ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the institutional context within which complex serials emerged on American cable television. However, as high-end dramas commissioned for ambitious cable networks, drama serials gained new opportunities for experimentation and innovation from their origination outside broadcast television. Although a range of cable networks contributed to establishing the complex serial form, the chapter foregrounds HBO as the network on which it originated. The emergence and continued expansion of complex serial drama has been a specific, yet instructive example of the wider and diverse institutional and cultural repercussions for costly forms of American TV production in a burgeoning multiplatform era. The chapter aims to show how, when and through which flagship shows other cable networks deployed this form having explained how complex serials originated in the first long-format drama commissions of HBO. This degree of creative autonomy can be perceived as a characteristic of working in cable television, rather than being specific to HBO, AMC or to complex serial dramas.
