Full Description
This book explores the ways in which television has engaged directly and indirectly with the new realities of the post-9/11 world. It offers detailed analysis of a number of key programmes and series that engage with, or are haunted by, the aftermath of the events of September 11 in the USA and what is unavoidably through problematically and contentiously referred to as the resulting 'war on terror'.
The substantive part of the book is a series of independent chapters, each written on a different topic and considering different programmes. It includes series and single dramas representing the invasion of Iraq (The Mark of Cain, Occupation and Generation Kill), comedic representations (Gary, Tank Commander), documentary (the BBC Panorama's coverage of 9/11), 'what if' docudramas (Dirty War), 9/11 in popular series (CSI:NY) and representations of Tony Blair in drama and docudrama. The book concludes with an extended reflection on contemporary docudrama and an interview with filmmaker and docudramatist Peter Kosminsky.
Contents
1. Introduction
Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget
2. Ways of Showing, Ways of Telling
Derek Paget
3. Embedded dramaturgy - representing the 'war on terror' from within: Ten Days to War, The Mark of Cain and Occupation
Stephen Lacey
4. Post 9/11 American Television Drama: 24 and Generation Kill as Melodrama
Steve Lipkin
5. The comedy of terror: Gary: Tank Commander and the TV sitcom's 'discourse of impropriety'.
Bruce Bennett
6. The Paranoid Style's traumatic speculations of suffering
Hugh Ortega Breton
7. Mac and Monotheism: Remembering 9/11, Surviving Trauma and Mourning Work in CSI: NY
Janet McCabe
8. Britz, Contemporary British National Identity and the 'War on Terror'
Steve Blandford
9. 'It Won't Be Iraq They'll Remember Me For, Will It?': Tony Blair and Dramatisations of The War On Terror
Stella Bruzzi
10. Panorama's coverage of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror'
David McQueen
11. Interview with Peter Kosminsky
Peter Kosminsky and Derek Paget
12. Texts cited
13. Bibliography
