Media Studies

This essay examines the historical formation of public radio program This American Life into a media franchise whose production and extension into film, television, live performances and podcast spinoffs represents an economic hybridity of both public and commercial production cultures. However, due to the value of highbrow intellectualism often articulated with public radio and its supposed separation from commercial media, This American Life’s economic hybridity occurs within a specific public radio context that encourages TAL’s producers to legitimate their collaboration with profit-driven media producers. Thus, This American Life’s producers attempt to reinforce This American Life’s distinction from commercial media through discourses of cinematic allusion, fundraising, and outsiderism in order to retain the cultural capital of public radio across a range of textual extensions. This study of This American Life reminds us that media franchising studies needs to account for the participation of public radio within media industries, as well as the cultural tensions and negotiations associated with economic hybridity.

The SF Golden Girls have been producing live performances of The Golden Girls episodes in drag since 2005, creating an iterative form of fan productivity that consistently resonates with San Francisco audiences. This essay considers the cultural significance of the SF Golden Girls’ live performances as a case study in how queer participatory culture can change the meanings of a residual media object. I argue that the participatory engagement between the audience members and the drag queen performers make The Golden Girls a collective and visible site of queer television heritage, and that producing The Golden Girls Live in drag also offers different logics of representation and engagement than television. These live performances are significant because The Golden Girls has become a symbol of television heritage, and performing episodes in drag explicitly queers a television program that has become a site of cultural memory and historical meaning. Additionally, these performances are staged in December as The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes, which restructures television heritage to create a new continuity between the past and present and construct a queered Christmas ritual that is familiar and imbued with historical consciousness.

This article examines how the production of radio drama changed after the advent of television in the United States, specifically looking at the period between 1962 and 1982. Although there is a long-standing myth that radio drama died in the United States once television became the dominant source of domestic entertainment in the 1960s, ABC, NBC, CBS and Mutual radio networks all, at some point, had new radio drama programming in development in the 1960s and after. Further- more, the introduction of formalized public radio policies, funding and structures in the late 1960s and early 1970s further opened up alternative spaces where radio drama was being made. This research demonstrates that the transition from radio entertainment to television entertainment by both sponsors and audiences in the United States was not predetermined, smooth, nor comprehensive. However, the pro- duction of radio drama became reconfigured amid the new post-network radio industry logics that favored narrowcasting, conceived of audiences as distracted lis- teners, and associated scripted radio with the outdated practices and technologies of the radio network era. This essay outlines key shifts in the production of radio drama after the ascension of television in the United Sates using ABC Radio’s Theater 5 (1964–5), NPR’s Earplay (1971–81) and CBS’s Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) as case studies.

This review critically analyzes the New York Times' (NYT's) digital platform for TV viewing, Watching (https://www.nytimes.com/watching), and considers how the NYT is trying to use television criticism to produce a commodity audience in the era of peak TV.

This year marked a historic milestone for Console-ing Passions (CP), as the international conference on television, video, audio, new media and feminism celebrated its 25 anniversary in East Carolina University (ECA) on July 27–29, 2017. This was the third CP conference I had submitted to, and as we collectively reflected on the significance of this intellectual home for feminist media scholarship over the course of the weekend, I was reminded of the ways in which solidarity, mentorship and egalitarianism pervades the event. For me, my time at ECU not only cemented Console-ing Passions as a site for top notch interdisciplinary research on the myriad ways gender, race and sexuality intersect and shape media production, reception and circulation; it also brought home how the conference functions to provide feminist media scholars with a level of academic recognition, feedback and support that we may not find anywhere else.

US television network ABC developed their "Thank God It's Thursday" (TGIT) programming block in 2014 as a prime-time schedule composed of three back-to-back dramas produced by well-known TV showrunner Shonda Rhimes. From its initial development, ABC intended TGIT to be a three-hour live viewing event, encouraged by a multipronged #TGIT Twitter campaign. I consider the industrial and cultural significance of marketing the TGIT block of programming together as a cohesive block of social TV in order to encourage and structure audience participation in live television viewing. #TGIT's form of social television developed as a result of the rise of multicultural market research. The reemergence of serialized melodrama on network television functions culturally to commodify Black femininity in order to appeal to a transracial upscale female audience.

This article draws upon interviews with work-at-home (WAH) agents who did technical support for DirecTV between 2009 and 2016. Satellite television technical support workers comprise an important node in maintaining the flow of television content as it is distributed by corporations, like DirecTV, through complex and often fragile technological conditions. Using interviews, trade press, and online employee forums, I outline the history of DirecTV's WAH call center work and employment conditions, and its dissolution after the merger with AT&T. This research intervenes to demonstrate the ways in which WAH television technical support work is an ambivalent form of distributive media labor, at once feminine and immaterial, while also creative and essential for television distribution. This article also demonstrates how technical support work is influenced by current precarious and digitally converged working conditions, surveillance tactics, and media conglomerate mergers and structures.

Mobile applications for downloading podcasts to smartphones and tablets, or podcatcher apps, are some of the most plentiful in various digital software application stores (app stores). The software features, interfaces, and options podcatchers make available give digital soundworks new functionality, materiality, visuality, and aurality. By collecting and analyzing some of the most popular podcasting applications, this article surveys the affordances and restrictions promoted by podcatching app interfaces. Our research explores how podcast apps promote new instances of listening, arguing that podcatchers reconfigure relationships between listeners and producers, and are also ultimately people-catchers that attempt to aggregate listeners in a fragmented media environment by increasing sonic interactivity, encouraging ubiquitous listening, curating and packaging podcasts as visual media, and emphasizing social features that allow users to share podcasts with each other.

Abstract The SF Golden Girls have been producing live performances of The Golden Girls episodes in drag since 2005, creating an iterative form of fan productivity that consistently resonates with San Francisco audiences. This essay considers the cultural significance of the SF Golden Girls’ live performances as a case study in how queer participatory culture can change the meanings of a residual media object. I argue that the participatory engagement between the audience members and the drag queen performers make The Golden Girls a collective and visible site of queer television heritage, and that producing The Golden Girls Live in drag also offers different logics of representation and engagement than television. These live performances are significant because The Golden Girls has become a symbol of television heritage, and performing episodes in drag explicitly queers a television program that has become a site of cultural memory and historical meaning. Additionally, these performances are staged in December as The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes, which restructures television heritage to create a new continuity between the past and present and construct a queered Christmas ritual that is familiar and imbued with historical consciousness.

This article examines how the production of radio drama changed after the advent of television in the United States, specifically looking at the period between 1962 and 1982. Although there is a long-standing myth that radio drama died in the United States once television became the dominant source of domestic entertainment in the 1960s, ABC, NBC, CBS and Mutual radio networks all, at some point, had new radio drama programming in development in the 1960s and after. Furthermore, the introduction of formalized public radio policies, funding and structures in the late 1960s and early 1970s further opened up alternative spaces where radio drama was being made. This research demonstrates that the transition from radio entertainment to television entertainment by both sponsors and audiences in the United States was not predetermined, smooth, nor comprehensive. However, the production of radio drama became reconfigured amid the new post-network radio industry logics that favored narrowcasting, conceived of audiences as distracted listeners, and associated scripted radio with the outdated practices and technologies of the radio network era. This essay outlines key shifts in the production of radio drama after the ascension of television in the United Sates using ABC Radio’s Theater 5 (1964–5), NPR’s Earplay (1971–81) and CBS’s Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) as case studies.

This essay examines the historical formation of public radio program This American Life ( TAL) into a media franchise whose production and extension into film, television, live performances, and podcast spinoffs represent an economic hybridity of both public and commercial production cultures. However, due to the value of highbrow intellectualism often articulated with public radio and its supposed separation from commercial media, TAL’s economic hybridity occurs within a specific public radio context that encourages TAL’s producers to legitimate their collaboration with profit-driven media producers. Thus, TAL’s producers attempt to reinforce TAL’s distinction from commercial media through discourses of cinematic allusion, fundraising, and outsiderism in order to retain the cultural capital of public radio across a range of textual extensions. This study of TAL reminds us that media franchising studies needs to account for the participation of public radio within media industries, ...

This review critically analyzes the New York Times’ (NYT’s) digital platform for TV viewing, Watching (https://www.nytimes.com/watching), and considers how the NYT is trying to use television criticism to produce a commodity audience in the era of peak TV.