Religion Across Television Genres PDF Download

Author: Joseph M. Valenzano III
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781433152801
Category : Religion on television
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Religion Across Television Genres connects communication theories to the religious content of TV programs from an array of form and content genres, specifically, the NBC comedy Community, the critically acclaimed Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, AMC's international megahit The Walking Dead, and the CW's long-running fan favorite Supernatural. Its contemporary relevancy that makes this book ideal for use as a library resource, scholarly reference, and textbook for both undergraduate and graduate courses in mass media, religious studies, and popular culture"--

Author: Alicia Suzanne Vermeer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Apocalypse in mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
The purpose of this study is to determine how youth and emerging adults use television as a platform to discuss religion and to express their religious, social, and political anxieties. Through a textual, genre, and audience analysis of three case studies--"Supernatural", "Battlestar Galactica", and "Joan of Arcadia"--This paper argues that the apocalypse genre is the most effective for attracting youth and young adult audiences. "Supernatural" and "Battlestar Galactica" each successfully used the apocalypse genre ("Supernatural as a sub-genre of fantasy, and Battlestar Galactica" as a sub-genre of science fiction) and had large young demographics. "Joan of Arcadia" was a teen soap opera/serial drama that used a realism narrative in its portrayal of religion, and was prematurely canceled because it did not have the young audience that it's network desired. The apocalypse genre is attractive to youth and young adults, because it allows them to express their religious and social anxieties in a way that is less intimidating because the setting does not directly correlate with their society.

Author: Walter T. Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This thinking person's guide to evaluating popular TV programs in light of one's faith, values, and beliefs consists of four main sections: comedies, dramas, fact-based programming, and the commerce of TV. Each section includes an overview, history, and trends in that genre plus several extensive "readings" of popular shows. B&W photos.

Author: Mara Einstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113479214X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Why is reality television flourishing in today's expanding media market? Religion and Reality TV: Faith in Late Capitalism argues that the reality genre offers answers to many of life's urgent questions: Why am I important? What gives my life meaning? How do I present my best self to the world? Case studies address these questions by examining religious representations through late capitalist lenses, including the maintenance of the self, the commodification of the sacred, and the performance of authenticity. The book's fourteen essays explore why religious themes proliferate in reality TV, audiences' fascination with "lived religion," and the economics that make religion and reality TV a successful pairing. Chapters also consider the role of race, gender, and religion in the production and reception of programming. Religion and Reality TV provides a framework for understanding the intersection of celebrity, media attention, beliefs, and values. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of religion and media studies, communication, American studies, and popular culture.

Author: Charlotte Elizabeth Howell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 666

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Book Description
This dissertation addresses how religion weaves through industrial practices of prime-time American television including programming, marketing, and content creation in the twenty-first century. Through a focus on the exponential growth of this one subject, religion, across the television landscape since 9/11, I am able to illustrate how a range of industry practitioners have responded to technological, cultural, and political forces in the post-network era. This study consists of interviews with industry executives and creative figures as well as analysis of trade/journalistic discourses and network marketing materials. Using these interviews as well as both genre and ideological analysis of more than a dozen programs (e.g., Friday Night Lights, Supernatural, and Daredevil), my research charts how religious discourses—and specifically, Christian discourses—are produced, marketed, and often discursively displaced in diverse genres across the contemporary primetime dramatic American television landscape. In particular, I analyze the paradoxical situation in which, even as religious representations multiplied in contemporary American prime-time dramas, writers, producers, executives, and marketers continued to regard religion as ideologically risky. As a result, these creatives have used a variety of containment strategies to distance themselves from the idea that they or their work might be religious. The year 2015 marks the potential beginning of a new stage, illustrated by a few case studies that offer examples of an accelerated openness among creatives discussing religion in their work.

Author: Charlotte E. Howell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190054379
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
From the mid-90s to the present, television drama with religious content has come to reflect the growing cultural divide between white middle-America and concentrated urban elites. As author Charlotte E. Howell argues in this book, by 2016, television narratives of white Christianity had become entirely disconnected from the religion they were meant to represent. Programming labeled 'family-friendly' became a euphemism for white, middlebrow America, and developing audience niches became increasingly significant to serial dramatic television. Utilizing original case studies and interviews, Divine Programming investigates the development, writing, producing, marketing, and positioning of key series including 7th Heaven, Friday Night Lights, Rectify, Supernatural, Jane the Virgin, Daredevil, and Preacher. As this book shows, there has historically been a deep ambivalence among television production cultures regarding religion and Christianity more specifically. It illustrates how middle-American television audiences lost significance within the Hollywood television industry and how this in turn has informed and continues to inform television programming on a larger scale. In recent years, upscale audience niches have aligned with the perceived tastes of affluent, educated, multicultural, and-importantly-secular elites. As a result, the televised representation of white Christianity had to be othered, and shifted into the unreality of fantastic genres to appeal to niche audiences. To examine this effect, Howell looks at religious representation through four approaches - establishment, distancing, displacement, and use - and looks at series across a variety of genres and outlets in order to provied varied analyses of each theme.

Author: Erika Engstrom
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739184768
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This book examines the text of the CW network television series Supernatural, a program based in the horror genre that offers viewers myriad religious-based antagonists, through the portrayals of monsters which its two main characters “hunt” and destroy, as well as storylines based in the Bible. Even as the series’ producers claim a non-religious perspective, we contend that story arcs and outcomes of episodes actually forward a hegemonic portrayal of Christianity that portrays a good-versus-evil motif regarding the superiority of Christianity. The depiction of its protagonist brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester of Lawrence, Kansas, forwards a pro-American perspective to a more generalized fight against evil in contemporary times.

Author: Marla Frederick
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804797005
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The presence of women and African Americans not simply as viewers, but also as televangelists and station owners in their own right has dramatically changed the face of American religious broadcasting in recent decades. Colored Television looks at the influence of these ministries beyond the United States, where complex gospels of prosperity and gospels of sexual redemption mutually inform one another while offering hopeful yet socially contested narratives of personal uplift. As an ethnography, Colored Television illuminates the phenomenal international success of American TV preachers like T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and Juanita Bynum. Focusing particularly on Jamaica and the Caribbean, it also explores why the genre has resonated so powerfully around the world. Investigating the roles of producers, consumers, and distributors, Marla Frederick takes a unique look at the ministries, the communities they enter, and the global markets of competition that buffer them.

Author: Birgit Meyer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253111722
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with." -- Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.

Author: Jonathan Pearl
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786405220
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
By the time he had concluded twelve years on prime-time television, Archie Bunker had raised a Jewish child in his home, befriended a black Jew, gone into business with a Jewish partner, enrolled as a member of Temple Beth Shalom, eulogized his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a Friday evening Sabbath dinner, participated in a bar mitzvah ceremony, and joined a group to fight synagogue vandalism. While the famed style of All in the Family was unique, its inclusions of Jews and Jewish issues was far from unusual. On the whole, Jewish issues have been portrayed with respect and relative depth during five decades of television programming. This work documents and examines the portrayal of Jewish themes in popular prime time television, from 1948 through the 1996-1997 television season, focusing on how such topics as anti-Semitism, intermarriage, Jewish lore and traditions, Israel, the Holocaust, and questions of Jewish identity have been featured in numerous television genres. How real-life attitudes about Jews and Jewish issues are reflected in television portrayals is also explored.