Today more than ever, series finales have become cultural touchstones that feed watercooler fodder and Twitter storms among a committed community of viewers. While the final episodes of The Fugitive and M*A*S*H continue to rank among the highest rated broadcasts, more recent shows draw legions of binge-watching fans. Given the importance of finales to viewers and critics alike, Howard and Bianculli along with the other contributors explore these endings and what they mean to the audience, both in terms of their sense of narrative and as episodes that epitomize an entire show. Bringing together a veritable "who’s who" of television scholars, journalists, and media experts, including Robert Thompson, Martha Nochimson, Gary Edgerton, David Hinckley, Kim Akass, and Joanne Morreale, the book offers commentary on some of the most compelling and often controversial final episodes in television history. Each chapter is devoted to a separate finale, providing readers with a comprehensive survey of these watershed moments. Gathering a unique international lineup of journalists and media scholars, the book also offers readers an intriguing variety of critical voices and perspectives.

(FAQ). TV Finales FAQ is the first book devoted exclusively to television's most memorable series finales. From Mary Richards' heartfelt goodbye to the WJM-TV newsroom in the classic finale of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to the puzzling conclusion of the enigmatic adventure series, Lost , to the tumultuous final hours in the life of Breaking Bad 's Walter White, TV Finales FAQ takes an up close, insightful, and entertaining look at the most memorable final episodes of television's most popular prime time, daytime, and late night series. Crafting the final episode to a long-running television series can be challenging for producers and writers who want to remain faithful to the show's characters and history, yet, at the same time, satisfy the high expectations of its loyal fan base. TV Finales FAQ offers television viewers the inside story on the creation, broadcast, and aftermath of the most famous (and infamous) final episodes of over 50 television series from the 1960s through the present day. The books features such shows as Dexter , Roseanne , Will & Grace , X-Files , The Sopranos , and some classic talk and late-night programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson , and many others.

A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

Season Finale is an inside chronicle of the entertainment industry following the unexpected rise and fall of the WB and UPN networks. In the mid-1990s, Hollywood studios Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures each launched their own broadcast television network, hoping to become the fifth player in an industry dominated by ABC, CBS, NBC, and, more recently, Fox. Against all odds, the WB and UPN altered primetime television’s landscape, only to merge as the CW in 2006—casualties of conflicting personalities, relentless competition, and a failure to anticipate the business’s future. Following the money, egos, and risks of network television, former WB executive Susanne Daniels and Variety television reporter Cynthia Littleton expose the difficulties of trying to launch two traditional broadcast networks just as cable and the Internet were ending their dominance. Through in-depth reportage and firsthand accounts, Daniels and Littleton re-create the creative and business climate that birthed the WB and UPN, illustrating how the race to find programming spawned their heated rivalry and created shows that became icons of youth culture. Offering insider stories about shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, 7th Heaven, Gilmore Girls, Smallville, Felicity, Girlfriends, Everybody Hates Chris, and America’s Next Top Model, the authors present the creative environment that ushered these groundbreaking programs into living rooms across America. Despite success, the WB and UPN unraveled due to corporate miscalculations, management missteps, and industry upheaval that led to their decline—and rebirth as the CW. This is a cautionary and compelling entertainment saga about a precarious moment in television history, when the transformation of the broadcast networks signaled an inevitable shift for all pop culture.

Stephen Kokoska’s Introductory Statistics: A Problem-Solving Approach demonstrated that when presented in a precise step-by-step manner, with an understanding of what makes the material difficult, statistics can be made accessible, meaningful, and useful, even to the most skeptical students. In this thoroughly updated new edition, Kokoska again combines a traditional, classic approach to teaching statistics with contemporary examples and pedagogical features, blending solid mathematics with lucid, often humorous writing and a distinctive stepped “Solution Trail” problem-solving approach to help students understand the processes behind basic statistical arguments, statistical inference, and data-based decision making. The second edition is a fully integrated text/media package with its own dedicated version of LaunchPad, W.H. Freeman’s breakthrough online course space.

"What do we want to feel when we reach the end of a television series? Whether we spend years of our lives tuning in every week, or a few days bingeing through a storyworld, TV finales act as sites of negotiation between the forces of media production and consumption. By tracing a history of finales from the first Golden Age of American television to our contemporary era of complex TV, my project provides the first book- length study of TV finales as a distinct category of narrative media. This dissertation uses finales to understand how tensions between the emotional and economic imperatives of participatory culture complicate our experiences of television.The opening chapter contextualizes TV finales in relation to existing ideas about narrative closure, examines historically significant finales, and describes the ways that TV endings create meaning in popular culture. Chapter two looks at how narrative anticipation motivates audiences to engage communally in paratextual spaces and share processes of closure. Chapter three takes up binge-viewing and the idea of "Netflix Poetics" in order to investigate how on-demand technologies change our experience of TV endings. Chapter four examines the ways that affective energies circulate intertextually within and across fan communities, reshaping our sense of finality. The final chapter explores the concept of "cofactuality" to account for the ways that viewers manage narrative loss by thinking through, and sharing, multiple versions of imagined endings.This dissertation combines core ideas from Media and Cultural Studies, Narrative Theory, and Fan and Audience Studies to make substantial cross-disciplinary contributions to the study of television and digital culture. I integrate links to images,video, news articles, and social media posts in order to convey the multimedia textures of TV viewership. By using a series of case studies to rethink the key terms of televisual storytelling and viewer engagement, "TV Finales and the Meaning of Endings" examines how TV endings can help us negotiate loss and come to terms with finality." --

This book looks at the origins and growth of television through the pages of TV Guide and covers the complete run of this American icon from the first guides in 1953 to the last issue in guide format on October 9, 2005. It includes full color reproductions of every cover ever printed, and is both a collector's guide with pricing included, and a retrospective view of the medium.