ABSTRACT
Robert J. Thompson provocatively claimed in 1996 that “Quality TV is best defined by what it is not. It is not ‘regular’ TV” (13). Identifying a new kind of program that had first appeared on American screens in 1981, which was “better, more sophisticated, and more artistic than the usual network fare” (12), he initiated a debate for defining quality at the very moment HBO was in the process of rebranding its original series as “not TV.” Since then, and as the cable channel ever more relied on its original programming to entice subscribers, “no institution across the range of the entertainment industry-in films, television, music or books-has been more talked about, written about, imitated and emulated than HBO” (Carter, 2002a: C1). The premier cable subscription channel has in fact come to define and make visible a new era of quality TV; and how it institutionalized that discourse of quality will be the subject of this chapter.
