Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond

Description

In his seminal book Televisions Second Golden Age, Robert Thompson described quality TV as best defined by what it is not: it is not regular TV. Audacious maybe, but his statement renewed debate on the meaning of this highly contentious term. Dealing primarily with the post-1996 era shaped by digital technologies and defined by consumer choice and brand marketing, this book brings together leading scholars, established journalists and experienced broadcasters working in the field of contemporary television to debate what we currently mean by quality TV. They go deep into contemporary American television fictions, from The Sopranos and The West Wing, to CSI and Lost – innovative, sometimes controversial, always compelling dramas, which one scholar has described as now better than the movies! But how do we understand the emergence of these kinds of fiction? Are they genuinely new? What does quality TV have to tell us about the state of todays television market? And is this a new Golden Age of quality TV? Origin