Journal Description
Television & New Media is an international journal showcasing key intellectual developments in television and new media studies.
The journal focuses on critical and cultural studies approaches to media and their application across social science and humanities disciplines. TVNM is particularly focused on scholarship that addresses the power dynamics of media cultures, industries, networks, and audiences.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
• the past, present, and future of television and the televisual
• critical analysis of genres, programs, and content
• digitalization, digital media, and theories of convergence
• broadcast and post-broadcast technologies, infrastructures, and platforms
• creative, cultural, aesthetic, affective, and digital labor
• transnational media, identity and global culture
• media audiences and fandom
• production and industry studies
• surveillance technologies and cultures
• media policy, ownership, and intellectual property
• social movements, activism, and media power
• citizenship and media
• datafication, gamification and algorithmic governance
Article submissions can address any aspect of television and new media, but should take up questions that point to both the specificities of the object of study and the broader implications of historical conjunctures, cultural formations, political regimes, geopolitics, and/or economic forces.
Recent Special Issues include:
• Genre After Media
• Gender and Sexuality in Live Streaming
• Nationalisms and Racisms on Digital Media
• Contemporary Irish Television
• Digital Politics in Millennial India
• Reactionary Fandom
Questions about submissions can be directed to Laurie Ouellette at ouell031@umn.edu
Please direct correspondence regarding book reviews to the editor listed below:
Hollis Griffin
University of Michigan
Department of Communication and Media
North Quad, Room 5370
105 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
hollisg@umich.edu
Journal Feed
- by Hunter HargravesTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This essay serves as the introduction to TVNM’s special issue on “Pandemic TV,” an analysis of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected principally anglophone television and television-watching in 2020 to 2021 (including television’s response to corresponding events such as the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and the fall 2020 U.S. presidential election). The introduction situates various periodizations of the pandemic, framing the dissonant temporalities of the pandemic against television’s traditional approaches to informing, representing, and containing ongoing crises. The essay also introduces the ten articles contained within the special issue, […]
- by Myles McNuttTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This article analyzes American cable channel HGTV’s programing strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically their construction of a “COVID-free” fantasia in their series Home Town and its spinoff, Home Town Takeover. By considering this response through the lens of dissonance, I argue that while the network originally emphasized their social responsibility to mitigating the spread of the virus, their business model incentivized them to move past the virus more swiftly than other channels, pushing the labor of mediating dissonance onto their on-screen talent and their audience. This case study foregrounds […]
- by Hannah HamadTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. In January 2021 the BBC continuing medical drama Casualty (1986-present) returned to UK television screens for the start of its thirty-fifth series, with the premiere serving as the first episode of the show to have been produced and broadcast since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused production to stop suddenly in March 2020. It was, in many ways, a “Very Special Episode,” and not least because it was the first new episode of the series to be seen by audiences for four months. Set during spring and summer of 2020, the episode begins […]
- by Nick SalvatoTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This essay begins with a brief history of sensitivity training, a therapeutic and organizational protocol for the instrumentalization of empathy that gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century. The reflection on sensitivity training serves as a wind-up to a meditation on the version of insensitivity training that television manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, both gestures provide the basis to make a pedagogical call for an alternative, critical version of insensitivity training for contemporary students. The essay then explores how the meanings of in/sensitivity help to set up […]
- by Jalen ThompsonTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. The way we do television studies changes with ongoing innovation; digital media and successive phases of subscription pay TV have complicated our work for the better. Additional contextual complexity in TV delivery, and the related notion of TV as a medium in perpetual identity crisis, contribute to experiences especially vivid in terms of pandemic pressures. This essay shares our collaboration from the Summer of 2020 through January 2021. We synthesize email correspondence and our many Zoom meetings discussing pandemic-inflected topics including sitcom redistribution and sports, weaving these conversations into an “inner-personal archive” combining […]
- by Juan Llamas-RodriguezTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This article analyzes “The Politics Episode” of One Day at a Time, an animated very special episode produced and aired during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on two aspects that prompt broader considerations about the role of scripted television in responding to pressing social issues. First, I demonstrate how the episode’s narrative structure appeals to democratic deliberation as an idealized form of conflict resolution. Second, I consider how its production and airing timeline responded to—and failed to account for—the current events its narrative attempted to incorporate. Although the disjuncture between […]
- by Yael LevyTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. In pandemic TV, the horror of the home was not only part of the narrative in several shows that depicted pandemic-related plots, but also a result of the tension between the textual and the contextual. As people were feeling trapped indoors, even the most colorful televised living room stood as a symbol of the inability to leave the spatial confines of domesticity. In this paper, I show how pandemic television added an ominous layer to the representation of the home, either directly through narrative means or indirectly through text-versus-meaning dissonance. Intersectionalizing feminist analysis […]
- “How to Save a Life”: On Grey’s Anatomy and the Logics of Televisual Alleviation in a Time of Crisisby Brandy Monk-PaytonTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This article examines the representation of the COVID-19 global public health crisis on U.S. network television medical dramas. Programs featuring healthcare professionals like Chicago Med (NBC, 2015-present), The Good Doctor (ABC, 2017–2024), and New Amsterdam (NBC, 2018–2023) depicted the devastation of the pandemic and the plight of the frontline healthcare community to viewers at home through the fictional hospital. In particular, Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–present) produced a “very special season” dedicated to portraying COVID’s toil. I argue that the primetime doctor show attempted to lessen the pain of COVID’s impact by presenting its […]
- by Eli Lee CarterTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. In recent years, audiences in the United States and around the globe have witnessed an explosion of television and streaming content focused on hip hop. Such content contemplates, historicizes, promotes, and represents the art form, artists, industry, and regional genres that have together emerged as a central feature of contemporary popular culture. This article explores the spatial and thematic links to the theoretical Global South in Atlanta and Sintonia. Analyzing the series’ respective portrayals of race and inequality from the margins, I examine how hip-hop/funk and the Global South function as narrative tools […]
- by Zoë Brigley ThompsonTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theorizing of the theme park, this study recognizes the TV show Westworld (2016-2022) as a simulation of contemporary America with intriguing questions about rape culture and justice in a post-#MeToo moment? In seasons 1 and 2, android characters like Dolores (Evan Rachael Wood), Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) are violated but rebel against sexist and racist programing, and the “Man in Black” represents the violating nature of the stereotypical, Western hero. The principles of the Old West, like benevolent violence, are reflected in a TV industry where […]
- by Daniel JohnsonTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. NIGHT HEAD was a science fiction drama that aired on Japan’s Fuji TV between 1992 and 1993. The series arrived during a wave of interest in the paranormal, a trend that was embraced by commercial television in both dramatic programs and variety/infotainment talk shows. This boom of interest in the paranormal happened within the thriving economic and cultural environment of Japan’s Bubble Era, a period that saw a rapid expansion of television in addition to the prosperity of markets in real estate and industry. NIGHT HEAD portrays a darker vision of 90s Japan, […]
- by Taylor M. HenryTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This article analyzes the Fox Sports 1 sports debate program Speak for Yourself. The article analyzes the thematic frames the show utilizes to espouse and reinforce sport as a site of conservative value-making and male bonding. In using an interracial male pairing of Colin Cowherd and Jason Whitlock, the show mimics similarly popular debate programs on rival network ESPN, such as Pardon the Interruption and First Take. However, Whitlock in particular advances a unique brand of Black conservatism, and his clashes with progressive activists and other black guests represent intraracial tensions among Black […]
- by Weixian PanTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. In 2020, the Philippines’ largest mobile network provider Smart Communications launched a year-long campaign with South Korean actor Hyun Bin, who gained high popularity among Filipino audiences through the Korean TV drama Crash Landing on You (TvN 2019-2020) aired through Netflix. This article analyzes media texts, government plans, corporate narratives, and infrastructure data to examines two ways that transnational media, such as K-dramas, function as cultural interfaces to disseminate and operationalize the infrastructural desires in the Philippines. First, Philippine internet service providers (ISPs) co-opt Netflix’s language of internet speed as a criterion of […]
- by Ju Oak KimTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the social construction of locality? To examine the impact of the ruptures between physical mobility and digital fluidity on the media representation of locality, I analyzed two cases (the Korea Tourism Organization’s Feel the Rhythm of Korea project and BTS’ media performances for “Dynamite”) produced during the pandemic. Based on a textual analysis of the chosen video projects, I identified three social techniques in shaping locality: a mixture of the past and present, the territorialization of cultural references and performed bodies, and the rhetorical dichotomization of cultural […]
- by Alexa ScarlataTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This article considers how TV retailers shape public understanding of television as a cultural technology and household device. Drawing on interviews with Australian TV retailers, we identify four sales strategies used when selling smart TVs in-store: simplification, avoidance, empathy, and exploitation. Our analysis shows how these sales strategies seek to minimize and manage the smart TV’s technological complexity, thus downplaying its interactive potential. We critically assess the assumptions about technological expertise that underlie these strategies.
- by Feng-Mei HebererTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. Though the political economy of Filipina care workers and their lives on the ground might appear to be a world distinct from that of digital platforms, this article explores their continuity: between the multiple demands for Filipina care workers in Taiwan to relentlessly serve the demands of others, and thus to be “always-on,” and the logics of the platforms that they use to stay in touch with loved ones and chill during down time. Based on interviews and online observation, I argue that examining the lives of women OFWs in Taiwan helps us […]
- by Vicki MayerTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ways that production is a process nested within social worlds. In 2020, global Hollywood promoted a “COVID-friendly ideal” in order to return to work during widespread lockdowns and work stoppages. Yet by focusing comparatively on the stories that film and television workers told about production during COVID, we argue that crisis stories reveal much about the specificity of places in studying production cultures. To illustrate, we compare workers’ pandemic stories as evidence of emplacement in national hierarchies and […]
- by Tupur ChatterjeeTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. How do key players in Bombay’s screen industries—producers, directors, writers, and business developers—understand, imagine, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Tracking the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established media professionals, I discuss how a restructuring of industry dynamics is elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences. Through case studies of a few prominent creative professionals associated in various capacities with global and local streaming platforms, I sketch the multiple […]
- by Jan SmitheramTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This paper investigates a new, popular, award-winning reality television show, Your Home Made Perfect. Drawing on insights from Sara Ahmed’s work on the promise of happiness, our thematic analysis of nineteen episodes of Your Home shows how architectural entertainment is uniquely positioned through its use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology to circulate happiness and uplifting emotions and to critique the power imbalances of architect-client relationships. The paper argues how Your Home foregrounds happy emotions to the re-design of homes, where emotions are mobilized through design visualizations that turn both home and architects into […]
- by Ryan BanfiTelevision & New Media, Ahead of Print. This article argues that unplayability must be a considered component of game analysis and further discussed in new media studies. The concept that games cannot be or should not be played does not limit game analysis. On the contrary, the “unplayable aspect” of a particular game or genre of games is what must be investigated. This essay hopes to expand upon why new media such as video games are becoming inaccessible by using Nicholas Baer et al.’s Unwatchable to discuss a range of unplayable games for common reasons such as: (1) excessive violence, […]