Book Review: Legitimating Television by Newman and Levine

So I found myself in an odd position while I read Legitimating Television. Like Television Studies before it, I read the book entirely on my commute back home from work. This in and of itself is not odd. People on this commute, a bus-coach service that largely serves professionals in bedroom communities around Atlanta, regularly consume media on the ride (if they’re not sleeping), including books, ebooks, music, and occasionally television episodes on a mobile device.

What struck me as odd, and I realized this about half way through the book is that I’d been reading it while listening to the soundtrack for Downton Abbey. Why is this odd? Well, here’s a show that is a soap opera through and through, but I don’t think the phrase is often uttered in connection with the show given its period settings, lavish production design (and cost!), and the cultural associations with British television and PBS.

Indeed, I’m listening to the soundtrack of  a show that, had it aired in the daytime on a U.S. broadcast network, had a lot less money, probably no Maggie Smith, and wasn’t available on streaming through PBS’s Website (never mind downloading it as a torrent when it originally aired in Britain (which I didn’t do)) wouldn’t be considered one of the current highwater marks of television pleasures by critics and audiences alike. Hell, it probably wouldn’t have had a soundtrack released in the first place if any of those things hadn’t happened.

And all of these thoughts (as well as other thoughts) came to me because of this book. What Legitimating Television does is perform an analysis of the various discourses — be they academic, journalistic, fan-created, or industrial discussions — that have helped create a situation in which television has been able to achieve legitimacy in the tail end of the 20th century and raising its profile even more during the start of the 21st.

Like other good examples of this sort of work, evidenced by my reaction to my habit of listening to the Downton Abbey soundtrack while reading it, Newman and Levine help the reader realize how these discourses about television legitimization occur.  The result is like when you first learn about the 180 degree rule, or when someone points out the arrow in the FedEx logo: You can’t stop seeing it.

Film Review: Redline (2009)

Redline is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated anime film to come to the U.S. in years. Seven years in the making, with stellar hand-drawn animation (I really cannot overstate it), Redline‘s release in the U.S. was a point of anxiety (no one was picking it up, or announcing dates), but Manga Entertainment and Anchor Bay (remember Anchor Bay? I had no idea that they were owned by Starz now) finally picked up the license and announced a release. And there was much rejoicing.

The film was heavily hyped within in my Twitter feed (I mostly blame @ABCBTom), and reviews from the anime press have been gushingly positive. From what I gather, however, the film is being less well-received by posters at the ANN forums, speaking to perhaps a generational gap between those in the position to be reviewing the film for high-profile sites and those commenting on said sites.

I’m afraid I fall someplace in the middle. Redline is a technical achievement of the highest order. I cannot remember the last time any film, animated or otherwise, looked this good. And for much of the film, I’m grooving on it, though never totally engaged. In the last 20 minutes, or so, I became totally disengaged to the point of boredom, which is exactly the thing you don’t want to happen in an action film.

Book Review: Television Studies by Gray and Lotz

Along with Levine and Newman’s Legitimating Television, Gray and Lotz’s Television Studies, part of a Polity’s Short Introduction series, topped my To Read list enough that they were high priorities for Christmas gifts from folks this year. Thankfully, I received both.

I opted for Television Studies first as both a primer for Legitimating‘s discussions and as a refresher on my own knowledge of the ins and outs of television studies. Likewise, still being a relatively young scholar, I haven’t read many of these sorts of single unified texts that seek to provide a broad overview of a single field or approach. I’ve read individual essays, book chapters, and the like that do similar things as Television Studies (including many of the ones that Gray and Lotz cite here), but I wanted to read something that was specifically designed as an introduction for a few reasons.

First and foremost is an issue of pedagogy. Books like Television Studies or Routledge’s Film Guidebooks (I can recommend Brigid Cherry’s Horror from that series) serve primarily, at least in my mind, as texts given to undergrads in introductory courses to provide both an orientation to what could be a brand new area of study and to provide a common ground on which for those in the course to speak to one another. So I’ll say upfront that as I was reading Television Studies, I was primarily reading it through this lens, asking myself how the book as a whole, as well as individual chapters, would fit into a syllabus, what kind of a syllabus, and how students might respond.

The second reason for wanting to Television Studies is directly related to my first reason. That these books are primarily expected to be used in introductory courses, or as a self-guided introduction as the case may be, they are inherently very political books. These books define and parse out the field or subject, policing borders and establishing ideas of what is/could be expected for someone operating in that field. And if you’re familiar with academia, you know that we take the defining of a field seriously.

So on the one hand we have a book that should be evaluated on its pedagogical value, but on the other, we have a book that delineates what something is, whether it be a field of study or a film genre. As a result, we have to consider what histories are told, who the major figures and/or theories are, and so forth, and the potential impact that can have on whatever topic the book is addressing since such books are used to train and educated younger scholars.

Catching Up on…Manga

I’ve pretty seriously neglected this blog, so I’m going to do a series of “Catching Up On…” posts to discuss and respond to some of the various media I’ve been consuming and my experiences with them. While these posts may be long depending on how many titles I’m discussing, I don’t want to spend too much time on each title. As a result, I’m hoping to engage folks in the comments to flesh out things a bit more. Also, of course: SPOILERS ABOUND.

I used to read buy a fair amount of manga, but not a lot of variety. I jumped in on Bleach as it was starting here in the U.S., and I read Naruto, Fruits Basket, Death Note, Emma, Genshiken, Hot Gimmick, Nana, and probably a smattering of other titles along the way. But due to the lack of new titles that looked interesting (I didn’t go to manga blogs to find new gems, instead flipping through books at Borders) and, more importantly, a lack of funds, I dropped manga from my purchasing routines. I rarely checked out the section at Borders (hell, I rarely went to Borders at that point) and that was that.

But with an increased cashflow and a desire to get back into comics again, I took advantage of Borders’ going out of business sales and picked up a number of titles after I was given recommendations by a number of folks on Twitter, including @MangaCritic, @animeresearch, @ABCBTom,  @edsizemore,  @OneGreatTurtle, @PhoenixTerran, and @Jrnemanich (If I missed someone, apologies).

So below you’ll find some thoughts on the 10 series I picked up a volume or three of over the past few months. There’s a decent variety here, from a baseball series (I know!) to yonkoma about a cat who runs a ramen shop. Most of these are relatively recent titles, however.

Persona 4: The Animation – “You’re Myself, I’m Yourself”

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, was the last game I purchased for the PlayStation2 (I even pre-ordered it), it’s the focus of a chapter in my thesis, and it, perhaps more than Persona 3 (another game I particularly enjoyed), made me very interested in not only other games in the SMT franchise, but in Atlus as a game developer and publisher.

So, as should have been expected, I was excited by the idea of an anime adaptation of the game when it was announced last year. But I was also intrigued by the logistics of adapting this particular sort of video game (a mix of classic dungeon crawling with dating simulations) to a more linear narrative mapped out over 26 episodes.

I won’t be doing weekly write-ups on the show (instead I’ll drop in and out when I feel particularly spurred to write something about an episode), but I wanted to address the first episode and some of the elements of the game that come through in the episode that feel particularly interesting, and my own unfamiliarity with animes based on video games.