Battlestar Galactica: Designing Spaceships
by Paul Ruditis and Mark Wright
This new book goes behind the scenes on the award-winning TV series Battlestar Galactica to discover the concepts behind the designs of dozens of spaceships! Battlestar Galactica debuted on TV in 1978 and acquired a phenomenal following, breaking new ground for TV drama and winning several awards. It returned to TV screens in 2003 in a critically acclaimed reimagined series, with Time Magazine naming it one of the 100 Best TV Shows of All Time. This behind-the-scenes guide looks at the creatio...
What makes a horror television drama interesting? Like any other drama, it is often the character development or plot, and this certainly applies to the dramatically-resonant Supernatural and its beloved characters. However, Supernatural has achieved a dedicated fandom and a record-breaking 15-season run by skillfully engaging with the social reality inhabited by the show's audience. Additionally, the show plays with the fourth wall by having an in-world fandom for the main characters. Supern...
A staple of television since the early years of the BBC, British crime drama first crossed the Atlantic on public broadcasting stations and specialty cable channels, and later through streaming services. Often engaging with domestic anxieties about the government's power (or lack thereof), and with larger issues of social justice like gender equality, racism, and homophobia, it has constantly evolved to reflect social and cultural changes while adapting U.S. and Nordic noir influences in a wa...
The 1970s were the era of the three-day week, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the winter of discontent, trade union Bolshevism and wildcat strikes. Through sitcoms, Raising Laughter provides a fresh look at one of our most divisive and controversial decades. Aside from providing entertainment to millions of people, the sitcom is a window into the culture of the day. Many of these sitcoms tapped into the decade’s sense of cynicism, failure and alienation, providing much-needed laughter for the...
The Rovers Return: The Official Coronation Street Companion
by Tim Randall
From the moment The Rovers Return opened its doors to television viewers more than fifty years ago, the iconic public house has witnessed everything from births, deaths, brawls and break-ups, to weddings, wakes and even its own ghost, all under the watchful eye of legendary landladies such as Annie Walker, Bet Gilroy and Liz McDonald.From its early days with the Walkers at the helm and Stan Ogden propping up the bar, to 2013's devastating fire and the subsequent renovations and revelations, this...
Let your best buds know that you'll be there for them with this DIY gift book inspired by the gang from Friends: Rachel, Ross, Joey, Monica, Phoebe and Chandler.Whether or not your best pal has hair as awesome as Rachel, cooks like Monica, sings like Phoebe or is as smooth as Joey, this is the perfect way to let them know you're friends for life. Once you fill in the prompts, this book becomes a personalised gift full of ridiculous, memorable or sweet expressions of appreciation that are as quir...
Provides a history and criticism of an important disrupting force in early science-fiction television programming. Joanne Morreale highlights the differences of The Outer Limits (ABC 1963-65) from typical programs on the air in the 1960s. Morreale argues that the show provides insight into changes in the television industry as writers turned to genre fiction-in this case, a hybrid of science fiction and horror-to provide veiled social commentary. The show illustrates the tension between networ...
Sam and Friends - The Story of Jim Henson's First Television Show
by Craig Shemin
Emile Zola (1840-1902) has become one of the most adapted authors of all time, but while much has been made of his adaptation into cinema and theatre, television has largely been overlooked. Yet television, with its serial structures and popular reach, is uniquely suited to the adaptation of a novelist who eagerly reworked his writing for the broadest audiences possible. It is not for nothing that broadcasters such as the BBC return to Zola so often - most recently with The Paradise (2012). In o...
THE OFFICIAL COMPANION TO THE ITV SERIESWilliam Thackeray's Vanity Fair was first published in the 1840s, but its power to entertain and provoke debate remains as strong as ever. The tales of charismatic, shrewd, and amoral Becky Sharp's journey from Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies to a wider world in which wealth and status is valued above all else is arguably as relevant today as it was nearly 200 years ago: Becky and her equally flawed friends and acquaintances are familiar to us al...
Jim Henson's iconic puppet characters, fantastic worlds, and warm humor have delighted millions of people of all ages. His incredibly diverse body of work, from the Muppets to the world of The Dark Crystal , reveals his charm and genius to fans old and new. Compiled directly from The Jim Henson Company archives, Imagination Illustrated adapts the diary that Jim faithfully kept throughout his career, supplementing it with a trove of little-seen visual material, including rare sketches, personal a...
This comprehensive historical account demonstrates the rich diversity in 1970s British experimental filmmaking, acting as a form of reclamation for films and filmmakers marginalized within established histories. An indispensable book for practitioners, historians and critics alike, it provides new interpretations of this rich and diverse history.
Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions
A dynamic investigation of processes of cultural reproduction – remaking and remodelling – which considers a wide range of film adaptations, remakes and fan productions from various industrial, textual and critical perspectives.
This volume brings together a series of essays that interrogate the notion of figuration in Indian cinemas. The essays collectively argue that the figures which exhibit maximum tenacity in Indian cinema often emerge in the interface of recognizable binaries: self/other, Indian/foreign, good/bad, virtue/vice, myth/reality and urban/rural.
A detailed, theoretically attuned analysis of all of the Scorsese-directed features from The Last Waltz to Bringing Out the Dead . Grist illuminates Scorsese's authorship, but also reflects back upon a range of informing contexts.
Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return
This edited collection offers an interdisciplinary study of Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of a TV program that has attracted the attention (and appreciation) of spectators, fans, and critics for over two decades. The book takes readers into several distinct areas and addresses the different approaches and the range of topics invited by the multidimensionality of the subject itself: the philosophical, the artistic, the socio-cultural, and the personal. The eighteen chapters constitutin...
This book explores the cycle of horror on US television in the decade following the launch of The Walking Dead, considering the horror genre from an industrial perspective. Examining TV horror through rich industrial and textual analysis, this book reveals the strategies and ambitions of cable and network channels, as well as Netflix and Shudder, with regards to horror serialization. Selected case studies; including American Horror Story, The Haunting of Hill House, Creepshow, Ash vs Evil Dead,...
The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research on the Gothic Revival. The Gothic Revival was based on emotion rather than reason and when Horace Walpole created Strawberry Hill House, a gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, he had to create new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle. Nevertheless, Walpole’s house produced nightmares and his book The Castle of Otranto was the first truly gothic novel, with supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements...