Hopeful Vision: Entertainment on The Small Screen

Explores the aesthetic and affective values of entertainment and its relation to cultural hope and aspiration

Interrogates and reappraises entertainment as a cultural category and as the basis for small screen criticism
Analyses a wide selection of exemplary television programmes, genres and forms as artworks within the traditions of broader entertainment provision, and as the focus of affective audience communities
Brings together theories of hope and aspiration with an emphasis on their aesthetic and narrative characteristics, further exploring associated cultural phenomena - including works described as utopian or dystopian, and wider social moods of optimism and pessimism
Develops the premise that entertainment meshes with forward consciousness, allowing that television, as an entertainment provider par excellence, to enjoy a special relationship with forward feelings of hope and aspiration
Demonstrates a critical focus on elusive textual qualities such as emotional tone, mood and expectation, and emphasises temporal seriality and narrative reiteration rather than closure

This monograph recuperates the concept of entertainment as a legitimate basis for ‘small screen’ criticism. It suggests that critical approaches to television might treat the text as an object of potential which actively engages and provides for aesthetic experience through entertainment.

Aesthetic experience is characterised by emotion, and this study shows how the textual production of specifically forward feelings such as anticipation, aspiration, fear or dread may be mobilised and made sense of, shaping our sense of the future and its objects of hope. The argument is demonstrated by case studies arranged from ‘light’ to ‘dark’ in tone - as varied as Eurovision and Succession, The Repair Shop and The Leftovers – showing how these provide potentially significant, affecting encounters that are ‘hopeful’ in varying degrees and guises. Hope is adopted both as a theme of analysis and as a critical strategy of interpretation which privileges entertainment efficacy, and thus moves towards a more viewer-centric appreciation of cultural value.