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Sexton, M. and Lees, D. 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3787-3740
(2021)
Seeing it on television: televisuality in the contemporary U.S. 'High-End' series.
Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp192.
ISBN 9781501359422
Abstract/Summary
Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US ‘High-end’ Series is co-authored by Dominic Lees and Max Sexton. The book is a detailed study of aesthetics in contemporary US television drama. It examines a range of cultural, technological and formal practices that continue to maintain a distinctive dramatic mode in the high-end series, acknowledging both television’s history, as well as a high degree of variability, in recent televisual conventions.
| Item Type | Book |
| URI | https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/100670 |
| Refereed | Yes |
| Divisions | Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Arts and Communication Design > Film, Theatre & Television |
| Uncontrolled Keywords | Television Drama; US television; Television theory; Style; Television Studies; Televisuality |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher Statement | Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US 'High-end' Series investigates new categories of high-end drama and explores the appeal of programmes from Netflix, Sky Atlantic/HBO, National Geographic, FX and Cinemax. An investigation of contemporary US Televisuality provides insight into the appeal of upscale programming beyond facts about its budget, high production values and/or feature cinematography. Rather, this book focuses on how the construction of meaning often relies on cultural discourse, production histories, as well as on tone, texture or performance, which establishes the locus of engagement and value within the series. Max Sexton and Dominic Lees discuss how complex production histories lie behind the rise of the US high-end series, a form that reflects industrial changes and the renegotiation of formal strategies. They reveal how the involvement of many different people in the production process, based on new relationships of creative authority, complicates our understanding of 'original content'. This affects the construction of stylistics and the viewing strategies required by different shows. The cultural, as well as industrial, strategies of recent television drama are explored in The Young Pope, The Knick, Stranger Things, Mars, Fargo, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, and Vinyl. |
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