Quality Television and the Primetime Novel

3 units

Over the past four decades, the cultural status of television in the United States has been reconfigured and complicated with changes in industrial structures, audience formations, regulatory presumptions, and production techniques and strategies. This course examines these interrelated forces, particularly as they have fostered a set of programs and practices often hailed as Quality Television. The class will survey the institutional paradigms that gave rise to particular generations of programming celebrated as quality and analyze the systems of distinction and cultural value that make the label socially and industrially salient. We will critically investigate the role of audiences and the conceptions of viewer choice at play in these developments. In addition, the course will analyze the textual features that have come to signify narrative complexity and aesthetic sophistication. We will examine foundational historical examples of this phenomenon from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Hill Street Blues and Cagney & Lacey to Northern Exposure as well as more contemporary broadcast and cable fiction such as Lost, The Wire, and Mad Men. In addition, students will be expected to watch a complete series, chosen in consultation with the instructor, as part of their final research project. Required screenings.