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Media Essay - Wilfred

"Pictures came and broke your heart… put the blame on VTR."
[Trevor Horn, 1979].

Since the very first Australian broadcastings in 1956 and the introduction of colour in 1974, television has been an immensely important and influential form of media in Australian society. Television has the power to entertain as well as educate. It can make one laugh, or make one cry, and it can open up a viewer's eyes and mind to a whole different world, that they perhaps didn't even know existed. All this while slouched sluggishly in the back of a lounge.
"When I watch television, I do not simply sit in front of the apparatus and watch whatever ‘flows' onto the screen. There are specific programs I like, whose return… gives me particular pleasure." [Alan McKee, 2001, (p.2)]

Television as a form of media incorporates an extremely vast array of sources and mediums that a viewer can gain entertainment, insight an knowledge from.
Television programs can be classified into genres as a way of grouping them according to conventional characteristics such as content, narrative structure and visual style. Genres are continuously developing and evolving as programs persistently cross over and even create new genres. Though a program is often classified as being part of a particular genre because of its conventional characteristics it is commonly the programs that challenge and step outside these conventions that are the most successful. Wilfred is a useful example and illustrates this point.

Wilfred is an Australian production based on the short film, of the same title, by actors and writers Adam Zwar and Jason Gann. The program is now a series aired on SBS Television (Monday 10.00pm). The program can be broadly classified into the genre of comedy, also known as television comedy. Television comedy generally focuses on those sub-genres of comedy which are more common and successful on the small screen, that is, television. These can include situation comedy (‘sit-com'), sketch...