This article examines how contemporary television engages with scale, arguing that the medium routinely prompts viewers to navigate conceptually between micro and macro perspectives. Bringing television studies into dialogue with scale theory, the article demonstrates how diverse programmes – using The Last of Us (2023–present), Familier som vores [ Families Like Ours ] (2024), Eurovision Song Contest (1956–present) and UEFA Champions League (1956–present) as case studies – mobilise narrative, thematic and visual strategies of scalar play that invite the viewer to conduct scalar thinking across individual experiences, collective formations and planetary frameworks. Aerial views, long shots emphasising size differences, glocal address and repeated returns to life-sized close-ups invite audiences to consider their position within networks that extend beyond the human. While television often re-centres anthropocentric perspectives through its grammar of intimacy, these scalar dynamics still encourage meaningful shifts in perception. The article argues that television’s routine engagements with scale cultivate everyday multi-scalar awareness.
This paper focuses on the manga-turned-anime, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou , to analyze the potential for the hybrid genre of post-apocalyptic iyashi-kei to transcend the neoliberal ideologies that tend to characterize each genre respectively. Iyashi-kei, translated to mean ‘healing’, is a category of self-care that prioritizes control over one’s ambiance to help individuals regulate the psychosomatic self. In observing how these qualities manifest in post-apocalyptic television, I argue that iyashi-kei healing leverages the post-apocalyptic genre to embrace the potentials of queer failure and aligning the self with the Other, while simultaneously rejecting repro-futurism.
This article analyses, through a feminist media studies lens, the representations of corporate cultures portrayed within the Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) produced for Disney+. The protagonist, Jennifer Walters, in both “normal Jen” and “She-Hulk” forms, is forced to navigate numerous gendered environments and expectations as part of working within the legal profession as a defence lawyer. The show, in line with popular forms of western fourth wave feminism engages with numerous contemporary gender issues, including women’s safety, expectations of normative femininity, workplace identity, and diversity work. This article explores how the character of Jen/She-Hulk, within the parameters of the superhero comedy form, provides a site for pop culture critique of the gendered aesthetic and emotional labour women undertake within corporate workplaces, as well as the diversity work expected of women and racially minoritised people. In a post #MeToo context the series makes sophisticated use of its comedic elements to humorously examine the pressures women experience when working in male-dominated corporate environments.
The conceptual fluidity of narrative in the children’s contemporary fantasy television series Trollhunters , from the Tales of Arcadia universe, emerges from techno-magic and non-human modes of being. Uncontainability and monstrous and object-mediated transformation define both aesthetic and subject matter. Creaturely humans, humane trolls, porous worlds and malleable realities, as well as magical objects transform that with which they come into contact. Contemporary iterations of established fantasy tropes, particularly the catalytic ‘thing’—offer useful insights into key aspects of posthuman childhood. Objects represent our affective orientation towards the world, and their talismanic quality foregrounds relational potential rather than depositing fixed meaning.
