What to watch in British SF/F TV

1. British TV

[1.1] At the SFRA 2009 meeting the weekend of June 11, I was on a panel moderated by my fearless coeditor, Craig Jacobsen, about what to watch for SF TV. The panel was quite large, so Craig held us to a strict 2-minute time limit. He asked us to prepare remarks about which shows were must-watch shows, and why. Here, I present my choices and briefly explain what I find interesting and worthy about the shows.

[1.2] Because I am particularly interested in British TV, I staked out this area as my own, leaving the usual suspects—Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Heroes—to others. But during our panel’s conversation, I was able to articulate why I had specifically earmarked certain shows as being of interest. Sadly, it wasn’t because of the shows’ uniform excellence: some are virtually unwatchable. Rather, what I found interesting had to do with intersections of these texts with other texts. This makes sense. I am, after all, interested in shared worlds and fan artifacts, and these pro texts feel like fan works: derivative crack that says something about the originary text.

[1.3] After the jump is my roundup of fun-to-think-about shows (if not fun-to-watch shows, unless you like things that are so bad, they’re good). Several haven’t aired in the United States yet. I discuss the following: Demons, Spooks Code 9, Merlin, Ashes to Ashes, and Primeval. And I briefly mention the Doctor Who franchise: Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures.

Fandom research methods

Madeline Ashby has started a blog that aims to round up details about research going on in fandom. Interested in seeing what sorts of questionnaires researchers are using? Wondering whether someone else already taken that great idea and started a project? Fandom Research wants to be the go-to place to answer these questions. It’s early days yet for the site, but the more people who contribute, the more useful the site will be.

Today I contributed a guest post entitled Fandom research methods that discusses, among other things, AOIR’s ethics guide, which is the de facto guide for people working on research in human subjects via the Internet in the social sciences. While writing it, I was reminded that the impetus of many guidelines is to prevent the subjects of study from harm, and to ensure that they understand exactly what will be done with the responses they provide.