An Analytical Guide To Television S Battlestar Galactica

When the space drama Battlestar Galactica debuted on ABC in 1978, it was expected to be the most popular new program of the year. Instead, it was attacked as a Star Wars rip-off and canceled after a mere 17 stories. The author acknowledges the show was full of dramatic clichés and scientific inaccuracies, but despite these shortcomings, Battlestar Galactica was a dramatically resonant series full of unique and individual characters, such as Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) and ace warrior Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch). The author contends that Battlestar Galactica was a memorable attempt to make science fiction accessible to mainstream television audiences. The brilliant work of artist John Dykstra brought a new world of special effects to network television. Battlestar Galactica also skillfully exploited legends and names from both the Bible and ancient mythology, which added a layer of depth and maturity to the weekly drama.

First comparative study to address the rediscovery of baroque aesthetic in modernism.

During its five-year run from 1997 to 2002, the popular TV show Ally McBeal engaged viewers in debates over what it means to be a woman or a man in the modern workplace; how romance factors into the therapeutic understanding of relationships; what value eccentricity has and how much oddity society should tolerate; and what utility fantasy has in the pragmatic world. In addition to these social concerns, however, Ally McBeal stood out for being well-constructed, narratively complex, and stylistically rich—in short, beautiful TV. Starting from the premise that much of television today is "drop-dead gorgeous" and that TV should be studied for its formal qualities as well as its social impact, Greg M. Smith analyzes Ally McBeal in terms of its aesthetic principles and narrative construction. He explores how Ally's innovative use of music, special effects, fantasy sequences, voiceovers, and flashbacks structures a distinctive fictional universe, while it also opens up new possibilities for televisual expression. Smith also discusses the complex narrative strategies that Ally's creator David E. Kelley used to develop a long-running storyline and shows how these serial narrative practices can help us understand a wide range of prime-time TV serials. By taking seriously the art and argument of Ally McBeal, Beautiful TV conclusively demonstrates that aesthetic and narrative analysis is an indispensable key for unlocking the richness of contemporary television.

In attempting to retain her "human" side, does Sharon really have free will? Is killing a Cylon murder or garbage disposal? These are some of the questions addressed in this thoughtful collection of writings on the philosophical underpinnings of Battlestar, Galactica. The book includes a brief analysis of the original 1970s and 80s series but concentrates primarily on the episodes, characters, and issues from the entirely reimagined current series (including its fourth and final season, scheduled for airing in early 2008) as well as the two-hour TV movie and direct-to-DVD release Razor.

This work indexes books, dissertations and journal articles that mention television shows. Memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, and some popular works meant for fans are also indexed. The major focus is on service to researchers in the history of television. Listings are keyed to an annotated bibliography. Appendices include a list of websites; an index of groups or classes of people on television; and a list of programs by genre. Changes from the second edition include more than 300 new shows, airing on a wider variety of networks; 2000-plus references (more than double the second edition); and a large increase in scholarly articles. The book provides access to materials on almost 2300 shows, including groundbreaking ones like All in the Family (almost 200 entries); cult favorites like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (200-plus entries); and a classic franchise, Star Trek (more than 400 entries for all the shows). The shows covered range from the late 1940s to 2010 (The Walking Dead). References range from 1956 to 2013.

Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond made its television debut in 1959, nine months before Rod Serling’s classic The Twilight Zone, and paved the way for a generation of television programs devoted to paranormal topics such as the occult, ESP, and ghost stories. One Step Beyond was also where some of Hollywood’s most famous leading men, including Warren Beatty, William Shatner, and Charles Bronson, got their starts in television. This complete reference work to the 96 half-hour episodes that ran for three seasons on ABC also offers a detailed history, extensive commentary and summaries of the critical reception of One Step Beyond as well as coverage of the sequel series produced in 1978 entitled The Next Step Beyond. Complete credits for both series are provided.

Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human. This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people’s main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.