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Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society riven by racism and inequality. In Connecting The Wire, Stanley Corkin presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social “givens.\" In The Wire’s gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life, and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.

\"Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised.\" Most of us have encountered this warning while watching television at some point. It is typically attached to a brand of reality crime TV that Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance call \"crimesploitation\": spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting \"real\" criminal behavior and its consequences. This book examines their enduring popularity in American culture. Analyzing the structure and content of several popular crimesploitation shows, including Cops, Dog: The Bounty Hunter, and To Catch a Predator, as well as newer examples like Making a Murderer and Don't F**K with Cats, Kaplan and LaChance highlight the troubling nature of the genre: though it presents itself as ethical and righteous, its entertainment value hinges upon suffering. Viewers can imagine themselves as deviant and ungovernable like the criminals in the show, thereby escaping a law-abiding lifestyle. Alternatively, they can identify with law enforcement officials, exercising violence, control, and \"justice\" on criminal others. Crimesploitation offers a sobering look at the depictions of criminals, policing, and punishment in modern America.

The police drama has been one of the longest running and most popular genres in American television. In TV Cops, Jonathan Nichols-Pethick argues that, perhaps more than any other genre, the police series in all its manifestations-from Hill Street Blues to Miami Vice to The Wire-embodies the full range of the cultural dynamics of television. Exploring the textual, industrial, and social contexts of police shows on American television, this book demonstrates how polices drama play a vital role in the way we understand and engage issues of social order that most of us otherwise experience only in such abstractions as laws and crime statistics. And given the current diffusion and popularity of the form, we might ask a number of questions that deserve serious critical attention: Under what circumstances have stories about the police proliferated in popular culture? What function do these stories serve for both the television industry and its audiences? Why have these stories become so commercially viable for the television industry in particular? How do stories about the police help us understand current social and political debates about crime, about the communities we live in, and about our identities as citizens?

Branded Women in U.S. Television examines how The Real Housewives of New York City, Martha Stewart, and other female entrepreneurs create branded televised versions of the iconic U.S. housewife. Using their television presence to establish and promote their own product lines, including jewelry, cookware, clothing, and skincare, they become the primary physical representations of these brands. While their businesses are serious and seriously lucrative, especially reality television enables a certain representational flexibility that allows participants to create campy and sometimes tongue-in-cheek personas. Peter Bjelskou explores their innovative branding strategies, specifically the complex relationships between their entrepreneurial endeavors and their physical bodies, attires, tastes, and personal histories. Generally these branded women speak volumes about their contemporaneous political environments, and this book illustrates how they, and many other women in U.S. television history, are indicative of larger societal trends and structures.

The influence of classic film noir on the style and substance of television in the 1950s and 1960s has persisted to the present day. Its pervasiveness suggests the vitality of the noir depiction of human experience and the importance of TV for transmitting the legacy of film noir and producing new forms of noir. Noir television is also noteworthy for its capacity to raise philosophical questions about the nature of the human condition. Drawing from the fields of philosophy, media studies, and literature, the contributors to The Philosophy of TV Noir illuminate the best of noir television, including such shows as Dragnet, The Fugitive, Miami Vice, The X-Files, CSI, and 24.

A new world of religious satire illuminated through the layers of religion and humor that make up the The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy.Drawing on the worldviews put forth by three wildly popular animated shows -The Simpsons,South Park, andFamily Guy- David Feltmate demonstrates how ideas about religion's proper place in American society are communicated through comedy. The book includes discussion of a wide range of American religions, including Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Native American Religions, New Religious Movements, \"Spirituality,\" Hinduism, and Atheism. Along the way, readers are shown that jokes about religion are influential tools for teaching viewers how to interpret and judge religious people and institutions. Feltmate, develops a picture of how each show understands and communicates what constitutes good religious practice as well as which traditions they seek to exclude on the basis of race and ethnicity, stupidity, or danger. From Homer Simpson's spiritual journey during a chili-pepper induced hallucination toSouth Park'sboxing match between Jesus and Satan to Peter Griffin's worship of the Fonz, each show uses humor to convey a broader commentary about the role of religion in public life. Through this examination, an understanding of what it means to each program to be a good religious American becomes clear. Drawn to the Godsis a book that both fans and scholars will enjoy as they expose the significance of religious satire in these iconic television programs.

Reality television remains a pervasive form of television programming within our culture. The new mantra is go big or go home, be weird or be invisible. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, for example, are arguably two of the most compelling reality television programs currently airing because of their uniqueness and ability to transcend traditional boundaries in this genre. Reality Television: Oddities of Culture seeks to explore not the mundane reality programs, but rather those programs that illustrate the odd, unique or peculiar aspects of our society. This anthology will explore such programs across the categories of culture, gender, and celebrity.

Men with stakes builds on recent discussions of television Gothic by examining the ways in which the Gothic mode is deployed specifically to call into question televisual realism and, with it, conventional depictions of masculinity. Released from the mandate of realism to describe the world as it is supposed to be, television Gothic calls attention to the constructedness of gender – and therefore to the possibility of re-imagining men’s agency, authority and the legitimated forms of knowledge with which men are traditionally associated (science in particular). In this context, after an overview of Gothic television’s larger history, this study discusses in some depth seven series from the last two decades: American Gothic, Millennium, Angel, Carnivàle, Point Pleasant, Supernatural and American Horror Story.

Screen documentary has experienced a marked rise in visibility and popularity in recent years. What are the reasons for the so-called 'boom' in documentaries at the cinema? How has television documentary met the challenge of new formats? And how do audiences engage with documentaries on screen? Watching the world extends the reach of documentary studies by investigating recent instances of screen documentary and the uses made of them by audiences. The book focuses on the interfaces between textual mechanisms, promotional tactics, and audiences' viewing strategies. Key topics of inquiry are: film and televisual form, truth claims and issues of trust, the pleasures, politics and the ethics of documentary. Case studies include Capturing the Friedmans, Être et Avoir, Paradise Lost, Touching the Void, and wildlife documentaries on television. This compelling and accessible book will be of interest to both students and fans of documentary.

Television has long been a familiar vehicle for fairy tales and is, in some ways, an ideal medium for the genre. Both more mundane and more wondrous than cinema, TV magically captures sounds and images that float through the air to bring them into homes, schools, and workplaces. Even apparently realistic forms, like the nightly news, routinely employ discourses of \"once upon a time, \" \"happily ever after, \" and \"a Cinderella story.\" In Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy offer contributions that invite readers to consider what happens when fairy tale, a narrative genre that revels in variation, joins the flow of television experience. Looking in detail at programs from Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the U.S., this volume's twenty-three international contributors demonstrate the wide range of fairy tales that make their way into televisual forms. The writers look at fairy-tale adaptations in musicals like Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, anthologies like Jim Henson's The Storyteller, made-for-TV movies like Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Bluebeard, and the Red Riding Trilogy, and drama serials like Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Contributors also explore more unexpected representations in the Carosello commercial series, the children's show Super Why!, the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, and the live-action dramas Train Man and Rich Man Poor Woman. In addition, they consider how elements from familiar tales, including \"Hansel and Gretel, \" \"Little Red Riding Hood, \" \"Beauty and the Beast, \" \"Snow White, \" and \"Cinderella\" appear in the long arc serials Merlin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dollhouse, and in a range of television formats including variety shows, situation comedies, and reality TV. Channeling Wonder demonstrates that fairy tales remain ubiquitous on TV, allowing for variations but still resonating with the wonder tale's familiarity. Scholars of cultural studies, fairy-tale studies, folklore, and television studies will enjoy this first-of-its-kind volume.