Graduate Student, Department of Culture, Film and Media
Thesis Title: From 'Dallas' to 'Lost': Polish broadcasters and American programming.
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Professor Roberta Pearson
Dr Mark Gallagher |
About
The notion that the United States has exercised cultural domination over the rest of the world has long been researched in terms of the media, or what Thompson has described as an ‘electronic invasion’. American television has alternately been perceived as either a supply of media products and source of variety (Bourdon 2009), or as a cultural threat to local traditions and heritage (Buonanno 2007). Both these perspectives complicate the now outdated notion that the powerful US exports its television to powerless nations which have no options other than passive acceptance.
Recent studies see the purported ‘Americanization’ of the global television marketplace as a dynamic interchange. The exported product does not have a predetermined meaning; meaning is determined by both the producers and the consumers in their national context. It is the broadcaster, recognized by Havens (2006) as a ‘decoder’, who becomes the key figure in this dynamic. The broadcaster not only makes important decisions about which programmes to air, but takes account of the national television environment, domestic audiences and channel requirements, thus enabling the assimilation of cultural imports within a particular national cultural context.
My project aims to investigate the dialogue that has existed between American and Polish television cultures since the dismantling of censorship and the fall of Communism, taking the broadcaster (the Polish national public broadcaster TVP and the commercial television networks – TVN and Polsat) as the main point of inquiry. My primary motivation is to contribute to the body of work done on the translation of American TV series abroad (Havens 2006, Rixon 2006, Ang 1991), which has as yet ignored Poland and other post-Soviet block countries. I wish to address this lacuna by applying a number of critical frameworks, including that of Paul Rixon’s concept of broadcasters as ‘active mediators’, developed in his study of British television’s assimilation of American programmes. I will therefore investigate the ways in which the new national setting and market requirements make different uses of US television imports.
