When Bevan hits her critical stride the results can be fascinating, and her understanding of nostalgia as a multilayered and often contradictory cultural phenomenon is often exemplary. * Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media *
An important addition to the field ... offers a compelling assessment of a long-overlooked facet in understanding nostalgia inducing television shows. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *
Nostalgia, Alex Bevan demonstrates, is a material practice that brings the past into the present and vice versa, in ways that are complex, contradictory, and deeply political. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV takes us on a wide-ranging tour of the materiality of contemporary television and how particular practices evoke, remake, and comment upon the past, be it through the recycling of sets in Desperate Housewives, the modernist furniture of Ugly Betty, or the shape and style of ice cubes, flatware, and shirt-dresses in Mad Men. Expertly weaving together fashion, design, and architectural history with interviews of those who supply the below-the-line labor of television's production, set, and costume design, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV expands and reimagines the possibilities of television criticism. * Grant Bollmer, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, North Carolina State University, USA, and Honorary Associate, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia *
With its attention to below the line creativity, intergenerational modalities and the unstable nostalgia that governs so many representations of baby boomer culture, this book travels down many productive paths. In so doing, it offers an exceptionally holistic account of US television. * Diane Negra, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture, University College Dublin, Ireland *
Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV: Production Design and the Boomer Era is a marvelous accomplishment as a theoretical intervention making a powerful case for production design and art direction's pivotal role in contemporary television drama's aesthetic and story-telling practices. It is also a significant extension of production studies to the pivotal creative work of those involved in staging production through props, costuming, and architectural settings. Bevan usefully and artfully shows just how fruitful the exchange has been between architecture and production design with sets becoming less like theatrical spaces and more like real built environments as producers have turned to improvements in production design to provide compelling television. Part genre study of nostalgia TV and part case study of the central role played by production design and designers more generally, Bevan expertly weaves together the central role played not only by props, costumes and built sets but by the businesses and creative workers who work with these to the overall shape, power, cultural resonance, of television series production. * Tom O'Regan, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, Australia *
