Genre and Television

Louisiana and Southern Identities in True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014)

“…Jason Mittell states that time is the "most central aspect of television narratives 4 ." Comparatively, space is a more "consistent narrative element 5 ", "the dimension of television narrative that needs the least outside help for viewer comprehension 6 "; thus he includes space among the orienting paratexts 7 which are the features of a TV series which help viewers "make sense of complex serial forms through practices of orientation and mapping 8 ." Yet, Doreen Massey believes that space "may call to mind the realm of the dead or the chaos of simultaneity and multiplicity 9 ."…”

“…Logically, the most vampiric recurring place, Fangtasia, is the last one to be introduced (S01E04). Like Lost (ABC, 2004(ABC, -2010 in Mittel's analysis, True Blood's last season returns to the most emblematic people and past places 15 and its finale concludes "with a going away party 16 ." These places appear as synecdoches for the United States and participate in True Blood's seriality by bringing back viewers to recognizable locations where identities are played out and potentially subverted.…”

From Songfilms to Telecomics: Vallée Video and the New Market for Postwar Animation

“…Tackling Maltin’s challenge, Hal Erickson (2005) and David Perlmutter (2014) offered dedicated, book-length analyses of television cartoons from the 1950s through the present, while recent studies by Maureen Furniss (2016), Giannalberto Bendazzi (2017), and Dan Bashara (2019) pursue synthetic approaches that trace industrial and stylistic transformations across both large and small screens, and place them in the context of broader shifts in modern art and design. Scholars within the neighboring field of television studies (Gray, 2006; Mittell, 2004) have shown a similar concern with animation’s broader cultural and creative contexts, while attention in both fields has expanded beyond series-level productions to include interstitial matter ranging from title art to commercial advertisements (Cook and Thompson, 2019; Spigel, 2008, 2016). Applying this contextualist, cross-media approach to our analysis of Vallée’s operations, we document his growing efforts to recruit animation workers originally trained in the theatrical sector and show their contributions to production work ranging from photography on Vallée’s early songfilms to title illustrations and cartoon commercials for live action productions, as well as full-length ‘telecomics’ series that constituted some of the first made-for-television cartoons.…”

Disruption and continuity on telenovela with the surge of a new hybrid prime-time fictional serial: The super series

“…Personal Communication, 13 August 2018, Mexico City)On the one hand, as I will demonstrate, super series depart from telenovelas, in a number of key ways; but on the other hand, they also share key elements of the telenovela genre, as a consequence of their origin as telenovelas themselves in their iteration as narconovelas . This industrial discourse that surrounds the emergence of the super series as a new genre or form within the realm of the telenovela universe reveals some deeply ambivalent interactions between industry players as they discuss and thus discursively construct the dynamics of generic evolution and recognition (Mittell, 2004). Telemundo’s marketing effort to position super series as distinctive televisual product is supported by their surge in prime-time ratings.…”