Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies

This article seeks to intervene in the ‘television aesthetics’ versus ‘media and cultural studies’ debate. It argues that aesthetic evaluation does not necessarily rely upon bad textual others or result in canon construction. It engages with Bourdieu in order to demonstrate that his account of cultural capital and distinction is more nuanced than is suggested by its uptake by scholars who want to use it to argue against evaluative activity. Finally, it argues that television aesthetics cannot be divorced from media and cultural studies to the extent that some of its practitioners appear to want.

Nevelot (Eagles) is an Israeli miniseries about two elderly men who, in their youth, fought for a Jewish Zionist underground movement in Palestine, and who in the present-day, embark upon an all-out, killing spree across the city of Tel Aviv, targeting exclusively the young. Whilst it does not directly address television (TV) per se, key scenes and paratexts convey that Nevelot is by no means ‘regular TV’, and that watching it constitutes a viewing experience which differs altogether from ‘regular TV viewing’; a practice often associated with passivity, femininity and victimhood. Employing terms from Zionist, gender and cultural discursive fields, Nevelot offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary Israeli society and the TV content it produces.

This study examines whether the award-winning news show The Newsroom depicted on HBO practises what John McManus defined as market-driven journalism. McManus posited that organizations practising market-driven journalism compete in the four markets he describes in his market theory for news production. This study found that The Newsroom depicts an organization that does indeed practise market-driven journalism, with results interpreted through the lens of market theory for news production.

Historically, the majority of work on British children’s television has adopted either an institutional or an audience focus, with the texts themselves often overlooked. This neglect has meant that questions of representation in British children’s television – including issues such as family, gender, class or ethnicity – have been infrequently analysed in the UK context. In this article, we adopt a primarily qualitative methodology and analyse the various textual manifestations of ‘family’, group or community as represented in a selected number of BBC preschool programmes. In doing so, we question the (limited amount of) international work that has examined representations of the family in children’s television and argue that nuclear family structures do not predominate in this sphere.

This article seeks to examine the notion of a ‘history boom’ on UK television (TV) during the second half of the 1990s and 2000s. It does this by sampling the UK TV schedule between 1982 and 2012, presenting material from interviews with leading producers and commissioners, and conducting an analysis of key programmes. What emerges is the contrary notion of a ‘history dip’ between the late 1980s and early1990s, which in turn reveals an earlier high level of history programme output on UK TV. By adding to the previous accounts of history TV production, this article comments on a tendency in media history towards a ‘history of the victor’, with the attendant danger of overlooking important periods of televisual output and industrial transformation.

This article considers possible futures for television (TV) studies, imagining how the discipline might evolve more productively over the next 10 years and what practical steps are necessary to move towards those outcomes. Conducted as a round-table discussion between leading figures in television history and archives, the debate focuses on the critical issue of archives, considering and responding to questions of access/inaccessibility, texts/contexts, commercial/symbolic value, impact and relevance. These questions reflect recurrent concerns when selecting case studies for historical TV research projects: how difficult is it to access the material (when it survives)? What obstacles might be faced (copyright, costs, etc.) when disseminating findings to a wider public?

The relationship between the roles of ‘researcher’ and ‘archivist’ appears closer and more mutually supportive in TV studies than in other academic disciplines, with many people in practice straddling the traditional divide between the two roles, combining specialisms that serve to further scholarship and learning as well as the preservation of, and broad public engagements with, collections. The Research Excellence Framework’s imperative for academic researchers to achieve ‘impact’ in broader society encourages active and creative collaboration with those based in public organizations, such as the British Film Institute (BFI), who have a remit to reach a wider public. The discussion identifies various problems and successes experienced in collaboration between the academic, public and commercial sectors in the course of recent and ongoing research projects in TV studies.