Comedy and the Mockumentary
The mockumentary: where the documentary form meets fictional events. Mockumentary productions are often used to analyze or comment on current events and issues by using a fictional setting, or to parody the documentary form itself [1]. It therefore challenges documentary’s claim…
Reality Television
So what is reality TV? Several things come to mind when I think about reality TV. Firstly, the subjects are typically unknown, they try to represent the everyday man or woman. Secondly they aim to inform and educate with an…
“It’s not TV, it’s HBO”: Branding, Genre and the idea of ‘Quality TV’
No contemporary show is ‘pure’ in terms of genre, they instead have a multiplicity of genre conventions. Jason Mittel wrote, “Genre definitions are no more natural than the texts that they seem to categorize. Genres are cultural products constituted by…
The Television Fan
French scholar Michel de Certeau asserts that audiences are not passive consumers but instead active interpreters of media texts. This follows Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model of communication first developed in 1973 in which he proposed that individuals create their own…
Live Television: The Ordinary and The Extraordinary
As a technology, the television’s introduction was negotiated through a series of discourses bringing the family together as people gather collectively to watch a program, and quite often these shows are dramas about families like The Simpsons and Modern Family….