ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of quality in television, and focuses on drama programmes, especially American ones, since this is where academic debates about the meaning of ‘quality TV’ have been conducted in recent years. Although academic work has largely avoided making distinctions that value one programme or genre over another, informal talk about television very often consists of identifying a ‘good’ programme (or channel or viewing experience). Methodologies deriving from literary and film studies have historically been adapted for the study of television programmes, and their focus on the construction of meaning and the analysis of image and sound produce dominant expectations of what the study of television will prioritise. Studies of television are often concerned to identify features that make a programme aesthetically significant, such as visual textures, performers or its legacy as the inspiration for subsequent programmes. The critical evaluation of quality in television depends on attributing value either by claiming that a programme matches the medium’s capabilities, or because bringing into television an aesthetic from outside it redresses an inherent predisposition for the medium to be of low quality. The US television theorist Horace Newcomb (1974) argued that the primary attributes of broadcast television are:
n intimacy: television engages viewers with characters and narratives n continuity: television is available whenever we wish to view it n immediacy: television is closely connected with events occurring around us.
