This article considers the emergence of makeover reality TV, including Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (EMHE), within the cultural and political economic context of neoliberalism, which advocates corporate benevolence, individual volunteerism, and personal responsibility as principle means for solving serious social issues. Four contexts include (a) the integration of corporate philanthropy and product marketing since the 1980s; (b) the proliferation of goodwill reality TV in a post-9/11 reality television economy; (c) home improvement reality TV's connections to the housing boom, shifting domestic gender roles, and the neoliberal ideals of an "ownership society"; and (d) EMHE's representational engagement with neoliberal frameworks for addressing social inequalities with particular attention to race and the Katrina disaster. The article concludes with thoughts on how noncommercial reality TV might broaden the frameworks for addressing social problems beyond commercial TV's neoliberalism.
• This article examines the official Australia/UK television co-production of Moby Dick (1998) to engage with cultural policy issues within an increasingly transnational audiovisual sector. It begins with the political and cultural contexts of Melville's mid-19th-century novel to demonstrate that international law and commercial power have long shaped `national' cultural production. The late 20th-century co-production contexts include international cable/satellite networks seeking prestigious literary adaptations for global branding; production trends oscillating between different least-cost production locations; national policy-makers supporting co-productions to negotiate transnational trends; and intranational policy-makers competing to attract international production. Policy forums largely treated co-productions as necessary compromises between maintaining national cultural expression and supporting transnational production, creating a preservationist cultural nationalism that devalued below-the-line workers and privileged drama over other genres. To problematize this dynamic the article considers the geopolitical contexts of the Moby Dick novel and TV movie so as to destabilize these bounded conceptions of national culture and insert priorities of international political justice in cultural policy-making. •
Pay-TV is the fastest growing source of film finance worldwide, which increased at a rate of 23 per cent in the last five years of the 1990s. In his essay, John McMurria maps this new market using the case of Canal Plus and Vivendi Universal to tell us about the future of film
production.
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