Television Style

Author: Jeremy G. Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135890692
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Style matters. Television relies on style—setting, lighting, videography, editing, and so on—to set moods, hail viewers, construct meanings, build narratives, sell products, and shape information. Yet, to date, style has been the most understudied aspect of the medium. In this book, Jeremy G. Butler examines the meanings behind television’s stylstic conventions. Television Style dissects how style signifies and what significance it has had in specific television contexts. Using hundreds of frame captures from television programs, Television Style dares to look closely at television. Miami Vice, ER, soap operas, sitcoms, and commercials, among other prototypical television texts, are deconstructed in an attempt to understand how style functions in television. Television Style also assays the state of style during an era of media convergence and the ostensible demise of network television. This book is a much needed introduction to television style, and essential reading at a moment when the medium is undergoing radical transformation, perhaps even a stylistic renaissance. Discover additional examples and resources on the companion website: www.tvstylebook.com.

Television Style

Author: Jeremy G. Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135890706
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Television Aesthetics and Style

Author: Steven Peacock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 162356249X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form. Television Aesthetics and Style provides a unique and vital intervention in the field, raising key questions about television's artistic properties and possibilities. Through a series of case-studies by internationally renowned scholars, the collection takes a radical step forward in understanding TV's stylistic achievements.

Televisuality

Author: John T Caldwell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978816227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 667

Book Description
Although the "decline" of network television in the face of cable programming was an institutional crisis of television history, John Caldwell's classic volume Televisuality reveals that this decline spawned a flurry of new production initiatives to reassert network authority. Television in the 1980s hyped an extensive array of exhibitionist practices to raise the prime-time marquee above the multi-channel flow. Televisuality demonstrates the cultural logic of stylistic exhibitionism in everything from prestige series (Northern Exposure) and "loss-leader" event-status programming (War and Remembrance) to lower "trash" and "tabloid" forms (Pee-Wee's Playhouse and reality TV). Caldwell shows how "import-auteurs" like Oliver Stone and David Lynch were stylized for prime time as videographics packaged and tamed crisis news coverage. By drawing on production experience and critical and cultural analysis, and by tying technologies to aesthetics and ideology, Televisuality is a powerful call for desegregation of theory and practice in media scholarship and an end to the willful blindness of "high theory."

Television

Author: Jeremy G. Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136925821
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
For nearly two decades, Television: Critical Methods and Applications has served as the foremost guide to television studies. Designed for the television studies course in communication and media studies curricula, Television explains in depth how television programs and commercials are made and how they function as producers of meaning. Author Jeremy G. Butler shows the ways in which camera style, lighting, set design, editing, and sound combine to produce meanings that viewers take away from their television experience. He supplies students with a whole toolbox of implements to disassemble television and read between the lines, teaching them to incorporate critical thinking into their own television viewing. The fourth edition builds upon the pedagogy of previous editions to best accommodate current modes of understanding and teaching television. Highlights of the fourth edition include: New chapter and part organization to reflect the current approach to teaching television—with greatly expanded methods and theories chapters. An entirely new chapter on modes of production and their impact on what you see on the screen. Discussions integrated throughout on the latest developments in television’s on-going convergence with other media, such as material on transmedia storytelling and YouTube’s impact on video distribution. Over three hundred printed illustrations, including new and better quality frame grabs of recent television shows and commercials. A companion website featuring color frame grabs, a glossary, flash cards, and editing and sound exercises for students, as well as PowerPoint presentations, sample syllabi and other materials for instructors. Links to online videos that support examples in the text are also provided. With its distinctive approach to examining television, Television is appropriate for courses in television studies, media criticism, and general critical studies.

Sitcom Style

Author: Diana Friedman
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN:
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
From Archie Bunker's Barcalounger to the framed peephole on Friends,a sitcom's decor sets the tone of the nation's favourite shows - and defines the lives of its characters. Sitcom Style brings readers a behind-the-scenes peek inside more than two dozen of the most recognisable TV homes and offers readers design tips for their own homes.

Seeing It on Television

Author: Max Sexton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501359401
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US 'High-end' Series investigates new categories of high-end drama and explores the appeal of programmes from Netflix, Sky Atlantic/HBO, National Geographic, FX and Cinemax. An investigation of contemporary US Televisuality provides insight into the appeal of upscale programming beyond facts about its budget, high production values and/or feature cinematography. Rather, this book focuses on how the construction of meaning often relies on cultural discourse, production histories, as well as on tone, texture or performance, which establishes the locus of engagement and value within the series. Max Sexton and Dominic Lees discuss how complex production histories lie behind the rise of the US high-end series, a form that reflects industrial changes and the renegotiation of formal strategies. They reveal how the involvement of many different people in the production process, based on new relationships of creative authority, complicates our understanding of 'original content'. This affects the construction of stylistics and the viewing strategies required by different shows. The cultural, as well as industrial, strategies of recent television drama are explored in The Young Pope, The Knick, Stranger Things, Mars, Fargo, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, and Vinyl.

Breaking Bad

Author: David P. Pierson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073917925X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, edited by David P. Pierson, explores the contexts, politics, and style of AMC's original series Breaking Bad. The book's first section locates and addresses the series from several contemporary social contexts, including neo-liberalism, its discourses and policies, the cultural obsession with the economy of time and its manipulation, and the epistemological principles and assumptions of Walter White's criminal alias Heisenberg. Section two investigates how the series characterizes and intersects with current cultural politics, such as male angst and the re-emergence of hegemonic masculinity, the complex portrayal of Latinos, and the depiction of physical and mental impairment and disability. The final section takes a close look at the series' distinctive visual, aural, and narrative stylistics. Under examination are Breaking Bad's unique visual style whereby image dominates sound, the distinct role and use of beginning teaser segments to disorient and enlighten audiences, the representation of geographic space and place, the position of narrative songs to complicate viewer identification, and the integral part that emotions play as a form of dramatic action in the series.

Appreciating the Art of Television

Author: Ted Nannicelli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317555570
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
Contemporary television has been marked by such exceptional programming that it is now common to hear claims that TV has finally become an art. In Appreciating the Art of Television, Nannicelli contends that televisual art is not a recent development, but has in fact existed for a long time. Yet despite the flourishing of two relevant academic subfields—the philosophy of film and television aesthetics—there is little scholarship on television, in general, as an art form. This book aims to provide scholars active in television aesthetics with a critical overview of the relevant philosophical literature, while also giving philosophers of film a particular account of the art of television that will hopefully spur further interest and debate. It offers the first sustained theoretical examination of what is involved in appreciating television as an art and how this bears on the practical business of television scholars, critics, students, and fans—namely the comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of specific televisual artworks.

The Craft of Criticism

Author: Michael Kackman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134749236
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 930

Book Description
With contributions from 30 leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies. Chapters address various methods of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, policy, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextuality and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses emergent technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and digital humanities. Each chapter includes an intellectual history of a particular method or approach, a discussion of why and how it was used to study a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth review of a case study drawn from the author's own research. Together, the chapters in this collection give media critics a complete toolbox of essential critical media studies methodologies.