Updating the Standard for the Next Generation of Electronic Media Historians

Broadcasting as a field of study is at least 75 years old. Part of the discipline’s folklore has it that Edward R. Murrow took the first radio announcing class ever offered in the U.S. at the then Washington State College in 1928. “It was called community drama, in order to qualify as an academic course,” explained Alexander Kendrick, one of “Murrow’s boys” and the initial biographer of the legendary newsman (Kendrick, 1969, p. 100). Whether this offering was really a historical first is beside the point; what is important for our purposes is that Murrow’s formative educational experience in broadcasting was tellingly pre-professional in orientation, thus setting the appropriate example for the literally tens of thousands of students who followed in his fabled footsteps over the next half-century

Falling Man and Man Men

Mad Men’s opening credit sequence is full of obvious and hidden clues as to what this series is all about. The program is a stylistic hybrid merging elements of Hollywood movies and television programs from the late 1950s along with TV’s contemporaneous “quality” dramas of today. For example, the debt Matt Weiner and his creative team owes to Hitchcock is immediately apparent in this sequence with its pastiche of Saul Bass’s title work from Veritgo (the optical disorientation), North by Northwest (the iconography of the Manhattan skyline), and Psycho (the foreboding strings à la Bernard Herrmann). The use of a protagonist in black silhouette even suggests the 1955-1965 television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where the producer-director steps right into a black silhouetted profile of himself during the opening credits of that show

Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age

From Ken Burns’s documentaries to historical dramas such as Roots, from A&E’s Biography series to CNN, television has become the primary source for historical information for tens of millions of Americans today. Why has television become such a respected authority? What falsehoods enter our collective memory as truths? How is one to know what is real and what is imagined—or ignored—by producers, directors, or writers? Gary Edgerton and Peter Rollins have collected a group of essays that answer these and many other questions. The contributors examine the full spectrum of historical genres, but also institutions such as the History Channel and production histories of such series as The Jack Benny Show, which ran for fifteen years. The authors explore the tensions between popular history and professional history, and the tendency of some academics to declare the past “off limits” to nonscholars. Several of them point to the tendency for television histories to embed current concerns and priorities within the past, as in such popular shows as Quantum Leap and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The result is an insightful portrayal of the power television possesses to influence our culture. Winner of the 2001 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Outstanding Textbook given by the Popular Culture Association Offers much food for thought in this highly visual age. —Alliance (OH) Review As an example of well-reasoned, original research, Television Histories makes an important contribution to the study of the medium. —Anthony Slide, Classic Images This book is even more timely and provocative because much of the material discussed is being rebroadcast now that digital television is opening even more new channels. —Choice An engrossing collection that slides the thorny subject of television, history, and memory under a microscope. . . . Digs deep into a contemporary phenomenon, and its many conclusions are right on target. —Film & History Helps those of us who care about history think more clearly about how television can shape historical thinking among our friends, neighbors, and students. —Florida Historical Quarterly Television Histories, a pioneer work, weaves an inspired and informed interdisciplinary analysis of television and history. The chapters are enlightening, readable, and entertaining; the editors and the authors have produced a work that enriches and strengthens the study of film and history. —Michael Schoenecke The stuff serious thinkers in a media age should read, mark and remember. —Rockland (ME) Courier-Gazette An insightful and important addition to the literature that sheds light on an often controversial subject for professional historians. —Southern Historian Most of the essays are likely to be of considerable value to any attentive student of television. —Television Quarterly Working from the thesis that people learn about history through television more than any other medium, Edgerton and Rollins look at what TV subliminally teaches us by what is shows and does not show. —Varietyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1020/thumbnail.jp

The Essential HBO Reader

The founding of Home Box Office in the early 1970s was a harbinger of the innovations that transformed television as an industry and a technology in the decades that followed. HBO quickly became synonymous with subscription television and became the leading force in cable programming. Having interests in television, motion picture, and home video industries was crucial to its success. HBO diversified into original television and movie production, home video sales, and international distribution as these once-separate entertainment sectors began converging into a global entertainment industry in the mid-1980s. HBO has grown from a domestic movie channel to an international cable-and-satellite network with a presence in over seventy countries. It is now a full-service content provider with a distinctive brand of original programming and landmark shows such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City. The network is widely recognized for its award-winning, innovative and provocative programming, including dramatic series such as Six Feet Under and The Wire, miniseries such as Band of Brothers and Angels in America, comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Def Comedy Jam, sports shows such as Inside the NFL and Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, documentary series such as Taxi Cab Confessions and Autopsy, and six Oscar-winning documentaries between 1999 and 2004. In The Essential HBO Reader, editors Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones bring together an accomplished group of scholars to explain how HBO’s programming transformed the world of cable television and how the network continues to shape popular culture and the television industry. Now, after more than three and a half decades, HBO has won acclaim in four distinct programming areas—drama, comedy, sports, and documentaries—emerging as TV’s gold standard for its breakout series and specials. The Essential HBO Reader provides a comprehensive and compelling examination of HBO’s development into the prototypical entertainment corporation of the twenty-first century. Describes the complexities and ambiguities of the channel, its history, its unique business model, and its individual programs. Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey Jones have assembled a dream team of television scholars, some of whom have been paying attention to HBO since its debut in 1972. There are a lot of essay collections about television out there these days --Robert J. Thompson Director, Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture Sy This is a splendid collection of scholarship and critical thinking. The authors have managed to tame and corral a very important aspect of American media history and yet allowed it to remain daring and unconventional. --Terry Lindvall, author of Surprised by Laughter: The Comic World of C. S. Lewis In the ever-expanding universe of cable, satellite and digital broadcasting, the authors explore how HBO fights to remain the frontrunner in innovative programming. Essential reading! --Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and Coeditors Edgerton and Jones have added a critical component to the study of television and American culture. The result is a fascinating book that is indeed essential reading for anyone with an interest in media history. --Mary Ann Watson, author of Defining Visions: Television and the American Experi Comprehensive and informative on a topic that deserves to be analyzed in-depth. HBO really did write an important new chapter in television history and has not received the scholarly attention that is its due. --Michael T. Marsden, coeditor of In the Eye of the Beholder: Critical Perspectives “An important assessment of the original programming HBO has created in the past few decades—how these programs are derived and what impact they have had. Recommended.”—Choice Because Edgerton and Jones offer such a thorough treatment of HBO\u27s programming, their volume is a useful addition to a growing number of books about American television in the \u27post-network\u27 era. --American Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/1014/thumbnail.jp

The Countdown to Y2KTV and the Arrival of the New Serialists

There is certainly a “before” and “after” to television in America and internationally when considering The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007). More than a half-century after the first stirrings of prime-time drama in the United States, The Sopranos jump started the aesthetic, narrative, and generic potential of TV to new and ever greater heights. Nevertheless, the seminal and innovative nature of The Sopranos was not achieved in an industrial, technological, and aesthetic vacuum. Showrunner David Chase and his creative team were deeply enmeshed in the practices and techniques of broadcast television, even though they and their sponsoring network, HBO, were aspiring to move beyond these institutional parameters. This lead chapter describes and analyzes the business, economic, and artistic transformation happening within the context of a rapidly evolving media marketplace where the firewall between TV and movies eventually came down at the turn of the 21st century because of the industrial and technological changes brought about by convergence. Special attention is paid to innovations in post-1981 U.S. scripted programming as well as The Sopranos’ aftereffect in relation to business, technological, and aesthetic innovations in theatrical film as well as the broadcasting, cable-and-satellite, and OTT (over-the-top content) streaming sectors of the current television industry

Television in America

Television is an ever-evolving and multi-dimensional medium, being at once a technology, an industry, an art form, and an institutional force. In the United States, it emerged as an idea whose time had come at the end of World War II. TV eventually grew and matured into the most influential social and cultural catalyst shaping and reflecting American civilization during the second half of the 20th century. Television revolutionized the way citizens and consumers in the United States learned about and communicated with the world; it also recast and re-envisioned the way they experience themselves and others. More than just escapist entertainment, TV reveals the dynamism and diversity of everyday life in the United States and the evolving nature of the nation’s core values. Television is moreover in a continual state of change and renewal. Its history has developed through a prehistory (before 1948) to a network era (1948–1975), a cable era (1976–1994), and finally the current digital era (1995–present). Today there are more than 650 networks in the U.S. marketplace whereby members of the typical domestic household receive 189 channels and watch more than eight hours of TV a day on average. TV in the 21st century also travels anywhere at any time, given its synergistic relationship with the Internet and a wide array of digital devices. It is now increasingly personalized, interactive, mobile, and on demand. Television is presently a convergent technology, a global industry, a viable art form, a public catalyst, and a complex and dynamic reflection of American society and culture

Ken Burns\u27s America

This is the first book-length study to critically examine the work of Ken Burns, the innovative producer-director as a television auteur, a pivotal programming influence within the industry, and a popular historian who portrays a uniquely personal and compelling version of the country\u27s past for tens of millions of viewers nationwide. Ken Burns\u27s America has a three-fold agenda: First it looks at the ideas and individuals that have influenced Burns in the creation of his easily-recognized style, as well as in the development and maturation of his ideological outlook. Second, the book gives readers a window on the Ken Burns production machine. Gary Edgerton shows us the inner working of Florentine Films. Finally, he looks at Burns as a popular historian who reevaluates the nation\u27s historical legacy from a new generational perspective and, in the process, becomes one of the major cultural commentators of our era. The volume finally takes the full measure of the man and the industry he has helped to create. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/communication_books/1026/thumbnail.jp

Mad Men: Dream Come True TV

Don and Betty Draper live in a picture-perfect world. He is a hard-living advertising executive - a \u27mad man\u27 - on the fast track. She\u27s a Bryn Mawr graduate and former fashion model, now a suburban princess, mother of three children. If they\u27ve everything, why are they so unhappy? Why is their dream come true not enough? This book explores, analyses, celebrates the world of Mad Men in all its aspects, and includes an interview with its Executive Producer and an episode guide. Every few years a new television program comes along to capture and express the zeitgeist. Mad Men is now that show. Since premiering in July 2007, it\u27s won many awards and is syndicated across the globe. Its imprint is evident throughout contemporary culture, from features to fashions and online debate. Its creator Matthew Weiner, a former exec producer on The Sopranos , has created again compelling, complex characters, this time in the sophisticated go-go world of Madison Avenue through the 1960s, with the excessive drinking and smoking, as well as the playing out of the prejudices and anxieties of an era long neglected in popular culture. Mad Men is a zeitgeist show of the early twenty-first century, this book demonstrates, partly because its characters are an earlier, confused and conflicted version of ourselves, trying to make the best of a future unfolding at breakneck speed. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/communication_books/1028/thumbnail.jp