Religion and Prime Time Television

Religion and Prime Time Television
Author: Michael Suman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 189
Release: 1997-10-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0313025223

How is religion portrayed on prime time entertainment television and what effect does this have on our society? This book brings together the opinions of all the important factions involved in this important public policy debate, including religious figures (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Freethinkers—liberal and conservative), academics, media critics and journalists, and representatives of the entertainment industry. The debate provides contrasting views on how much and what type of religion should be on entertainment television and what relationship this has with the health of our society. Many contributors also offer strategies for how to reform the present situation. This is an important work that delineates the debate for the layperson as well as researchers, scholars, and policymakers.

Watching What We Watch

Watching What We Watch
Author: Walter T. Davis, Jr.
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780664226961

Offers counsel on how to address messages of popular culture as reflected on television today, explaining how to view programs in light of faith, values, and belief systems as a means of identifying appropriate broadcasts. Original.

Prime Time Preachers

Prime Time Preachers
Author: Jeffrey K. Hadden
Publisher: Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1981
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Channels of Belief

Channels of Belief
Author: John P. Ferré
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1990
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Religious Television

Religious Television
Author: Peter G. Horsfield
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1984
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Divine Programming

Divine Programming
Author: Charlotte Elizabeth Howell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 666
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation addresses how religion weaves through industrial practices of prime-time American television including programming, marketing, and content creation in the twenty-first century. Through a focus on the exponential growth of this one subject, religion, across the television landscape since 9/11, I am able to illustrate how a range of industry practitioners have responded to technological, cultural, and political forces in the post-network era. This study consists of interviews with industry executives and creative figures as well as analysis of trade/journalistic discourses and network marketing materials. Using these interviews as well as both genre and ideological analysis of more than a dozen programs (e.g., Friday Night Lights, Supernatural, and Daredevil), my research charts how religious discourses—and specifically, Christian discourses—are produced, marketed, and often discursively displaced in diverse genres across the contemporary primetime dramatic American television landscape. In particular, I analyze the paradoxical situation in which, even as religious representations multiplied in contemporary American prime-time dramas, writers, producers, executives, and marketers continued to regard religion as ideologically risky. As a result, these creatives have used a variety of containment strategies to distance themselves from the idea that they or their work might be religious. The year 2015 marks the potential beginning of a new stage, illustrated by a few case studies that offer examples of an accelerated openness among creatives discussing religion in their work.