Television Commons^™

When Actors Don’T Walk The Talk: Parasocial Relationships Moderate The Effect Of Actor-Character Incongruence, Riva Tukachinsky

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

The study examines the effect of a narrative that featured an actor playing a counterattitudinal role. Participants read an online magazine interview with a popular comedian and then watched a sitcom in which this actor played a role that was either consistent or inconsistent with his personal views. Parasocial relationships with the actor moderated the effect of actor-character incongruence. Specifically, incongruence was associated with lower support for narrative-related attitudes, but only among viewers with weak parasocial relationships. These results provide evidence of the existence of vicarious cognitive dissonance, wherein witnessing another person’s hypocritical behavior produces attitude change in the observer.

Live From New York, It's The Translation Of Cultural Humor!, Megan Hosack

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Translating comedic material into another language presents challenges both in accurately representing specific words and idioms and in conveying social conventions and national temperament. As American television programs gain international popularity, there is a developing need for understanding these issues of translation.

Several American comedy television programs have gained popularity in Spain in recent years. Shows including The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons have been translated into Spanish and dubbed by Spanish voice actors to air on television stations in Spain (Grandio). "Big Bang," the Spanish version of The Big Bang Theory has been on the air in Spain …

Documenting Portrayals Of Race/Ethnicity On Primetime Television Over A 20-Year Span And Their Association With National-Level Racial/Ethnic Attitudes, Riva Tukachinsky, Dana Mastro, Moran Yarchi

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

The current study content analyzes the 345 most viewed U.S. television shows within 12 separate television seasons spanning the years 1987 to 2009. Using multilevel modeling, the results from this comprehensive content analysis then are used to predict national-level racial/ethnic perceptions (between the years 1988 and 2008) with data from the American National Election Studies (ANES). Content analysis results reveal severe underrepresentation of Latinos, AsianAmericans, and NativeAmericans, and a tendency to depict ethnic minorities stereotypically (e.g., overrepresentation of hyper-sexualized Latino characters). Multilevel-modeling analysis indicates that both the quantity and quality of ethnic media representations contributes to Whites’ racial attitudes.

Mobile Production: Spatialized Labor, Location Professionals, And The Expanding Geography Of Television Production, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This article addresses the spatial challenges facing television laborers amid an increasingly expansive and contingent environment of local production incentives. Pushing away from the term runaway production and its limited engagement with local, spatialized dynamics of labor, I argue for a consideration of “mobile production,” wherein television series are capable of being executed in an increasingly wide range of locations—not necessarily Los Angeles—and capable of being moved should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so. Through personal interviews and analysis of industry discourse, this case study of location professionals considers how the mobility of production affects …

Food Tv, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Determinants Of Demand For Cable Tv Services In The Era Of Internet Communication Technologies, Michael Gorodetsky

Honors College Theses

The rise of the Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as video-on-demand (VOD) services, is expected to have substantial impact on the entertainment industry. In particular, cable TV is likely to be one of the media channels most affected by the expansion and development of these new technologies. Given these changes and the fact that the signs of the cable TV viewership decline are starting to show, it is important to investigate the potential of the loss of competitive advantage of television programming services.

Most of the existing research on the topic focuses on the relationship between TV viewing and Internet …

From ‘Sots-Romanticism’ To Rom-Com: The Strugatskys’ Monday Begins On Saturday As A Film Comedy, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The Strugatskii brothers’ novella Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu (Monday Begins on Saturday; 1965) imagines bright young scientists working at the cutting edge between quantum physics and folktale sorcery in a setting that was undeniably contemporary and local. I argue that the story can be best understood as ‘soc(ialist) romanticism’ – an aesthetic mode that celebrates the possibilities for individual questing and agency in late Soviet socialism. Konstantin Bromberg’s 1982 adaptation of the Strugatskiis’s story abandons both the romanticism and complexity of the novella, but, by incorporating elements of the‘youth film’, it represents a different kind of Soviet rom-com.

Switching Screens: An Examination Of How House Of Cards And Scandal Represent Shifting Strategies In Television, Laura Rossiter

Scripps Senior Theses

Both House of Cards and Scandal have similar conceits (White House? Check. Sex? Check. Murder? Check.) but use different platforms: House of Cards is a Netflix Original production while Scandal is a broadcast television program on ABC. Through the course of this paper, I will examine how the platform and type of consumption affects the content and distribution of the show and the types of relationships they forge with their viewers.

The Basque Big Boy? Basque Masculinities In Vaya Semanita, Iker González-Allende

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

This article argues that the television show Vaya semanita portrays a specific Basque masculinity, different from the Spanish or Mediterranean ones. The traditional Basque masculinity shares some values with the most accepted forms of Spanish masculinities –including manhood as a challenge to be overcome, physical strength, intemperate drinking, and gluttonous eating – but differs from them in the way men behave in relation to women and sex, and the way they maintain close friendships with each other. Basque men appear as dependent on their mothers and wives, making them look emasculated and infantile. Their male bonding is also interpreted as …

Long Live The Evil Queen: Once Upon A Time's Evolved Villain, Frank S. Lombari

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Mirror on the wall, who's the fairest Queen of all? In today's pop culture, many traditional villains are beginning to be turned into antiheroes. ABC's television show Once Upon a Time has taken a number of fairy tale villains and provided them both a background and character growth. Specifically, the adaptation of the Evil Queen has shifted from primary antagonist to redeemed hero over the first three seasons. The show also displays her in the real-world rather than just a fairy tale universe. The author claims that this radical development occurs due three essential aspects: the Evil Queen and Snow …

Specters Of Kurdish Nationalism: Governmentality And Counterinsurgent Translation In Turkey, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

This essay examines translations of the Kurdish epic poem Mem û Zîn into Turkish, tracing the logics behind these state-sponsored translations and examining how acts of translation are also efforts to regulate, translate, and erase Kurdish subjectivities. I argue that the state instrumentalizes Mem û Zîn’s potent nationalist currency in order to disarm present and future claims of Kurdish national autonomy. Using translation as a counterinsurgent governmental tool, the state attempts to domesticate Kurdish nationalist discourses even as it reproduces them, thereby transforming Kurdish nationalism into a specter of itself. Attending to this specter, however, allows us to see how …

Representing Us All? Race, Gender, And Sexuality In Orange Is The New Black, Michael Robert Chavez

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Orange Is the New Black is a Netflix television series that began in 2013. The series focuses on the lives of inmates in a fictional women's prison. Television series about prison have focused primarily on men in prison. This thesis will expand upon previous research on representation of minorities in television using a feminist media analysis to examine the first season of the series. I will explore how race, gender, and sexuality are represented within the series. I examine the representations of four characters during the first season. I chose these four characters because they represented different racial groups, sexualities, …

The Integration History Of Kuwaiti Television From 1957-1990: An Audience-Generated Oral Narrative On The Arrival And Integration Of The Device In The City, Ahmad Hamada

Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to compose an account of television history in Kuwait, one that focuses on its integration into society and is told from the audience's perspective and experience. This study represents a cultural alternative to the overwhelmingly national, institutional, and biographical focus that accompanies television history works in Kuwait and the Arab world.

The narrative is gathered and generated through the individual oral stories of 25 Kuwaitis over the age of 50, who generally represent the six geographical districts of Kuwait. Through their oral stories, the narrators examine the different areas in which television has integrated itself into society …