Millennials Killed the Video Star


Book Description

Between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows, including Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, Catfish, and Jersey Shore, which were aimed at predominantly white youth audiences. In Millennials Killed the Video Star Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture—ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities.




Reality TV


Book Description

A collection of essays, which provide a comprehensive picture of how and why the genre of reality television emerged, what it means, how it differs from earlier television programming, and how it engages societies, industries, and individuals.




American Film Cycles


Book Description

A series of movies that share images, characters, settings, plots, or themes, film cycles have been an industrial strategy since the beginning of cinema. While some have viewed them as "subgenres," mini-genres, or nascent film genres, Amanda Ann Klein argues that film cycles are an entity in their own right and a subject worthy of their own study. She posits that film cycles retain the marks of their historical, economic, and generic contexts and therefore can reveal much about the state of contemporary politics, prevalent social ideologies, aesthetic trends, popular desires, and anxieties. American Film Cycles presents a series of case studies of successful film cycles, including the melodramatic gangster films of the 1920s, the 1930s Dead End Kids cycle, the 1950s juvenile delinquent teenpic cycle, and the 1990s ghetto action cycle. Klein situates these films in several historical trajectories—the Progressive movement of the 1910s and 1920s, the beginnings of America's involvement in World War II, the "birth" of the teenager in the 1950s, and the drug and gangbanger crises of the early 1990s. She shows how filmmakers, audiences, film reviewers, advertisements, and cultural discourses interact with and have an impact on the film texts. Her findings illustrate the utility of the film cycle in broadening our understanding of established film genres, articulating and building upon beliefs about contemporary social problems, shaping and disseminating deviant subcultures, and exploiting and reflecting upon racial and political upheaval.




Kids These Days


Book Description

In Kids These Days, early Wall Street occupier Malcolm Harris gets real about why the Millennial generation has been wrongly stereotyped, and dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up. Millennials have been stereotyped as lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. We've gotten so used to sloppy generational analysis filled with dumb clichés about young people that we've lost sight of what really unites Millennials. Namely: We are the most educated and hardworking generation in American history. We poured historic and insane amounts of time and money into preparing ourselves for the 21st-century labor market. We have been taught to consider working for free (homework, internships) a privilege for our own benefit. We are poorer, more medicated, and more precariously employed than our parents, grandparents, even our great grandparents, with less of a social safety net to boot. Kids These Days is about why. In brilliant, crackling prose, early Wall Street occupier Malcolm Harris gets mercilessly real about our maligned birth cohort. Examining trends like runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more, Harris gives us a portrait of what it means to be young in America today that will wake you up and piss you off. Millennials were the first generation raised explicitly as investments, Harris argues, and in Kids These Days he dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up.




One Size Does Not Fit All


Book Description

This edited collection explores the malleability and influence of body image, focusing particularly on how media representation and popular culture’s focus on the body exacerbates the crucial social influence these representations can have on audiences’ perceptions of themselves and others. Contributors investigate the cultural context and lived experiences of individuals’ relationships with their bodies, going beyond examination of the thin, ideal body type to explore the emerging representations and portrayals of a diverse set of body types across the media spectrum, paving the way for future research on this topic. Scholars of media studies, popular culture, and health communication will find this book particularly useful.




Ryan Murphy's Queer America


Book Description

Ryan Murphy is a self-described "gay boy from Indiana," who has grown up to forge a media empire. With an extraordinary list of credits and successful television shows, movies, and documentaries to his name, Murphy can now boast one of the broadest and most successful careers in Hollywood. Serving as writer, producer, and director, his creative output includes limited-run dramas (such as Feud, Ratched, and Halston), procedural dramas (such as 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lonestar), anthology series (such as American Crime Story, American Horror Story, and American Horror Stories), sit-coms (such as The New Normal) and long-running serial narratives (such as Glee, Nip/Tuck, and Pose). Each of these is infused in different ways with a distinctive form of queer energy and erotics, animating their narratives with both campy excess and poignant longing and giving new meaning to the American story. This collection takes up Murphy as auteur and showrunner, considering the gendered and sexual politics of Murphy’s wide body of work. Using an intersectional framework throughout, an impressive list of well-known and emerging scholars engages with Murphy’s diverse output, while also making the case for Murphy’s version of a queer sensibility, a revised notion of queer time, cultural memory, and the contributions his own production company makes to a politics of LGBTQ+ representation and evolving gender identities. This book is suitable for students of Gender and Media, LGBTQ+ Studies, Media Studies, and Communication Studies.




Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots


Book Description

With sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs, or copies of successful films or franchises dominating film and television production, it sometimes seems as if Hollywood is incapable of making an original film or TV show. These textual pluralities or multiplicities—while loved by fans who flock to them in droves—tend to be dismissed by critics and scholars as markers of the death of high culture. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots takes the opposite view, surveying a wide range of international media multiplicities for the first time to elucidate their importance for audiences, industrial practices, and popular culture. The essays in this volume offer a broad picture of the ways in which cinema and television have used multiplicities to streamline the production process, and to capitalize on and exploit viewer interest in previously successful and/or sensational story properties. An impressive lineup of established and emerging scholars talk seriously about forms of multiplicity that are rarely discussed as such, including direct-to-DVD films made in Nigeria, cross-cultural Japanese horror remakes, YouTube fan-generated trailer mash-ups, and 1970s animal revenge films. They show how considering the particular bonds that tie texts to one another allows us to understand more about the audiences for these texts and why they crave a version of the same story (or character or subject) over and over again. These findings demonstrate that, far from being lowbrow art, multiplicities are actually doing important cultural work that is very worthy of serious study.




The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music


Book Description

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.




Television’s Streaming Wars


Book Description

This volume addresses contemporary debates and trends regarding the production and distribution, content, and audience engagement with the television streaming industry. The book interrogates the economics and structure of the industry, questions the types and diversity of content perpetuated on streaming services, and addresses how audiences engage with content from US and global perspectives and within various research paradigms. Chapters address television streaming wars, including the debates and trends in terms of its production and competition, diversity and growth of programming, and audience consumption, focusing on multiple platforms, content, and users. This timely and creative volume will interest students and scholars working in television studies, media industry studies, popular culture studies, audience studies, media psychology, critical cultural studies and media economics.




Wise Millennial


Book Description

*GOLD AWARD WINNER* -- Nonfiction Author's Association ★★★★★ “ 'Wise Millennial' is enrapturing, edifying and transporting.” -- Reader’s Favorite ★★★★ “An engaging and articulate self-help book, Wise Millennial combines personal storytelling and guidance and will resonate with its target generation” -- Clarion Review “Lively, appealing, and instructive; perfectly targeted to the millennial demographic.” -- Kirkus Review Who the hell is Peter Darrow? Health and wellness entrepreneur Peter Darrow thought he had life all figured out. A native of the posh and privileged Upper East Side, the young millennial lived large--attending elite schools, throwing lavish birthday parties, and spending summers in the Hamptons. Then one day his seemingly perfect, polished life came crashing down. Over the course of three hellacious years, his father died, he inherited and burned through a shit-ton of money, his girlfriend dumped him, and his first ever business floundered. One morning he found himself looking in the mirror thinking, Whose life am I living anyway? After thousands of hours of therapy, introspection, and meditation, Peter exchanged entitlement for humility and his parents' worldview for one authentically his own. His tragic crash course in the meaning of life revealed that true wealth and happiness are not found in affluence and privilege but within oneself and within healthy relationships with others. This is his story . . . In this book, you will learn: - What it was like for Peter to grow up in Manhattan's Upper East Side - How to overcome heartbreak when dealing with the loss of a parent, a failed relationship, or an unsuccessful business endeavor - About the grueling stresses of the restaurant industry, and an inside perspective on what it's like to be an owner - The unique world of online dating and how to cultivate more meaningful relationships - How millennials can break free from their parents' outdated values and their self-obsessed egos so they can discover their personal truths and live fulfilling, authentic lives ... and many other fascinating insights from a young, entitled, and privileged human being who now sees the world differently through loss, disappointment, and failure. "A powerful set of ruminations that are likely to hit many millennials of privilege where they live...and help start them on journeys that are likely to be both interesting and useful. Wise Millennial gives readers lots to think about." -- Len Schlesinger, President Emeritus-Babson College, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School "Millennials are given a bad rap--lazy, entitled, generally bad at life. But my generation is so much stronger and wiser than you might think, and Wise Millennial proves that! Peter gives an inside take that's alternatively hilarious, poignant, and inspiring for millennials and the people who love them." -- Nicole Lapin, New York Times bestselling author of Rich Bitch and Boss Bitch "The millennial generation is reminiscent of the baby boom generation: it is already wielding enormous influence over every facet of American culture, society, politics, and economics--and yet, it is poorly if at all understood by the generations that preceded it. In Wise Millennial, Peter N. Darrow offers insights based on hard-won personal experience and assiduous academic study that make the thoughts, dreams, wants, and desires of the millennial generation understandable at long last."-- Harry Hurt III, award-winning journalist and author of Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump