Cult TV is a very exciting area of contemporary television. "The Cult TV Book" is the companion reference to this TV phenomenon, whose shows push the boundaries and offer biting commentaries on society today. Cult TV is also changing. Where being cult used to mean being marginal with a small, loyal fan base, cult TV is now key to the television industry, fandom is global and online, cult status for a show is fostered by the networks, and cult series are noted for their spectacular special effects and sumptuous visual style. So, what is cult TV today? Leading scholars, writers and journalists redefine our understanding of cult TV, with new approaches to and case studies on: Cult TV aesthetics, History of cult TV, Cult TV & new media, The 'sub-cultural celebrity', Jane Espenson on how to write cult TV, Cult TV & the broadcast industry, Music, Innovation, Cult channels, Children's cult TV, Sex, Gender, Race, Cult audiences, Transgressive TV, Cult of cult TV, Nancy Holder on writing tie-ins, TV & Film Guide, Fan fiction, "Battlestar Galactica", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Doctor Who", "The Avengers", "The Prisoner", "Quatermass", "The Sopranos", "Masters of Horror", "The Twilight Zone", "Twin Peaks", "Grey's Anatomy", "Bagpuss", "South Park", "The X Files", "Da Ali G Show", "Trailer Park Boys" and "Angel". Contributors include: Stacey Abbott, Sergio Angelini, Jes Battis, Stan Beeler, Miles Booy, Simon Brown, Bronwen Calvert, Jane Espenson, Dick Fiddy, Lincoln Geraghty, Janet K. Halfyard, Matt Hills, Nancy Holder, Catherine Johnson, Lorna Jowett, Roz Kaveney, Roberta Pearson, Denzell Richards, Hillary Robson, David Simmons, Sharon Sutherland, Paul Sutton, Sarah Swan, Donato Totaro, Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tat Wood.

From Mrs Peel to the first female Doctor Who, this book offers a timely focus on the popular phenomenon of the cult TV heroine. The enduring phenomenon of cult TV itself is carefully explored through questions of genre, the role of the audience and the external environment of technological advances and business drivers. Catriona Miller then suggests a fresh account of the psychological dimension of the phenomenon utilising Carl Jung's concepts of the transcendent function and active imagination. Her analysis of the heroines themselves considers the workings of the audio-visual text alongside narrative and character arcs, exploring the complex and contradictory ways in which the heroines are represented. Established cult TV favourites such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X Files, and Xena: Warrior Princess are examined alongside more recent shows such as Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Jessica Jones and American Horror Story: Coven.

Reaching back to the beginnings of television, The Greatest Cult Television Shows offers readers a fun and accessible look at the 100 most significant cult television series of all time, compiled in a single resource that includes valuable information on the shows and their creators. While they generally lack mainstream appeal, cult television shows develop devout followings over time and exert some sort of impact on a given community, society, culture, or even media industry. Cult television shows have been around since at least the 1960s, with Star Trek perhaps the most famous of that era. However, the rise of cable contributed to the rise of cult television throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and now, with the plethora of streaming options available, more shows can be added to this categorization Reaching back to the beginnings of television, the book includes such groundbreaking series as The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner alongside more contemporary examples like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Hannibal. The authors provide production history for each series and discuss their relevance to global pop culture. To provide a more global approach to the topic, the authors also consider several non-American cult TV series, including British, Canadian, and Japanese shows. Thus, Monty Python’s Flying Circus appears alongside Sailor Moon and Degrassi Junior High. Additionally, to move beyond the conception of “cult” as a primarily white, heteronormative, fanboy obsession, the book contains shows that speak to a variety of cult audiences and experiences, such as Queer as Folk and Charmed. With detailed arguments for why these shows deserve to be considered the greatest of all time, Olson and Reinhard provide ideas for discussion and debate on cult television. Each entry in this book demonstrates the importance of the 100 shows chosen for inclusion and highlights how they offer insight into the period and the cults that formed around them.

Premiering in September of 2006, the weekly NBC television series Heroes was an immediate commercial and critical hit, lasting four successful seasons. Heroes follows a group of interrelated characters who discover they have superhuman powers, with each successive episode exploring how these people react to and utilize their powers for good or for evil. This collection of essays explores a variety of issues surrounding Heroes, examining the series' content, marketing and reception. Also investigated is the show's fusion of "cult" and mainstream elements of television, analyzing its ability to combine so-called lowbrow elements (comic books and superheroes) with a high-quality television form prizing such factors as moral ambiguity and depth of characterization--and what this blending process suggests about the current hybrid state of genre television, and about the medium as a whole.

This volume brings together writing on the topic of home media, and in particular releases described as appealing to ‘cult’ fans and audiences. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, the distributors of physical media maintain a vivid presence in the digital age. Perhaps more so than any other category of film or media, this is especially the case with titles considered ‘cult’ and its related processes of distribution and exhibition. The chapters in this collection chart such uses and definitions of ‘cult’, ranging from home media re-releases to promotional events, film screenings, file-sharing and the exploitation of established fan communities. This book will be of interest to the ever-growing number of academics and research students that are specializing in studies of cult cinema and fan practices, as well as professionals (filmmakers, journalists, promoters) who are familiar with these types of films.

It was as if American television audiences discovered the musical in the early 21st century. In 2009 Glee took the Fox Network and American television by storm with the unexpected unification of primetime programming, awkward teens, and powerful voices spontaneously bursting into song. After raking in the highest rating for a new show in the 2009-2010 season, Glee would continue to cultivate rabid fans, tie-in soundtracks and merchandising, and a spinoff reality competition show until its conclusion in 2015. Alongside Glee, NBC and Fox would crank up musical visibility with the nighttime drama Smash and a string of live musical productions. Then came ABC's comedic fantasy musical series Galavant and the CW's surprise Golden Globe darling Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Television and the musical appeared to be a perfect match. But, as author Kelly Kessler illustrates, television had at that point been carrying on a sixty-year, symbiotic love affair with the musical. From Rodgers and Hammerstein's appearance on the first Toast of the Town telecast and Mary Martin's iconic Peter Pan airings to Barbra Streisand's 1960s CBS specials, The Carol Burnett Show, Cop Rock, Great Performances, and a string of one-off musical episodes of sitcoms, nighttime soaps, fantasy shows, and soap operas, television has always embraced the musical. Kessler shows how the form is written across the history of American television and how its various incarnations tell the stories of shifting American culture and changing television, film, and theatrical landscapes. She recounts and explores this rich, decades-long history by traversing musicals, stars, and sounds from film, Broadway, and Las Vegas to the small screen.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave contemporary TV viewers an exhilarating alternative to the tired cultural trope of a hapless, attractive blonde woman victimized by a murderous male villain. With its strong, capable heroine, witty dialogue, and a creator (Joss Whedon) who identifies himself as a feminist, the cult show became one of the most widely analysed texts in contemporary popular culture. The last episode, broadcast in 2002, did not herald the passing of a fleeting phenomenon: Buffy is a media presence still, active on DVD and the internet, alive in the career of Joss Whedon and studied internationally. I'm Buffy and You're History puts the entire series under the microscope, investigating its gender and feminist politics.In this book, Patricia Pender argues that Buffy includes diverse elements of feminism and reconfigures - and sometimes revises - the ideals of American second wave feminism for a wide third wave audience. She also explores the ways in which the final season's vision of collective feminist activism negotiates racial and class boundaries.Exploring the Slayer's postmodern politics, her position as a third wave feminist icon, her placing of masculinity in extremis, and her fandom and legacy in popular culture, this is a fresh and challenging contribution to the growing literature on the pitfalls and pleasures of a great cult TV show.

"The West Wing" or "Generation Kill" in Space? A show about God-fearing sex-obsessed robots? Or a complex meditation on fate, dreaming and eternal recurrence? Of all recent television science fiction series, the reimagined "Battlestar Galactica" is the most highly praised and consistently inventive and intelligent. Where the original show was a straightforward space opera, the new one is rich, strange and above all unpredictable. This book covers the new "Battlestar Galactica" from beginning to end, covering all of the show's principal themes from the depiction of sexuality in an era of artificial people and downloaded memories to what it means to be a member of a military organization when the stakes are not victory or defeat but survival. Like all the best shows about the future or the past - we are never sure when all this is supposed to be happening - "Battlestar Galactica" is a series about the present; chapters here cover its depiction of the post-9.11 world and such issues as abortion and worker's rights. This definitive book on the full new "Battlestar Galactica" also includes an interview with Jane Espenson, co-executive producer of the show's last seasons and writer/director of the "Battlestar Galactica" prequel film "The Plan", with a complete episode guide.

As seen in HBO's "True Blood", vampires have never been more edgy, gory or sexy. Since its arrival on screen in 2008, Alan Ball's adaptation of "The Southern Vampire Mysteries" by Charlaine Harris has exploited the creative freedoms of the HBO brand and captured a cult audience with its passionate, blood-drenched visuals and stories. From viral webisodes depicting vampires announcing themselves on TV to the steamy title sequence and the show's uninhibited use of language, sex and gore, "True Blood" has quickly gained status as cult TV with bite. "True Blood" posed the question of what would happen if vampires 'came out of the coffin' and this book considers the representations of sexuality, race and class in a series that engages directly with prejudice and civil rights. It also considers "True Blood's" generic roots in television horror, paranormal romance and Southern Gothic, the wider contexts of fairy tales and religion, the marketing of the series and the activities of its fans. Written for students, scholars and fans, "True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic" explores the hidden depths of "True Blood's" vampire bars, small town communities and haunted bayous.

Scholar and Who fan Miles Booy has written the first historical account of the public interpretation of Doctor Who. Love and Monsters begins in 1979 with the publication of 'Doctor Who Weekly', the magazine that would start a chain of events that would see creative fans taking control of the merchandise and even of the programme's massively successful twenty-first century reboot. From the twilight of Tom Baker's years to the newest Doctor, Matt Smith, Miles Booy explores the shifting meaning of Doctor Who across the years - from the Third Doctor's suggestion that we should read the Bible, via costumed fans on television, up to the 2010 general election in Britain. This is also the story of how the ambitious producer John Nathan-Turner, assigned to the programme in 1979, produced a visually-excessive programme for a tele-literate fanbase, and how this style changed the ways in which Doctor Who could be read. The Doctor's world has never been bigger, inside or out!