Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, streaming television subscriptions and media consumption surged at an unprecedented scale in the U.S. While audiences turned to streaming TV to cope with the lockdown, streaming platforms experimented with content delivery and packaging to adapt to emerging viewership trends. In this mixed-method study that combines surveys and focus groups with undergraduate students we found that students used streaming media both alone and with others to structure space and time and navigate life under enforced domesticity. We argue that under such conditions, audiences engaged with streaming media as a form of prosthetic sociality—a substitute for in-person interaction that helped maintain a sense of connection and routine.
This study explores how Netflix has transformed traditional genres of South Korean television dramas, commonly known as K-dramas. The growing presence of Netflix has disrupted established production and distribution mechanisms, prompting local stakeholders to adapt to compete more effectively on a global scale. Interviews with twenty-nine industry practitioners suggest that Netflix’s perceived flexibility and creative autonomy, supported by its financing models and regulatory differences, motivate creators to explore a broader range of genres—something traditional television networks cannot provide due to their financial and regulatory constraints. By analysing how those involved in domestic television production recognise the changes brought about by foreign streaming giants, the findings provide insights into how genres function as industrial arrangements, how local stakeholders have responded to shifts in the media landscape during the streaming era, and how power asymmetry between global players and domestic creators influences television genres.
This article examines the rise of platformized collective creator cultures in rural India. Focusing on a rural YouTube collective in Telangana, South India, it explores how rural creators in non-urban contexts navigate and sustain their work within the global social media entertainment and creator culture ecology. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the study demonstrates how rural creators produce aspirational digital content through innovative storytelling practices that blend entertainment with social awareness, using cinematic production logics such as spectacular visuals, drone cinematography, and creative editing. Sustained through collective media labor, their professionalized, platformed cultural productions have not only established them as popular creators but also generated persistent economic and creative tensions. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on regional social media entertainment and creator cultures, particularly from non-urban and rural perspectives.
The production of short online dramas has grown into a significant industry in China. “Micro dramas” have evolved into a distinct genre that refers to a high-volume serial format with fast-paced individual episodes of only a few minutes duration, distributed on Chinese online video platforms. This article discusses the production structures and processes in the Chinese micro drama industry. Drawing on research combining practitioner interviews and industry observation, it maps the current production system and its key roles. Drawing on Idiz and Poell’s conceptual framework of dependence, it analyses the relationships between platforms and micro drama producers and argues that the latter’s structural dependence on the former creates creative constraints based on platforms’ commercial preferences.
In explaining transregional media flows, cultural proximity has been embraced in academia and industry. However, in the past decade, drama series produced in traditionally peripheral media hubs in the Global South have been increasingly circulated on major pay TV platforms in sub-Saharan Africa, despite crossing geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. This article investigates how television buyers as institutional cultural intermediaries navigate the interplay of the global media industry, commercial goals of media institutions, social stratification of local societies, and interpretations of audience proximity to mediate the contact zone between content alternative to globally dominant productions and audiences in sub-Saharan Africa. Centralizing alternative media flows in a region historically at the margin of the global television market, this research complicates the traditional discourse of proximity, suggesting the fluidity of culture and identity in the interaction of the local and global, and contributes to media industry studies with the Global South perspective.
This paper analyses YouTube comments on the viral short “ Do NOT Interrupt Our Mukbang!” from the Netflix phenomenon K-pop demon hunters to explore how participatory culture and parasocial interaction intersect in digital fandom. Drawing on 1,798 comments, we show how fans collaboratively construct meaning through humour, insider knowledge, and affective identification with animated idols and the K-pop industry beyond them. Commenters blend discourses of food, fitness, body ideals, and K-Pop industry realities, collapsing boundaries between fiction and reality. These practices illustrate a dual parasociality in which intimacy is projected onto both fictional characters and real-world idols. Through such playful and emotionally charged exchanges, fans transform online commentary into a participatory, interdiscursive space that negotiates identity, belonging, and critique. The analysis highlights how affective engagement and cultural production converge to sustain collective intimacy within transnational K-pop fandoms.
This article examines how postfeminist empowerment is mediated and reconfigured within China’s platformed media ecology, focussing on narrative design and affective mechanisms. Drawing on two female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas, A Dream of Splendor (2022) and The Legend of Shen Li (2024), the study combines close textual reading with contextualised paratextual analysis of highly visible discussions on platforms such as Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili. While both series share a genre logic centred on female growth and emotional autonomy, their pathways of empowerment diverge significantly. Female subjectivity is predominantly validated through affective labour, emotional stability, and relational repair rather than sustained structural confrontation. Platform curation and audience affective engagement further consolidate this logic, transforming empowerment into a highly shareable and emotionally resonant cultural form. Through comparative analysis, the article reveals an inherent tension within postfeminist empowerment in the Chinese platform context, where female agency is simultaneously foregrounded and depoliticised.
This study examines how the digital restructuring of drama production and distribution has reconfigured actors' position in the Korean television industry within global digital capitalism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with actors and industry professionals, supplemented by document analysis, it demonstrates that global streaming platforms and advanced production technologies are transforming capital-labor relations in the Korean drama acting ecosystem by reorganizing distribution and production. The findings suggest that global streaming platforms amplify the value of globally marketable actors while shifting control over them to global capital through IP monopolization. Digital production technologies, including generative AI, further extend actors' marketability by transforming stars into sites of intensified value extraction, converting embodied performances into data, and reorganizing performance labor under more direct technological control.
Situating the popularity of queer reality TV shows Queer Eye and RuPaul’s Drag Race against the haunting spectre of far-right populism, this paper examines how progressive audiences engage with queer reality TV in order to negotiate the challenges of a turbulent political milieu and the contradictions of “woke” subjecthood. In contrast to assumptions that audiences primarily experience reality TV as a form of indulgent, escapist entertainment, this paper uses data from interviews and focus groups to show how audiences position their spectatorship of QE and RPDR in unexpectedly solemn ways. Focussing on the mandate to “know one’s place” and practices of audience distancing, I examine how QE and RPDR are taken up as moral objects through which audiences negotiate the uncertainties of their political subjecthood and attempt to position themselves as “good” people. I argue that these audiences conceptualise their viewership of queer media as a technology of moral citizenship.
Suspicion has become a central mode of engagement in contemporary media, shaping how audiences interpret both political and entertainment content. Reality TV formats that rely on secrecy and deception encourage viewers to question appearances and evaluate trustworthiness, yet the role of conspiratorial reasoning in such shows remains underexplored. This article examines Wie is de Mol? , a Dutch reality game where contestants unmask a saboteur. Drawing on conspiratorial storytelling, reality TV conventions, paranoid reading (Sedgwick), and media literacy scholarship, we analyze how viewers develop strategies to navigate the show’s multilayered deception. Based on ten focus group sessions conducted during season 22 (2022), we identify five interpretive categories: evaluating (un)reliability, program mechanics, psychological effects, building collective intelligence, and influence and belief revision. WIDM illustrates how entertainment can cultivate critical engagement, offering a low-stakes playground for practicing suspicious reading that resonates with broader debates on media literacy.
What sorts of films, filmmakers and film-watching is recognised as feminist by the users of the cinephile platform Letterboxd? What do practices of curating and logging feminist films reveal about how feminism is imagined? And how are these imaginaries shaped by Letterboxd’s platform logics and affordances? Drawing on a dataset of public lists labelled “feminist” and/or “women director,” we explore how Letterboxd users define feminist films via platform affordances including producing reviews, curating lists and logging films. We observe a sharp divergence between the number of films logged “women director” and those recognised as “feminist,” and an orientation towards practices of aspirational, ongoing tracking and totalising list-making, rather than practices of refining, redefining, or deliberating a “feminist” film canon. We find the feminist imaginary that emerges is one entangled by technological intermediaries and their automated logics.
Anime media has garnered attention both for its distinct spreadability and the affective bonds audiences have created with its texts. Much of the deeper analysis surrounding anime’s spread however tends to ignore its global cultural impact before the 1990s, thereby overlooking many of its key incursions into the quotidian popular cultures of emerging broadcast landscapes around the world. This investigation focuses on the production and spread of two anime series from the 1970s, Heidi: Girl of the alps and Maya the Bee , in order to explore anime producers’ first collaborative, deliberate efforts to integrate a global media market beyond the usa. In doing so, it addresses the spread and reformatting of these texts through a variety of trajectories, in order to demonstrate antecedents to anime’s current transnationality, as well as highlight the breadth of voices involved in lending to meaning to anime as they integrated these diverse localities.
This article examines The Exchange (2023), Netflix’s first Kuwaiti original series, as an example of how the platform negotiates cultural specificity within an environment shaped by regulatory oversight and representational constraint. Set in Kuwait’s 1980 financial sector, the series reworks familiar melodramatic tropes with a focus on women’s ambition and economic agency. Drawing on a textual analysis and close examination of paratextual materials, the article considers how the series employs strategic ambiguity and polysemy to operate across global and local audience contexts. Rather than rejecting regional storytelling conventions, The Exchange appropriates them through a gendered refraction that enables the series to appear both nostalgic and progressive. In doing so, it exemplifies Netflix’s evolving strategy in the Gulf, embedding potentially contentious themes within locally recognizable forms. This approach reflects a glocalization strategy that privileges narrative flexibility over resolution, allowing the platform to expand regional engagement without sacrificing global appeal.
The article analyses class ideology in three popular reality TV formats broadcast in Polish television (Broke Rich Kids, Dames and Hicks, Rich House Poor House). Following Fredric Jameson, we understand ideology as a cultural narrative, which offers an answer to predicaments posed by the actual workings of the social structure. Social problems - in this case growing class inequalities - are presented with imaginary answers, both arousing and pacifying the public's curiosity and anxieties. We examine the vision of class hierarchies present in 'role-swap' shows and their rationalisations, as well as cultural scripts of possible transformations. We trace the ideological underpinnings of this broad narrative, including the moral dimension and nature of hierarchies present in narratives of a middle-class 'good life' and respectability, rationalisation of success and failure in individualistic terms, possibility of cross-class mobility, dimensions of class pedagogy and ways of explaining social differences in presentations of 'ordinary' life.
Reddit communities like r/DeclineIntoCensorship and r/WatchRedditDie have emerged out of rejection of the platform’s moderation policies. We find that these groups frequently exhibit white nationalist ideologies, often independent of critiques of Reddit governance. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis of highly-engaged posts and comments, our research investigates why governance venues are prominent sites of racism. We find that, first, being aggrieved over speech restrictions creates an environment where other grievances can flourish. Second, governance grievance participants reject the restricting individual freedom to benefit others, seeing themselves as victims of such restrictions. The combination of these grievances is why resistance to platform governance is a conducive space for spreading racial grievance.
As the 2024 Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) season drew record viewership, it also became a site of intense media discourse about race, racism, and rivalry. This article examines ESPN's broadcast commentary during the 2024 WNBA playoffs, a period marked by heightened racial harassment of players, to explore how, under economic and political constraints, sports broadcasters enlist engaged audiences as co-authors of meaning. I theorize this rhetorical practice as co-framing-a process through which broadcasters invite and incorporate audience engagement in narrating conflict, rivalry, and controversy. Through close analysis of broadcast discourse, this study demonstrates how racial conflict is rendered legible as entertainment and how narratives surrounding gender, race, and responsibility are negotiated, amplified, or muted. By tracing these dynamics, this research contributes to ongoing debates about power, agency, and authority in an evolving sports media ecosystem.
Using Belgium's top-tier domestic football competition, the Pro League, as a case study, this article analyses the impact of platformisation on the structure of the sports broadcasting value chain and identifies a parallel process of streamification and broadcastification. Based on semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, the article illustrates that sports media rights can be seen as the latest front in the streaming wars. It highlights how the growth of online distribution provides the potential for both sports rights owners and new entrant streaming services to bypass legacy pay-tv operators and connect with audiences directly. Despite the potential success of streaming, however, our results also suggest that live sport continues to rely heavily on distribution via established pay-tv operators. Utilising institutional isomorphism as a theoretical framework, the article provides evidence to support the argument that predictions of the imminent death of broadcasting and the hegemony of sports streaming are largely misguided.
Taking a feminist media industries approach, this essay argues that sexual harassment and sexual misconduct are not incidental, but are built into, the mechanics of Below Deck as an exemplary reality TV workplace show. It argues that this recognition bears significance for critical discussion of how sexual misconduct is endemic to RTV and what needs to be done about it. Drawing from Andreas Chatzidakis and Jo Littler's concept of corporate "carewashing" (2022), the essay explores how Below Deck relies on a performative idea of care to paper over its unsafe working conditions. The essay concludes by reflecting on the need to prioritize the welfare of all those who labor for reality TV productions, both behind and in front of the camera, suggesting that there needs to be preventative care measures in place.
"It's Not Serving Snookie and Her Escort Friends Cheeseburgers: Race, Class, and Labor in Below Deck" discusses the representational risk aversion of 51 Minds Entertainment, the production company that has rarely cast people of color in their popular occu-soap franchise Below Deck. The series features predominantly white yacht stewards who profit from this work via both monetary and cultural capital, perpetuating the myth of the American Dream, easily achieving upward class mobility through hard work. The essay considers the implications of these casting choices which essentially erase the financially precarious nature of domestic labor, a field that primarily employs people of color.
