The Norwegian commercial public service broadcaster TV 2 was established 25 years ago, and the anniversary makes it relevant to investigate the development of TV 2 within the frames of Norwegian media policy and the commercial TV market. TV 2 represented innovation and freshness as an institution, a brand and a media producer. The article is based on qualitative interviews with the five editors-in-chief with authority to manage TV 2 through different periods of its 25 years. Main perspectives in the study are market competition, program policy and media policy. A key finding is that TV 2’s position in the Norwegian media landscape has changed as the institution has become well-established and now seeks alliances with the state, but that the key formula of the media company is still highly recognizable.

Critical media exposure has become more usual, but little is known about the reactions of individuals being subject to a media hunt. In-depth interviews have been conducted with 43 persons, initially competent and well functioning, who in their professional roles had been subject to critical media exposure. The focus was on how the media exposure had influenced their health and quality of life. All participants experienced high levels of stress and low quality of life during the media exposure, albeit of varying intensity. Special risk factors were the interactions with the journalists, waiting for the articles, and the content of the articles themselves. Common experiences were loss of control and helplessness. The strongest stress was related to invasion of their private spaces and being subject to strong negative characterisations in the public space. Follow-up interviews of one third of the sample four to five years later demonstrated that most participants had coped with the stress and moved on with their lives. However, readdressing the media exposure brought up strong emotional reactions.

Deceptive portrayals, dreams, hallucinations, states of psychosis, visions and prophesies, cognitive displacements, blended timelines, and conflations of parallel worlds: these are some of the themes and motives underpinning a whole range of films and television series, as well as computer games, from the mid-1990s until the present. This article will discuss the mind-game film and the way it places the inexplicable and the uncanny at the forefront of its narration. Thereafter the concept of the filmic narrator, and the presence of an unreliable narrator agent, will be given attention. This discussion of the status of cinematic narrator is centered at the juncture between what characters see and what they experience, and what functions as a neutral observation of the characters—but which is potentially false. However, the theoretical terms are not an end-point in themselves; rather, they will also serve as a means of analytical assessment. The aesthetic traits engage with what the stories mean, and how they create meaning. This will be illustrated thorough an analysis of Pål Sletaune’s feature film Babycall / The Monitor (2011), a film that deals with care and abuse in families.