Mortality remains a taboo topic in much of Western society, but death and violence continue to be staples of popular television. We can better understand the appeal of violence by investigating psychological theories surrounding anxiety about death and the defenses we use to manage that anxiety. This book examines five recent television series--Game of Thrones,The Punisher, Jessica Jones, Sons of Anarchy and Hannibal--and shows how fictional characters' motivations teach viewers about both the constructive and destructive ways we try to deal with our own mortality. Instead of dismissing violent television as harmless entertainment or completely condemning it as a dangerous trigger of hostile behavior, this book shows its effects on viewers in a more nuanced manner. It provides a new perspective on the enjoyment of violent television, enhancing fans' appreciation and sparking ongoing discussions about their value to both the individual and society.

As the first collection dedicated to the relationship between television and the U.S. South, Small-Screen Souths addresses the growing interest in how mass culture represents the region and influences popular perceptions of it. In sixteen essays divided into three thematic sections, scholars of southern culture analyze representations of the South in a variety of television shows spanning the history of the medium, from classic network programs such as The Andy Griffith Show and Designing Women to some of today’s popular franchises like Duck Dynasty and The Walking Dead. The first section, “Politics and Identity in the Televisual South,” focuses on how television constructs understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and class, often adapting to changing configurations of community and identity. The next section, “Caricatures, Commodities, and Catharsis in the Rural South,” examines the tension between depictions of southern rural communities and assumptions about abject whiteness, particularly conceptions of poverty and profitized culture. The concluding section, “(Dis)Locating the South,” considers the influence of postcolonialism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism in understanding television featuring the region. Throughout, the essays investigate the profuse, often contradictory ways that the U.S. South has been represented on television, seeking to expand and pluralize myopic perspectives of the region. By analyzing depictions of the South from the classical network era to the contemporary post-broadcast age, Small-Screen Souths offers a broad historical scope and a multiplicity of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on what it means to see the South from the television screen.

Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen examines the impact of cinema closures and the shift to small-screen consumption on our aesthetic and subjective desires during the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective. The chapters in this text hold a unique focus on the intersections of film, psychoanalysis, and the subjective implications of the shift from cinema to the small screen of domestic space. The subjects span historical and current Lacanian thinking, including the representation of psychoanalysis as artifice, Lacan appearing on television, the travails and tribulations of computer mediated analysis, the traumatrope, and the techno-inflected imagined social bond of what Jacques Lacan called the ‘alethosphere’. In this collection, the socio-cultural narratives and Real disruptions of the pandemic are framed as a function of the paradoxes of enjoyment characteristic of Lacanian psychoanalysis rather than merely the psychosocial repercussions of a planetary and contingent disaster. With contributions from practicing psychoanalysts, as well as academics working in related interdisciplinary areas, Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen will have appeal to readers of contemporary Lacanian work in general, to readers and researchers of contemporary psychoanalytic studies, and transdisciplinary and intersectional scholars engaged in psychoanalytic, cultural, and psycho-social research.

While television has always played a role in recording and curating history, shaping cultural memory, and influencing public sentiment, the changing nature of the medium in the post-network era finds viewers experiencing and participating in this process in new ways. They skim through commercials, live tweet press conferences and award shows, and tune into reality shows to escape reality. This new era, defined by the heightened anxiety and fear ushered in by 9/11, has been documented by our media consumption, production, and reaction. In Small Screen, Big Feels, Melissa Ames asserts that TV has been instrumental in cultivating a shared memory of emotionally charged events unfolding in the United States since September 11, 2001. She analyzes specific shows and genres to illustrate the ways in which cultural fears are embedded into our entertainment in series such as The Walking Dead and Lost or critiqued through programs like The Daily Show. In the final section of the book, Ames provides three audience studies that showcase how viewers consume and circulate emotions in the post-network era: analyses of live tweets from Shonda Rhimes's drama, How to Get Away with Murder (2010–2020), ABC's reality franchises, The Bachelor (2002–present) and The Bachelorette (2003–present), and political coverage of the 2016 Presidential Debates. Though film has been closely studied through the lens of affect theory, little research has been done to apply the same methods to television. Engaging an impressively wide range of texts, genres, media, and formats, Ames offers a trenchant analysis of how televisual programming in the United States responded to and reinforced a cultural climate grounded in fear and anxiety.

Marilyn Monroe died at 36. Her death certificate lists "Acute Barbiturate Poisoning. Ingestion of Overdose" as the cause. Just below that line, you can see that the person who issued her death certificate typed "Probable Suicide." Many people question whether her death was a suicide, an accident, or possibly a homicide. A death certificate is an intriguing document. It encapsulates a person's life story on one page--the birthplace, parents, education, length of career, residence, time, place, and cause of death and finally, what happened to the remains. The information required for a death certificate can vary since each state looks at it differently. California regards them as public documents. Texas and New York makes them available only to family members and others showing a direct need. Satisfying curiosity is not considered a need. John Belushi, John Denver, George Harrison, Truman Capote, "Fred and Ginger" and Frank Sinatra are just a few of the 182 Hollywood notables from the Silent Era to today whose intriguing death certificates are collected here--fascinating!

Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture is the first and only book to position what are called “Soundies” within the broader cultural and technological milieu of the 1940s. From 1940 to 1946, these musical films circulated in everyday venues, including bars, bowling alleys, train stations, hospitals, and even military bases. Viewers would pay a dime to watch them playing on the small screens of the Panoram jukebox. This book expands U.S. film history beyond both Hollywood and institutional film practices. Examining the dynamics between Soundies’ short musical films, the Panoram’s film-jukebox technology, their screening spaces and their popular discourse, Andrea J. Kelley provides an integrative approach to historic media exhibition. She situates the material conditions of Soundies’ screening sites alongside formal considerations of the films and their unique politics of representation to illuminate a formative moment in the history of the small screen.

Literally the last word for Hollywood trivia buffs, a celebrity death certificate is also strangely compelling. Its matter-of-fact reportage makes the famous ordinary, illuminating previously well-lit profiles with the unfiltered light of the everyday. A death certificate may also reveal information that stars assiduously concealed, such as actual birthdates. In California, home to many of Hollywood's brightest stars, death certificates are a matter of public record--and consequently an untapped mine of information. This follow-up to M.F. Steen's previous collection (2003) reproduces in full 169 of the death certificates of the entertainment industry's dearly departed. Brief biographical notes are included, listing birth and professional name as well as notable film, TV and entertainment credits. Mel Blanc, Lorne Greene, John Ritter, Gregory Peck, and Ronald Reagan are just a few of Hollywood's notables whose death certificates are collected here.