Undead TV: Essays on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer": Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822340658 ISBN 13: 9780822340652

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

"Aiming its Mr. Pointy at preconceived ideas about the show, this collection tackles Buffy from cultural, economic, and aesthetic angles. Cancellation has clearly done nothing to blunt the show's cutting edge. Read it along with Joss Whedon's new eighth-season comic book and you'll agree: Buffy is dead--long live Buffy!"--Heather Hendershot, author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip

"Keenly attentive to gender, age, race, and institutional politics, the essays in this collection reverberate with the clarity, cogency, and force of high-quality television studies scholarship. Undead TV is indispensable reading not only for those interested in one of the most important American television series but also for anyone who wants to be informed about the current practices, investments, and prospects of television and other associated media."--Diane Negra, coeditor of Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture

"I was incredibly excited to have the chance to read Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and feel like I was doing 'academic' work while still obsessing over my favorite show. . . . [T]he articles about media and marketing aspects of TV shows that use Buffy as an example are interesting, and deserve a reading by any Buffy scholar. As Undead TV proves to its readers, a successful TV show becomes great only after it is already dead. But like any Buffy fan knows, when things die, they're never really dead, and it is in this undead experience that things really start to get interesting."--Chelsey Clammer "Feminist Review blog "

"This intelligent collection of essays offers a critical commentary on both the ongoing cultural significance of the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and on media and television industries in general. Undead TV makes a great resource for anyone interested in television theory as well as offering fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer an insightful look into the program's continuingly relevant themes and messages."--Maryanne Mangano "M/C Reviews "

Synopsis:

When the final episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" aired in 2003, fans mourned the death of the hit television series. Yet the show has lived on as a commercial success through syndication, global distribution, DVD release, and merchandising. Buffy offered sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth. In the process, it helped shape trends in television production and reception. The flagship show for the WB network from 1997 until it moved to UPN in 2001, Buffy represents an important shift in network television, the moment when the "netlets" - Fox, UPN, and the WB - began to focus on markets that had been largely overlooked by the three major broadcast networks: teenagers, African Americans, and Latinos.In "Undead Television", media studies scholars tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. One contributor considers Buffy lead Sarah Michelle Gellar's successful career as representative of a new, more fluid form of stardom capable of traversing television, film, and the Internet.

Another explores the show's feminist (or postfeminist) agenda in relation to its depiction of Buffy as a New Woman balancing a powerful position with her femininity. Others explore the WB's marketing of Buffy to viewers of different ages; the reception of Buffy and its spin-off, "Angel", in the United Kingdom; and the representation of alternative masculinities and queer desire in "Buffy and Angel".

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0822340658
• ISBN 13: 9780822340652
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Levine Elana, Parks Lisa