An umbrella title is a formal or informal name connecting a number of individual items with a common theme. It is most often used in lieu of listing the separate components or providing a convenient "label" for a collection of disciplines.
Uses of umbrella titles
Academia
Nonspecific fields of study are identified by umbrella titles such as "physics", "physical education", and "medicine", to distinguish them from specialized fields of study such as exercise physiology.
Umbrella titles in common use involve either general job descriptions of a group of workers with similar responsibilities or rank.
Politics and law
Collections of organizations with a common legal or legislative interest are often "united" under an umbrella title for the purposes of lobbying or participating in a lawsuit.
Entertainment and literature
Umbrella titles are widely used in music, literature, television, and theater. Uses of umbrella titles vary widely in the arts, to a much greater spectrum of use than in other fields of study.
Music and dance
Umbrella titles are used to demarcate the music field into general trends or styles: classical music, jazz, rock music, hip hop, rhythm and blues and other labels which each cover more specialized musical styles. A similar "structure" can be found in the field of dance. Prior to the sale of the long playing record in 1950, albums containing several 78 revolutions-per-minute records were often sold under umbrella titles. It can be argued that titles of all long-playing records and compact discs are "umbrella" titles—and several such recordings with a common theme often have an umbrella title as well.
Television
While it can be argued that every title of a televised series, especially those primarily used to designate a time period rather than actual programming is an umbrella, the term is more appropriately applied to names of anthology series, series that combine together to provide a common theme, wheel series, and other series under a common heading. While it was common practice in the 1950s and early 1960s for series to alternate or otherwise share a time slot in American broadcast network television, umbrella titles were not used by United States' networks until 1964, when NBC presented three half-hour programs on Monday nights as a programming block centered at a southern California apartment complex, 90 Bristol Court. While the 1964 programming experiment did not succeed, NBC was not dissuaded from further programming experimentation. Within a decade, the network then experimented with wheel series, first with Four in One and The Bold Ones, then with NBC Mystery Movie. Afterwards additional wheel series were presented by American broadcast networks, to varying degrees of success. The experiment was revived in 1979 with Cliffhangers. In the United Kingdom, umbrella titles were used in varying degrees in their programming as well. The long-running Doctor Who used umbrella titles on several levels, first with individual named episodes under the umbrella of the title of an overall story ; even after the naming of individual episodes ceased, umbrella titles were often used to collect stories with a common enemy or theme.
The use of umbrella titles in motion pictures parallels their use in literature. Movie trilogies such as Lord of the Rings and the Three Colors trilogy commonly are called by umbrella titles, as was the case for their literary cousins. Umbrella titles were often used to cover longer sequences of motion pictures or novels. Often umbrella titles are used to collect motion pictures with common stars or common characters, as is the case for novels or comics. In literature, sometimes an umbrella title is used for a collection of stories with a common locality, such as the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy.
