The Show That Refused To Die : The Rise and Fall Of AMC’s The Killing

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Continuun: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies on 1 September 2015, availalble online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1068724. To view correction statement, see Corrigendum https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1096986.The Show That Refused to Die: The Rise and Fall of AMC’s ‘The Killing’ interrogates the impact of digitalisation on the modern global television industry. Discussing one case study series, the adaptation of Danish crime series, Forbrydelsen (Danmarks Radio (DR), Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK)/Sveriges Television (SVT)/ZDF Enterprises[(2009-2012]/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), to the USA’s The Killing (KMF Films/Fuse Entertainment/Fox Television Studios/The Killing Production [2011-14]) this article examines the complex narrative of cable television’s incursion in the US TV landscape with particular attention to the practices of cable channels HBO, AMC and streaming service, Netflix. With a tight focus on the representation of motherhood, read through maternal workplace legislation, this article contends that the series adaptation exposes hotly debated notions of ‘ideal’ maternity and how they inform attitudes towards those deemed ‘unfit’ for the role. The narrative hostility towards motherhood in The Killing, was notably absent from, Forbrydelsen, and exposes how precarious the adaptation market can be once cultural attitudes towards maternity and maternal rights are laid bare.Peer reviewe

Mothers on American television: the relationship between representation and economic oppression in a neoliberal patriarchal society

This PhD by Publication focuses on the representation of motherhood on ‘quality’ American television and how that is intrinsically linked to women’s political and economic oppression in society. Although this study focuses on contemporary television series, it is grounded in a history of how motherhood has been theorized, its cultural positioning and how this informs the representations of maternity, motherhood and mothering in quality American television drama. Arguing that, in order to understand how patriarchy subjugates women, we need to expose the way patriarchal norms related to motherhood work as, while ‘we know that difference exists, … we don’t understand it as constituted relationally’,1 I propose that cultural attitudes expressed through televisual representations betray a deep-rooted misogyny that ties women to their reproductive potential thus impacting their positioning in society, their employment prospects and a lifetime’s wage prospects. With so many meshes of ideological carriers at work, I conclude that it is urgent to bring them into consciousness and wield that knowledge politically.2 My work brings what is invisible into discourse, what is unconscious into consciousness and teaches us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on women in society more broadly. My original contribution to this field acknowledges ‘quality’ television’s soap opera roots, and, by analysing series from a feminist perspective, shows that much can be revealed about the patriarchal unconscious, how it views its mothers and how women are inevitably linked to their reproductive potential

Tele-branding in TVIII: the network as brand and the programme as brand

In the era of TVIII, characterized by deregulation, multimedia conglomeration, expansion and increased competition, branding has emerged as a central industrial practice. Focusing on the case of HBO, a particularly successful brand in TVIII, this article argues that branding can be understood not simply as a feature of television networks, but also as a characteristic of television programmes. It begins by examining how the network as brand is constructed and conveyed to the consumer through the use of logos, slogans and programmes. The role of programmes in the construction of brand identity is then complicated by examining the sale of programmes abroad, where programmes can be seen to contribute to the brand identity of more than one network. The article then goes on to examine programme merchandising, an increasingly central strategy in TVIII. Through an analysis of different merchandising strategies the article argues that programmes have come to act as brands in their own right, and demonstrates that the academic study of branding not only reveals the development of new industrial practices, but also offers a way of understanding the television programme and its consumption by viewers in a period when the texts of television are increasingly extended across a range of media platforms

The One with the Feminist Critique: Revisiting Millennial Postfeminism with Friends

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism

The Gendered Politics of a Global Recession : A News Media Analysis

All copyrights for the published work remains with the authors. The content in Studies in the Maternal is published non-commercially and non-derivatively under the Creative Commons licenceThis journal article looks at the gendered angle taken by journalists when reporting the recession in North American and British newspapers and how the emphasis on gender hides issues of race and class.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Feminist Television Criticism : Notes and Queries

Peer reviewe

Who Said Crime Doesn’t Pay? : Introduction to Dossier FoxCrime and the CSI franchise in Italy

This dossier focuses on FoxCrime and its acquisition of the internationally successful CSI franchise. Based on transcripts from presentations given at a two-day conference, entitled 'lo schermo Globale: presente e futuro della televisione' ('The Global Screen: present and future of television'), held at the Triennale di Milano in April 2008, it gives insight into how US acquired fictions function in the Italian television marketplace. The transcripts are followed by commentaries, which seek to locate FoxCrime within a longer history of the crime genre in twentieth-century Italy.Peer reviewe

Motherhood and Myth-making : Despatches from the front-line of the US mommy wars

Commentary and Criticism SectionPeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio