Television is now recognized as a key source of knowledge about the social and cultural reality. TV series is one of the genre with special role on this field. It’s norm-creating properties have been spotted already in the 70’s and used to construct the first, based on narrative, edutainment programs. The article is focused on the series about social workers “Into deep water”. This TV show was creating by Ministry of Labor and Social Policy and it’s first example of education series in Poland. The author analyzes pop culture text based on education-entertainment strategy and educational potential of series. The empirical basis for article are written expression and qualitative research interviews. The aim of the research was verification the educational extent of the “Into deep water” and what it is. The main conclusion that results from the analysis is that the show is more PR tool than educational.
Product placement is an example of a popular form of advertising characteristic for the Polish TV shows. Film and TV writers in Poland are keen on using this method also in TV shows. As product placement has got a strong influence on the audience, the viewers perceive the film reality as the reflection of real life. TV series fiction in turn influences the consumerist preferences of the adresses. The strategy of product placement in the Polish TV series, however, still leaves much to be desired as directors find it difficult to apply the method to suitable scenes in a subtle way. It happens that the product being placed remains onscreen for too long, the number of the products per single episode is too high and the dialogues aimed at highlighting the advantages of given products seem too artificial. All those actions have a negative result on the final decision of the viewers on whether to buy the advertised goods or not.
Polish People’s Republic On Air: How the Film Creates the Knowledge about the Past among the Young PolesIn the article Author will present the idea for the analysis of the reality of Polish TVseries telling about the time of the communist era in Poland. Th is analysis will beconfronted with examples of other sources of collective memory, like books, documentaryfi lms and teaching program. Aft er that, this comparison will be comparedwith respondents opinions in order to analyze which of them have more infl uenceon the content of individual memory that may lead to creating a collective memory.
Ten years after the 9/11 attacks CBS premiered Person of Interest. It introduced the inventor of a surveillance system commanded by the government trying to find a ―back door to his creation: devised to prevent terrorism, it was programmed to distinguish ―relevant from ―irrelevant threats, and he feels that many potential victims are being neglected. Focusing on the topicalization of gender violence, we read the show through: 1) Furedi‘s analyses of the post-9/11 culture of fear; 2) McNay‘s neo-Foucauldian discussion of gender and agency. We argue that Nolan transplants ideas about the War on Terror onto everyday threats including gender terrorism. We also approach agency, which fluctuates between presenting the (super)hero as the savior of the damsel in distress and portraying women as agents who can protect themselves and others. Although the former dominates, the weight of gender violence within a Greimasian dramaturgical model makes Person of Interest different from other post-9/11 series; the clearest one in the vindication of this problem as ―relevant within a media discourse dominated by allegedly more important, macro-level fears of our time.
Can a TV series be treated as a space for pedagogical discourses? The answer seems obvious. For modern culture pedagogy, it is a reservoir of knowledge about society. TV series is a characteristic phenomenon in contemporary audiovisual culture. It describes our world in a very honest way. At the same time, it talks about problems affecting various social groups, which are often considered to be “not serious” in informal debates. The television series, as an element of popular art, is an interesting and valuable “social document”. The goal of modern education is to develop a reflective critical view of audiovisual products that surround us. A critical look at fictitious images of reality helps us better understand our world that is the most real. The article is a voice in the discussion on the Sex Education series, as an example of the image of today’s youth, their dilemmas and anxieties woven into school reality, as well as their relations with peer groups and parents.
Artykuł prezentuje założenia metodologiczne oraz wskazówki praktyczne dotyczące prowadzenia wywiadu grupowego z wykorzystaniem materiałów filmowych. Rozważania oparte zostały na doświadczeniach własnych z okresu realizacji projektu, który dotyczył recepcji seriali tradycyjnych i seriali typu post-soap. W tym celu zorganizowałem i poprowadziłem w różnych częściach Polski cztery wywiady grupowe z mieszkankami wsi popegeerowskich (minigrupy, osoby znające się wcześniej). Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, że wywiady grupowe są dobrą techniką badań także w kontekście akademickim, a nie tylko, jak zwykło się przyjmować, w komercyjnych badaniach marketingowych. Artykuł składa się z pięciu części. W pierwszej prezentuję dorobek polskich studiów kulturowych w zakresie badania publiczności telewizyjnych. Następnie omawiam ogólne założenia wywiadów grupowych z wykorzystaniem materiałów filmowych. W trzeciej części przedstawiam przeprowadzony przez siebie projekt badawczy, na którego podstawie wyprowadziłem przedstawiane tu wnioski. Część czwarta stanowi analizę korzyści i zagrożeń, które powoduje zastosowanie tego typu wywiadów. W piątej części, podsumowującej, prezentuję zaś schemat przygotowania badania z wykorzystaniem materiałów filmowych.
EN
The article presents the methodological assumptions and practical guidance on conducting a group interview supported by film material. The discussion is based on my own experience from the project, which dealt with the reception of traditional TV series and post-soap series. To this end, I organized and led in various parts of Poland four focus groups with residents of the post-PGR villages (mini-group, affinity group). The aim of this paper is to show that the group interviews are a good research technique not only in commercial marketing research, as it is usually taken for granted, but also in an academic context. The article consists of five parts. First, I present the achievements of Polish cultural studies in the field of television audience research. Next, I discuss general assumptions of group interviews supported by film material. In the third part I present my research project, which helped me to draw the conclusions. The fourth part is an analysis of the benefits and risks of such interviews. In the fifth, summarizing part, I present a research scheme involving the group interviews supported by film material.
The post-modern gothic simultaneously makes reference to already well-grounded experience, such as the repertoire of motifs and narrative prefigurations which have entered the artistic canon of the convention for good. A lot of figures and characters identified with horror become a part of the transfictional process of allocating them in new settings and re-designing their fictional biographies. Although in TV series reinterpretations of classical literary narratives quite often focus on instilling a positive image of erstwhile impersonation of numinosum, they do offer in return a construal of more contemporaneous fears, aligned with today’s socio-political-economic landscape. This article will include the following series based on literary prototypes representing the very canon of gothic fiction: Dracula, Penny Dreadful, Jekyll and Hyde, Second Chance and Sleepy Hollow as well as elements of productions connected with literary narrations of horror, such as Once Upon a Time.
The subject of this article is one of the Netflix’s series – Grace and Frankie (2015–2017). The show is a voice against the lack of elder women in social and media space and against discrimination and exclusion in terms of culture and dignity of the elders. The purpose of the topic is to attract attention to the role of media, including popular TV series, in presenting ways and possibilities to experience aging well promoting and supporting successful and positive aging, and counteracting the negative stereotypes of old age. The show in question can constitute appealing form of media’s social education which fits perfectly into the contemporary pro-elderly policy.
We depict practices of Polish audiences in communist Poland and the transition of these practices after the fall of communism. In Eastern Europe, digital distribution of video content has been built on semi-peripheral culture of VHS tapes copying and sharing. Although the unique Polish 20th century historical trajectory contains the experience of being excluded from Western popular culture, the first decade of 21st century brought unlimited digital access to audiovisual content. Peer re-production, a non-creative mode of participation increased. Our article provides new historical data illustrating this specificity both in terms of historical experience and globalizing technological progress.
One of the most discussed TV series of recent years is Fauda (directed by A. Issaharoff and L. Raz). In the article, I discuss the reception of the film in the Israeli and Western media, as well as the ways of representing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the series in the context of the so-called war on terrorism and forms of violence. In my work, I am particularly interested in the following questions: in what form did the idea of conflict return to the screens and to the public debate? How has the Palestinian issue been marginalized in the Israeli public consciousness? Under what conditions does the violence intensify? Taking into account the forms of violence presented in the series, I am inclined to the thesis that the creators of “Fauda” are trying, sometimes with greater, sometimes less success, to look critically at the reality dictated by the laws of war.
Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie, w jaki sposób seriale post-soap (przełamujące schematy gatunkowe, wysokobudżetowe produkcje nowego typu) zmieniają medialny obraz tabuizowanych dotąd tematów, takich jak nienormatywne koncepcje ról społecznych. Na przykładzie obrazu rodziny wykażę, że serialowa rewolucja stara się nadążyć nie tylko za najnowszymi osiągnięciami techniki, ale również za problematyką eksplorowaną przez nauki społeczne.
EN
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the post-soap series that tend to break limits of the genre as a new type of high-budget productions change media images of tabooed topics such as non-normative conceptions of social roles. Using the notion of family, I will show that the revolution in the area of TV series is trying to keep up not only with the latest advances in technology, but also with the issues explored by social sciences.
This article is an attempt at a fairly detailed analysis of the TV series Being Forty in its first version of the 1970s. The text proposes an interpretation of the film from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and in particular reconstructs the social sphere of the film’s protagonists, which consists of the intelligentsia elite, the nomenklatura, the lower intelligentsia, and medium-level technical personnel. In the picture produced by the filmmakers, the role of the intelligentsia, especially its multi-generational old elite, is dominant. This vision does not fully correspond with the real place of the intelligentsia in Poland during the Gierek era. The authors of the article thus interpret the film as the scriptwriters’ appreciation of the intelligentsia, both in respect to its lower technical staff and to the part of the nomenklatura that was less rich in cultural capital. The interpretative framework proposed in the text seems useful for analyzing other works of art in order to reconstruct the social relations of the times in which they were created.
The starting point for the present work is the conviction that we can study the memory of undemocratic pasts from both a transnational and comparative perspective. Television series offer viewers an account of the passage of official history, through the prism of both the fictional characters and viewers’ personal (emotional) relationships. In light of this, some elements are going to be investigated common to two television products, the first set during the Francoism (Cuéntame cómo pasó) and the second during Socialism (Vyprávěj), whose patent purpose is to depict how everyday life was under these repressive regimes. From a transnational point of view, the two TV series demonstrate the presence of at least one common narrative mode of undemocratic pasts, which goes beyond specific national features and characteristics. The specific elements mentioned in this work (the narrator as re-affirmation of the guide-values, the family as a synecdoche for the community that remembers, the television as the ‘memory medium’, and the emotional recognition between audience and character as the mediation space with a ‘problematic’ past) can be interpreted as a possible first mapping of the different narrative modes that tend to be connected with the representation of undemocratic pasts in Europe.
The article discusses the phenomenon of transformation of masculinity which can be observed in Polish society. The text discusses this issue using the dichotomy between the "old" paradigm of masculinity, and the "new" one and presents the determinants of both of them. While the first one clearly defines masculinity and fatherhood leaving almost no space for self-reflection and redefinition of one’s role, the second paradigm provides a variety of possible patterns, with no indication which one is right. The article discusses the results of a quantitative study showing the degree of satisfaction of women and men with the division of duties that take place in their households. The complementary material for analysis is brought by selected contemporary TV series broadcast on Polish television in which the characters represent different models of masculinity, both assigned to the "old" and the "new" model. The author’s reflections on these two sources - the quantitative research and the analysis of TV series’ heroes - lead to conclusions concerning the relationship between the TV series “reality" and "real” world. The author hypothesizes that the TV series soothe the audience tension as regards appearing models of family relations and of masculinity, and that they transform the individual experience into the common one.
The Narrative Complexity of Contemporary TV Series Based on Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad The formula of the contemporary TV series, as a product of quality television, diff ers signifi cantly from the traditional series in terms of its narrative structure and ways of building a plotline. Th is article presents an analysis of the Breaking Bad series’ “narrative complexity”, which is the most distinguishing feature of the modern TV series. “Narrative complexity” can be understood not only as a series of innovative narrative devices, such as cold opens, fl ashbacks and fl ashforwards, but is also based on the multiplicity of plotlines present in each episode, constituting a whole story over the course of the seasons. Looking at the ways used to construct a plot and the narrative techniques adopted in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, that is, his use of parallels and symmetries, and the plot’s focus on the development of the series’ (anti)hero, the show can be interpreted as a “result drama"and “mirroring drama”. Th rough its use of the above-listed features of “narrative complexity”, the show meets the standards for a contemporary, quality television series.
The article focuses on the issue of contemporary film series (TV series) and the practices of viewing of them. Taken into consideration is the role of film series in the media culture, and reflected upon are new viewing practices related to socio-cultural changes. The choice of texts and research in the field of the humanities and social sciences was conditioned by the need to conduct interdisciplinary research on film series’ narratives and their reception. A review of the recent literature has shown a lack of research in the field of andragogy aimed at analysing this dynamically changing area of media culture. The considerations undertaken are an introduction to the research on contemporary film series (TV series) and their reception.
PL
Przedmiotem rozważań podjętych w artykule są współczesne seriale filmowe oraz modele zachowań odbiorczych. Celem refleksji badawczej jest zastanowienie się nad rolą seriali w kulturze medialnej, jak również nad nowymi praktykami odbiorczymi, wynikającymi ze zmian społeczno-kulturowych. Wybór przytoczonych tekstów oraz badań z zakresu nauk humanistycznych i społecznych uwarunkowany jest koniecznością prowadzenia interdyscyplinarnych badań nad serialowymi narracjami i ich odbiorem. Przegląd najnowszej literatury wykazał niedostatek badań z zakresu andragogiki ukierunkowanych na analizę tego dynamicznie zmieniającego się obszaru kultury medialnej. Podjęte rozważania stanowią wstęp do badań nad współczesnymi serialami filmowymi i ich recepcją.
Celem artykułu jest analiza humorystycznych użyć antroponimów w serialu telewizyjnym Jak poznałem waszą matkę. Za podstawę pojawienia się w badanych nazwach elementu humorystycznego uznano procesy apelatywizacji i onimizacji prowadzące do niespójności w odbiorze onimów. W wyniku przeprowadzonej analizy opisano i pogrupowano tematycznie osiemdziesiąt przypadków sytuacyjnej onimizacji i apelatywizacji. W artykule poddano analizie funkcję humorystyczną antroponimów w Jak poznałem waszą matkę.
EN
The aim of the article is to analyse the use of humour in anthroponyms in How I Met Your Mother. It has been claimed in the analysis that it is the processes of appellativization and onymization which produce the humorous effects, as these processes constitute the basis for the emergence of the incongruity in the reception of the proper names. The collected material is examined in thematic groups.
Contemporary series productions are modern TV forms, which are undergoing transformation both in terms of structure and conveyed messages. They communicate certain categories of values, such as: informative-educational, ethical-moral, educational-psychological and social-cultural. This paper was based on analysing the phenomenon of contemporary TV series forms in the context of value message. The subject of the study were contemporary foreign TV series. Moreover, it is an attempt at confirming the thesis about communicating certain categories of values.
PL
Współczesne produkcje serialowe to nowoczesne formaty telewizyjne, ulegające transformacji w obrębie budowy, ale także w przestrzeni przekazywanych treści. Seriale komunikująpewne kategorii wartości, między innymi takie jak: wartości informacyjno-edukacyjne, wartości etyczno-moralne, wartości wychowawczo-psychologiczne czy wartości kulturowo-obyczajowe. Praca została oparta na analizie fenomenu współczesnych formatów serialowych w kontekście ich przekazu wartości. Analizie poddano współczesne seriale zagraniczne. Ponadto stanowi próbę potwierdzenia tezy o komunikowaniu pewnych kategorii wartości.
In recent years the process of entering adulthood underwent multiple social changes and faced the necessity of redefinition. The article presents an andragogic reflection on the contemporary world of young adults presented in the series “Girls”. The text includes the description of popular culture as a space for education and socialisation and sources of knowledge about society. Then, the period ofearly adulthood as a concept used both in psychological and andragogic literature was characterised. Also the place of the “Girls” series in the contemporary and cultural debate was presented. The attempt of analysing the social life spaces of young adults presented in the series enabled the interpretation of the world of contemporary young adults. I pinpointed differences that took place in the way of comprehending adulthood and development tasks specific for that period in the contemporary generation of young adults.
PL
W ostatnich latach proces wchodzenia w dorosłość uległ wielu społecznym przemianom i stanął wobec konieczności redefinicji. Artykuł przedstawia andragogiczną refleksję nad współczesnym światem młodych dorosłych przedstawionym w serialu Dziewczyny. W tekście dokonałam opisu kultury popularnej jako przestrzeni edukacji i socjalizacji oraz źródła wiedzy o społeczeństwie. Następnie scharakteryzowałam okres wczesnej dorosłości jako pojęcie stosowane zarówno w literaturze psychologicznej, jak i andragogicznej. Przedstawiłam również miejsce serialu Dziewczyny we współczesnej debacie pedagogicznej i kulturoznawczej. Dokonana przeze mnie próba analizy przedstawionych w serialu przestrzeni życia społecznego młodych dorosłych umożliwiła interpretacje świata współczesnych młodych dorosłych. Wykazałam różnice, które zaszły w sposobie pojmowania dorosłości oraz charakterystycznych dla tego okresu zadań rozwojowych we współczesnym pokoleniu młodych dorosłych.
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