Television and film crime/cop drama is very popular with a wide audience. Crime dramas seek to anchor the representations of all types of police officers, criminals and victims as ‘believable’ characters, with ‘realistic’ plot lines, set in urban locations.The genre has been taken up in the US under the heading of American Quality Televsion (AQT) - see under heading AQT.

Codes and conventions

Crime dramas:

• are constructed realities
...

Period Dramas are also known as Historical Dramas or Costume Dramas. Below are the typical codes and conventions of Period Dramas but also examples of key texts:

• Elaborate costumes and sets to catch the ambience of a particular time period (stereotypically female audiences are attracted as much by the costumes as by the narrative content)
• Multi stranded narrative based on character (each character has their own storyline)
• Often part of a...

Sub Genres

Television Drama is a broad area of study covering a range of sub genres and even genres that would be considered to be a category of their own with their own codes and conventions. Some texts cross over different sub genres e.g. 24 is Crime Drama and Action Adventure. A generic, comprehensive list includes:

• Period Drama | Emma, Downton Abbey, The Tudors, Mildred Pierce
• Crime Drama | The Wire, Luther, Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes,...

Waterloo Road is a television drama broadcast first on BBC1 in 2006 between 6pm and 7pm and currently (November 2011) is in its seventh series – two new series (8 and 9) have been commissioned for April 2012 after an explosive end to series seven when Linda, who is Head of English deliberately runs over the male head teacher, Michael Byrne after he ends their brief relationship. Waterloo Road is set in a troubled 11-18 comprehensive school...

H140

• G321 Foundation Portfolio in Media (50%) and G322 Key Media Concepts (50%)
• G322 Section A: TV Drama (52%) and Section B: Film Industry (50%) - 32 Week Scheme of Work

Overview

• OCR A Level Media Studies Overview

Scheme

• OCR AS Media Studies SOW 2011-2014.doc

Concepts

• Media Language, Forms and Conventions (Media Language, Representation, Genre, Narrative)
• Film Industry Institution
• TV Drama and Representation
• Research, Planning and...

Institutional Factors | Production and Historical Context

The Tudors is a critically and commercially successful Period Drama, (a sub genre of TV Drama), produced by an Independent Production Company, commissioned by the BBC and screened on BBC2 in October 2007 but originally shown on the American cable channel, Showtime. It ran for four seasons until 2010. Screenwriter Michael Hurst created the series, he had previously written Elizabeth,...

Getting Started on TV Drama

A Suggested Scheme of Work

In this section:

• Getting started with unit G322 – TV drama
• What do students need to be able to do?
• TV drama background
• Activity – quick textual analysis
• Some theory
• Shot analysis
• Shot size
• Camera angles
• Framing
• Mise-en-scène
• Soundtrack
• Postproduction
• Activities

As a teacher you will be thinking about the structure of this two year course- see Course Structure. It’s a good idea to...

Vampires don’t exist, unless they’re bats. However they are potent monsters that have been recently finding favour with audiences: the new independent-Hollywood Twilight franchise (2008-), based on Stephanie Meyer’s novels; the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In (2008), from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel; series one of the BBC3 genre hybrid series Being Human (2009). Genres need to evolve in order to remain fresh so it’s...

G322 Key Media Concepts

Textual Analysis and Representation in Television Drama

G322 EXAM

This unit has a two part exam.

In Section A of the exam students will view an unseen sequence from a television drama. They are asked to interpret the way representations are created by analysing content and media language – see week by week course plan and content on this site at TV Drama.

Section B is different. It is a compulsory question that...

Kid’s Today! Skins: The Wild Bunch

To the horror of parents and the delight of just about everyone else, the TV drama Skins blew the lid off what untamed teenagers get up to when let off the leash. With the second series due, Cassandra Jardine went behind the scenes to meet the show’s surprisingly sensible cast and its frighteningly young writers. If you don’t want to know the score, look away now… (Jardine, 2008)

This standfirst (an...

Trailer: BBC Extended

On 10 April 2007 Sam Tyler, the protagonist of Life on Mars (Kudos, 2006-07), committed suicide (or returned to 1973 depending on your viewpoint) in front of 7.7m viewers, a record for the serial in its final episode.

Although the first series of the classic police drama Z Cars (1962-78) reached nearly double that when it appeared, the 7.7m is a very respectable figure in the multi-channel environment of contemporary...

One of the first lessons media students get to attend is ‘What are the key concepts?’. Then the rest of the students’ Media Studies life is spent applying them to media texts, issues and debates. Here we investigate what they can they tell us about Heroes (series 1, 2006-07).

Most media texts are commodities; that is they are produced to make money. This is probably most evident in American television where shows exist only if they get...

A case study of Doctor Who as a cross media brand could look at ...

• Broadcast fiction - new media impact on Doctor Who
• The influence of Doctor Who on the genre of sci-fi in all media
• Creating a popular brand – why has Doctor Who launched so much online activity and other media, and other series have not
• Representation of women in Doctor Who assistants across media
• A case study of the Doctor Who audience, including the influence of fans...

Kid’s Today! Skins: The Wild Bunch

To the horror of parents and the delight of just about everyone else, the TV drama Skins blew the lid off what untamed teenagers get up to when let off the leash. With the second series due, Cassandra Jardine went behind the scenes to meet the show’s surprisingly sensible cast and its frighteningly young writers. If you don’t want to know the score, look away now… (...