Library Guides: Film, Television and Theatre: Television: Articles, reviews, more ...

Reviews & News

Metacritic
Aggregates reviews and assigns an overall numerical score.

New York times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window
Covers 1851-three years prior to the present. Full page views, including illustrations.
More recent coverage (1980-present) available in LexisNexis Academic, but excludes illustrations.
Newspaper source plus This link opens in a new window
Provides full text for more than 40 national (U.S.) and international newspapers, including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Times (London), The Toronto Star, etc. Selected full text for more than 200 regional (U.S.) newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The New York Daily News, The San Jose Mercury News, etc. Full text television & radio news transcripts provided from CBS News, FOX News, NPR, etc.
Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) This link opens in a new window
Full text of more than 350 national and international newspapers. Earliest coverage is from the 1970s; includes today's papers. No illustrations.

Hollywood Reporter
Entertainment news source covering TV, movie, and video games. Available via several databases.
Variety
Entertainment news, reviews, box office results, cover stories, videos, photo galleries, credits database, production charts and calendar, with archive content dating back to 1905
Rotten Tomatoes
Aggregates movie and TV show reviews from professional critics. Includes "Tomatometer" rating of the percentage of positive reviews.

Articles about Television

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies. The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theater are included.

Film & Television Literature Index This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive bibliographic database covering the entire spectrum of television and film research. It has been designed for use by a diverse audience that includes film scholars, college students, and general viewers. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews. Updated on a weekly basis, this database provides full text for hundreds of journals and books and cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts and selected coverage for hundreds of publications. Variety movie reviews from 1914 to present and a vast image collection from the MPTV Image Archive are also included.
Performing arts periodicals database (formerly International index to the performing arts IIPA full text) This link opens in a new window
Covers 250+ periodicals, some as old as 1864, in television, film, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, and related disciplines.

Screen Studies

A database of film scholarship, Screen Studies also contains a "collection" on BFI TV Studies, which includes over 40 books "encompassing a wide range of topics in television history, culture and forms. Featuring coverage of television from around the world, the collection includes foundational books by leading scholars in the field, some of which are not currently available in eBook format."

General databases with good coverage of television:

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. Contains digitized current and many back issues of academic journals, books, and primary sources.
Project Muse : scholarly journals online This link opens in a new window
Full-text articles from journals in history and the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Disciplines covered include literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. A brief bibliographic description of each title is given. Searches can be conducted across the full text of all journals in the database.

Television News Programming

Meet the Press (1947-2016) This link opens in a new window
Streaming source of the full surviving broadcast run from 1947 to the present.
Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) This link opens in a new window
Transcripts of broadcast news programs 1987-present. In search results, select "News Transcripts" under "Publication Type" facet. Can further restrict to specific media outlets under "Sources" facet.
Television news archive, Vanderbilt University This link opens in a new window
Searchable archive of abstracts of news broadcasts from 1968 to present (ABC, CBS, NBC), 1995 to present (CNN), and selected content from PBS and FOX News.

C-SPAN Video Library
"All programming that has aired on C-SPAN since 1987 (200,000 hours) is now available for viewing online. Many programs aired since 2003 have searchable text transcripts of the program’s closed captioning. Transcript text can be clicked on and the video will jump to that point."
TV News Archive
From Internet Archive. Search closed captions from US TV news shows, 2009-yesterday. View clips, 2009-present.

Television Commercials

AdViews
Duke University's AdViews digital collection hosts thousands of vintage television commercials, dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Included are a number from South Bend's Studebaker Corporation.
Classic Television Commercials
The Internet Archive's Classic Television Commercials site has several dozen that are in the public domain.
Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2012

General Television Resources

Databases

Screenonline (BFI): Television
British Film Institute guide to TV history in Britain.

Print Sources

Television Program Master Index by Charles V. Dintrone
Call Number: Reference Collectionl PN 1992.9 .D56 2014
ISBN: 0786472456
Publication Date: 2014
Critical and historical information on 2,273 shows appearing in books, dissertations and journal articles
Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 Through 2010 by Vincent Terrace
Call Number: PN 1992.3 .U5 T463 2011
ISBN: 0786464771
Publication Date: 2011
Covers over 10,200 programs, both network and cable.

Streaming Site Information

Just Watch
Search for a specific movie or TV show to find out where to watch it legally online.
Reelgood
Reelgood says it "is the world's most extensive streaming guide, with every TV show and movie available to stream online. Browse through every TV series and movie and sort by title, release year, genre, IMDB rating, and, most important -- see where to watch it. Then play with a single click or tap."

Film, Television and Theatre