For decades after its invention, television was considered by many to be culturally deficient when compared to cinema, as analyses rooted in communication studies and the social sciences tended to focus primarily on television's negative impact on consumers. More recently, however, denigration has largely been replaced by serious critical consideration of what television represents in the post-network era. Once derided as a media wasteland, TV is now praised for its visual density and complexity. In the last two decades, media scholars have often suggested that television has become cinematic. Serial dramas, in particular, are acclaimed for their imitations of cinema's formally innovative and narratively challenging conventions. But what exactly does "cinematic TV" mean? In Cinematic TV, author Rashna Wadia Richards takes up this question comprehensively, arguing that TV dramas quote, copy, and appropriate (primarily) American cinema in multiple ways and toward multiple ends. Constructing an innovative theoretical framework by combining intertextuality and memory studies, Cinematic TV focuses on four modalities of intermedial borrowings: homage, evocation, genre, and parody. Through close readings of such exemplary shows as Stranger Things, Mad Men, Damages, and Dear White People, the book demonstrates how serial dramas reproduce and rework, undermine and idolize, and, in some cases, compete with and outdo cinema.

Investigating the boundaries between media in an age of convergence, Cinematic TV constructs a new model for exploring how contemporary serial dramas quote, copy, and appropriate American cinema.

With its twisty serialized plots, compelling antiheroes, and stylish production, Breaking Bad has become a signature series for a new golden age of television, in which some premium cable shows have acquired the cultural prestige usually reserved for the cinema. In Breaking Bad and Cinematic Television Angelo Restivo uses the series as a point of departure for theorizing a new aesthetics of television: one based on an understanding of the cinematic that is tethered to affect rather than to medium or prestige. Restivo outlines how Breaking Bad and other contemporary “cinematic” television series take advantage of the new possibilities of postnetwork TV to create an aesthetic that inspires new ways to think about how television engages with the everyday. By exploring how the show presents domestic spaces and modes of experience under neoliberal capitalism in ways that allegorize the perceived twenty-first-century failures of masculinity, family, and the American Dream, Restivo shows how the televisual cinematic has the potential to change the ways viewers relate to and interact with the world.

This essay examines the primacy of worldbuilding in the age of CGI, transmedia practices and "high concept" fiction by studying the principles that govern the creation of a multiverse in a wide range of film and TV productions. Emphasis is placed on Hollywood sci-fi movies and their on-screen representation of imaginary machines that mirror the film medium, following in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's writings and the cyberpunk culture. A typology of worlds is established, as well as a number of analytical tools for assessing the impact of the coexistence of two or more worlds on the narrative structure, the style (uses of color, editing practices), the generic affiliation (or hybridity), the seriality and the discourse produced by a given film (particularly in fictions linked to post-9/11 fantasies). Among the various titles examined, the reader is offered a detailed analysis of the Resident Evil film series, Total Recall and its remake, Dark City, the Matrix trilogy, Avatar, Source Code and other time-loop films, TRON and its sequel, Christopher Nolan's Tenet, and several TV shows – most notably HBO's Westworld, but also Sliders, Lost, Fringe and Counterpart.

Each volume contains film stills, set photography, quotes from the cast and the filmmakers, Introductions, copies of handwritten notes by Adam Driver (Charlie) and Scarlett Johansson (pink) giving their perspectives on who the other character is. In envelopes adhered to front paste-downs of each other's volumes.

Holman covers the broad field of sound accompanying pictures, from the basics through recording, editing and mixing for theatrical films, documentaries and television shows. In each area, theory is followed by practical sections.

Film and television create worlds, but they are also of a world, a world that is made up of stuff, to which humans attach meaning. Think of the last time you watched a movie: the chair you sat in, the snacks you ate, the people around you, maybe the beer or joint you consumed to help you unwind—all this stuff shaped your experience of media and its influence on you. The material culture around film and television changes how we make sense of their content, not to mention the very concepts of the mediums. Focusing on material cultures of film and television reception, The Stuff of Spectatorship argues that the things we share space with and consume as we consume television and film influence the meaning we gather from them. This book examines the roles that six different material cultures have played in film and television culture since the 1970s—including video marketing, branded merchandise, drugs and alcohol, and even gun violence—and shows how objects considered peripheral to film and television culture are in fact central to its past and future.

Michael Anderegg investigates how Shakespeare films constitute an exciting & ever-changing film genre. He looks closely at films by Olivier, Welles, & Branagh, as well as postmodern Shakespeares & multiple adaptations over the years of 'Romeo and Juliet'.

For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops with the so-called fall of the Comanche empire in 1875, when Quanah Parker led Comanches onto the reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches, the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity. Co-starring a long list of Comanche actors, filmmakers, consultants, critics, and subjects, Cinematic Comanches moves through the politics of tribal representation and history to highlight the production of Comanchería cinema. From early silent films and 1950s Westerns to Disney's The Lone Ranger and the story of how Comanches captured its controversial Comanche lead Johnny Depp, Tahmahkera argues that Comanche nationhood can be strengthened through cinema. Tahmahkera's extensive research includes interviews with elder LaDonna Harris, who adopted Depp during filming in one of the most contested films in recent Indigenous cinematic history. In the fragmented popular narrative of the rise and fall of Comanches, Cinematic Comanches calls for considering mediated contributions to the cultural resurgence of Comanches today.

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the seminal works of western literature. Its impact on modern culture has been enormous, nourishing a plethora of twentieth century authors from Joyce and Borges to Kenzaburo Oe. Although Dante's influence in the literary sphere is well documented, very little has been written on his equally determining role in the evolution of the visual media unique to our times, namely, cinema and television. Dante, Cinema, and Television corrects this oversight. The essays, from a broad range of disciplines, cover the influence of the Divine Comedy from cinema's silent era on through to the era of sound and the advent of television, as well as its impact on specific directors, actors, and episodes, on national/regional cinema and television, and on genres. They also consider the different modes of appropriation by cinema and television. Dante, Cinema, and Television demonstrates the many subtle ways in which Dante's Divine Comedy has been given 'new life' by cinema and television, and underscores the tremendous extent of Dante's staying power in the modern world.