APA Referencing – Citing a Film or TV Show

Prefer watching TV or going to the cinema to reading boring textbooks? Don’t we all. Unfortunately, that isn’t likely to help you in your university studies.

Nevertheless, there are situations when you might need to cite a film or TV show in your work. And with APA referencing, there are some things you should know about how to do this.

In-Text Citations

APA citations for a film or TV show are essentially the same as for any other source, so you need to give the name of the creator plus a date of publication:

The film dramatizes recordings from John Hull’s audio diary (Middleton & Spinney, 2016).

In this citation for the documentary Notes on Blindness, Middleton and Spinney are the directors, while 2016 is the year it was released.

However, when quoting a video source, there is a difference compared to print sources. In these cases, instead of page numbers, a timestamp is used:

Naomi Klein has described the rise in political populism as a response to governments bailing out ‘the elites’ after the 2008 financial crisis (Marr & Burley, 2017, 9:18).

Here, we have a quote from Naomi Klein on The Andrew Marr Show. The ‘9:18’ timestamp shows that this occurred 9 minutes and 18 seconds into the programme. You’ll also notice that, although Klein was speaking, the programme’s creators are cited – i.e. Andrew Marr and Rob Burley, the editor. This is standard for all audio-visual sources in APA.

Reference List (Feature Film)

In the reference list, the basic format for a feature film is:

Surname, Initial(s). (Role). (Year). Title [Format]. Studio.

We would therefore list the DVD of the documentary cited above as follows:

Middleton, P. & Spinney, J. (Directors). (2016). Notes on Blindness [DVD]. Artificial Eye.

Reference List (Episode from a TV Show or One-Off Broadcast)

How you should reference a TV show depends on whether it’s a one-off broadcast or an episode from a series. For a one-off broadcast, the basic format is:

Surname, Initial(s). (Role). (Date of Broadcast). Programme [Programme Type]. Network, Studio or Distributor.

But when citing a named episode from a series, the format to use is as follows:

Surname, Initial(s). (Writer, Director or Host). (Date or Year of Broadcast). Episode title [Program Type]. In Producer’s name (Producer), Programme. Network, Studio, or Distributor.

In practice, then, you would list an episode and a standalone broadcast like this:

Leonard, P. & Winchcombe, S. (Directors), & Pascoe, S. (Narrator). (2017, 29 June). Dawn of the Driverless Car [Television series episode] In S. Crabtree (Producer), Horizon. BBC.

Marr, A. (Host) & Burley, R. (Editor). (2017, 2 July). The Andrew Marr Show [Television broadcast]. BBC.