Quality TV Drama: Fields of Research and Practitioners’ Perspectives

This chapter goes into more detail about the term “quality TV drama” and the related field of research, dealing with the connection between television and quality. In addition to discussing the well-known quality TV criteria according to Robert J. Thompson (1996), to which a number of analyses link, this chapter identifies gaps in quality TV research as well as other contexts, which have mostly arisen through the single-minded attention on US series. German and public-service television fiction represent different contexts through which these gaps can be addressed. The chapter then explains that the aesthetic evaluations that discussions on quality TV and its storytelling and screenwriting inevitably lead to take place in specific contexts. This then opens up into an explanation of the book’s approach of considering quality TV drama as both a construction and an evaluation discourse by the television industry. Quality judgements, as becomes clear, shape different phases of television production, especially the screenwriting process, and consistently take place in project networks and screen idea work groups. The third and final part of this chapter explains what the analysed television professionals understood “quality TV” to mean and what textual aspects they attributed to it. With reference to well-known TV series, especially from the US and also Denmark, the practitioners particularly emphasised storylines across several episodes and the associated character development as (desirable) attributes of quality drama.