Who. Here, Time Lords Eccleston and Tennant meet the lords and ladies of Cultural Theory as Davies/Foucault co-deal in the time travel of the ‘de-materialising auteur’. New Who’s branded format engages with the genre function (Foucault, via Mittell), production-fan ‘gamekeepers’ watch warily the watching fan ‘poachers’(de Certeau, via Jenkins), and the oscillation of producers between fan and media production identities works systematically to reduce the semiotic density of the new Who text (Elam, via Tulloch and Alvarado). Triumph of a Time Lord is a wittily written study, with brilliant extended forays on Rose’s ‘intimate epic’, celebrity-history as quasi-brand, and the reconfiguration of Who’s ‘unfolding text’. This book is all about the agency of production reflexivity, fans’ shifting pleasure since the show went off-air and–especially important–the greater branding requirements of promotion and marketing.

Hills succeeds brilliantly in his epic quest to show how ‘genre discourses are… embedded in production decisions and textual structures’. Likewise, he convinces with his analysis of the ‘text-function’(again elaborating Foucault) via production play between ‘mainstreaming’and ‘cult’, and musical scoring that brands the show beyond sci-fi identifications, all the while approved by the ‘powerless duality’of fans (no longer a ‘powerless elite’) who are figured both in the Who text and outside it by its fan-producers. I predict you will read this book several times, and it will get better each time.