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ISSN: 1329-878X |
Contents
AbstractsPopular ‘series’ drama in TV’s multi-channel age, Trisha DunleavyDevised to introduce the themed section of this MIA issue and the ‘popular’ area of TV drama that is its focus, this paper examines the contemporary drama series form and outlines some key institutional and cultural conditions for its production in non-American countries. Interested in the commercial pressures being brought to bear on drama by intensifying prime-time competition and increasing audience fragmentation, the paper looks at how the series, in particular, has adapted to these. It assesses the contribution of three pervasive approaches to this area of drama: ‘recombination’ (Gitlin, 1994), ‘flexi-narrative’ (Nelson, 1997) and ‘must see-TV’ (Jankovich and Lyons, 2003). To foreground some specific challenges for locally produced drama in the emerging era of television ‘plenty’, a case study of New Zealand TV drama follows. Although its domestic TV drama has a 40-year tradition, New Zealand’s efforts to maintain profile and diversity in this meta-genre have been frustrated by its position as a small, English-speaking country for whom leading American and British imports have been popular, affordable and available. Risky and commercially fragile in comparison with these imports, the position of New Zealand TV drama has never been guaranteed to the extent that it is reliant on the support and supply of public funding. Since the mid-1990s, these problems have combined with the challenges of multi-channel competition in television. While the resulting pressures have left some forms of local TV drama as ‘endangered species’, it is the popular, long-form genres — the drama series, soaps and sitcoms — that have shown the greatest resilience. A ‘new wave’ in British television drama, Lez CookeIn recent years, American television drama series have been celebrated as ‘quality television’ at the expense of their British counterparts, yet in the 1970s and 1980s British television was frequently proclaimed to be ‘the best television in the world’. This article will consider this critical turnaround and argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the last few years have seen the emergence of a ‘new wave’ in British television drama, comparable in its thematic and stylistic importance to the new wave that emerged in British cinema and television in the early 1960s. While the 1960s new wave was distinctive for its championing of a new working-class realism, the recent ‘new wave’ is more heterogeneous, encompassing drama series such as This Life, Cold Feet, The Cops, Queer as Folk, Clocking Off and Shameless. While the subject-matter of these dramas is varied, collectively they share an ambition to ‘reinvent’ British television drama for a new audience and a new cultural moment. No longer ‘the best in the world’: The challenge of exporting British television drama, Jeanette SteemersWithin the broader context of globalisation and the transformation of world television markets, this article sets out to address the extent of British drama’s international presence, and the factors which either promote or inhibit that presence in Britain’s major television export markets in the United States, Western Europe and Australasia. Alongside an examination of recent policy debates, which raised concerns about the exportability of British drama series, this article pinpoints and assesses the culturally specific factors that affect overseas acceptance of British drama. These include the continuing decline of traditional public service channels, the different needs of distinctive nationally based television ecologies, and the growing demand for more locally originated programming. Sales of British drama are stagnant or declining, but alternative export strategies, including coproduction and the export of scripted formats, have had only limited success. Increasingly, Britain’s export successes are dominated by programming genres (children’s, factual) and entertainment formats, which can be indigenised and adapted by the receiving culture, and in their more ‘universal’ appeal are quite different from the identifiably British detective series, historical and literary-based drama on which Britain’s international success was judged in the past. The ‘sailor’ and the ‘peasant’: The Italian police series between foreign and domestic, Milly BuonannoApplying the categorisation made by Walter Benjamin as regards popular storytelling — stories told by sailors, and stories told by peasants, the former being internationally oriented and the latter locally based — this paper reconsiders the history of Italian police drama as in transition from ‘foreign’ or international to ‘domestic’ or national/local storytelling. This transition follows three phases: the adaptation of foreign classics in the first two decades of the Italian television; the emergence of the domestic voice in the 1970s and 1980s, when locally based police series were produced, although in the context of a television supply widely internationalised by massive slates of foreign imports; and the establishment and popularity of the now hegemonic formula, all’italiana, from the 1990s onwards. The contemporary police drama is now a fully localised genre, yet this doesn’t disguise the footprints of a trans-nationalisation which is still underway, whereby the sailor’s and the peasant’s voices converge and merge. The popularisation of Dutch TV drama and the rise of multicultural police series, Joost de Bruin and Joke HermesThe Dutch police series is a new TV drama genre in the Netherlands. During the last five years, several broadcasters have aired new domestic police series, leading the sub-genre to gain a stable position in the prime-time television schedules. This paper analyses the major transitions that have led to the prevalence of Dutch police series: the shift from a public to a dual system of broadcasting in the Netherlands; the transition from broadcasters each producing their own drama to participation of independent producers; the change from the single play as the main genre of Dutch TV drama to the expansion of popular drama genres such as soaps, police series and sitcoms; and, most importantly, an alteration in the identities that are represented in the storylines of Dutch TV drama. A close look at these transitions shows how the Dutch police series became a remarkably ‘multicultural’ drama form. Endangered genre: English-language television drama in Singapore, Pieter AquiliaFor 40 years, the Singapore government has successfully promoted the English language for its citizens to operate in an international Western economy. However, English-language television drama, with no cultural-linguistic roots in Singapore’s multi-Asian society, has been heavily criticised for its lack of quality in comparison to its successful Chinese-language counterpart. A case study of the prime-time drama @Moulmein High demonstrates how state involvement in English-language television has an impact on drama’s content, popularity and commercial aims. This paper explores whether a television network endowed with the responsibility of maintaining a national value system can produce a TV drama series able to win favour with an increasingly English-educated local audience, and whether the drama can translate to television markets outside Singapore. Television drama in China: Remaking the market, Michael KeaneThis paper discusses the evolution of television serial drama in China. It argues that Chinese television drama production has progressed through three periods: industrial (1958–89), market (1990–2002), and most recently interpersonal (2003 onwards). These three stages of development are in turn associated with standardised production according to state-directed formulae, outbreaks of producer autonomy, and celebration of modern lifestyles and consumer culture. The paper provides an overview of the development of drama production during these three periods, and notes a shift from ‘socialist reality’ towards contemporary popular reality. ‘Local (people) mean the world to us’: Australia’s regional newspapers and the ‘closer to readers’ assumption, Jacqui Ewart and Brian L. MasseyThe intersections between journalism and democracy are explored in this paper through an analysis of the ‘voices’ through which the news is ‘told’ by specific segments of the Australian print media. We argue that evidence of the extent to which a newspaper fulfils its roles to democracy and society is partially found in the range of sources quoted in the news stories it publishes, and in the prominence and dominance it gives to various types of sources in those stories. Our goal was to quantify the validity of the widely held assumption that, in Australia, regional newspapers are closer than metropolitan newspapers to their readers. This suggestion guided our content analysis of the types of news story sources quoted or paraphrased in the general news published in four regional newspapers and one metropolitan newspaper in one Australian state. The assumption of closeness to readers for Australian regional newspapers did not hold up well in this test. Indie rocks! Mapping independent video game design, Jason WilsonThough many video games scholars and journalists tend to train their sights on ‘big gaming’, there is a vibrant and varied sector of independent game design, production and distribution. Indie gaming is not a unitary field and, as well as producing a diverse range of games, indie designers occupy a range of positions vis-à-vis mainstream video gaming. Therefore, while this article gives examples of this diversity, it is by no means an exhaustive account. Industry watchers and events are together suggesting that low-cost, independent modes of production will become increasingly important and prevalent in the immediate future. Scholars and practitioners alike will do well to understand the historical trajectories of indie design, and to keep pace with its present and future diversity. Wilderness and the loaded language of news, Libby LesterThis paper addresses the politicisation of the idea of wilderness in the Australian news media, and questions how journalistic labelling in news copy intensified this process. It is based on research into the coverage of the Franklin Dam blockade in the summer of 1982–83, the first wilderness campaign to attain global stature. Specifically, it analyses the coverage of the 10-week protest in the Melbourne Age and the Hobart Mercury, and draws on the work of Allan Bell, Teun van Dijk and Roger Fowler to discuss how journalists and their readers formed an ‘alliance of shared meaning’. Book Reviews, Edited by Maureen Burns Atkins, Barry, More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form
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