Quality Drama as Transnational Expansion: Exports and Local Specifics

This chapter analyses how practitioners are negotiating the transnational expansion of German television fiction and its industry in their discussions on quality TV. In doing so, this chapter takes into account local aspects and particularities that accompany processes of globalisation and transnationalisation in the sense of “glocalisation”. The chapter’s second part specifically deals with negotiations on series exports, which historically have taken place sporadically in the German context but for which, today, a larger number of licensees in different countries and territories are available, through transnational streaming services. English-speaking markets in particular are now showing greater openness to non-English (i.e. also German-language) series, although these remain niche programmes in the Anglo-American distribution context. The third and final part of Chapter 5 demonstrates how individual project networks and screen idea work groups and their practitioners are transnationalising in the context of export ambitions and the expanded television industry. The transnationality of individual screenwriters and other players, working groups and production companies, as becomes clear, can become a decisive criterion for evaluating, selecting and finally greenlighting television dramas, alongside the transnational potential of the content, narrative style and aesthetic at the textual level.