buzz: [...]

Filed under: Narrative, TV Industry, TV Shows, Television   |  5 Comments
Tags: alias, dollhouse

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney

14Feb09

My textbook, Television and American Culture, has hit the streets (or at least the postal system – order yours now!). I received my first copy yesterday, and am happy to say that it looks great. This is due not to my own work (I’m solely to blame for the content), but the excellent staff at [...]

Filed under: Books, Copyright, Fair Use, TV Industry, TV Textbook, Television   |  6 Comments
Tags: abc, disney

NBC’s scheduled self-destruction: Affiliates, rise up!

23Dec08

A few people have asked me for my take on NBC’s odd move, announced a couple of weeks ago, to abandon to dark forces schedule Jay Leno in the 10:00 pm timeslot. I don’t have much to add beyond what Derek Kompare, Alan Sepinwall, and Jonathan Gray have said, save for one key perspective: the [...]

Filed under: TV Industry, Television   |  4 Comments
Tags: affiliates, leno, nbc

Rethinking Heroes and Mea Culpas

16Nov07

I’m down in Cambridge for a few days, attending a double-decker of conferences. First up, Futures of Entertainment 2, a two-day meetings of the minds between media industry folks and scholars, and then Unboxing TV, a set of meetings among a small number of television scholars exploring the future of both the medium and the [...]

Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Narrative, TV Industry, TV Shows, Television   |  9 Comments
Tags: conferences, Heroes, MIT-FOE2

Television writers – on strike, but off-base

11Nov07

The writers’ strike is reaching at the one week point. Since my last post, an 11th hour negotiating session led the writers’ to inexplicably cave on one of their chief demands, doubling the DVD residuals. Ken Levine offers the explanation – the studios had suggested that pulling DVDs from the table would yield a new [...]

Filed under: Fandom, Film Industry, New Media, TV Industry, TV Shows, Technology, Television   |  13 Comments
Tags: Heroes, Lost, strike, wga

The Strike

04Nov07

The big news in the world of American television is the upcoming strike of the Writer’s Guild of America, planned to start Monday, November 5. While I’m not an expert on the convoluted world of Hollywood labor policies, I thought I’d blog a bit about what’s going on and offer a bit of analysis from [...]

Filed under: Film Industry, TV Industry, Television   |  6 Comments
Tags: labor, strike, wga

It’s Always Misanthropic in Philadelphia

13Sep07

I started this blog for a number of reasons – to share random thoughts about TV, to test drive my scholarly writing, and to network with interesting people among them. One reason I’d never considered was that blogging would lead to getting swag. Not that I’m against swag – I’ll go on-the-record as pro-swag. But [...]

Filed under: TV Industry, TV Shows, Television   |  2 Comments
Tags: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Copyright and Television

13Jul07

Update: The book will be out soon – details on the Television & American Culture website.
My major project for this summer is to finish (or come real close!) a draft of my textbook, Television and American Culture. The goal of the book is to introduce television through a topical structure, using six basic facets to [...]

Filed under: Academia, Copyright, Fair Use, Media Politics, Media Studies, New Media, TV Industry, TV Textbook, Technology, Television   |  4 Comments

The demise of the ‘Seven Dirty Words’ regime

05Jun07

An appeals court decision on Monday ruled that the FCC’s new “tough on obscenity” policy overreached their purview by issuing harsh fines for “fleeting expletives” on television. While the FCC has traditionally maintained that it has the right to fine broadcasters for airing obscene content, in the post-nipplegate era they have ratcheted up fines for [...]

Filed under: Censorship, Media Politics, TV Industry   |  1 Comment

Fun with ratings

26May07

The 2006-07 Nielsen Ratings chart is out. I always love perusing these lists more than the weekly Top 20s, as the deeper recesses of the schedule shows many of the ambiguities and randomness of the television industry and their decisions to renew or cancel a series. While the measurement of ratings itself is pretty questionable [...]

Filed under: TV Industry, Viewers   |  5 Comments

Mourning Veronica

17May07

I recently argued that we should accept the end of a long-running series like Gilmore Girls instead of holding out for the promise of an infinite run. Well, today I need to reconsider – The CW has decided not to renew Veronica Mars for a fourth season. While the show has certainly declined from its [...]

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Storytelling technologies

13May07

First, go read David Bordwell’s mini-essay on DVDs and cinema storytelling – I’ll wait here.
As he frequently does, Bordwell writes engagingly about things that you think you’ve already thought of, but he walks through the issue more clearly and comprehensively than anyone else, and by the end, what you thought you knew has to be [...]

Filed under: Narrative, TV Industry, Technology   |  3 Comments

There will be no Zombie Season

07May07

I guess ABC reads this blog! Just two days after me writing about the benefits of television programs ending, ABC has publicly announced that Lost will run for three more seasons of 16 episodes, ending in 2010. As far as I know, this is a first for American network TV: to stipulate a finite boundedness [...]

Filed under: Narrative, TV Industry   |  2 Comments
Tags: Lost