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Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an extraordinary wealth of television drama and are among the leaders in their respective continents. The new dramas have high production values (easily the equal of cinema), intricately plotted narratives, and compellingly ambivalent characters. They are thus clearly worthy of the close textual analysis they have not yet received. Drawing on both national practices of production and reception (based on archival research in Madrid and Mexico City) and international theories of textual analysis, this book offers the first study of contemporary quality TV drama in two countries where, unlike elsewhere, it is not yet recognized that television has displaced cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative. As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen. Social issues treated include historical memory, youth, drugs, race, and gender.

The first two seasons of the television series Star Trek: Discovery, the newest instalment in the long-running and influential Star Trek franchise, received media and academic attention from the moment they arrived on screen. Discovery makes several key changes to Star Trek’s well-known narrative formulae, particularly the use of more serialized storytelling, appealing to audiences’ changed viewing habits in the streaming age – and yet the storylines, in their topical nature and the broad range of socio-political issues they engage with, continue in the political vein of the franchise’s megatext. This volume brings together eighteen essays and one interview about the series, with contributions from a variety of disciplines including cultural studies, literary studies, media studies, fandom studies, history and political science. They explore representations of gender, sexuality and race, as well as topics such as shifts in storytelling and depictions of diplomacy. Examining Discovery alongside older entries into the Star Trek canon and tracing emerging continuities and changes, this volume will be an invaluable resource for all those interested in Star Trek and science fiction in the franchise era.

This volume in the Constellations series explores in detail what made the TV series Lost a popular hit with critics and viewers, while also accruing intense fan scrutiny. Lost is discussed in terms of its generic hybridity, and in particular how it incorporates and reframes familiar tropes of science fiction in the context of a Survivor reality TV-style plot on the one hand and as a ‘mystery box’ of extremely complex hermeneutic codes and hyperdeigesis on the other. It sets out a detailed analysis of Lost’s neo-baroque aesthetics, situating it in relation to its reconfigurations of the time travel, reproductive technology, conspiracy, and surveillance strains of science fiction. Further, it explores the ways in which Lost uses science fictional narrative approaches to the intersections between themes of gender, identity, community, science, faith and philosophic thought. The book also discusses the series’ relationship with its narrative extensions in online games, merchandise and secondary texts. Accordingly, it sets out an in-depth analysis of Lost as a narrative that invited the viewer into a storyworld extending beyond the television episodes into paratexts and transmedia storytelling, of which Lost is a significant example from the early 2000s. Constellations: Lost is thus an important retrospective examination of a significant television series and an indispensable account of a pioneering transmedia text.