AustLit

'This special issue of Continuum seeks to provide a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes. Assembling an international team of scholars (from Australia, Germany, Israel, the UK and the USA), this edition draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation that extends beyond those approaches that seek to reduce the phenomenon of television remakes simply to one of economic pragmatism. While recognizing the commercial logic of television formats that animates and provides background to these remakes, the collection develops a framework of ‘critical transculturalism’ to describe the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a unitary one-way process of cultural homogenization but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the essays attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialization and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series (on services such as Netflix Instant and Sky Arts) shape an audience's reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of ‘Quality TV’ impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture – for example, the case of Till Death Us Do Part (UK 1962–1974), All in the Family (USA 1972–1977), and Ein Herz und eine Seele (DE 1973–1976) – but also recognizes the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century.' (Editorial introduction)