Bloomsbury Time on TV: Narrative Time, Time Travel and Time Travellers in Popular TV Culture (Investigating Cult TV)

Time and television have a unique and multi-faceted relationship. Focusing on the cult genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, the book draws examples from among the most beloved television programmes of recent decades including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Dr. Who to explore the diverse uses and representations of time. Television now provides increasingly malleable temporal formats: capable of both episodic and epic time scales as well as following the advent of DVDs and online streaming allowing entire series to be available for watching on demand. Depending on how a series is released be it episode by episode or all at once the viewer s experience of anticipation and consumption, as well as the particular generation of fan communities for the show, will alter. Television, of course, often explores time itself. From Eureka s unexpected plot twists resulting from sudden ruptures in linear history, to Star Trek s concern with the moral implications of time travel and Once Upon a Time s frozen fairy-tale world, television demonstrates how time is the fundamental frame on which our memories and identities hang. Using academic approaches from cultural studies, literary analysis, psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, this book lends a deeper understanding of television as a contemporary narrative medium.