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Reading Contemporary Television

The Reading Contemporary Television series aims to offer a varied, intellectually groundbreaking and often polemical response to what is happening in television today. This series is distinct in that it sets out to immediately comment upon the TV zeitgeist while providing an intellectual and creative platform for thinking differently and ingeniously writing about contemporary television culture. The books in the series seek to establish a critical space where new voices are heard and fresh perspectives offered. Innovation is encouraged and intellectual curiosity demanded.

Series editors: Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

Loving the L Word: The Complete Series in Focus

Explores the series' quantum contribution to the evolution of queer television. Including complete Character/Actor, Film/TV and Episode guides, this title also proceeds from the understanding that while "The L Word' ended in 2009 it manages to live on - in the lives of its fans, as well as in a new reality spin-off, "The Real L Word".

Mad Men: Dream Come True TV

Mad Men is a zeitgeist show of the early twenty-first century. This book demonstrates, partly because its characters are an earlier, confused and conflicted version of ourselves, trying to make the best of a future unfolding at breakneck speed.

New Dimensions of

New Dimensions of Doctor Who brings together experts on the Doctors, on TV brands, bioethics, transmedia, and cultural icons to explore contemporary developments in the series' music, design and representations of technology, plus issues of showrunner authority and star authorship.

Nip / Tuck: Television That Gets Under Your Skin

Promoted as a 'disturbingly perfect' and 'deeply shallow' television show and created by the mind behind Glee Ryan Murphy, Nip/Tuck has been among the most popular and controversial shows on television. The book also features an interview with frequent Nip/Tuck director Elodie Keene and an episode guide.

Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond

Dealing primarily with the post-1996 era shaped by digital technologies and defined by consumer choice and brand marketing, this book brings together leading scholars, established journalists and experienced broadcasters working in the field of contemporary television to debate what we mean by quality TV.

Reading Asian Television Drama: Crossing Borders and Breaking Boundaries

The Asian TV industry is 'unstoppable' reported "Variety" in 2008. This book discloses that Asian TV drama is diverse in form and content, it has value that is local as well as transcultural and its shows have strong appeal in their aesthetics, storytelling, acting and cinematography to large non-Asian as well as Asian audiences.

The Queer Politics of Television

Brings together the fields of political theory and television studies. This book explores the cultural politics of television by treating television shows - including "Six Feet Under", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Desperate Housewives", "The L Word", and "Big Love" - as serious, important texts and reading them through the lens of queer theory.

Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in Box

Demonstrates the ways in which third wave feminist television studies approaches and illuminates mainstream TV. This work looks at the contradictions and reciprocities between feminism and television. It offers a discussion of what television has to offer feminist fan.

Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in a Box

Takes a look at the contradictions and reciprocities between feminism and television, engaging as they go in theoretical and critical conversations about media culture, third wave feminism, feminist spectatorship, the sex wars, and the politics of visual pleasure. This book offers a discussion of what television has to offer feminist fan.

TV's Betty Goes Global: From Telenovela to International Brand

Premiering in 2006, the award winning US hit show "Ugly Betty", is an incarnation of a global phenomenon that started as a Colombian telenovela, "Yo soy Betty, la fea", back in 1999. This book about how television formats go global asks what the "Betty" phenomenon can tell us about the international circulation of locally produced TV fictions.

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