This article analyses the migration of Brazilian telenovelas to the streaming environment through a case study of Beleza Fatal (2025), the first original telenovela produced by HBO Max in Brazil. The objective is to examine how a format that has historically been central to the Brazilian audiovisual industry is being reshaped in the contemporary audiovisual ecosystem, with a focus on narrative and aesthetic reconfigurations. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach based on narrative analysis, examining production strategies and transformations in the local market.
This article introduces the concept of scrolling television to describe TikTok-based viewing practices where television content is experienced through continuous, personalised scrolling. Drawing on an empirical study of TV-related videos on TikTok and a case study of Netflix Italia’s editorial strategies, the research examines how platform affordances, algorithms, and user practices co-construct a televisual flow. The findings show that scrolling functions not as passive distraction but as an active mode of televisual engagement, in which user-generated clips, edits, and remixes coexist with professional content, reshaping television consumption and fandom practices within algorithmically curated environments.
The article aims to examine the role of sports-themed TV documentaries as a genre able to emphasize authorship and aesthetic features in contemporary audiovisual scenario. In particular, the focus will be on Italian production with two recent and relevant cases from Public Service Broadcasting offer that highlight the role of team and “chorality” in sport epic narration: Scugnizzi per sempre (2023) on basketball and Generazione di fenomeni – La miglior squadra di pallavolo del XX secolo (2024) on volleyball. Combining textual analysis and in-depth interviews with professionals involved in the creative process, the article wants to provide a preliminary discussion on national traits of sports documentaries and docuseries in an era where linear and non-linear strategies cohabit shaping narrative structures and repositioning players within the enduringly central discourse of sport in national television storytelling.
Editorial for VIEW Journal Volume 15 Issue 29 - Understanding and Documenting the Transformations of Television Texts in the Streaming Era - Part One.
This article examines Netflix Spain’s In Love All Over Again (2023) as a case study for understanding the tensions within contemporary serialised romantic comedy. The series deploys meta-commentary and a non-linear temporal structure to dissect its chosen genre, staging an intervention in romcom conventions through the story of a romcom filmmaker and her diegetic actor lover. While such self-reflexivity initially deepens romantic tension by stretching the ‘will-they-won’tthey’ dynamic into an extended, serialised temporality, this article contends that the logic of narrative deferral ultimately becomes exhausting. The series’ endless, suspended retellings drain narrative and erotic charge through wearying repetition – a fatigue reflected in its negative reception and rapid cancellation. By positioning In Love All Over Again within broader debates on streaming-era seriality, heteropessimism, and narrative fatigue, this analysis demonstrates how the demand for prolonged serialisation in the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) landscape can undermine, even exhaust, the recursive romantic fantasy it seeks to sustain.
The article considers how the American streaming platform Netflix redefines the representation of the national English past to a transnational context. It states that Netflix applies its own stylistic and aesthetic codes to create a vision of the English Regency era. The comparative analysis of the series Bridgerton with the latest adaptation Persuasion will shed light on the influence of seriality over film adaptation in a transnational context of production and distribution. It will underline how this process redefines the aesthetic treatment of a period drama, which induces a redefinition of Englishness.
When Viaplay’s expansion and original’s production collapsed in 2023-2024, competitors acquired Nordic noir series but passed over dramas exploring war experiences and relationship breakdowns. This article examines this selection as indicative of different commissioning approaches. A case study of young adult television suggests that key competitor Netflix’s genre-driven, universalizing approach contrasts with Viaplay’s creator-driven emphasis on social authenticity. Drawing on textual analysis, business reporting and creator statements, the article suggests that Viaplay’s ‘Nordic way’ - personal experience as starting point, everyday realism as aesthetic - offered something distinct that was commercially unsustainable yet culturally significant in the Swedish streaming landscape.
This article highlights the commissioning and content strategies employed in the production of programmes for the ‘prime space’ of the public service streaming service TV 2 Play in Denmark. The strategies fuel two overall trends in the entertainment and documentary programmes currently published: (1) the embedded diversity approach and (2) the megaphone approach. The article is based on interviews with management at TV 2 and strategic documents, and it presents three examples of these current programming trends: the Danish adaptation of the reality game shows The Traitors (2023+), Race Across the World (2020+), and the documentary The Black Swan (2024–2025). The article discusses on this background the challenges to core values in public service media programming online.
The article examines the evolving relationship between global streaming services and national broadcasters in the Italian television market, situating the analysis within the broader European regulatory and industrial context. By exploring platform originals, continuation deals, licensed content, and the reuse of broadcast imagery, the study investigates how streaming services recontextualise and reorganise television within subscription video on demand (SVOD) environments while drawing on legacy texts, genres, temporalities, and cultural memory. Finally, the article argues that the rise of streaming platforms reveals processes of institutional adaptation and industrial continuity, through which television is strategically reframed rather than replaced.
This article analyses the development of Canal Quickie, a channel on YouTube and Twitch created in 2024 by the producers of the successful TV programme Sálvame (Telecinco, 2009-2023) after its cancellation. Quickie presented its stars and recurrent contents (gossip and celebrity news, commentary on reality TV shows, attention to the personal relationships of its contributors), but adapted them to the new context of streaming, while broadcasting for linear television via the channel Ten. Canal Quickie thus worked until January 2026 as a hybrid audiovisual space between traditional television and new streaming platforms in a context of huge transformations in the Spanish media landscape.
The worldwide popularity of Turkish TV series has enabled Turkish actors to gain global celebrity status. The launch of Turkish original productions on global streaming platforms such as Netflix has further increased the visibility of these actors, who have since begun to be cast in global productions, performing a wider range of roles. This article is primarily concerned with this televisual mobility of Turkish actors. By adopting a multidimensional approach which acknowledges that performance is shaped by multiple determinants, it focuses on the analysis of Öykü Karayel’s performance in the Irish crime drama, Kin (2021-2023) and Haluk Bilginer’s performance in the American, British, Turkish coproduction The Turkish Detective (2023). Through these case studies, the article examines how national identity continues to shape actors’ performances and character construction in transnational production contexts.
This article examines co-commissioned high-end drama series between the BBC and streamers, focusing on three examples: Dracula (Netflix, 2020), Doctor Who series 14 and 15 (Disney+, 2024) and A Very English Scandal (Amazon Prime Video, 2018). Through analysing in detail these series’ genesis, subject matter, and aesthetics, the article demonstrates that these co-commissions reflects the BBC’s bespoke strategy, which varies according to the streamers’ different priorities and that they amplify – enhancing and extending the scale and stylistic range – of established traditions in BBC drama productions. Although such relationships have become necessary in the digital era as European Public Service Broadcasters evolve from national programme suppliers to digitally enabled international content providers, Public Service Media, the article contends that this development is precarious, has mixed outcomes and generates risks for the UK’s television ecology as a whole.
This paper analyses the concept of interactivity considering the interactive and digital television experiences that became widespread in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s. The concept of interactivity, and television itself, channelled advances in digital technology as they were adapted for domestic use, conceptualising interactive television as a new media rather than an evolution of conventional television. Thus, we examine the development of European standards for the creation of interactive television services. First, we review the main European videotex initiatives, and then we analyse the most recent open standards in a context characterised by a high degree of technological convergence.
This article examines why traditional European broadcasters face competitive limitations in the adult animation market, currently dominated by SVOD platforms. The study analyzes how three linear constraints – cultural discount, two-sided market structures, and institutional risk aversion – impact cultural and economic value propositions. Through a comparative analysis of case studies across the UK, Italy, and France, the research demonstrates that legacy broadcasting rigidities can be overcome via digital ecosystems. By leveraging long-tail dynamics and narrative hybridization, broadcasters can aggregate transnational niches, preserve advertising revenues, and transform local specificity from a commercial barrier into a ‘cultural premium’.
This paper seeks to highlight the link between some current televisual forms and the contradictions of our relationship to digital platforms. Many shows today aim to create ‘comfortable’, soothing experiences, which spell the end of riskier and more original narratives in TV production. I will map the circulation of feelings that indicate ‘lukewarmness’, comfort, and that set TV fictions far from the initial expectations, raised years ago, about the medium as newly important. Whereas these critical commentaries and theorisations concern primarily US television, I will describe the intertwining of forms and representations in a global market, focusing on a European show: the Netflix remake of The Leopard (2025). Through the analysis of the show and discourse about mid-TV, boredom, fatigue and casual viewing, the routine of TV consumption emerges as characterized by the perpetually renewed hope or promise of finding pleasure and meaning in gratifying forms of entertainment. How does this paradoxical relationship with television shape, and is shaped by television forms? What kind of affects circulate in this contemporary economy, across technologies, forms, narratives, and subjects?
In the age of streaming, television series increasingly foreground the relationship between tv and digital media. This article examines the rise of crime narratives centered on true crime podcasters as a way for television to reflect upon industrial transformations, transnational circulation and its own media forms. Focusing on three successors of Only Murders in the Building (Based on a True Story, Bodkin, and Costanza) the paper combines textual analysis and media industry studies to trace a progressive adaptation of podcast-centered storytelling from the U.S. to Europe, highlighting tensions between American models and local cultural and industrial specificities.
This article argues that Netflix’s premium original series The Crown (2016–2023) exemplifies a strategy by which the platform positions itself as the latest technological successor in an ongoing history of televisual memory production. Drawing on media archaeology, the analysis proceeds on two registers. At the textual level, the drama stages the history of broadcast ing technology as itself constitutive of historical consciousness, making television’s centrality to collective memory-making a self-aware and recurring preoccupation. At the technical level, Netflix’s deployment of digital production technologies – VFX fabrication, the artificial ageing of footage, uncompressed archival preservation – actively acknowledges, interrogates and transforms the prosthetic memory produced by the historical broadcasts it remediates. Comparing the BBC’s 1953 Coronation broadcast and The Crown as structurally analogous yet institutionally opposed moments of televisual memory-making, the article demonstrates that cultural memory in the streaming era is materially produced not only through visual ae sthetics but through platform infrastructure itself.
Using Netflix’s Rabo de Peixe as a case study, this article examines how cultural identity is negotiated when global streaming platforms engage with non-hegemonic contexts. Grounded in Cultural and Media Studies, it draws on qualitative research combining semi-structured interviews and media-based reception analysis to examine production conditions, institutional mediation, and audience response in Portugal’s audiovisual sector. It shows how Açorianidade functions as a flexible yet essentialised identity framework, selectively mobilised to signal authenticity while ensuring transnational legibility. Although nationally celebrated as a landmark achievement, the series generated local resistance, exposing how platform-driven visibility might amplify asymmetries of symbolic power and narrative authority.
Editorial for VIEW Journal volume 14 issue 28 - With and Against the Grain: Creative Dialogues with Broadcast Archives.
The digitisation of television archives has transformed our ability to revisit and reinterpret recent histories, particularly through materials that capture the texture and complexity of local life. Within these archives lie not just recordings, but layers of voices, perspectives, and lived experiences that challenge dominant historical narratives. This article will explores these multilayered histories through an examination of Un mito antropologico televisivo (Maria Helene Bertino, Dario Castelli, and Alessandro Gagliardo, 2011), an Italian documentary that creatively reactivates the archives of an independent Sicilian television station operating during a pivotal period of Italian history. During the mid-1990s, as mainstream Italian media increasingly turned toward commercial entertainment under Berlusconi’s influence, the cameras of a local network captured a radically different reality: the intense social and political dynamics of a community grappling with anti-Mafia movements, local governance disputes, and grassroots activism. Drawing on Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of microhistory, which reveals broader historical patterns through intensive small-scale analysis, this article will examine how local television archives can serve as repositories of multiple, often conflicting voices and perspectives. These archives present complex interactions between journalists, activists, local officials, and community members, each contributing to a polyphonic narrative of Sicilian life during this turbulent period. Through close analysis of the documentary’s innovative editing strategies and careful attention to the original context of the archival material, this research will explore how creative archival reactivation can illuminate the multivalent nature of historical experience. Ultimately, this article raises crucial questions about how we approach and reinterpret such historical materials: How can creative archival practices make visible the multiple perspectives and power relations embedded within these archives? What can local television recordings reveal about the interplay between media workers, their communities, and the social structures they documented? How might creative engagement with these materials help us understand the complex dynamics of a specific time and place while revealing broader patterns of social and political life? By examining these questions through the lens of microhistory, this article analyses the potential of local television archives in revealing the plurality of historical experience.
